The psychic, overwhelmed by the enormous popularity of his tours, canceled and rescheduled our last session three separate times. I could tell, during those weeks, that we were losing Ma. Sometimes when I visited her, she was disoriented; Where the hell am I, baby? she would ask me. She would laugh and cry within the same sentence. Sometimes she didn’t speak at all and just stared at the pictures of Dee that she piled up next to her bed in a sad heap of toppled frames. So when Pete called me after the latest cancellation, I assumed it was about Ma.
“Do you have a minute?” Pete asked me on the phone.
“Of course.”
“Great,” he said. He exhaled heavily. “Can you come over?”
“Oh, Pete,” I said. “It’s late. I’m—”
“It’s about Dana.”
“Okay,” I said.
Though my brother’s house was lit up, and from the street the windows shone with warm yellow light, inside the house had the cold air of punishment. Peter let me in through the garage without a word. The house was too quiet. In the kitchen Helena sat at the table in front of a plastic tub containing two bedazzled cell phones and associated accessories. A pit of wire snakes. Alive. Pete tossed a thin manila folder on the table. Helena slid it toward me. A sticker on the folder’s tab said: Property of Wauwatosa Police Department. I opened it, though I did not want to.
Inside there was a grainy cell phone photo, a screenshot of a Snapchat frame, that the police had blown up and printed on glossy paper. Most of it was blurred, but this was what I could see: a girl on her back in bed, her top off, her hand reaching down into her underwear. There was a stuffed dog with glassy eyes on one of the pillows. A cereal bowl with a few sad Cheerios encrusted in dried milk on the bedside table. A girl’s room. A baby’s room. I looked at the photo too long. I turned it over and slid it back toward Helena. Though what was visible of her face was obscured, the girl, I knew, was Dana.
In a poorly devised revenge plot, Cal, the boy Dana had been seeing, had distributed this screenshot to all his friends, who had then begun to distribute it to boys beyond her high school. A mother of one of the boys had found the photo and reported it to the police. Cal was being investigated for possession and distribution of child pornography. Pete and Helena decided to take away the girls’ phones because it seemed the vitriol would not stop. This only angered Dana’s sister, Sophie, who felt it was unfair to punish her for what was happening to Dana. Pete and Helena asked me to speak to Dana, who had locked herself in her room and refused to come out. I said I would try. I sat in front of her bedroom door and I said, I love you, baby, and Why don’t you let me in? But she made no noises behind the door, and eventually, I just began banging my forehead against the wood. Sophie came out to watch me: I saw that familiar look of pity tinged with fear. I was accustomed to people looking at me this way. I was numb to it. After I’d become nauseated and disoriented on account of hitting my head against the door, Sophie went to get Pete, who pulled me away. As my brother was guiding me down the stairs, Sophie kicked at the bottom of the Dana’s door and produced a thin crack in the wood. I stared at it. You slut, Sophie yelled at the door, you ruined everything.
Pete called me a few days later to say that Dana’s pediatrician had suggested she be put on suicide watch. He’d prescribed her some antidepressants and said they might want to look at other schools.
“And she’s asking for you now,” he told me.
I swallowed a gulp of wine that dried my mouth out. “For me? Are you sure?”
“You should come by,” he said.