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celebrate?” she asked. “Did you open your present yet?”
    â€œI’m saving my present to open tonight after we go out for pizza,” I lied. There’d be no movie or pizza or presents. I just wanted someone to know it really was my birthday.
    She looked over my shoulder. “You can go back inside now. They’re gone.”
    I turned to look. Three men got into a dark blue van and left. If Mo had been watching us for a while, she knew more than Mom would like her to know.
    When I turned back to her, she was already skipping toward the wall. The wind drowned out her words, but it sounded like she was singing “Happy Birthday.”
    Later, I plopped onto the bed to read. Mom was lying on her side, talking to herself like she normally did when her visitors left. I couldn’t make out her words, but I rarely could. Her legs and arms jerked, but I’d stopped worrying about that a long time ago. I folded the bedspread over her like a burrito, partly to keep her warm and partly because I didn’t want to look at her.
    It was after 8 p.m. when I heard a knock on the door. Even though Mom told me never to answer the door, I asked her if I could. She didn’t respond so I took a chance.
    I left the chain on and opened the door slowly. No one was there. My eyes moved to the doormat. On it sat a cardboard bakery box from the City Market grocery store directly across the street. I could see through the clear plastic lid to the pink rose decorations on a round cake. The writing on top said: Happy Birthday, Arlene .
    I ate nearly half of the chocolate cake even though I couldn’t enjoy it. A funny metal taste filled my mouth, and I only felt the cake crumbs and the greasy frosting. I couldn’t remember what chocolate even tasted like.
    Mo was right to call me a liar. Whenever Mom asked me if I could smell anything, I still said no when I really could. I smelled and tasted our old apartment. I smelled and tasted the explosion.

CHAPTER 4
    For the last two weeks, I dreamed every night of a never-ending wall of stainless-steel doors, the top row accessible only with a rolling ladder like those found in libraries and bookstores. Behind each door, the dead waited their turn to be drained of blood, washed and clothed by a stranger, laid in a satin-lined casket, and grieved over by tearful loved ones.
    In the dream, the room always glowed with a bluish light whose source wasn’t apparent. My bare feet ached from the cold of the cement floor, and my white breath fogged my vision. I’d hear Mom screaming for me to let her out, but I didn’t know which door to open. When I opened the wrong door, Lloyd’s decaying corpse reached for me with bony arms draped in bits of muscle and skin. Sometimes his icy hand wrapped around my throat.
    Those few times that I cried out in my sleep, my foster mom would wake and come into my room. She’d say, “Your mama isn’t in the mortuary. She’s in heaven with God and the angels.”
    I didn’t tell Tammy about Lloyd’s recurring role in my nightmares. But I truly appreciated the comfort she tried to give me on those black nights. The despair I felt came from the fact that Tammy couldn’t provide proof of her version of the afterlife. How could she be so certain Mom was in a better place? No matter what Tammy said, Mom was indeed at the mortuary. She’d been waiting behind her steel door for twenty-one days, locked in an ice-cold holding pattern until next of kin could be found. Next of kin with the means to pay for the burial, that is.
    The day after Mom died, I’d met with a social worker. She’d explained that after all avenues were exhausted, Mom would be buried in the indigent portion of the cemetery in a numbered grave paid for by the county. She whispered the word “indigent” as if it meant something profane instead of just poor. Now that they’d found my uncle, he’d foot the bill.