“Where’s Kit?” I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.

In fact, she never told me. To this day, I had no idea what they fought about that night. All I knew was, it must have been bad. Kitty sent me an email the next day, to tell me that she was moving to New York. Immediately.

I tried to get her to come home and talk to me about it, but she wouldn’t. I tried to get her to tell me where she was, but she wouldn’t. I didn’t think she’d really leave, but she did.

I didn’t think it would last, either, but it did.

She left, and she didn’t look back. She stayed away from all of us. My mom never tried to contact her, but I did, and my dad did, even though emails went unanswered and texts and phone messages were ignored.

The whole situation bewildered me at first. My mom and Kit had never really gotten along, I knew. I also knew my mom had always been harder on Kit than she was on me. But just disappearing? Ignoring everybody? No Thanksgivings, no Christmases? No birthdays? It seemed like a bit much.

After a year and a half of trying and trying and getting nowhere, I stopped trying so hard. I stopped wondering what we’d all done to push her away, and I just found myself feeling resentful of the fact that she’d gone. You can only reach out so many times before you stop trying. After a while, just the fact that somebody is mad at you can make you feel mad at them. The longer she stayed away, the more defensive I became, and without even noticing, I drifted into an alliance with my mother—steadily resenting Kitty for disappearing without ever even saying why.

At this point, my sweet dad was the only one of us still hoping she’d decide to get in touch.

“No picture of Kitty?” I asked—not because I was surprised, but as a way of calling attention to our allegiance, a way of reinforcing a little closeness when I could.

My mom gave me an eye-roll that was just as reinforcing. “Please.”

But the mention of Kitty did raise a question. “Has anybody called her about this?” I asked.

“No,” my mother said definitively, just as my father said, “Yes.”

My mother and I both looked at him. “You did?”

My dad nodded. “I sent her an email with the subject URGENT FAMILY EMERGENCY.”

My mom looked away. “I’m surprised she replied.”

“Well,” my dad said, “she did. And then she hopped on a plane and came home.”

“She’s here?” my mom asked.

My dad nodded. “She came to the ICU several times.” Then he glanced at my mom. “When you were out.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember seeing her.”

“You were on a lot of medication.”

My mother gave my dad the look she gives him when he’s been very bad. “We didn’t pay for that plane ticket, did we?”

He ignored her. “She’d like to come see you,” he said to me, “but she doesn’t want to upset you or make any trouble. Can I tell her it’s okay?”

From his expression, he clearly expected me to say fine. But I found myself shaking my head. The idea of some big, delayed, years-too-late confrontation with her felt like way too much right now. I couldn’t face it. I had enough going on. Even just thinking about seeing her again made me exhausted.

“Okay,” my dad said, nodding. “I get it. I’ll tell her you’re not ready.”

“Just tell her to go back to New York,” I said. “I won’t be ready anytime soon.”

My mother had that look she gets when she wants to yell at my dad, but she holds it in for the sake of the children. I did not envy his car ride home.

“Thank you for going to all this trouble to grab my stuff,” I said to cheer her a bit.

“No trouble,” she said, shrugging in a way that let me know yes, it had been trouble, but that’s the kind of self-sacrificing mother she was. Also, she was going to make another trip later to bring her folding bridge chairs “so company would have a place to sit.”

“No company,” I said then. “I don’t want any visitors.”

My parents looked at each other. My estranged sister was one thing—but no visitors at all?

“A few close friends, at least?” my dad asked, in a be reasonable tone.

“No friends. No one.”

“Sweetheart,” my mother said. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook. The front hall table is covered in cards. People want to see you.”

It was my moment to reflect graciously on how kind it was of people to think of me. But I just said, “I don’t really care.”

“We can’t barricade the hospital,” my mother said.

But my dad said, “We might talk to the nurses. Say she’s not ready.”

My mom frowned. “But all the literature says not to let them get isolated.”

Oh, God. She’d been reading “the literature.” It was worse than I thought.

“I just need some time,” I said, trying to get her on my side.

Truer words were never spoken. If I had to make a list of things I wanted to see right now, old friends who would pity, judge, and gossip about me would be the last things on it. I didn’t want anyone else thinking the things I was thinking. I didn’t want anyone else privy to the specific horrors of my new situation. I did not want to be the topic of anyone’s phone chats, or get-togethers, or status updates. I didn’t want to be the reason other people counted their blessings.

I would see them—might—when and if I could do it of my own accord.

Which left my mother with nothing but decorating. After capitulating at last to the No Visitors policy, she made us both weigh in on whether or not the hospital might let her bring some floor lamps. Her next stop, she said, was Bed, Bath & Beyond for a tension curtain rod and some better window treatments. Maybe a throw pillow.

This was my mother’s method for loving people: through décor. She glared at the mauve-and-gray-swirled curtains as if they actually might try to harm us. “Doesn’t that fabric make you want to cry?”

I tilted my head. “I’m not sure it’s the fabric.”

“That fabric,” she went on, pointing at it now in accusation, “is a crime against humanity.”

My dad and I knew better than to argue. If my mother ruled the world, its prisons would be crammed full of nothing but citizens with bad taste.

*

AFTER THEY LEFT—taking the morning’s sad croissants to donate to the nurses’ station after I declared I’d never eat them—I decided to close my eyes for just a second, and I fell dead asleep. You wouldn’t think being confined to a bed would be so tiring.

I slept until my new occupational therapist, Priya, came in and wanted me to try to wiggle my toes. She also wanted to work on transferring from the bed to the wheelchair, saying the sooner I could get into the chair on my own, the sooner I could wheel myself to the bathroom—and the sooner I could do that, the sooner we could remove my catheter to see if, God willing, I could pee on my own.

We practiced an extra transfer, just for good measure.

I kept expecting to see Chip. All day, every time the door swung open, I expected it to be him—carrying flowers, at least, and full of apologies and encouraging words. But he never did show up. Maybe he was still at his parents’ house, sleeping it all off. For his sake, I hoped so.

All of this bustling busy-ness seemed oddly cheerful on the surface. Every professional I interacted with had a pleasant, just-another-day-at-the-office demeanor, and yet I strongly suspected they were faking. I know for sure that I was. I kept things calm, I stayed pleasant, I took my medicine—but the truth is, I had woken up in a dystopic world, one so different that even all the colors were in a minor key, more like a sour, washed-out old photograph than anything real.

It looked that way, and it felt that way, too.

I couldn’t imagine the future, and I couldn’t—wouldn’t—even think about the past. And by “the past,” I mean ten days earlier. My past hadn’t even had time to fade: It had been severed from me—the whole history of who I’d been, what I did, anything I’d ever dared to hope for—gone.

That kind of thing puts quite a spin on your perception.

By that evening, I was so tired, I had hopes I might actually sleep through the night. Exhaustion is a friend to the grieving. I was the kind of tired where sleep just reaches out and tugs you into its gentle sea without you ever making a choice. Just as I was giving in and closing my eyes, the door opened again.

And it was my sister, Kitty. With a suitcase.

Seven

KITTY HESITATED AT the door. “Hey, Mags,” she said.

When I didn’t respond, she held her hand up in a little wave.

“I know you said you didn’t want me to come,” she said. “But I came anyway. Obviously.”

I just stared.

She didn’t step in. She waited for permission that I wasn’t prepared to give.

Three years. Three years of unanswered emails and phone messages. Three years of nothing, and now here she was.