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I woke up in a pitch-dark room with no idea where I was, no
idea who was in bed next to me breathing steadily, and no idea
why my thighs felt sticky.
I woke with a gasp and the certainty that I was dead, only
to recognize almost at once that I was still living. But my heart
pounded hard in my chest, as if I had been chased, as if I had
fallen from the sky. I reached under the covers and touched
between my legs. My sleep shorts were wet.
It was my mom in bed with me, still asleep. We were in a
hotel room in Rome. The bedside clock’s glowing red numbers
told my squinting eyes that it was 2:43, and the velvet dark-
ness all around told me it was the middle of the night, not the
afternoon.
I’d never experienced jet lag before. I didn’t know that this
was how it was, that you could be dead asleep one moment and
more awake than you’d ever been the next, but that part of you
would be missing, that part of the brain that made sense of
things.
I threw back the covers and stumbled across the room. In
the bathroom I felt around for the light switch and found it at
last. The light flickered on and I squeezed my eyes shut against
its sudden painful brightness. When I opened them again
moments later, I saw the wall where I’d fumbled for the switch,
I saw the white switch itself. They were smeared with blood.
Someone was dead. It was my mother. Someone had mur-
dered her in bed next to me. I was sure of it for less than half of
one second, not even long enough to scream, before I remem-
bered that I had heard her breathing. I looked into the mirror
above the sink. There I was, my hair a mess from sleep, my
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