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Marion handed Fee a CD and we lay on the uneven floor of her bedroom to listen, heads close and the music loud enough that we could feel it vibrating through the boards.

That was how it began. Food and music. The rest of it came later: the magic, the things that fueled it. We were angry before Marion came, even if we didn't know it. At our dads, at our dead moms, at ourselves for being fifteen years old with lives the size of a pinprick, and no idea how to change them. But it was Marion who gave our anger form.

It started with the music. That's not where it ended

She was one of those people who wielded her own history like a knife. Spend enough time with career alcoholics and you can spot this type from an avenue block away; threading their conversation with terrible, intimate revelations, designed to make you believe they're telling you their secrets. Making you think you had to pay them back in kind. Sharon was magically gifted, but I'd bet her true talent was an eye for damage.

I never knew my mother. She died when I was two, and my dad wasn't the kind to keep a candle burning. When I asked questions, he'd send me to the kitchen drawer where he kept a stack of old photos and a rubber-banded lock of her red hair.

So. A mother can be a photograph.

My best friend lost her mother even earlier. Fee came into the world and the woman who'd carried her stepped out. Death transfigured her into a dark-eyed martyr, their apartment the reliquary where Fee's father tended to her traces.

A mother can be a saint, then. A ghost. A blessed outline that shows where she's gone missing.

Sometimes she's a stranger on a park bench, feeding her child from her fingers, the air between them so tender you could knead it like bread dough. Or a woman on the train, Coke in the sippy cup and yanking the kid's arm until it cries. I've always liked to watch bad mothers.

A mother can be a paring knife, a chisel. She can shape and destroy. I never really thought I would become one.

There are things a daughter should know about the woman who's raising her. If that woman had the courage. If she could say the words.

Let's say you lie in bed at night and rehearse the things you'd tell her, if you could. This daughter of yours, infinitely unreachable and just across the hall. This deep into the disaster, what could you still say?

Where would you begin?