“I tried, Gillian. And it wasn’t just me, you know. Abigail could be…disruptive, at school. She didn’t understand compromise, she wasn’t accommodating; she couldn’t just accept what was and wasn’t appropriate.” Mom looks at me. “She always thought I was nagging her; trying to change her. But I was trying to help her, Gillian. I was trying to keep her safe. She was always so headstrong—so headstrong—and the world isn’t kind to people like that, especially young women. Once in ten times you break the system, but nine times out of ten the system breaks you.”

I look at my mother, wondering where this is coming from.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of Lorna,” Mom goes on. “But no one ever taught that girl to think ahead, to consider consequences; to just slow herself down. I saw a lot of that in your sister. She was always so restless, always impatient. So stubborn, and hang the consequences.” She sighs. “I felt she needed someone to balance her out, and your father certainly wasn’t going to do it; he never checked her, never. And I didn’t want her to make trouble for herself, Gillian.

“But she never listened to me. It was like she knew.” Mom glances over. “Maybe it sounds silly saying it, but sometimes when she was an infant I felt she knew in her bones that I wasn’t the mother her body remembered; that I wasn’t the one who’d carried her. And yet with your father she was different. She’d scream and scream at me, but then when your father picked her up she was quiet as a lamb.”

I study Mom as she speaks, wondering how much of these memories is colored by her own fears and doubts. If Abigail really cried for her and not for Dad, or if that’s just the way Mom saw it.

Mom shakes her head.

“It was like she was always trying to be gone: always walking or crawling in the opposite direction. Even before she could crawl, always with her eyes on something just outside of the room. She never wanted to just be; to just be in my arms.”

But some babies are like that: curious, impatient. Mom didn’t need to take it personally.

“Do you—” I hesitate. “Did you bond with her? When she was a baby?”

I would never have dreamed of asking my mother such a question before today. We’re a private sort of family, I suppose, with a nervous sixth sense for anything taboo to say aloud. But now it’s like the rules of the game have changed.

Mom sighs.