There were two rooms that didn’t make me feel like I was underwater: First, the oak-cabinet kitchen with an antique white stove, checkerboard-tile floor, and a breakfast nook with white café curtains that left the top of the windows bare and streaming with light. Second, the wood-paneled basement with a wet bar, a red vinyl barber’s chair inherited from the previous owners, a lumpy sofa whose arms and back had been shredded by W’s cat, and rows of paperback sci-fi novels in a built-in bookshelf along the far end. The whole house smelled of cough lozenges, raisins, and cigarette smoke. W, who in my child’s mind was ancient but was thirty-five years old, always seemed to be hacking up a lung, leaving wadded-up tissues and full ashtrays around the house.

When W was at work the first day of our stay, you put on a pair of hot-pink dish gloves you found under the sink and traversed the apartment with a wastebasket tucked into the curve of your arm, plucking trash from the carpet and coffee table with two gloved fingers. I followed you around, bumping into you whenever you paused to stoop and reach for something. You put your pink-gloved fingers around my waist and set me on the arm of the living room sofa.

I slid off and leaned against the arm. “Why do we have to stay here, Mama?”

“Few weeks,” you told me. You went into the kitchen, removed the gloves, and pulled things out of the refrigerator: a tomato, half an onion wrapped in cellophane, three eggs.

“Can we go home after the weeks, Mama?”

“Maybe,” you said. “Sure.”

I flopped on the floor crying, and you tripped over me on your way to the counter, landing on your knees, the food clutched to your chest, the eggs miraculously intact between your fingers.

“No crying. I didn’t say no.” You lifted yourself without using your hands, your eyes closed, like you couldn’t look at me. When I didn’t stop, your voice rose. “Stop crying, OK? You want lunch or no?”

I nodded, cowed, my heart in my knees, and climbed onto a chair to watch while you chopped an onion. You spread the onion along the bottom of a cast-iron pan coated with hot, shiny, smoking olive oil. While the onion sizzled and its fumes burned my eyes, you peeled a tomato with the point of a paring knife and squeezed the seeds out between your fingers, like you were squeezing a washcloth. You chopped the tomato with quick flicks of your wrist and tossed it into the pan. The phone rang and you ignored it. Steam rose. You reached your hand into it to break three eggs into the pan and stir them with a fork. We ate the eggs in folded English muffins, like tacos.