An hour later I sat in the living room with Patricia and my mother, unwrapping presents. I gave my mother the shell I’d found in the house.

“I remember this trip,” my mother said. “This is a weird present, Steven.”

“Patricia and I can’t remember it,” I said. “We wanted you to remind us.”

I tried to catch my sister’s eye but she was looking at her lap.

“You didn’t go,” my mother said. “Your father and I went for our anniversary. It was nice. Pretty sunsets. You know, a Caribbean island.”

Well, it was better to have never been there, maybe, than to have forgotten it.

Patricia handed my mother her next present and she unwrapped it.

“A rock,” she said. “How thoughtful.”

An hour later, I knocked on the door of what used to be Tricia’s bedroom. She was sitting on her bed, cross-legged, reading a Jerry Lee Lewis biography.

“I’m heading out,” I said. “Gonna stay with Sam in D.C. for a while.”

“Now, there’s a good influence,” she said.

“Is there somewhere you’d rather I fuck off to and die?”

She went back to looking at her book.

“You’re not going to die.”

Tricia’s walls had once been covered in ugly magazine ads, drunken Polaroids, Clash posters. Not even the ceiling had been spared her chaos. My mother had turned it into a guest room years ago, so now bland flower prints were our only witnesses.

“I guess we’ll see,” I said.

She put the book facedown on the bed and hugged her legs to her chest.

“Don’t die, though,” she said. “Really.”

And I didn’t. After getting kicked out of Sam’s house, I sublet a dirty furnished apartment across the street from the University for the Deaf. I got a nearly full-time job working on a janky local-politics show, splicing together sound bites from city council members into unconvincing denials of corruption. Funny: it made me feel better about my life, and gave me less time to drink. I even handled a few objectively harrowing OkCupid dates without spiraling into the void.

One night, while I was having some whiskey—out of a glass, okay, with ice—and watching an incomprehensible late-night talk show, there was a knock on my door. I knew it was Patricia before I opened it. She was skeletal and green, her eyes unfocused and deep in her skull. She wore a huge camping backpack that hulked around the edges of her torso.

“Okay, I’m here,” she said.

“What happened?” I said.

She stepped into the apartment. Her eyes lingered on the ratty plaid-upholstered armchairs and the wood-paneled entertainment system.

“This place is pretty sweet,” she said.

“There’s a little bit of a mold thing,” I said modestly.

I gave her a hug, felt how frail her limbs and shoulders were.