* Readers, as you may know, we do have Ava Brookhants’s own account of this scene from her 1964 memoir, Seer: The Ava Brookhants Story. The book was neither a critical nor a commercial success, but her rendering of these moments is both beautiful and terrifying (a combination favored by our own Bo Dhillon). In the passage, Ava writes that she did not understand, as a child—one who had recently been given a dose of heroin for the pain of her broken arm (yes, you read that correctly)—what she was seeing. She could not fathom what Libbie was doing in the water with all her clothes on at night, or if she should even believe that Libbie was there at all, given her state of mind. And soon, Adelaide came to find her and tuck her back into bed, anyway. Ava accepted her mother’s departure as readily as she had accepted her return: with disinterest.