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says. My heart goes cold.
    “Watching the house, Victory?”
    She looks at me, cocks her head. “No. The birds. He was watching the birds.”
    Victory begins pouring little imaginary cups of tea. Esperanza is still humming in the kitchen. There is no one on the beach. The sun moves from behind the clouds and paints everything gold. I decide it’s time to call my shrink.

4
    A couple of months after my mother and I moved to Florida and I had settled reluctantly into my new school, she started to act strangely. Her usual manic highs and despondent lows were replaced with a kind of even keel that felt odd, even a little spooky.
    The early changes were subtle. The first thing I noticed was that she’d stopped wearing makeup. She was a pretty woman, with good bone structure and long hair, silky and fine. Like her hair, her lashes and brows were blond, invisible without mascara and a brow pencil. When she didn’t wear makeup, she looked tired, washed out. She’d always been meticulous about her appearance. “Beauty is power,” she would tell me, though I’d never seen any evidence of this.
    We were in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. I was eating cereal and watching cartoons on the small black-and-white set we had sitting on the counter; she was getting ready for the lunch shift at the diner. The ancient air conditioner in the window was struggling against the August heat, and I could feel beads of sweat on my brow and lip in spite of its best efforts.
    I looked over at my mother, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee from a red mug, her bag over her shoulder. She stared blankly, zoning out, somewhere else.
    “Mom, aren’t you going to ‘put your face on’?” I said, nastily mimicking the chipper way she always said it.
    “No,” she said absently. “I’m not wearing makeup anymore.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s cheap. Frank thinks it makes me look like a whore.”
    I felt a knot in my stomach at her words, though at the time I couldn’t have explained why.
    “He said that?”
    She nodded. “He said he couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I was walking around looking like that, that other men were leering at me, thinking they could have me at any price. He said I should display my face as God made it. And he’s right.”
    I didn’t know
what
to say. But even at sixteen—almost seventeen by then—I knew that it was so screwed up in so many ways that there was no way to address it.
    “Mom,” I said finally, “that’s bullshit.”
    “Watch your mouth, Ophelia,” she snapped, turning angry eyes on me. “I didn’t raise you to talk that way. When Frank comes home, there won’t be any talking like that.”
    She looked away from me after a moment and stared out the window as if she were expecting someone.
    “Mom, Frank’s on death row,” I said calmly. “He’s not coming
home.
”
    She turned and looked at me sharply. “Don’t say that.”
    “It’s true, Mom. You know it’s true.”
    “Ophelia, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, raising her voice. “There’s new evidence. Evidence that will prove there is no way Frank did the things they say he did. He’s innocent. God won’t let an innocent man die for crimes he didn’t commit.”
    Her tone had gone shrill, and there were tears in her eyes. She slammed her empty coffee cup on the counter and left without another word.

    We’ve talked about this a hundred times at least, my shrink and I. This first moment between my mother and me when I knew that something was wrong, really wrong.
    “And how were you feeling after she left that morning?”
    “Sick,” I say. “Scared.”
    “Why?”
    “Because she seemed…different. And I didn’t want Frank to ‘come home.’ I figured he was just a phase she was going through, that it would go bad like all her relationships, and we’d move back to New York.”
    “You were afraid of him?”
    It seems like a stupid question. “He was a convicted rapist and