o, I don’t know.

I don’t know if the faeries were aiming to harm my mother or if it was her refusal to let go of her power that hurt her in the overlapped world. I don’t know if I was tricked or if my mother was tricked or if the faeries were tricked. I don’t know why the faeries had to be at the farmhouse for their plan to work. And I don’t know if there’s any real way to find out.

I don’t know exactly what happened between my mother and Dr. Holden, but after camping out with us for a few weeks he promptly decamped back to Dr. Sivaloganathan. While I never asked, and no one ever told me, I suspected that Drs. Holden and Sivaloganathan broke up and got back together with the same frequency as teenagers “in love.” I don’t know what initiated my mother and Dr. Holden’s initial romance (although it begat me, so I can’t be too critical of the liaison), or whether the faeries were involved with their recent abortive attempt, although my mother seems far less aggravated with Dr. Holden since his move-in/move-out, even though he still insists she wears scrubs instead of her nurse’s uniform on shift. I’m supposed to see him Wednesday and Sunday nights, but usually one of us cancels. It’s still too weird.

I also don’t know how I’m supposed to go about paying the hardware store back. Do I just go in and surreptitiously leave the money somewhere? Do I find the manager and explain the whole story? Should I take my mother in with me so it seems more official? I’ve been avoiding the hardware store since June because I simply don’t know.

Not that I don’t know everything. I do know that:

Dr. Sivaloganathan didn’t leave, and the Will O’Wisp didn’t close. Plus, the new CEO (who knew government-subsidized nursing homes had the same power structure as multinational corporate conglomerates?) signed some partnership with two overseas training colleges, and now nurses come from the Philippines and Malaysia to the Will O’Wisp while they work on getting their Canadian credentials. There are three (three!) new restaurants in town catering to our new residents, and each is amazing. The addition of new food options might be the greatest thing that has happened to this town ever in the history of all time.

Dr. Holden realized he could charge higher rent to the nursing students and asked us, quite politely due to our non-payment of rent, to find a new place to live. So we moved, but not far. Turns out Mrs. Delavecchio owns both sides of her duplex, and now we stay on the right side of her duplex, rather than the right side of Dr. Holden’s. The layout is exactly the same. The view is different, though, since this house is two halves of a duplex and a driveway over from our old duplex half, with the result that the street lamp no longer shines right in my window! And we share a wall with Mrs. Delavecchio, whose deafness means that she doesn’t mind when I turn the volume up on Internet videos (we have WiFi at home now! It came bundled with Mrs. Delavecchio’s new cable package that gets about eighty billion Berlusconi-owned channels from Italy) or when Margery drops a bunch of plates onto the floor and then punches a wall.

My mother went back to work, acting like her reduced magical capabilities had always been the norm and she’d never once been so powerful as to stop time. As for threatening to exchange me for a better model, she claims no memory of that, that whatever made her say it was struck away when I detached the blue thread from her. But she’s said, numerous times, that even without remembering saying it she’s sorry that she did (although in more lofty language: she uses the word contrite a fair deal). I’m working on believing her. She’s working on making it up to me. But the wound is still raw, and the prognosis is still middling. We’re trying, though. Some days.

Lem wrote me a few more times. I wrote him. Mrs. Delavecchio sent him a prayer card. He sent word back that he did not appreciate being lectured at. Mrs. Delavecchio denied that she was lecturing him. Their bickering continues, in epistle form, weekly.

Mrs. Estabrooks, the principal, still thinks I’m a nuisance and my new teacher can’t remember my name and school is still as boring as ever. To wit: our first English assignment of the year is Write what you did on your summer vacation. Seriously? Seriously.

I’ve never managed to completely shake the feeling I got at the farmhouse that I’ve forgotten something important. It comes and goes, and mostly it’s just a hum that I can ignore, but other times I feel like I should know better. I tried describing the pull to my mother: it almost has a color, a golden yellowish brown. Sticky like honey. Hardened like butterscotch candy. My mother said I’d probably left behind a pen and am welcome to walk back by myself any time and pick it up. I have not yet taken her up on the offer.

So that’s what I know.

But about the faeries — I still don’t know that.