Towering

made me happy to think about the dog, so happy I wished for a moment that I could have a dog myself.
    But, of course, that wouldn’t do. A dog can’t live in a tower. Dogs, I now remembered, were vigorous creatures. They needed to run, to play.
    But didn’t I? I had never tried to escape, had always just listened to Mama. What would happen if I had?
    Yesterday, I had quite a shock. I was rereading Wuthering Heights , which is my favorite book. I especially like the part where Catherine, who never seems to leave the house either, sneaks out with Heathcliff to spy on the Linton children. Their dog (dog, again), Skulker, bites Catherine on the leg, and she must stay with the Lintons until she recovers.
    I liked that part because Catherine is like I am, sheltered from the world. But as soon as she meets the Lintons, they like her. They take her in, and she ends up marrying the charming and wealthy Edgar.
    But what upset me was, when I turned to the end of the book, for the first time I noticed there was a page about the author, Emily Brontë.
    And it said she was dead!
    Long dead from the look of it. It said she had died in 1848.
    Which motivated me to look through my other books to learn about their authors. The authors, after all, seemed the most like friends of anyone. I learned that Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907, almost sixty years after Emily Brontë had died. And her characters, unlike Brontë’s or Austen’s, drove around in motorcars!
    I could picture a car. Mama had one, and when she took me to this tower on a rainy, gloomy day, it was a car that brought me here. Or, at least, most of the way. The last part, we walked.
    I remember the feeling of being in the car. Mama made me put my head down so I couldn’t look out, but I felt the motion of the road beneath me, and when we arrived, I felt the grass and rocks beneath my feet. It was the last I’d felt them.
    When Mama arrived to see me, I had some questions for her.
    “Mama, what year is it?”
    She stepped back a bit at the question. “Please, Rachel, you must allow me to catch my breath before you bombard me with questions.”
    “I’m not bombarding,” I said, thinking I probably didn’t question enough. But then, I apologized. My tower, I knew, was over fifty feet high, and Mama reached it by walking up steps from the bottom and crawling through a trap door. When she came, she was out of breath and needed to rest. She hadn’t always been so out of breath but, she explained, she was getting older.
    Sometimes, I wondered what would happen if Mama died. Did anyone else know I was here? Would I die too?
    But I didn’t ask that question. I would leave before that happened.
    When she caught her breath, she reached for a book to read to me. She always read before we ate. She said it was therapeutic. But before she started reading, I said, “Mama, you forgot to answer my question.”
    “What question is that?”
    “What year is it?”
    She fidgeted through the pages of the book. “Why do you care so much?”
    “Why would I not care?” And yet, it was difficult to put my reasons into words. “Because it is . . . strange not to know such a thing. I understand that you are trying to protect me from . . .” What? Life? The world? “. . . those who would do me ill.” Mama had told me that the man who had killed my mother had also tried to have me killed, but she had saved me. “Yet, someday, I must go out into the world, and I do not wish to be thought strange. I wish to be ordinary. I’m not mad, after all, like Bertha Rochester, who needed to be locked in an attic.”
    I wasn’t mad, was I? What if I was and I only didn’t know it because of the level of my dementia? Did madwomen know they were mad? Or did they think they were sane, and it was the world that was off-kilter? What if everything, my tower, the trees, even the squirrels were all figments of my mad imaginings?
    But if these were my imaginings, why would I not imagine something else, something better?
    “Am I mad? Is that why you keep me here?” I twisted my neck to see her, for she had moved behind me.
    “Of course not, darling Rachel.” She reached to stroke my cheek and, simultaneously, to move my face so that I was not looking at her. Yet I detected a strange expression on her face, an expression like panic. “It is not you who are mad but the world, Rachel.” She reached for my hairbrush. Even though she no longer had my special brush, she sometimes brushed