I went this time. My mother was still lying there, just as she had been, breathing softly. I had realized by then that I was going to have to spend the night uptown. I wanted to call Helen. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to get away from my whole family. I wanted to wake my mother up, but I also wanted her dead, wanted it almost enough to kill her, because I couldn’t stand any more waiting. My mother had been right. It was time for it to be over. If it hadn’t been time in the afternoon, it was certainly time now. I went back to the kitchen. “Nothing’s changed,” I said.

My father studied the booklet for a few minutes. Freddy went back to his room and got a big file with all the letters and birthday cards and postcards and funny notes my mother had ever sent him, and he dumped it all over the kitchen floor. “I want to find something she wrote to me,” he said. “For a eulogy.”

My father shook his head. “I could never deliver a eulogy,” he said. I looked at my list of sentences, the last words on the yellow notepad. My father coughed. “Boys,” he said. “It says here that sometimes the pills don’t work, and that if they don’t take effect and you think the patient is waking up you should try to smother him under a pillow, as he will be too weak to fight back and will in that way die as planned.”

I remembered my mother saying that the one thing she feared was waking up, and though I still wanted in some ways to wake her myself, to get something more from her, I knew that she had closed her eyes when and as she had meant to close them. I knew that she would hate waking up and having her life end in a mess. I looked at my father blankly. A minute earlier, I had thought about killing her.

“If someone has to do it, I’ll do it,” said Freddy staunchly.

I looked at my father and waited for him to decline that offer, but it didn’t happen. “Thank you, Freddy,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”

I went back and checked again. I thought her breathing was becoming slower, but I wasn’t sure. I went and sat by her side, and made some more meaningless remarks.

When I got back to the kitchen, Freddy was arranging everything in piles. “Look at this,” he said, and passed me an old letter that had been sent to him at summer camp. “And do you remember these?” he said, and showed me a series of postcards my mother had sent one summer from a trip to Scandinavia with my father.