And we learn to make, I think, by telling. Held to the light of common scrutiny, nothing’s ever quite as unique as our shame and sorrow would have us think. But if you don’t say it, you’re alone with it, and the singularity of your story seems immense, intractable. And isn’t that part of what brought her to this bed, to these nailed wrists, in the first place: her isolation?

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that’s why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn’t yours. Proximity is the best consolation; place the griefs beside one another and watch them diminish. We seem to need to hear, Yes, I’ve known something like that, too.

But the story lives in the details, those sharp bits of experience to which emotion is attached, the way kelp and sea wrack cling to bits of stone and shell. Hell is in the details: I haven’t said it clearly, the terror of it, the diminishment, the horror and pity, the selfish fear and pity for myself even in the face of her pain, how I want to draw close to her and also don’t think I can stand to look, want to help and am entirely helpless.

Try again: “Your father,” my mother says, “has nailed my hands to these boards.” She tries to sit up in the hospital bed, but manages only to raise her head so she can look me directly in the eye, conspiratorial, desperate. Her room is high in Tucson’s University Hospital, the unmistakable profile of those mountains out the window, a dozen shades of smoke blue. Her hands are attached to boards because she is being fed intravenously, and in her delirium she thrashes so that the tubes are pulled from her wrists, or else she tries to yank them out, so they’ve been secured by white elastic tape that holds the plastic and bandages in place. She lifts them in the air, miserably, toward me; she wants me to see what has been done to her, as if now that I have come surely I will understand her, I of all people will believe her when she tells how he’s tortured her, and how the orderlies come in the night to rape her—she says, come with hooks and with pepper and an arsenal of poisons that burn and sting.

Oh, God, I think, I can’t look.

I’m twenty-three, living halfway across the country, and my father’s called and said, “If you ever want to see your mother alive again, you’d better come now.” He’s given me the money to fly back home.