“Mom,” I say, pulling harder.
She lets me go, caresses my face with her free hand.
I frown at her. “Can I have those?” I ask, meaning the papers in her hand.
She looks down and seems confused about how they got there. “You don’t need these,” she says, but gives them back to me anyway. “Want to have a slumber party?” she asks again, patting the bed. “I’ll feel better if you stay with me.”
But I’m not sure I will.
MADELINE’S DICTIONARY
sus?pi?cion (s??spiSH?n) n. pl. -s 1. The truth you don’t believe, can’t believe, won’t believe: Her suspicion of her mother keeps her awake all night. | She had a burgeoning suspicion that the world was laughing at her. [2015, Whittier]
IDENTITY
CARLA’S BARELY IN the door before I’m on her with the letter. She reads it and her eyes widen with each sentence.
She grips my forearm. “Where did you get this?”
“Keep reading,” I say. The charts and measurements will mean more to her than they did to me.
I watch her face and try to understand what is happening in my world. I’d expected her to dismiss the letter out of hand just as Mom did, but her reaction is…different.
“Have you shown this to your mother?”
I nod, mute.
“What did she say?”
“That it was a mistake.” I’m whispering, hiding from the sound of my own voice.
She searches my face for a long time. “We need to find out,” she says.
“Find out what?”
“If it’s true or not.”
“How could it be true? That would mean—”
“Shh, shh. We don’t know anything yet.”
We don’t know anything? Of course we do. We know that I’m sick. That I’m not allowed to leave my house on pain of death. I’ve always known this. It is who I am.
“What’s going on?” I demand. “What are you hiding from me?”
“No, no. I’m not hiding anything.”
“What does this mean?”
She sighs, and it is long and deep and weary. “I swear I don’t know anything. But sometimes I suspect.”
“Suspect what?”
“Sometimes I think maybe your mama’s not quite right. Maybe she never recovered from what happened to your papa and brother.”
The oxygen in the room is replaced by something else, something thin and not-breathable. Time does slow down now and I get a kind of tunnel vision. The walls are much too close and Carla recedes away from me, a small figure at the end of a very long hallway. Tunnel vision gives way to vertigo. I’m unsteady on my feet and then nauseous.
I run to the bathroom and dry heave into the sink. Carla comes in as I’m splashing water on my face.
She puts her hand on my back and I sink under the weight of it. I’m insubstantial. I’m Olly’s ghost girl again. I press my hands into the porcelain of the sink. I can’t lift my eyes to the mirror because I won’t recognize the girl looking back at me.
“I have to know for sure,” I growl, using someone else’s voice.
“Give me a day,” she says, and tries to pull me into a hug, but I don’t let her. I don’t want comforting or protecting.
I just want the truth.
PROOF OF LIFE
ALL I HAVE to do is go to sleep—quiet my mind, relax my body, and go to sleep. But no matter how I will it, sleep just will not come. My brain is an unfamiliar room and trapdoors are everywhere. Carla’s voice loops in my head. Maybe she never recovered from what happened. What does that even mean? I look at the clock. 1:00 A.M. Seven hours until Carla comes back. We’re going to do some blood tests and send them off to a SCID specialist that I found. Seven hours. I close my eyes. I open them again. 1:01 A.M.