The Night Sister

“No. I’m sorry to hear it. What happened?”


He had never actually met Rose Slater, but he’d seen her plenty around town since she’d been back and Margot had filled him in a bit. When they were all growing up, Rose hadn’t been around much; Amy never talked about her, but word was she had a drinking problem, maybe had been in a mental hospital. Then, after years of being God-knew-where, she’d made a reappearance just after Amy’s daughter was born and had moved back into the house; she helped Amy and Mark with Lou, and in time with baby Levi. Margot said that Amy was thrilled to have her mom back in her life and that she was turning out to be a wonderful grandmother. There were murmurs about where Rose Slater had been all those years, how she could have gone and left her daughter to grow up alone with old Charlotte in that creepy motel. But soon, according to Margot, all the gossip turned positive: Isn’t Rose looking well? She must have been in some fancy rehab out west. Maybe she got religion. Did you hear she’s running the elementary-school bake sale? And she’s a troop leader for the Girl Scouts now! Just goes to show, anybody can turn it around.

“Did she fall or something?” Jason asked. “My grandmother broke her hip and had to spend some time in the nursing home, but once she was well, she went back to her own place, and—”

“My mother didn’t break her hip,” Amy said abruptly. She stood up, went to the counter, and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. Once she had shaken one out, she held the pack out to him.

“Sure,” he said, though he’d hardly smoked since high school—just the occasional pack when he was feeling stressed or working too many hours.

She sat back down, handed him a cigarette, lit it for him, and put the ashtray on the table between them.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“She suddenly went crazy,” Amy said. “Some kind of dementia, the doctors think.”

Jason drew smoke into his lungs, and let it out slowly. “But I thought things were good. I heard she was doing real well.”

“She was! She was doing amazing. It was like…like I finally had a mom, you know? Like other people. But then, a couple of months ago, she started saying really weird stuff. Talking absolutely crazy.”

“Like what?” Jason asked.

“Oh, like, she said that there are monsters.” She laughed, but didn’t seem amused. “Actual monsters, with teeth and claws and shit, and that we might have one here at the motel. She said if we didn’t do something soon, something terrible would happen.”

“Wow,” Jason said. “Was she drinking?”

“I don’t think so. I never saw her anyway, never smelled it on her. She was really freaking me out. Scaring the kids. Sometimes they’d wake up in the middle of the night and she’d be there in their rooms, standing next to the bed, watching them sleep. Mark asked her what in God’s name she was doing, and she said she was protecting them. Standing guard. Keeping us all safe from the monsters.” Amy did dramatic air-quotes with this last word.

“Sounds terrible. I’m so sorry,” Jason said.

Amy nodded. “We took her to the doctor. They admitted her to the hospital, did all kinds of tests, but they didn’t find anything physical, nothing they could do, blah, blah, blah, so they discharged her. Mark didn’t want her to come back home—felt it wasn’t safe to have her around the kids. So we got her into the nursing home. They’re taking good care of her.”

“Probably for the best,” Jason said.

Amy pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it with the tip of her first smoke, which was still burning. Her hands were shaking.