My mother smiled at me. “I’m glad it’s you, Ali Alligator. Sometimes they’re not who they say they are. Sometimes they put on different faces.”
My mouth went dry, my heart jackhammering in my chest. “Who does, Mother?”
“Don’t you remember?” she asked.
I shook my head.
My mother looked down at the remote in her hand.
“I’ve been trying to make a call,” she said, pushing buttons. “But I can’t get through.”
She looked so small, so lost and pitiful. My heart ached a little to see her like this.
“That’s the television remote, Mother,” I explained, my voice low and soothing.
She put it to her ear like a phone. “I can’t get through.” She sounded frantic as she waved the remote around, then stabbed at the buttons with her pointer finger.
“Who are you trying to call?”
“Bobbi,” my mother said. “I need to talk to Bobbi.”
Great. A telephone call to the dead. Just what we needed to be dealing with at three in the morning.
“I need to ask her what to do. If there’s a way to stop it.”
“Stop what, Mother?”
She clung tightly to the remote, kept pushing the buttons. “Don’t pretend you don’t know, Ali. That’s not going to do either one of us any good.”
I walked over, gently took the TV remote from my mother’s hands, pressed the power button. The screen went from crackling static to black, and the room dimmed.
“Let’s get back to bed, okay?”
I took her gently by the arm, helped her to her feet. She was so light, hardly there. A whisper of a woman.
“Where are we?” she asked, looking around, panic rising.
“My house,” I said again, leading her across the living room floor, into the dining room, toward the guest room, which was on the other side of the kitchen.
“We shouldn’t be here,” my mother said. She whipped her head around, searching the shadows.
“Of course we should. This is where I live. Me and Mark and the girls. And you’re staying here with us. Don’t you remember? Paul brought you this afternoon.”
“It isn’t safe,” she said, eyes frantic. I thought of the med list Paul had left me—the instructions to give her an Ativan if she seemed agitated. This definitely qualified. One Ativan coming right up.
We got to the guest room door and I guided her through. I helped my mother back into bed, tucked her in the way I’d tucked Olivia in only hours ago.
“Of course it’s safe. You’re safe here. We’re going to take good care of you.” I spoke as soothingly as I could. It was my mommy voice, the one I used to chase away bad dreams and fevers.
She laughed. It was a crackling, dry-leaves-brushing-together sort of laugh. “You’re the one who isn’t safe, Alison. You’re the one in danger.”
My heart went cold and still inside the cage of my chest.
She looked up at me, grasped my hand with her own, which was bony, clawlike. “It’s always been you.”
ELEVEN
YOU OKAY, LITTLE MOUSE?”I asked, poking my head into Olivia’s bedroom. I’d called her down to breakfast three times, and she hadn’t come. She was usually the first one downstairs, putting in a complicated breakfast order: cereal with six banana slices and three strawberries, cinnamon toast with cinnamon sugar on both sides of the bread.
