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Show Moon - 28 them how Esther went at me when we were alone in the house, even showed them the red pinch marks and bruises, but that's when they'd suddenly remember water boiling on the stove or a window that needed shutting. Esther kicked my shin under the table. I cried out. My mother and my grandmother turned to me with angry faces. Now I was being kicked right before their eyes, and they were looking at me like I was a peculiar stranger. My grandmother said something. I couldn't make out what. I felt as if I'd gone suddenly deaf. Her skin was puckered around her lips like the gathered waistline of a skirt. My mother's skin looked strange, too, smooth as paper, smudged dark around the eyes. Esther and Ruth and my mother became odd, alien creatures made out of paper and glue. I could no longer believe that I was one of them. Nothing I said could make any difference. They weren't ever going to believe me. If there weren't another world of people like the one I'd seen among the daffodils, then there was no world at all. The living room at my grandmother Ruth's was so dimly lit, except for the circle of light over Grandad's chair, that to sit there was to feel a swooping together of dark shapes. The couch squatted like a thick animal under the windows; an empty table stood next to a fireplace that was never lit; overstuffed chairs seemed to swallow us. We sat there evenings, my grandmother, my grandfather, Esther, my mother and I. We never said much, except my grandmother, who, as I remember it, was always saying, "There's a draft in here." She said it in a fearful voice, coming down hard on the word "draft," as if a draft were something alive, like a mouse or a cat, but larger, more dangerous, darker. "Move over here," she'd say, patting the sofa, "away from the draft," but I'd be too afraid to move. "Get a sweater. There's a draft in here." Or, |