“Ali Alligator?” my mother whispered as she crept into my room, slipped under my heavy quilt, cuddled up next to me on my twin bed. I was eight years old, a big girl, too old for mommy snuggles, but still, when she pressed her body against mine, I sighed with contentment and tucked myself tight against her.

We fit perfectly together, she and I. So perfectly that I wasn’t sure where I ended and she began.

“Are you asleep, my love?” she asked. “Or are you playing possum?”

I opened my eyes a tiny bit, enough to spy the numbers on the clock on my nightstand: 2:15.

My mother often worked late in her studio, sometimes stayed in there all night, painting. But every so often she’d take a break, come into my room, wake me up, so eager to show off her latest work that she couldn’t wait until morning. Some nights she’d wake me up and ask if I wanted to bake cookies with her, or drive to the all-night convenience store for ice cream and root beer to make floats.

Now she ran her fingers through my hair, down my back, bumping them along the knobby bones of my spine; my mother’s fingers, I knew without looking, were stained with paint. They smelled faintly of turpentine, like the rags in her studio—flammable, an accident waiting to happen.

She put her face up next to mine, cheek to cheek. “I know you’re awake,” she said, and then I smelled it, distinct from the faint turpentine scent. Her breath was thick with gin: a boozy evergreen scent that reminded me of a forest of Christmas trees.

Her fingers worked their way over the back of my nightgown, tracing shapes, making letters to spell out words. It was a game we played, she and I. A can-you-guess-what-I’m-spelling game.

I felt the familiar letters:

I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U

I smiled, wriggled back closer to her.

“I do,” she said, her words slurred in a way that made my stomach start to hurt. “You’re my perfect girl. Too perfect for this world. Sometimes I think . . .” Her words were thick and strange. “I think I should have spared you. Drowned you at birth, maybe, not let you suffer the things that are to come,” she cooed into my hair.

My heart pounded so loud and hard that I was sure she could feel it, ringing like an alarm bell.