A few moments later, everything stopped.

Quiet, like being inside a movie with no sound.

She found herself standing on a roadside. Cold rain beat down. In the distance stood a two-story house with lighted Halloween decorations. Beyond the house, a car moved toward her, headlight beams cutting through the rain.

Cleo stood rooted to the spot where the road curved sharply into a bridge. She tried to step back, but she couldn’t lift her feet. She couldn’t close her eyes. Suddenly the car was almost upon her, its headlights reflecting off her white shirt. She saw the driver’s face, saw his look of surprise and heard his cry of alarm. In his haste to miss her, he jerked the wheel. The car skidded, the rear coming around. There was a crash, a grinding and squeaking of metal, the sound of shattering glass. The driver’s side had taken most of the impact, hitting the cement footing head-on.

Silence rang in her ears.

This time she was somehow able to move until she was next to the car.

There were two people inside.

Jordan and Cleo.

Cleo came to on the wooden floor of her apartment. Her body ached. The candle had gone out, leaving nothing but a puddle of wax. An acid taste collected in the back of her throat, a familiar sensation. She lurched to her feet. With the floor tilting like the deck of a ship, she staggered to the bathroom, making it just in time. Afterward, she half crawled from the room, and dragged herself into bed. She didn’t wake up until the next day.

Remembering what had happened when she was in the trance was nothing like trying to remember a dream. Dreams were vivid upon awakening, but quickly faded until they often became impossible to recall. This was different. Like remembering something she’d done the day before. Something she’d really done.

My God, she thought. What if I made it happen? What if I killed Jordan and our baby? Had he seen her standing there and swerved to avoid her?

Cleo put a hand to her mouth, letting out a sound that was half cry, half sob. She thought back to the night of the crash, to a scene she’d replayed in her head again and again. They were in the car on their way home. They were arguing about cleaning the apartment. Jordan didn’t do his share. They were both working and going to school, so it was only right that they share the household chores. Jordan always said he would help, but when his turn came, he never seemed to have time, and Cleo always ended up doing his work too.

At one point in the argument, Jordan had glanced over at her, then back at the road. It was the briefest of seconds, but when he looked back up he let out a cry, as if something beyond the car had startled him. Cleo thought she saw a flash of white, then the cement wall was directly in front of them.

Minutes later, Jordan took his final breath.

With the last of her money, Cleo bought a supply of candles and tried the trance again.

Nothing happened.

For two weeks, nothing.

Not a damn thing.

During that time the phone rang until she jerked the cord from the wall. During that time she forgot to shower, and forgot to wash her hair, and forgot to eat.

Then one day someone pounded on her door. It was angry knocking. Furious knocking.

She didn’t answer.

The knocking stopped. Footsteps moved back down the stairs. A short time later she heard a key turning in the lock. The door opened, then caught, stopped by the safety chain. Through that three-inch opening, someone shouted her name.

“ Adrian?” She got to her feet.

“Cleo, unlock the door!”

“What are you doing here?” Seattle was a long way from Madison, Wisconsin.

“I’ve been trying to call you. Open up!”

It took her a while, but she finally got the chain unfastened.

Normally Adrian would have hugged her, especially since they hadn’t seen each other in almost a year. It seemed as if he started to, then stopped. She saw the shock go through him.

“Christ,” he mumbled.

Cleo put a hand to her matted and tangled hair. She looked down at a long-sleeved top that had once been white, but was now smudged with candle smoke. Her jeans hung on her hips, her bare, bony toes poking out under the frayed hem.

He came in and quietly closed the door, as if he thought the sound of the latch might set her off. Adrian wasn’t a big person, not much bigger than Cleo herself, but when he walked into that room there was something huge about him, something almost bigger than life.

She was so proud of him.

So glad he was her brother.

They had been through a war together, the battle of growing up, of finding themselves, of making sense of the senseless. They’d been through a massacre and survived.

Adrian grasped her gently by both arms. “I came to get you.” He spoke slowly.

She nodded, wondering what the hell he was talking about and where he was taking her.

“You’re going to come back to Seattle with me.”

“ Seattle?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t.” She couldn’t leave this room. It was the place where she’d made contact. It was part of the equation.

He looked around at the mess, the candle wax on the floor, at Cleo. “What have you been doing?’

She smiled a little, remembering. “Transcending time and space.” Adrian would understand. Adrian would be proud of her.

She didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly she was sitting at the kitchen counter with a bowl of soup in front of her. It was cream-colored, with flecks of something.

“Eat,” Adrian commanded.

She stared at it. And stared some more. What were those things?

While she stared into the bowl, she felt him lift her hand, felt him wrap her fingers around the cold metal of a spoon.

“Eat,” he repeated. “Or I’ll force-feed you.”

And he would.

She ate, trying to avoid the dark things. She did pretty well until she got about halfway done and the concentration of dark things began to overpower the liquid. She accidentally got a dark thing.

It had a strong taste.

A mushy texture.

Mushy…mushroom. She was eating mushroom soup.

The spoon clattered to the floor as she ran for the bathroom to throw up.

That was the beginning of Cleo’s eating problems.

Adrian helped her pack her stuff. Actually, Adrian did most of it. Cleo sat, staring at nothing.

She didn’t know why he was going to all this trouble. “I can’t leave,” Cleo told him.

“You can’t stay.”

He was her older brother. He knew about such things. She nodded, realizing he was right. At least for the moment.

While they packed, he discovered that she would drink milkshakes if they didn’t have any pieces of anything in them. So he plied her with shakes until she got diarrhea and had to stay in the bathroom for hours. Two days after his arrival, all of her belongings were packed and put in storage and they were on a flight to Seattle.

She woke the next morning to find herself face-to-face with a small child who stood staring at her, a wet finger dangling from her pouty mouth.

“Are you Macy?” Cleo asked haltingly, her voice broken from sleep and the weakness that was so much a part of her now.

“That’s my bed.” Macy dragged the wet finger from her mouth and poked at the mattress with its Winnie-the-Pooh sheets. “My bed.” She patted the woven pink blanket flung carelessly over her pajama-clad shoulder. “My bankie.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t take your bankie.”

With the sober seriousness of the Pope, Macy dragged the blanket from her shoulder and tucked the bulk of its pink softness under Cleo’s cheek.

Cleo could only blink back tears and try to smile.

Adrian didn’t believe in waiting. That morning he got Cleo in to see his shrink.

“She’s good,” he told Cleo as he drove her to the office. “I no longer feel guilty about things I have no control over.”