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Grandma told me many years later that it was around this time that Mother had been moved, on the advice of her doctors, from the Austen Riggs Center, a more open residence for the affluent "mentally afflicted" in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to the Craig House sanitarium in Beacon, New York. The doctors said that her emotional deterioration and suicidal tendencies required she be under constant guard. Grandma was with her for the move and told me that Mother was in a straitjacket and didn't recognize her. I can't manage to wrap my mind around that image of Mother in a straitjacket, or what Grandma's anguish must have been. One day Mother came home accompanied by a uniformed nurse. I refused to see her. I was playing jacks with Peter on the hardwood floor upstairs when she arrived in a limousine. Grandma called for us to come down. "Peter." I grabbed his arm. "Don't go down. I'm not going to. Let's just stay up here and play jacks. I'll let you win. Okay?" "No, I'm going," Peter said, and he went downstairs. Why didn't I go down? Was I so angry with her for not being there for us? Was it I'll-show-you-I-don't-need-you-either? I never saw her again. She must have known it would be her last time home. She'd come, I guess, to say good-bye — but also to get the small razor that she kept in a black enamel box given to her years before by her friend Eulalia Chapin. Apparently, she had rushed upstairs and just managed to slip the razor into her purse when the nurse, who'd been sent to make sure such a thing didn't happen, caught up to her. A month later, in April, on her forty-second birthday, Mother wrote six notes — one each to Peter, Pan, and me; one to her mother; one to her nurse, telling her not to go into the bathroom but to call the doctor; and one to the doctor, her psychiatrist: "Dr. Bennett, you've done everything possible for me. I'm sorry, but this is the best way out." Then she went into her bathroom in the Craig House sanitarium, carefully withdrew the razor she'd managed to keep hidden, and cut her throat. She was still alive when Dr. Bennett arrived, but she died a few minutes later. The fluttering slowed; the wings grew still. Then peace. I came home from school that afternoon, and as I walked through the front door, Grandma called down to me from her bedroom at the top of the stairs. "Jane, something's happened to your mother. She's had a heart attack. Your father is on his way here right now. Please stay in the house and wait for him. Don't go out." I turned right around, ran out the door, and ran all the way to the stables, where I was to have a riding lesson. I don't remember feeling anything at all, though I must have known something serious was happening, because Dad didn't just travel out from the city unexpectedly on a weekday. In the middle of my lesson the phone in the stable rang. It was Dad telling whoever answered to make me come home immediately. But I took my time. There were so many dead bugs and interesting rocks in the dirt driveway that I needed to stop and examine. Eventually, when I could find no more ways to stall, I trudged up the hill. A strange car was parked at the bottom of the steps. Must be Dad's rental, I thought with a shudder. In some deep part of me that wasn't my mind, some part that could keep secrets from the rest of me, I knew what was coming. My conscious mind knew this was all a dream, that I was about to wake up. I opened the heavy front door and walked into the living room. Nobody had turned on any lights, and the room seemed grayer than usual. Dad and Grandmother were sitting up very straight, each on a different couch, facing each other. Dad took me on his lap and told me that my mother had had a heart attack and was dead. Dead. Now, there's a word. Short, heavy. I felt myself holding it in my hands, like a brick. Dead, like the butterflies mounted on that board on the other side of the living room wall. Her jars and tweezers were lying spread around on the table out there. I'd seen them only yesterday when I'd gone to polish the saddle. She couldn't be dead. She hadn't put her things away. Maybe I was dreaming. Then I was outside my body looking back at myself, waiting for myself to react. Everything was familiar, yet nothing was the same. From another room came the loud ticking of a clock — jarring, wrong. Didn't it know that time no longer mattered? I noticed wrinkles in the chintz slipcovers and tried to smooth them out. Make it better. I know I can make it better. Peter came home a few minutes later. Dad got up and switched seats with Grandma, taking Peter on his lap and repeating the story to him. I had to get away from all of them, to be by myself, try to get myself back into my body, figure out how I felt. "Excuse me, please. I'm going to my room." I could hear Peter crying as I followed myself upstairs. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I wondered why I couldn't cry, like Peter. "Mother's dead. I will never see her again." I said it over and over to myself, trying to bring up some tears. But I felt nothing. I remembered that I had stayed upstairs the day she'd come home for the last time. Why hadn't I gone down to see her? I felt something begin to stir in my chest. Ah, here it comes. I'm normal. But the feeling skittered away and I went outside myself again, and again I went numb. When I was in my forties and the tears for Mother did finally come — unexpectedly and for no apparent reason — they were unstoppable. They came from so deep within me that I feared I wouldn't survive them, that my heart would crack open, and like Humpty-Dumpty, I'd never be able to be put back together again.