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She dropped the fabric eye into the box. Sparing my nose, she stirred the contents with the blade once more, but she quickly lost interest. “Put it away.”

After I put the box on the nightstand, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blade.

For maybe half a minute, she didn’t say anything, and neither did I, and finally she put the knife away. “Good thing you were lying about your mama coming home. If she’d walked in and seen me with that knife in my hand, I’d have used it on her and then on you. You love your mama, snoop?”

“Of course.”

“Not everyone does. Mine was a selfish bitch.”

I turned my attention to the window, to see if rain might be falling yet, though mostly so I wouldn’t have to look at her.

“If you love your mama, then you think about what I said. I like to cut. I could make her a new face in half a minute. Look at me, boy.”

No rain yet.

“Don’t you dis me, boy.”

I looked at her.

“You understand me, how it is, how it has to be?”

“Yeah. I understand. No big deal.”

She turned away from me, crossed the room, opened the door.

I don’t know why I needed to make one more revelation, except that I was a small boy, rattled, and not thinking clearly. “In the nightmare, you were dead, and I was very sorry for you.”

On the threshold she turned and regarded me as when she’d first appeared: not with robotic indifference, as it had previously seemed to me, but with the contempt of a machine intelligence that despised weak creatures of flesh and blood.

“What’re you trying to do with this seeing-me-in-a-nightmare shit?”

“Nothing. I felt sorry, that’s all.”

“Am I supposed to be afraid? Is this a threat or something?”

“No. It’s just … the way it was. In the nightmare, I mean.”

“Then maybe you better not dream anymore.”

I almost spoke her name, so that she might believe me about the nightmare, but something stopped me, whether instinct or guardian angel, I can’t say.

“What? What is it?” she asked, as though she could almost read my mind.

“Nothing.”

Her face was simultaneously beautiful and cruel, but as I would learn in time, cruelty was the truth of Fiona Cassidy. She stared at me, and I held her stare because I thought that if I glanced away she would come around the bed again and hurt me. Finally she stepped into the hallway, leaving the door open, and moved out of sight toward the front of the apartment.

At that moment, as though she willed it to add drama to her exit, the sky loosed an entire quiver of lightning bolts, and cataclysmic thunder followed closely, rattling window glass and reverberating through the walls as if the building were a drum, and rain fell in torrents.

I stood there, trembling, mortified, having betrayed the image of myself that I had crafted and cherished. The man of the family. How absurd that seemed now. I was a boy, not a man, and the merest stick figure of a boy.

Grandpa Teddy often said that musical talent was an unearned grace, that I should give thanks for it every day, and that it was my obligation and my honor to make the most of the gift. But right then, I would have traded talent for brawn, youth for age, wishing myself a grown man, thick-necked and broad-chested, a tower of muscle.

Although I intended to give Fiona Cassidy plenty of time to leave the apartment, shame and a need for redemption compelled me to follow her sooner than might have been prudent. I hurried along the hallway to the living room, but she wasn’t there. The apartment door was shut, the deadbolt engaged, which suggested that she remained somewhere in our few rooms.

Summer rain slanted under the raised sash of each front window, spattering the sill and spilling into the apartment. I closed one, then the other, and with considerable trepidation, I searched our rooms and closets and even looked under my mother’s bed, and then under mine. I was relieved to find myself alone, but I was also mystified. Creepy. Definitely creepy. But nothing serious yet.

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