Chapter 29

Mila was dreaming again. Her dreams had been strange and scattered like the faces of newly mixed puzzle pieces. Her mother and brother featured prominently in them, and Mila felt certain that the doses of hormone medication weren’t helping with the nightmares.

For the third night in a row, she woke up in a cold sweat. She padded to the window, opened it, and hurriedly gulped in big gasps of fresh air. This time her mother had been threatening her brother with a gun. It seemed so vivid that Mila could see the scene even now… She shivered at the thought. There had been a gun… Mila remembered it vaguely. A civil war pistol her father had lovingly restored after finding it at some shop downtown. She could hardly remember, but she had thought he’d told her it wouldn’t shoot. She wondered if her brother had known that.

She mopped sweat from her brow with the hem of her t-shirt and fumbled along in the dark till she reached her desk. She felt for the chair, for the jacket she’d left hanging there, and drew out a slim cigarette. These things were better than anything, she thought, lighting one and taking a long drag. Why had she never known about them?

It was just one more thing in a series of millions that her mother had never told her about. It was massively unfair, she thought, but in a distanced way, not as embittered as she felt entitled to. She couldn’t work up the energy for that right now.

She discarded the cigarette underfoot, disregarding the stain it made on the hardwood flooring, and climbed back into her bed. She’d been watching a lot more television lately, and Perry Mason had acted as a private detective to find someone. She wondered if her mother’s estate lawyer did things like that. She decided to call him in the morning and find out. She desperately needed another human presence in this house, and she knew exactly who she wanted it to be.