“Did you see the police officer?”

“No. They must be back in their car, writing up the ticket.”

“Can I look then?”

Her mother was growing more agitated. “No, you can’t.”

“I want to.”

“Look, if they have a gun, if, for some reason, someone shoots, if you’re looking through the window, a bullet can go through a window, but if you’re down here, on your bed, the bullet can’t go through the brick wall here, okay? Do you get it?”

Izabel was scared. She went stiff under the sheets.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said. “It’s not scary. Probably no one has a gun. Do you want to look through the window?”

Izabel shook her head.

“Let’s go to sleep, okay? The lights will be gone in a minute.”

Her mother put her arms around her.

Through her whole childhood Izabel worried about bullets tearing through walls and windows. Missed shots. The distances that bullets could travel. Which guns could fire through what. The size of rounds. Collateral damage. Accidents. Drunk people. Drunk people on Ambien. Every story she heard got layered into the scenarios she imagined. In almost all of them, her mother was tragically injured, while Izabel was left unhurt—the one who hears, watches, drops to the floor.

The next morning, the news showed a newly dead family’s smiling faces. Six people this time: Carlos and María Calandria, and their four small children, each about two years apart, Imilce, Gabriel, Rubén, and the infant, Graciela. The news reported that they called the girls Imi and Gracie.

Izabel began to cry. Calandria was Izabel’s maiden name. Her mother’s last name. She didn’t remember the Calandria family from the hospital, but maybe they’d moved from another town. Ten years was a long time. A lot of new people had come in. She pulled up the town directory to see if there were other Calandrias, but only Carlos and María came up.

Izabel thought she would cry forever. Not in a disruptive way, just with tears that fell down her face for the rest of her life.

To distract herself, Izabel began running through old gun scenarios in her head. A man enters a bank, a school, a synagogue, a Target, an ice-cream shop, a theater.

Her fear of bullets was a decades-old feeling that had been sparked by that man in the car. And now that she felt that fear again, it was easy to obsess over it, and its oldness.

In this new world, having a gun in a dome was like having a gun on a plane. If the dome is pierced, everyone dies. Only, not because of cabin pressure. No paper napkins being pulled into the sky first.