I could stay in this exact moment for a very long time.
He straightens up and reaches to the nightstand and picks up a glass and holds it out. "Drink."
I look at the glass and then look at him.
His face is blank, like the first time I met him. I ignore the faint knock of unease beneath my ribs and I take the glass because he is handing it to me and because I am trying not to be the girl who ruins a good morning by looking for problems in it.
I drink and he takes the glass back and his thumb moves across my mouth, wiping the corner, and he looks at me and he says. "It was nice hosting you, Miss Keller."
I look at him.
His face suddenly starts to blur and then I realize, he is giving me back. He is returning me. I reach for his arm and my hand won't grip properly and I hear myself saying,
"Wait! Where are you going?—" and my voice is coming from somewhere far away and he steps back. I try to follow him with my eyes but I feel myself falling and then the cold hits me. Everything is gone and then I jerk up. I am no longer in the room, I am in the middle of the road and it's cold.
The road is enormous and stretches in both directions further than roads should stretch. I am standing in the middle of it on bare feet.
I look left and I see two cars, one of them I recognize without knowing how I recognize it, something about the color, and then a truck comes.
It comes from nowhere, from a bend in the road that wasn't there before, and it is enormous and it is fast. Then there is a sound that isn't a sound, more a pressure or wall of displaced air that hits me before the impact does.
The truck smashes into the car and I am screaming but I cannot hear myself scream because the noise of it takes everything. I am standing in the middle of it and nothing touches me.
Then the road is gone and I am on the ground and my mother is in my arms.
She is here, I pull her closer and I pat her face with both hands and I sob, "Mom. Mom. Mom, wake up, wake up, Mommy please?—"
I am sobbing, great heaving sobs that I can feel in my whole body, because she is here, she is warm and she is in my arms, and I have not been able to touch her in twelve years.
"Mom," I say, softer, because she is stirring, her lashes are moving, "Mom, it's me, it's Nathalie, I'm here, I've got you, you're alright?—"
Her eyes open. They are her eyes. Exactly her eyes, the same brown, the same warmth that I have spent twelve years trying to reconstruct from memory and failing.
She looks at me and she asks, "Why can't you get your father to like you?"
I go still.
"Mom—"
"Why can't you?" she says again, and her voice is wrong now, not her voice. Her face starts moving, the features rearranging themselves like water finding a new shape, and I hold her tighter because if I hold her tight enough maybe she will stay, maybe she will stay as herself. She doesn't stay, she is gone and it is Alana looking up at me from the ground with my mother's brown eyes turned contemptuous.
"Why do you always make things worse?" Alana says.
"That's not—you're not—" I pull back and look at my hands because I need to look at something that is still itself. "That wasn't you, she was just here, my mother was just?—"
"Why, Nathalie?" Alana says, and sits up and her face is doing something wrong, the mouth moving at a different speed from the words coming out of it. "Why do you always, always make things worse? Why can't you just?—"
"Stop," I say. "Stop it, please?—"
"Miss Keller."
I turn around.
Gerald is standing behind me on the road that is back again, the road that has no end in either direction, and he is in his usual suit with his sour face and he says, "Miss Keller."
"Gerald where is she," I say, "Where did Mom go, she was just here, I was holding her?—"
"Miss Keller."
