“She used to sing to me,” Alice says now. Her voice is soft, dreamlike. I decide not to sing to her because that might upset her, although I used to sing to my babies when they still slept in my arms. I could see my voice reach deep inside them, settle their nerves. Mine was the voice they heard as I carried them inside me. It is primal, the way the body reacts to the voice of the mother.

I think that maybe I will sing to myself one day so she can overhear it, and that maybe she will come to me and ask me to sing. Yes, I think. I will lure her into asking me to sing to her like her first mommy. Maybe I can get close enough. Maybe it will reach her, even just a little.

There are other things she says, and I make a note of all of them.

But my thoughts keep drifting back to the antifreeze under the sink in my bathroom, poured into the teacup which I carried back to my room.

Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, which breaks down in the body by forming sharp crystals. Those crystals shred human tissue, especially the kidneys. I taught some of this to my students when I introduced basic chemistry. Of course, I did not share the rest of it.

How death does not always occur. But severe illness does. Incapacitating illness. The kind that makes it impossible to move, or run. The kind that would allow someone to lock you in a room behind metal bars and then drive away.

It has a sweet taste.

Sweet, like sugar.

Sweet, like Alice. I must believe this. I must hold her close.

And then this sweet girl tells me, in a sleepy voice, “Do you know that it’s selfish to have children?”

I am very quiet now as I whisper, “What do you mean?”

“Well,” she says, “you had children so you could have someone to love. So you could have football games to watch every other Thursday.”

I am still. Perfectly still as I always am in these moments when Alice reveals something new to me. I fear if I move she will stop talking. But she stops anyway.

“I do love watching my son’s football games. Do you know where I go to see them?”

But she doesn’t bite. She doesn’t care about my desperate need to understand what is going on, how they know these things about me—so many things, like he’s been watching me. But how?

“That’s not the point!” she says. She wants to finish her story. Her theory.

“Okay, Alice. I’m sorry. You think it’s selfish to have children?”

“It’s not what I think. It’s just what is. It’s selfish to have children because they’re just going to die one day.”