The room starts to spin and my head starts to pound. Mama and the old woman are talking to each other, but I can’t hear a word on account of the rumbles and clangs in my ears. The details of their faces and the space between them gets swallowed by a jumbled cloud of colour. Piney greenish-grey bands with streams of piss-yellow mash into jagged swaths of maroon, with intermittent black-red spirals shooting out in all directions. My stomach turns, my teeth start to chatter, and for a minute I can’t remember who anyone is or what we’re all doing here. Then the incision site on my skull starts to throb, the auditory cacophony subsides, and my eyes lay off on the technicolour trip just in time to see the stone cold fury on Mama’s face as she yanks a wheelchair into the room, throws my coat onto my bed, and says, “C’mon. The nurse said you can go.”

She takes a couple of quick strides toward me and pulls off my blanket.

“Ma, I’m still in the johnny coat —”

“Keep it as a souvenir. We’re leaving. Now.”

She hustles my coat over the hospital gown, guides my shaky frame into the wheelchair, plops my bag onto my lap, then breaks for the door. But she stops short, half-turning to face the dumbfounded old biddy in the other bed. Slowly, clearly, with glaring narrowed eyes and a feral smile tugging on the left side of her upper lip, Mama speaks.

“Hope the cancer gets you this time, Lady Rosalind. And may it hurt like the hot horrors of hell.”

And out the door we go.

Rosalind Spenser. My father’s mother.

Mama talks about my father with as much love and warmth as she can muster, which admittedly isn’t a ton. The rest of his family, though? She says their names like she’s spitting out shit: Saint Sarah, Lady Rosalind, the Other Old Bastard. My one and only memory of ever meeting them still sits vividly in my mind, despite Mama’s insistence that I’d be best off forgetting they existed, because that’s how they’d treat me and we’d never darken their door again.

It was Christmas Eve. I was eight. Mama wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but she scrubbed my face and fingernails until they were raw because only streels went around with dirty faces and fingernails. She dressed me in an itchy, starchy green dress with red smocking and a big, floppy, white lace puritan collar. She wrestled my hair into too tight, too high pigtails, tied them with pieces of thick, fluffy red yarn, and jammed my poor duck feet into a pair of stiff, narrow Mary Janes that would leave gaping, bloody blisters on both heels. I remember looking at myself in the mirror in abject horror. I wanted my hair pulled back with a headband. I wanted to wear my orange corduroy jumper. I wanted my duck feet in warm, wide winter boots. But no. We were going somewhere.