For a couple of weeks Chey’s Mom walked around the house like a ghost. She would walk into a room and look around as if she didn’t recognize it. She didn’t talk much and when she did it was just to say she was alright, she was fine, she was just tired. She worked pretty hard at boxing up all of Chey’s father’s stuff. Most of it went to the local church, even though the Clark family had never been particularly religious.

Eventually Chey’s Mom went back to work. She was a paralegal at a firm of business lawyers. She said she desperately didn’t want to, that she wanted to stay home with Chey and help her, but after a couple days back on her job Chey’s Mom wasn’t wandering around the house anymore. She looked more like her old self.

It took Chey a while longer to figure things out.

She had trouble with the neighbor’s dog. It was a little schnauzer with whiskers hanging down from its face and it didn’t look anything like a wolf but still, every time it barked, she would jump. Her heart would race and she would hug herself, pull herself into a ball. When they walked around town, when her Mom would take her to do the shopping and she saw a dog, she would cross the street.

She didn’t sleep much. Maybe a few hours every night. Her grades started dropping at school because she kept falling asleep during Algebra. She would try all kinds of tricks to stay awake. She would jam pencil points into her thighs, bite her tongue, anything, but it never seemed to work.

The therapist gave her tranquilizers so she could sleep and Prozac so she wouldn’t just sleep all day. The combination made Chey feel like live eels were swimming around and around inside her skull so after a while she only pretended to take them and hid them in the back of her desk drawer.

She didn’t much like therapy, but everyone agreed that she needed real help. Professional help. She couldn’t see what the use of it was. He was supposed to be somebody she could talk to but she had nothing to say. She would go and sit in his office and not say anything, thinking she could just wait him out. For a couple of sessions that was exactly what happened—he just waited until her time was up, then sent her home. After a while though he started asking her questions. Weird questions that made her feel angry or upset and she didn’t know why.

He asked her about dogs a lot. He told her that he owned a dog, a Dalmatian. He asked if she’d like him to bring his dog to the office so she could pet it. She said no thank you.

One session he started asking her questions she definitely didn’t like. This time he wouldn’t take no for an answer, though. He wanted to know what she remembered about her father. She wanted to know what her father had looked like, and she thought that would be easy but then she couldn’t quite remember. Then he asked her if she ever thought about how her father had died and she had to admit that she did.

“Do you ever get excited when you think about that?” he asked. Her heart jumped in her chest when he said that. She stared at him as hard as he could but he just sat back in his chair and waited for her answer. “This is really important, Chey,” he said to her. “I think this might be a breakthrough. I want to show you a picture,” he said. “I want you to tell me if this picture is arousing.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, a folded sheet torn from the pages of a magazine. Carefully he unfolded it and passed it to her. It was a picture of a wolf with snow on its muzzle.

She told her Mom about what had happened and she said Chey didn’t have to go to therapy anymore.

She tried to be a normal kid, then. Tried her hardest to just fit in and do okay. Tried to act like a spinny chick and flirt with boys and get invited to parties. It never felt quite right but it did lead to one unexpected bonus. At the parties there was always alcohol. She discovered by trial and error that two or three beers would insure she slept the whole night through.