In amongst the dream’s hallucinatory light, my mother packed a cooler with snack packs, Diet Cokes and purple grapes, and drove us to our spot in Galveston. Leah and I shared the backseat, as we always did, neither of us wanting to be too far apart. My mom complained she felt like a chauffeur. She put on her Shania Twain CD. Man! I feel like a woman, we all sang. On the beach, we spread towels on the hard-packed sand. My mom watched us girls in the water. We dove for pieces of fool’s gold, tossed the stones and took turns chasing a glint barely visible against the oil sludge. Leah wore her pink bikini, I wore my purple, colors vibrant enough to flash like coral in the dirty Gulf.

Time disappeared. We were ocean, animals. Only the call of my mother’s voice could pull us back. “Girls,” she yelled, “don’t make me come in there.” She was standing, adjusting her giant sunhat, shaking towels, by the time we waded to shore.

It was ritual: the chase, the cool shade of evening that ended it, diluted blue before the black. My mother’s voice. The stick of vinyl on my bare legs when I buckled into her stuffy Prius, the heat of Leah’s body next to mine, humid air pulling through the open window as we drove home. Home where we were wanted. Home where we were warm. Home, a girl, a woman, a beige phone, ringing, waking me.

I stood to answer. My vision was murked in places, like I’d swum up into daylight, the hospital, the dank and empty chamber where I waited. “Hello?” I held the receiver away from my face. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. “Is this . . .” it asked and said my name. I answered yes and waited for her to tell me what to do, where to go. “The surgeon is on his way to discuss your mother with you,” she said, and hung up.

I returned to my chair, my phone, and checked the screen to see the time, almost midnight. The door opened and a man came in. I blinked to focus. He was Jake’s age, but taller. Blue-scrubbed, he towered over me, smelling like Purell and rubbing his palms. I reached up to shake his hand, but he kept his pressed together, kept rubbing.

“So initially we operated with an exploratory goal,” he said.

I said, “Right,” and realized I expected him to tell me there had been no point. I expected him to complain about my mother, her persistent search for problems that had no source. I expected a bill, endless zeros, the cost of her pain.