Then she says she’s going to paint his toes. He jumps up, which startles me and makes me jump too, and I brace myself for what I know will come next. Daddy, dripping with Mommy’s beads and rhinestones, bounds upright onto the bedroom floor while she gets to her feet, bounces a couple of times on the bed, and launches herself, all those sparkly green arms, at the spot where he’s standing. I hear her falling against him. Mom into Dad, Dad into door, door into my face, front tooth onto the floor. They’re laughing in this sparkling pile—they haven’t even noticed me—and for what feels like forever I don’t know how to get them to see the blood on my hands and running down my nightgown.

If I had been at school then, and the teacher had asked me to draw a picture of my family, it would have been just like that: green glitter parents in a giggling pile, and me on the other side of the door frame, brown and pink with a terrible spill of red that keeps spreading, and plain, blank, paper white all around where the edges of my memory can’t come up with any detail.

And then I’m in our kitchen. I know the walls in that kitchen were green with pink edges, but in my memory of that night the walls are paper white and my daddy is smiling at me and making cartoon voices so I smile back. He says I look cool with my missing front tooth. Tough. But I can’t smile for very long and when it hurts too much I put my face into his neck and he closes around me like the whole entire world.

Then I’m wearing the green dress, in love with its weight, and my parents are tangled in a heap on the floor. And the air is flowery and spicy like nectar and sap. Did we walk through a forest that smelled like this? Was it Seattle, not LA? They’re on the rug, breathing like dragons and shining their eyes at me while I sing Mommy’s song to them in Mommy’s dress, standing on a chest of drawers by an open window with the lights sitting gently on the city like my dad in all my mother’s jewelry and my mother reclining long in a black silk slip.

It’s been a long time since I heard her sing.