If you are wondering what kind of child you were: You were a child terrified of your own body. You were afraid of the bird flu, of radiation poisoning, chemical warfare, poisonous plants, spiders. You nurtured up fear like a little green shoot, watered it, fertilized it, put it out in the sun. Encyclopedias, Wikipedia, library books. Mustard gas, Chernobyl, the rhododendrons growing in your mother’s front yard. A video of snake venom injected into a petri dish of human blood, which bubbled, fizzled, and then congealed like Jell-O. The corpse of a black widow your mother smashed on the side of the front door; for three weeks you insisted on going out the back. Until your mother scooped you up in her arms, squeezing you around the ribs while you screamed, kicked, pounded disobedient fists between her shoulder blades. So afraid you nearly seized with it, she carried you out to the sidewalk. “See, Maura? It’s fine. You’re fine.” That incident was what first put you on a therapist’s overcushioned sofa. You were far too old to be screaming that way.

* * *

You shouldn’t have been surprised by the accuracy of your mother’s writing. Your mother took notes for most of your life. She was an organized woman. She carried a binder. People with severe health conditions—chronic, life-threatening, rare—have said this is what a person has to do. Have a binder for all the doctors, the operations, the diagnoses, the medications, the allergies. A woman whose memoir you read for some undergraduate class, a woman who nearly died of a very rare illness—orphan disease, that’s the term for a sickness so particular no one could make any money off a cure—came to speak in front of your class once. Her mother had a sunshine-yellow binder, her mother kept every paper, wrote down every word. Some note about some allergy lost in a hospital transfer, that comprehensive thoroughness saved this woman’s life. You’re giving her that? No. The sound of pages flipping. You can’t give her that.

There may be common knowledges between people who love sick people. Your binder, your mother’s binder, that is, was blue, and had MAURA written across the front and down the spine in thick Sharpie letters. Once in a while you might imagine a line of mothers stood behind a line of binders, shelved front to back cover, in a long, neat library. Yours had print-offs from the pharmacy, pamphlets, scanned paperwork, chunks of parenting books and self-help books copied off and marked up with a highlighter, a calendar. Your mother always knew how far you were into a prescription. If you found yourself standing in front of the medicine cabinet, unable to remember if you’d taken your meds that day or not, you could count them, and call down the hallway to her for the right number. This was something you could rely on.