The thing that’s been lurking under the waves of my mind all day breaks to the surface: those first moments pulling into our new home years ago. How for me it was the treasure at the end of an adventure: Something Gold. I think Ruth thought it would be gold for her too. For the first several days we explored together, excited. We unpacked our things. We got into the routine of a new place, a new city. Now I’m looking back and remembering how the initial enthusiasm faded from the way Ruth talked, the way she walked around the house, the way we played. She started wandering through the house quietly, searching, like she was looking for something that wasn’t there, like she’d woken up somewhere she didn’t expect to be. And how maybe I’d been too caught up to really notice.

And then later, those memories from before Ruth got a therapist and medicine to help her. Those days and weeks and months beforehand, watching Ruth stumble around the house while the shell around her got thicker and thicker like a crustacean, and how maybe she was thinking about disappearing too. Her constant tiredness. How the music she listened to in her room got quieter and quieter until it stopped. Was she sad? I would ask. She would say no. And that was true; it wasn’t really sadness. It was an absence. No real feeling, not like contentment, but like a vacuum. No music, no pictures. No pirate stories or anything remotely like treasure. Nothing, nothing, nothing; no Somethings at all.

That is the real Pit.

And without really wanting too, I’m thinking about our kitchen in Tennessee, and coming down the stairs toward it, and that bottom step that creaks. The spaghetti pot unwashed from the night before, that night in those worst weeks. Coming down past my bedtime, my feet in seahorse socks, for some late-night orange juice, and hearing Mom and Dad at the table. Hearing squeaking chairs on tiles. Hearing Ruth’s name and the urgent pressure in my mom’s lowered voice. Hearing my mom say, I am so scared. What if things get worse? What if they get worse and worse until …

Her voice trailed off. That worse and worse until lingered in the air and in my ears with no answer to follow. I wanted my mom to say something else, to finish her words with something happy. I wanted my dad to answer that everything was going to be all right, that there was a solution out there somewhere. But neither of them spoke, and that worse and worse until echoed in my skull. Worse and worse until what? I never wanted to find out.

That night I walked quietly back upstairs, skipping the squeaking step and skipping the orange juice.

Ruth’s therapy visits started soon after that.