Pain is . . . my best friend reciting every detail of her first kiss. Watching her face glow and hearing her voice giggle and wondering if I would ever feel the same. My father had found two case studies of sisters with congenital insensitivity to pain who’d married and had children. In theory, the inability to feel pain did not preclude the possibility of falling in love, of being loved back. It didn’t stop the genetically abnormal from hoping to grow into normalcy.

It didn’t keep you from wanting a family.

My adoptive father loved me. Not right away. He wasn’t the type. His was a measured, controlled approach to life. Understanding the hard realities facing a foster child, he made the necessary investment in my future care by opening his large home and considerable financial resources. Most likely, he assumed proper staffing would meet my everyday needs, while he continued to study my condition and write up stunningly dry academic reports.

He hadn’t anticipated my nightmares, however, or foreseen that a little girl who couldn’t feel pain was still perfectly capable of dreaming of it, night after night. In the beginning, he puzzled over this phenomenon, asking me endless questions. What did I see? What did I hear? What did I feel?

I couldn’t answer. Only that I did fear. The night. The dark. The sound of canned laugh tracks. Dolls. Scissors. Nylons. Pencils. Once, I spotted a shovel leaning against the gardening shed; I ran screaming for my closet and wouldn’t come out for hours.

Thunder, lightning, hard rain. Black cats. Blue quilts. Some of my fears were ordinary enough in the lexicon of childhood. Others were completely bewildering.

My adoptive father consulted with a child therapist. Under her advice, he asked me to draw pictures of my nightmares. But I couldn’t. My artistic vision was limited to a black pool, bisected by a faint line of yellow.

Later, I overheard the therapist saying to my father, “Probably all she could see, shut up in the closet like that. But understand even an infant is capable of recognizing and responding to terror. And given what was going on in that house, the things her father was doing . . .”

“But how would she know?” my father pressed. “And I don’t mean because she was just an infant at the time. But if you can’t feel pain, then how do you know what to fear? Isn’t the root of most of our fears pain itself?”

The therapist had no answers, and neither did I.