I stare at the monotonous screen, walk behind my eyes through my mother’s kitchen. The rice cooker and electric kettle, the microwave splattered inside with tomato sauce from the soggy English muffin pizzas she’d make for Leah and me after school. We’d sit at the blue-tile table, a hand-me-down from my grandmother. Our feet dangled from the chairs. Red sauce gathered in the corners of Leah’s mouth and she never seemed to notice, or care. She cared about animals, habitats, the plight of the displaced sea turtle and horseshoe hare. And she cared about us, the world of us, filled with a language all our own, composed of voices, characters we’d made up: mean old “Farmer Cowhide’s” country twang; high class “Queenie’s” pitched whine; rakish “Rhett’s” sleazy drawl. And “Doomer,” a foreboding growl Leah assumed on the nights she tried to keep me awake.

“Wait, did you hear that?” Doomer would grunt, just as I was drifting to sleep. “There’s someone in the house.” A murderer, rapist, child molester.

“Don’t get me riled up,” I’d plead, truly afraid but also often giggling. We both knew she was faking. But sometimes we’d forget. Sometimes, as Doomer, Leah would scare us both so bad we’d call for my mom—Mom! Naurene!—who would arrive, annoyed to have to sit on the edge of the bed, keeping watch, until we fell asleep.

I get out of bed, shuffle to the bathroom, count my fifty Vicodin, sift pills like memories. The Galveston Pleasure Pier, beignets and sundresses. The summer Leah and I learned to dive, the summer of the sailor’s bracelets that shrank around our wrists and were always damp. The summer we pooled our chore money to adopt an endangered red wolf named Granny, and all we received in return was a pamphlet showing Granny’s picture, some facts about her life. Leah cried in frustration. She had imagined a forest ranger would deliver the old wolf in a crate, to live out the rest of her years in my mother’s backyard. “Granny’s better off in the wild, honey,” my mother said, wiping tear-sopped hair off Leah’s face. “You wouldn’t want to confine her to a pen.” She made us English muffin pizzas, then put us to bed, and in the morning, Leah and I sat at the table and identified a new animal to advocate for and save (whales, it turned out).

I select the final pill, swallow, then sit on the princess pink toilet with my bathrobe bunched around me and tally phantom calories. A hundred and forty for the English muffin, seventy for the tomato sauce. Counting is an instinct I can’t silence. Counting is like hunger itself. I used to think it would protect me. As if in reducing the essence of something—a story, a meal, a body—to a number, I’d know its truest value.