Her voice was so thick with damage and tears and rising hysteria, I could barely make out the words. Maybe someone else would have patted her shoulder and come out with the perfect thing to say. I couldn’t touch her. I took the glass of water from her bedside table and held it out. Jenny buried her face in it, choking and coughing, until she got some water down and the terrible noises subsided.

She said, down to the glass, “So then I just sat there next to him, on the floor. It was freezing cold, but I couldn’t get up. I was too dizzy, it was the worst it’s ever been, everything kept sliding and tilting. I thought if I tried to stand up I’d fall over face-first and smash my head on one of the cupboards, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I think we sat there for a couple of hours, I don’t know. I just held onto this thing”—the drawing, spattered with drops of water now—“and I stared at it. I was terrified that if I stopped looking at it even for a second, I’d forget it had ever existed, and then I’d forget that I needed to do something about it.”

She wiped at her face, for water or for tears, I couldn’t tell. “I kept thinking about that JoJo’s pin, up in my drawer. How happy we were back then. How that had to be why I’d dug it out of some box: because I was trying to find something happy. All I could think was How did we get here? I felt like there had to be something we had done, me and Pat, to make this happen, and if I could just find that, then maybe I could change it and everything would be different. But I couldn’t find it. I thought right back to the first time we kissed, when we were sixteen—it was on the beach in Monkstown, it was evening but it was summer so it was still bright and so warm, the warm air on my arms. We were sitting on a rock talking, and Pat just leaned over to me and … I went through every moment I could remember, every single one, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work out how we had ever got here, this kitchen floor, from where we started out.”

She had quieted. Behind the fine gold haze of hair, her face was still, turned inwards. Her voice was steady. I was the one who was afraid.

Jenny said, “Everything looked so weird. It felt like the light kept getting brighter, till it turned into searchlights everywhere; or like there had been something wrong with my eyes for months, some kind of haze blurring them up, and all of a sudden it was gone and I could see again. Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful—just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window, and the kids and Pat were left there to get eaten up alive. I said, ‘Pat, we have to get out now’—at least I think I did, I’m not sure. He didn’t hear me, either way. He didn’t notice when I got up, didn’t even notice I was leaving—he was whispering something to that hole, I couldn’t hear what … Going up the stairs took forever because my feet weren’t touching the ground, I couldn’t move forward, I kept hanging there trying to go up in slow motion. I knew I should be scared that I wasn’t going to get there in time, but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and sad. So sad.”