I woke to Sarah sitting on top of me and running her fingers down my face. I screamed and knocked her to the floor, grabbed my phone from beneath the pillow, and held it out like a weapon. She was a blur of arms and legs scuttling themselves back into a standing position, from where she grinned at me.

“Something is deeply, deeply wrong with you,” I told her.

“Welcome home, Ruthie.”

I unfolded my glasses and put them on so I could see her for real. She was thin and small like always. It was dark in the room; the sun hadn’t risen yet.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m going back to sleep. And I’m locking the door this time.”

“I learned how to pick locks last summer,” she said. I decided to take my chances.

—

“You have an insane daughter,” I told Mom as I entered the kitchen with my blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Dad sat at the table, going through his calendar. The sun came in through the window and the oven clock read 8:30. Mom and Dad were neatly dressed. I was in an early-morning blear, my hair half-tied, half-frizzed around my face.

“I have two insane daughters,” said Mom. She handed me a cup of coffee.

“She was on top of me. In my sleep. Smiling like a maniac.”

“She’s just excited to see you,” said Mom. “She’ll hate you again soon enough.”

“You call that excited?”

“Sarah’s got an odd way to love. It’s just her nature.”

Mom took my head in her hands and turned it from side to side. The way she was going at it, I thought she might knock on my skull to see if my brain were still in there. “You doing okay?” she asked.

I pulled away. “I’m fine. It was an accident.”

“You’re not getting enough exercise,” she said. “I read somewhere that exercise lowers the likelihood of suicide.”

“I didn’t try to kill myself,” I said.

“Alright,” she said, holding up her hands. “We’re just glad you’re home and safe.”

“We were very worried about you,” said Dad, looking our way.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not allowed to do that again,” said Mom, like an order.

“What she means to say,” said Dad, “is that we understand that you were in a lot of pain. If you ever feel the urge to…” he waved his hands, “you can come to us.”

“Great,” I said. “Thank you for that generous offer.”

“Anytime.” On his way out, he kissed my forehead.

The two of them left for work. I lazed around the house, indulging in my freedom. A semester off of school as recommended by the counselor Queen’s College assigned to me after my trip to the hospital. The counselor was sweet but young, and though she was good at hiding it, I could tell she was anxious, like I was an exam she was worried she was going to fail. “Can you identify any sources of stress?” she asked. I was embarrassed by her questions. I didn’t know what to tell her; everything I said came out defensive, and, at one point, I denied that the incident ever happened. It was a misunderstanding, I had said. They saw me on the ground but I was just tired; they thought I was turning blue but it was just the tint of the overhead light; the doctor had been wrong when he said I nearly died. The fuss was for nothing. I was sorry I had caused it.

I didn’t tell the counselor, but the worst part was waking up in the hospital and realizing it was me on the bed. It didn’t feel right, the nurses directing their attention my way. I got out of bed and sat in the visitor’s chair, looking around the room as if it was someone else being treated. That was natural, easy, and when Mom arrived, frazzled from the flight and concern, she found me unwilling to treat myself like a patient. In the hospital I would always be a visitor: that had long been my role and I had reserved it.

But I listened to the counselor’s suggestion. I had to give in to something. Mom and Dad wouldn’t forget and back off, and I was tired of everything, tired of making my own decisions. I packed my apartment and flew back to Texas.

After a couple hours of sitting around, I dressed and walked to the swath of trees behind the synagogue. It had always been my favorite spot; in the summer, wild sunflowers sprung up with long thick stems. I picked my way over the tree roots, tracing how they poked out of the ground, the floor covered thinly with leaves and sticks and pinecones. The air held a faint smell of weed. I looked out and behind a tree was Sarah, smoking a joint. She was in her school uniform: white polo, knee-length skirt. As I approached, she spotted me and waved.

“You’re supposed to be in school,” I said.

“I didn’t want to go today,” said Sarah.

“You know you’re not supposed to be alone,” I said. “Ever.”

Sarah ignored me. I wanted to shake her. My mind drifted for a moment to consequences and funerals, images that once manifested into research as a way to soothe myself. Instead the mortality rates would give me panic attacks and I stopped googling them; now I no longer knew the exact number. It slipped easily from my brain the same way everything else did. I couldn’t hold on to most information, like the names of the doctors and the dosage of the medicines. But I knew that the number was bad, and I didn’t want to look it up again. I sat beside her on the ground, took the joint, and inhaled. The smoke burnt my throat and I coughed. Sarah smoked and didn’t cough, and I felt silly coughing more than a sixteen-year-old.

“Does Mom know you smoke?”

“It’s medicinal,” she said. “Helps with my seizures.”

“This shit is not medicinal,” I said. Sarah handed me her water bottle and I drank.

“You can’t handle your weed?”

“You’re going to rot your brain. Smoking and skipping school? Do you even want a future?” She wasn’t listening to me at all. “The school’s going to call Mom, you know.”

“They think I had a seizure last night,” she said, her face lit up with deception. “I texted Margaret, told her it was a long one. I miss so often anyway, they don’t bother counting my absences.”

Margaret was Sarah’s shadow at school. She’s probably seen more seizures than I have. Our Jewish school was small, but the teachers didn’t feel equipped to watch Sarah on their own. Still, they were remarkably accommodating. They created a whole curriculum for her, one that was flexible enough to account for her condition.

We went quiet, staring out into the forest at the grayish trunks and quick squirrels in the brush. I smoked until the moments stopped connecting and my brain was quiet. I was waiting for life to do this on its own but each day it failed me. Each day it churned out seconds that kept looking back.

We remained there for a long time; eventually, the empty calm dissipated. The world resumed and memories turned out memories. The singing of the afternoon prayer from inside the synagogue, cars driving by, bugs landing on our legs. I watched a mosquito situate itself on the back of my hand and sink its proboscis down into my skin. Its underbelly swelled red with my blood. Everyone feeds on something. Sarah dug into the ground with her nails, ripping up sprigs of grass, clearing the earth just to clear it and see it cleared. She looked up from her burrowing and said, “Mom wouldn’t tell me the details but you have to. I’m your sister and I deserve to know.”

I laughed, because it was all so suddenly ridiculous, and I said, “You want to know what I did? I got drunk and I took some Klonopin, like an idiot, and my breathing stopped.”

Sarah grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it in my face. It hit my eyes, my mouth, my nose; I was blinded and blinking furiously. I spat and reached for her but she was quick; she walked away and then turned. “You are an idiot!” she yelled. My instinct was to run after her—I had been trained to do so— but I fought it, my eyes red and irritated, until I had to relent. I chased her but she had disappeared; I called her name but no one answered. I knew she wouldn’t let up and anger replaced anxiety. She was reckless, irritating, wild. I could not twist her arm; if I tried, she would cut it off. I walked home without her.

In the empty house, I took a long bath in her bathroom and drained all of her shower products. I found a bag of weed and rolling papers under her bed and hid it behind my bookshelf. It was childish. I was twenty but she made me feel fourteen. I wrote Mom a text, She skips school by herself and smokes weed, but felt bad and deleted the smoking weed part before I sent it. It was half revenge, half responsibility. Sarah couldn’t be alone. She could have her privacy when she needed it, but only if Mom was around and able to check on her every so often. If she was alone and no one knew where she was and she had a seizure and didn’t get the emergency medication in time—too dangerous. Her seizures didn’t stop without it. That’s what Dravet Syndrome did: Sarah’s body couldn’t make some kind of protein and the punishment was an entirely fucked up life. Only after Sarah turned twelve and begged and begged did my parents let her move out of their room into her own. Her bat mitzvah present, they called it, like it was a normal thing to give.

Mom called me immediately. “I’m coming home right now,” she said. “Keep your eye on her.”

“She’s not here.”

“You let her out of your sight? What were you thinking? Call her and find her.”

“I’m not speaking to her at the moment,” I said.

“Do you want her to die?” asked Mom, and I flinched. Mom took in a breath and then she muttered, “I’ll call her,” and hung up.

—

Mom gave Sarah quite a talk. Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table and I stood in the doorway so I could see her face as Mom lectured, “You never go out alone,” and “How could you be so irresponsible?” It was blown up like a balloon and twisted from anger to shame to obedience. I slipped out and walked fifteen minutes to a drugstore and bought her new bottles of her shampoo and conditioner. I came into the house through the back door and left them on her bed.

I laid on top of my blanket and watched the ceiling fan spin. My room still reflected a teenage version of myself. The walls were teal and featured taped-up pictures of high-school-me and my high-school-friends, grinning in the backyard of our Jewish day school and posing in dresses at the mall. On the bookshelf were old kids’ novels with torn covers. The Westing Game, Lemony Snicket’s entire body of work, my annotated copy of Jane Eyre from ninth grade. That one I had read during the two weeks Sarah had been intubated in the hospital after a seizure in the pool caused her to aspirate. Forty-five minutes long, the doctor had said, maybe more; she was unconscious, it was hard to tell what her brain was doing without the EEG. Once they attached  all the wires to her skull, my parents watched the screen spit out waves of brain activity as if it were a movie. I barely looked at it, buried in Brontë’s story. I didn’t want to know. I wrote the worst essay of my life on that book despite my two-week devotion to it. Every time I thought about the narrative my head hurt; all I saw was electroencephalography. I couldn’t remember if I loved or hated the novel, and I haven’t reread it since. It took Sarah years just to recover from that singular event. She was nine at the time, but the doctor said her maturity was at a five-year-old level, and my parents spent thousands of dollars in tutoring and therapy to get her to a normal high school. And every seizure—monthly, at the best times, every three days at the worst, now about once a week—set her back. I never understood why she fought so hard just to keep falling behind. She couldn’t read well, behaved erratically, and she could never be alone; thinking of her future made me so angry I wanted to vomit and then die.

“Ruthie?” It was my father’s voice from the kitchen. I hadn’t heard him come home. I rose slowly, like I was exhausted or injured, an old woman with a failing body. It was a fun game to play, to reject my youth, to allow my mind to infect my physicality. My parents and Sarah were eating dinner: grilled corn and baked chicken and rice. I grabbed a head of corn and ate it standing.

“Sarah wants to stay home tomorrow but your father and I have work,” said Mom. “She asked if you could watch her.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“What else are you doing?” asked Sarah. “Planning another attempt?”

“Watch your mouth,” said Mom.

“Chutzpah,” said Dad.

“Great job parenting, guys,” I said to them. I wished I was back at school. I chose New York so I could be far away, because I was stupid and thought that distance meant freedom; that there was a life of my own if I would just go out and find it. The life: sitting through chemistry classes in cramped lecture halls, walking back to the overpriced studio apartment my parents paid for because they wanted me to have something of my own for once, taking tequila shots at the shitty dive bar that didn’t card because my fake ID had been cut in half the one time I tried to go to Cubbyhole, befriending drunk girls as we staggered home, me thinking, Something happen to me already. I wanted to be in danger. I always got back safely. I littered my night table with dead vapes and smoked blunts, always thinking, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah couldn’t do this, Sarah was stuck at home, Sarah was sick. I was sick with worry and sick with the frustration of that worry. Sometimes I painted, but mostly, I bought canvases and left them blank. I hated everything I made. I didn’t care about sunsets or fields; I could think only of painting my sister convulsing on the floor, which made me feel so awful I thought I should be tortured. What else could I do? That’s how I grew up: watching. All of us waiting for emergencies at all times, always on, and Sarah paid no attention. She was selfish. I was angry. We circled each other in perverse orbits. I looked over at her. Her head was bowed slightly and she was quiet. Mom and Dad stood around unsure how to fix it despite all the years they had had to figure it out. They were too busy keeping their eyes on my sister, watching for the moment when her brain would try to kill her.

“Please?” said Sarah.

“Why can’t you go to school?”

“She’s been having a hard time,” said Dad. “We’re showing her that if she needs a break, she can ask us rather than sneak around behind our back.”

“Fine,” I said. “But you’re paying me for babysitting.”

“Twenty bucks,” said Mom. She patted the seat beside her. “Won’t you sit and eat with us?”

I sat, though I didn’t want to, and looked around. Mom was only forty-five, but her wrinkles were deep, and her roots revealed that all her hair now grew in gray. Dad’s kippah sat on a large bald spot. Sarah always looked pale and tired; even her loud emotions could not hide her body’s weary composure. We had grown around the weight of her. The byproduct of sickness was guilt and this house was stuffed with it. Dad felt endlessly guilty that I always had to come second, Mom felt endlessly guilty that her womb had produced such a torturous existence, and I felt endlessly guilty that I was angry—furious, really. Whether Sarah felt guilty, I didn’t know. She had been a burden for so long, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had staked her identity within that role. Perhaps she reveled in it.

Mom placed our dishes in the sink and then, as I was standing, slipped an arm through my arm. “Take a walk with me,” she said. “I miss talking to you.”

She was ordering me around again, and I told her so. “You’re too good to walk with your mother?” Dad said, squeezing my cheek. Another stupid thing to fight; I put on my shoes.

It wasn’t late but it was getting dark. The weather was cool and I held my arms to my chest, careful not to touch my mother. “Do you still paint?” Mom asked.

“Not much. I got tired of it.”

“That’s a shame.”

“I was never any good at it.”

“No, but you loved it. And we all need something to keep us busy.”

“I was too tired all the time.”

“I’ve been thinking of taking up gardening.”

“Nothing felt good. Even the things I loved didn’t feel good.”

“It’s a nice day,” she said. “Isn’t it a nice day?”

“Mom,” I said, “if I get down on the floor and start seizing, would you listen to what I’m saying?”

My mother was silent.

“Mom.”

“Do you want to be sick?”

“No. Of course not.”

“There’s so much Sarah can’t do.”

“I know.”

“She’s disabled. You want that?”

“No.”

“I love you,” said Mom. “When I heard you were in the hospital, it felt like you were trying to hurt me.”

“I was having a hard time.”

“We’re all having hard times. But you need to learn how to ask for help. You scared me so bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I never thought to be worried about you. You were hardly sick as a child. Sarah caught everything and you never had a runny nose.” She paused to study my face. “Even in the hospital, you seemed so healthy to me. I kept telling the nurse how you were glowing. The light couldn’t wash you out. The nurse said you were a very pretty girl, and I corrected him. I said, ‘a very pretty woman.’ I always felt like you were older than you are. Like a roommate. You didn’t need us.”

“I do,” I said. I couldn’t keep my voice even.

“That’s what makes this so hard: I’m all used up. I’m more of a nurse than a mother. I really wish I could be better but I’m all used up.”

Mom turned away from me and I could tell she was wiping her eyes. I kept quiet. I’d seen her cry before. The time I woke up at 2 a.m. to her shouting for the medicine, disoriented with sleep. When she spent a week in the hospital and came home to a daughter who told her she hated her only two days later. In the grocery store aisle, when I was fifteen and sullen and said that Sarah was ruining my life. It made me want to hold her.

“You’re an amazing person, Ruthie,” she said. We were turning back to our street. “I’m so lucky to have you as a daughter.”

“What if I was a serial killer? Would you still feel lucky?”

She laughed. “You’re so gentle. You could never hurt someone like that.” She caught the look on my face and added, “You are. You don’t see it, but I do. You handle everyone with so much care.”

She didn’t know me at all, is what I thought. When we got back to the house, I returned to my room and smoked Sarah’s weed out the window, thinking about how I had drunk-stumbled around, reaching into my bag. What had I been looking for? My phone maybe, or a cigarette; the bar was about to close for the night and I was loitering on the sidewalk, ready to go home. Whatever it was, I didn’t find it. I had seen the pill bottle, and without thinking, not even a little, dry-swallowed five of the small yellow pills.

—

The next day, we both slept in late. I drove Sarah to get Chinese food and then to the mall, where she tried on an endless amount of clothes. I was irritated watching her sort through rack after rack, but she kept promising me, “Just one more store,” and I acquiesced, hovering behind her with the emergency pouch of medicine clipped to my wallet. I was relieved when she got bored and decided to go home, but soon after our parents returned from work, she made me walk thirty minutes with her to the lake. It wasn’t a nice lake as lakes go. It was small, swamped with algae, and infested with water snakes. But when we got there, Sarah lifted her arms and jumped into the air. “Look,” she said, “do you see the water?” It was glimmering. She took off her shoes and waded in. I sat on the grassy bed.

“No swimming!” I called after her.

“Ankles only,” she promised. The sun beat down; it was low in the sky now, a fierce yellow. Sarah moved her hands through the weeds. She dipped her fingers into the shallow puddles near the shore. I could tell she wanted to swim and that it hurt her to hold back; she’d lift her skirt and go just a bit deeper and just a bit deeper. But anytime she got too far, I called, and she turned around immediately, no protests. I laid back. The weather was nice and I wanted to close my eyes but I was afraid Sarah would take advantage of my blindness. After a while of splashing around, she came running my way, her hands clenched around something.

“Check it out,” she said.

“If that’s a snake or a bug, I’ll kill you,” I said, standing.

She opened her hands. It was a black and green speckled frog with a reddish stripe down its back. “It let me pick it right up,” she said. Her gaze was held to it, captivated.

“Let it go,” I said, but she abruptly sat down on the grass. There was a vacancy to her face, and her open eyes took on an uncanny look. Not captivated—locked. Seizing. Her body loosened and she sunk over. The frog hopped away; it moved so slowly; I was stuck watching it; it disappeared into the grass.

I swore under my breath and grabbed for the medicine. I moved between getting the zipper open and spraying the midazolam into her nose without being sure that those two moments happened beside each other. I called 9-1-1 and my mother. 7:46 p.m. I lifted Sarah’s head and watched her closely. Her leg started twitching: a good sign, it meant the seizure had shifted and would be less severe. Usually once her body began to move, the seizure was ending. If she was totally still with her eyes locked to one side, it was riskier; the seizures were longer, and sometimes she had to go to the hospital. I waited, shaking out my hands. I strained my ears for sirens.

By the time the Austin Fire Department arrived, the seizure had stopped (7:52 p.m.) and she was asleep on the grass. The paramedics buzzed around her anyway, checking her oxygen levels, and, though I wanted desperately for them to leave, nothing I said could have shooed them away; they were following procedure. Mom appeared, her hair covered with a baseball cap, sweaty from the evening run she had rerouted to meet us. She took over. The ambulance came and I asked the paramedics if they could load Sarah onto the stretcher and drop her off at our house. She was heavy, dead weight, and she had pissed herself. They said no. We waited as they made calls to their supervisors to confirm it was okay to leave her and not go to the hospital, and then Dad arrived; he had rushed back from his study group at the Jewish community center, and the two of them lifted her into his backseat. She cried and fought them without opening her eyes. She didn’t want to move, drugged by the midazolam and worn out by the misfired electricity in her brain. The sound of her protests made me nauseated, and I was glad I did not have to go near her piss-wet clothes. I walked home as slowly as I could and by the time I got back, they had cleaned her, put her to bed, and showered and gone to bed themselves: the whole ordeal was exhausting, I knew that; I’d been through it, too.

Mom and Dad kept a mattress beside their beds ; Sarah slept with them after every seizure. When I was certain they were all asleep, I gathered my bedding and entered the room, settling on the recliner in the corner. I shut my eyes but I did not sleep; instead I closely listened to the sounds of three people breathing, so I could distinguish among them. This heavy-throated one is Mom’s, these gentle snores Dad’s, the breathing of a deep, deep sleep Sarah’s. I thought, I love you, I just want to hear you and hear you. Whenever any of their breathings changed course, whether it was to roll over or to mutter the nonsense of a dream, I felt something inside of me breaking at the disturbance. I wanted to do something to keep them in their respite but I knew any interference would only wake them. I could sing a lullaby, but what use was a surprise lullaby in the night? I could stroke their hair but I was afraid they’d stir at my touch. I sat on the recliner and listened to the rustle of blankets and the hum of the fan. The night was turning over and the sun would be back again and I was helpless in the face of it all: the rotation, the waking, the twitching of legs on grass.

Mom woke a few times, leaning over to check on Sarah’s breathing, but she didn’t see me: she barely looked around at all. I dozed but I didn’t sleep much. When five a.m. came, I gathered my blanket and pillow once again and left the room tiptoeing. I arranged my bed as though I had slept there all night and walked, compulsively, to the lake and back.

—

“I would suggest not talking to Sarah today,” said Mom to me, first thing. “She’s in a horrible mood.” She sighed and massaged her temples.

“The seizure is hard on her,” I said.

“I know, but I’ve got a horrible headache, and I can’t handle her tantrums. She woke up at six and decided she wanted meatballs. Never mind that I’m half-dead with exhaustion or that we had no meat in the fridge. It took her forty-five minutes to agree to eat some yogurt and go back to bed.” Mom opened the junk drawer and rummaged around. “Here,” she said, handing something to me. It was a twenty-dollar bill. I felt sick at the sight of it. I put it in my pocket.

Sarah came in not long later. Her hair was all stuck up around her head and I wanted to brush it out, make her look clean. “Let me fix your ponytail,” I said, and it was more of a plea than I expected.

“Don’t fucking look at me,” she said, her face so scathing I became immediately pissed off.

I turned to Mom. “Tell her she’s not allowed to say that word.” But Mom just shrugged like, what am I supposed to do about it? Sarah could get away with murder if she had a seizure the day before.

She smiled at me mockingly. It was a sign of weakness to invoke Mom’s authority, and over such a stupid thing; Sarah and I cussed to each other all the time. I rolled my eyes. Sarah reached out and yanked my hair so hard that my head was jerked back. “You bitch,” I said and pushed her away. She crashed into the counter and then was on top of me, knocking me down, digging her nails into my skin. I was pressed against the floor, my hands pinned to my chest, but she wasn’t heavy. I could fight back. I wanted to. I only turned my face away, waiting for someone to pull her off.

“Sarah!” Mom shouted. “I’m taking away your phone if you don’t stop this minute!” That managed to snap Sarah out of it. She released me, gave Mom a dirty look, and slammed the door as she went in to her room.

I got off the floor and smoothed out my hair. My scalp hurt and my forearms had red half-moon marks from her nails. “I told you not to talk to her,” Mom said.

I didn’t answer. I stomped out just like her and slammed my own door.

I secluded myself the rest of the day. Mom brought me food, and occasionally I heard Sarah tantrumming. I pitied my parents but I did nothing to help. Sarah napped toward the end of the day, and when she woke, she sounded calmer. Still, I didn’t brave the world outside my bedroom. I let the day pass in a blur of cooking shows and 2006 reality TV.

I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, when I heard a fumbling sound at the door. I got out of bed, unlocked it, and swung it open. Sarah was standing hunched over with a defunct credit card. “Told you I could pick locks,” she said.

“You didn’t pick anything,” I answered.

“Can I come in?”

“Only if you promise not to attack me again.”

“Promise.”

I got back into bed and she situated herself in the corner, taking up half my space. The window shades were open and there was enough moonlight to see her clearly.

“Well?” I asked.

“I’m sorry I was so awful today,” she said. “I always regret it but I can’t control myself.”

“It’s fine. Not your fault.” I looked at my forearms. The marks were still there but they didn’t hurt.

“I hate feeling like a baby,” she said. “I hate having to be supervised all the time.”

“I know,” I said.

“But I get it,” she said. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to die. Mom and Dad watch you well.”

“Alright.” She looked scared. It was an unnerving thing to see; I had to turn away.

She rearranged herself once, twice.

“Why’d you do it, Ruthie?” She asked it like she had been waiting ages to ask it, and I heard it like I had known it was coming. But I didn’t know what to say. “Promise me you won’t do it again.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “It’s hard.”

“It’s not hard,” said Sarah. “All you have to do is not kill yourself.”

I looked over at her. “You suck the life from everyone around you, you know? I’m not blaming you. I think that’s just what happens when you’re sick.”

She was quiet for a while, chewing her lip. Trying to find something to hurt me, maybe. She didn’t seem upset, only tired. Worn and weary.

“Give me your hands,” I told her.

She held them out hesitantly, and when I took them, they were tensed. “Now close your eyes,” I instructed. I closed my own. “Dear Hashem, holiest of holies, for whom any shit is possible.” I peeked and saw Sarah smiling. “Please give Sarah’s epilepsy disorder over to me.”

We sat for a while not moving and Sarah was holding her breath. She was the first to pull her hands away. “It didn’t work,” she said, regretfully, like there had been a chance.

“Sarah,” I asked, “is it a decent life?”

“It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t. I want it.”

“I really would take it,” I told her.

“Well. What can you do.”

I reached over and felt her pulse. When I was younger, and Mom and Dad went on vacation, I would sleep beside her in their room. I didn’t trust my ears to make sure she was breathing so I’d reach out to her neck and find the thump, thump, thump. She hated it; she’d stir; she’d swat my arm away. Now, she remained still. Her legs were crossed and she uncrossed them and laid beside me. I pulled the blanket over us, thinking of the frog, hopping away.