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I wasn’t, though. I wasn’t feeling better at all. In many ways, in fact, I was feeling worse. I’ll admit, this feeling was
based more on my circumstances than on my disease: the fact that I was almost thirty, in the hospital, clearly insane, heavily
medicated. At times I felt I was moving toward catatonia. At times I could only sit in front of a window and watch the clouds
pass by as if on a separate plane in the sky, the treetops rustling across the hospital parking lot, the woods advancing toward
me millimeter by millimeter.

Hannah smiled nervously.

“I’m all right, Mom,” I said. “Really, I’m feeling much better.” I knew she didn’t want me to explain this to her, and I knew
she would never tell me how she was doing herself, not truly, so I just asked, “Are things all right with you?” not expecting
an answer.

But there was a knot of cancerous cells forming at the base of her spine, I knew, like a wasps’ nest fixed to the branch of
a tree, a tumor in the hollow beneath her medulla oblongata.

“Don’t worry about me.”

She brought me rhubarb pie, of course, and tea biscuits. She brought a basket full of tiny cheeses and salamis and even a
bit of black caviar. She brought a couple of news magazines.
She wanted to know if I wanted anything else, a certain book, perhaps, or my Walkman and some tapes. She brought her hand
to her face and touched her hair. She bit her lip. Everything looked so new to me. Did she always bite her lip like that when
she was nervous? The color of our mother’s hair, chestnut fading to gray, when did it become like that? I was overcome by
a feeling of amazement, the way I felt sometimes looking at a new car. “How’s Eric?” I asked. I had the feeling that I wasn’t
me anymore. When I looked around, everything had that new-car look, that just-slightly-different-ness.

“He’s very concerned about you,” our mother told me. “Eric is very, very worried. He cares for you a great deal.” Every word
she said was underlined. Eric was somewhere, at that moment, plotting my murder. He was developing insidious new methods of
torture. He was formulating poisons, devising traps. He was rubbing his hands together like a fly. “He’s doing everything
he can,” our mother went on, “pulling all his strings, just to make sure that you’re well taken care of while you’re here.”

“I’d like to go home soon,” I told her. “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I felt for the shoelace. This was one string, I
thought to myself, Eric couldn’t pull.

“That’s Dr. Lennox’s decision.”

I put my head back. The pillowcase was overly starched, and it made a crinkling noise in my ear. It seemed like they changed
the sheets every fifteen minutes. “I know.”

“He’s a very good psychiatrist,” she asserted. “Very well respected.”

“Right.”

“Pilot,” my mother said, “
please
.”

I didn’t know what she meant by the
please
. Please what? Please shut up? Please cooperate? Please stop pretending to be crazy? This room had wall-to-wall rusty orange
carpeting
to match the orange linoleum tiles in the halls outside. The windows were covered in heavy robin’s-egg-blue curtains. Our
mother wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. She wore a pair of gray slacks. She wore a silk scarf, dark purple,
around her neck. She wore a gold pin that I knew our father had given her, of two hands clasped together in prayer. “Hannah,”
I said, “nothing matches.” The television, which was kept low but constantly on by my roommate, a cocaine-addicted bonds trader
named Harrison Reardon Marshall, a man with three last names, erupted into a violence of red and a woman’s scream. He was
watching a horror movie, I think. He also seemed to be living one, the way he thrashed around in his bed, the way he breathed
all night through clenched teeth, apologizing over and over.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hannah said. “Pilot, I don’t—”

“I mean,” I began, but then I realized that I didn’t know either. Despite the medication, it was still difficult for me to
keep track of all the thoughts coursing through my consciousness. “Eric cut off Halley’s leg,” I told her. “That’s what I
mean.”

“Pilot.”

“But not the way you think,” I said. “Eric cut it off with a hunting knife, the one—”

“Pilot, stop.”

“I don’t want you to die,” I said now, somewhat desperate. I twisted the shoelace even tighter. Her cancer cells divided,
multiplied, divided again. It happened so quickly.

“Pilot.” I could see that I was making our mother cry. “Pilot,” she said, “if you don’t stop this nonsense, they’ll never
let you out of here. Do you understand? Dr. Lennox has to believe that you’re normal, somewhat normal, at least, before he
can let you go.”

I had been sitting up, I thought, but now I realized I was lying down. I sat up again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—” These
thoughts came out of nowhere, like someone had put them inside my brain. Did Eric have something to do with that? He was a
neurosurgeon, after all, with the knowledge and necessary skill. These didn’t feel like my thoughts. Perhaps I wasn’t Pilot
James Airie. Maybe I was looking out through his body, and my consciousness was something else, or someone else’s, entirely.
And these thoughts were Pilot’s, this other person’s, and I was only observing them.

“I have a client coming to the house,” my mother said. She worked with hands—the hands of surgeons who had smashed their fingers
in car doors, of violinists who had cut their tendons with kitchen knives, of writers who had inexplicably gone numb from
the wrists down.

“It’s all right, Hannah, I understand.”

“Pilot, I’m your
mother
.”

“It’s your
name
.”

She closed her eyes and opened them. “I really have to go.”

“I’m really all right,” I assured her. “I really, really am.”

“Just try and take it easy,” she said. “Just try. No one wants to hurt you, okay? Especially Eric. And nothing’s wrong with
me. So stop worrying.”

“You’re seeing ghosts,” I said.

“It’s nothing, sweetheart. It’s just my eyes. It’s just what happens to an old lady’s eyes.”

The cancer cells divided, multiplied, divided again. “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “And you’re not so old, Hannah—
Mom
. Not old enough for something like that to be happening to your eyes without a reason.”

“Pilot,” my mother said, “you have to at least try to
sound
normal.”

“Sound normal?”

“Will you try?”

Sound normal. I wanted to, so badly. She had no idea how badly, all my life.

Hannah was growing accustomed to seeing double, though. It didn’t hurt, at least. It was even beautiful sometimes. The ghosts
moved across her field of vision like reflections on glass, like flower petals floating along the surface of a brook. Every
morning she poured herself a pot of tea from the kettle and saw the ghost pot inches away being filled by the ghost kettle.
She sat in the real chair in front of the real television, and next to her was a ghost chair and a ghost TV. She lost sight,
sometimes, of which object was real and which one was the ghost. She tried to pick up her ghost keys from the kitchen counter.
The real ones lay nearby. She stumbled over a real wastebasket that she thought was a ghost. She reached for the real phone
and was surprised to find that it
was
real. “I’m losing track of things,” she told my real brother on the real phone. “And these ghosts, they’re not going away
anymore.” It was like she was seeing the sky on the still surface of a lake. It was like she was looking at a world full of
twins.

“It’s only been a few days,” Eric said, the phone on speaker, his hands touching each other, a spider on a mirror, “and you’re
just reacting to stress. It’s Pilot, and you’re worried about him. That’s all. That’s all it is.”

“We’re all crazy in this family.” Our mother’s voice was plaintive, whiny, high-pitched. “We’re all nuts.”

“No one’s crazy.”

“Pilot is schizophrenic,” she said. “Eric, for—”

“Mom, he’s already much, much better. There are new drugs. There are all sorts of medical options.”

“He still thinks you’re trying to kill him,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s crazy?”

“It’s a delusion that will go away with time. Please, Mom. I’m sure Katherine DeQuincey-Joy will help him with—”

“What do you know about her?” our mother said. “She’s new, isn’t she?” Hannah sat in the living room drinking tea. Right now
she tried to put her real cup into the ghost saucer. She sighed, finding the real saucer now with her real hand. She watched
the ghost hand put the ghost cup into the ghost saucer.

“Katherine is very qualified,” Eric said, leaning back in his office chair. “In fact, I’ve been out with her socially, and
she’s really very intelligent.”

“You’ve been out with—”

“We just went out for some spaghetti, that’s all. That’s all it was.”

“She’s your brother’s analyst, Eric. Shouldn’t you—”

“She’s not his
analyst
, Mom. It doesn’t work like that anymore.” Eric sighed heavily. “Anyway,” he said, “she’s a very intelligent, highly competent,
well-educated psychologist. And her job is simply to monitor Pilot’s progress on a day-to-day—”

“She wants to know why it happened.”

“True,” Eric said. “Katherine wants to know why.”

“Eric,
she wants to know why it happened
.” Our mother paused. And Eric said nothing. “Do you think,” our mother said after a while, “do you think it has anything
to do with—”

“With Fiona? Because it happened around that time of year?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let it go,” Eric said. “Pilot has had a lot of problems in his life. It could be anything.”

For every object Hannah saw, there was a ghost. She imagined
that for every object there ever was, a ghost of it remained somewhere, and that she was somehow seeing into that world.
Her daughter would have to be there somewhere out there. If there was a little girl, there was a ghost of her, too.

“Mom?” Eric said.

“Yes.”

“Are you spacing out?”

“I guess so.”

“You were humming.”

“Sorry.”

“I should go,” Eric said. “But I want you to relax now, all right? I’m bringing home a prescription for you, some Xanax.”

She shook her head into the phone. “I don’t want any Xanax.”

“You’ll feel so much better, Mom.” Eric leaned forward at his desk. In his drawer he had dozens of plastic containers filled
with sample drugs.

“No Xanax.” She could just see him rolling his eyes, his frustration. From my position in the clinic lobby in front of the
Caribbean mural, I could see it, too.

“I’ll bring it anyway, Mom, and you can decide.”

“Do what you like.” Hannah had already taken three Valiums today. Besides, she didn’t want Eric to know that she relied on
pills. She said, “Good-bye, Eric.”

“Bye, Mom.”

Hannah put the black rotary-dial phone back into its cradle, and nearby a ghost phone was placed into its ghost cradle. She
looked at her hand, the long, thin fingers, the blunt nails, and right next to it was her ghost hand, its long, thin fingers,
its blunt nails, the hand of a ghost woman who lived in a ghost house.

She thought of me. Pilot must be the ghost-woman’s son, she said to herself. He can’t be mine.

I’m not sure how many other patients were staying on the ward. They all seemed new to me each time I saw them. I had the
same roommate the entire time, though—poor old Harrison Reardon Marshall. And his problems were more drug related than mental,
as far as I could see. He’d been doing crack, it seemed. And he was a bonds trader. Apparently, crack is frowned upon in the
bonds-trading business. There were white-uniformed nurses and medical techs everywhere. It was a psychiatric clinic, however,
so most of the people here were either threats to themselves or to others. I was considered a threat to myself. The question
of whether I was feeling suicidal had been put to me many times.

Whenever I was asked that question, it was always with the same gentleness, the same fearfulness, as if just asking might
lead me to try.