TEN

I may have had as much maternal contact as I could stomach in one dose, but my mother had not finished with me. By the time I had finished examining Snowboy’s tooth, shaved a matted Persian, and de-wormed Pimpernel, the perpetually ailing Chihuahua, it was late in the afternoon, and the light was fading.

“You can always spend the night,” my mother offered. She knew I hated driving in the dark and was probably hoping I could pull Snowboy’s impacted tooth in the morning. But I didn’t have a general anesthetic in my handbag, and the thought of spending a night and a morning trapped at my mother’s held its own gnaw-off-your-own-paw terror.

“You know me. When I’m stressed, I can’t sleep.”

“So spend the night and don’t sleep here. You can watch my old movies.”

All through adolescence, images of my mother in various guises kept me company while my physical mother slept. “Thanks, Mom, but I really need to get back.”

“As you like. Wait a second, let me give you something before you go.”

I hoped it wouldn’t be anything like my birthday gift, which had been a tooth-whitening kit, tweezers, a pot of facial wax, and a magnifying mirror—the deluxe criticism basket. I glanced at my watch. “Mom? Can’t this wait? I really want to get on the road.”

“Stop being so impatient, I’m coming.” My mother ambled over as if she had all the time in the world and deposited something cold and metal into my hands. “Here. Put this on.”

I held up the heavy silver chain, which supported a massive pale stone, its iridescent blues barely visible beneath the milky surface. As a whole, the piece was hideous—fussy and ostentatious and utterly at odds with the subtle beauty of the stone itself. “Thanks, Mom, but I don’t really think it goes with anything in my wardrobe.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Abra, you could do with a bit of decoration. And when are you going to get laser surgery? Nobody wears glasses anymore.” She slipped the pendant into my hand; it felt like something used to secure prisoners.

“To be honest, I prefer delicate things.”

“You prefer to disappear. Never mind about the style, Abra. Your father’s mother gave it to me. She called it Las Lagrimas de la Luna, the tears of the moon.”

I examined the stone again. To me, it looked more like drops of semen, but I refrained from saying so. “I think you should keep it, Mom.”

“No.” My mother’s hand pressed down on mine. “According to your grandmother, this moonstone can increase a woman’s powers of intuition. It can bring you true dreams. And it can help regulate your menstrual cycle.”

“You should have given it to me fifteen years ago.”

“Abuela said it was too powerful for you then.” My mother placed the pendant over my neck. “You know, maybe if you didn’t repress your thoughts and feelings so much, your wolf wouldn’t keep trying to escape.”

I put my hands on my hips, incensed. “You always find a way to blame everything on my being inhibited. Maybe if you hadn’t been so damn uninhibited during my childhood—” I broke off, because this was skirting dangerously close to a memory I did not want to drag out into the light.

My mother made a gesture with her hands that jangled various bracelets. “Abra, you know how terribly sorry I am about what happened that night. And if that’s the event that shut you off from your intuitive, creative side, I’m even sorrier.”

“I don’t want to discuss it.” I gave my mother a cursory kiss on the cheek and climbed into my car. When I reached the Taconic, a light snow began to fall, but it didn’t seem like a problem until I turned off onto a side road near home.

Here, the snow was falling more heavily, and when I turned my headlights on high beam I was dazzled by what appeared to be a whirling geometric pattern. I switched back to low beam and crawled along the un-plowed road, trying to look at the bright side. At least it wasn’t rutting season for deer, and I didn’t have to worry about slamming into some feckless ungulate racing headlong for sex and disaster. I turned on the radio for comfort, and found myself listening to Faith Hill again. This time, instead of boasting about her husband’s stellar technique in the sack, she was singing about how fame hadn’t changed her. You know, there ought to be a—

Dart of brown out of the corner of my eye. The antilock brakes shudder under my right foot. A sudden white bang, a smell of powder, a loud thump.