It went on, page after page. Luz had started keeping track so she would know if it was getting worse, and it had gotten worse, and she had kept writing it down anyway, as if writing it down was the same thing as handling it. In April she had started setting an alarm for two in the morning to check his room. In May she had moved her mattress so it was against the door of the lavender room and she would feel it if anyone went down the hall. At the start of summer she had put a bell on the front door, a little brass Christmas bell on a ribbon, and told her mother it was decoration, and her mother had said, It's not Christmas, and Luz had said, It's cute, and her mother had been too tired to argue.
The last entry was in August.
Aug 17. K is sleeping over. He's been good all week. Going to play one game. Bell is on the door.
That was all. The rest of the notebook was blank.
"The bell fell off," Luz said. She was not crying anymore. She was past it, into a strange flat place. "I found it the next morning. Behind the shoe rack. The ribbon was old, it just — fell off. I don't know when. I had my headset on. I didn't hear anything. I didn't hear the door. I always heard the door. For ten months I heard every single time that door opened, and the one night — "
"Luz."
"It's my fault." There it was. Six weeks of it, a year of it, out on the carpet between them like the spilled books. "It's my fault he's in that place. It's my fault you had to sell the house. If I'd told you in October you could have gotten help before it was so bad, you could have gotten, I don't know, a nurse, something, and instead I hid it, and I played a stupid game, and he walked four miles in the dark, and now we're — and you won't even look at me. You haven't looked at me since August. You just keep handing me boxes. And I get it. I get why. I just needed you to say it. I just needed you to say it's your fault so I could stop waiting for you to say it."
The room was very quiet. Outside, faintly, through the window, Luz could hear Kiara's voice saying something about crows, and her grandfather laughing.
Her mother was holding the notebook now. Luz didn't remember handing it to her. Inez turned the pages slowly, one at a time, reading every entry, her lips moving slightly the way they did when she was counting pills. When she got to Feb 22. Called me Inez all day. I just answered, she stopped for a long time.
Then she closed the notebook and set it on top of the headset, very carefully, as if it might break.
"Ms. Ashby called me," she said.
Luz stared at her.