As it happened, I did not need stitches. The stitches, the doctor said, were optional at that point, cosmetic. After much debate with my parents, who were, despite my protests, summoned to the Raritan Bay Medical Center in the middle of the night, I chose to keep the scar. It was a stupid decision. I was afraid of the needle, sure. But I also thought that preserving the evidence of the wound might keep me from turning my youth into cheap nostalgia. As if a scar, of all things, were capable of that.

Bad Feelings

My mother had a surgery scheduled, so I, lacking any pressing obligations, agreed to accompany her and my stepfather Richard to the hospital. She’d gone into the OR at noon and wasn’t expected to be out until four, and Richard, God love him, had long exhausted his store of conversation related to traffic and the perfidy of politicians and was now playing solitaire on his laptop. I decided, in an attempt to pass the remaining hours as painlessly as possible, to go to the movies.

I looked up the options on my phone. The choices on offer this February afternoon were not in line with my current interests—a couple of computer-generated kid things, a reboot of an exorcism, the one about the American soldier who, with a heavy heart and exquisite precision, murders a hundred Iraqis. I settled on a movie that had been out for months, the third sequel to a blockbuster adaptation of a young adult book series, of which I had seen none of the previous episodes. It started in ten minutes, but I didn’t want to watch the previews anyway.

My mother was probably going to be all right, at least for the day. It was one of many minor surgeries in the course of a major illness. It just so happened to be the one I was home for, and I wasn’t acclimated to the anxiety that came with these things. Richard usually called me after one of the medical procedures that I hadn’t known she was undergoing, which annoyed me even though—and, probably, because—it was for my own emotional good. I was, like my sisters, like my mother, sensitive.

Until a few weeks earlier I’d been an editor at a website that mostly published in-depth reviews of food carts around the world; I was laid off when it was purchased by the company of a Koch cousin and folded into a site that focused on branded content directed at wellness enthusiasts. I’d been done with the job anyway, I told myself, and, after finally paying off a decade’s worth of credit card debt, I’d been making more money than I absolutely needed. But still: the void was the void. I wanted my mother to be all right in large part so that she would tell me everything was going to be all right.