Sometimes, now that Maura is around more, you have to touch her, to relocate her hands away from something valuable, to catch the top of her head, keep Maura the sixth from knocking against the wall while she cries about flies that lay their eggs under living skin, cries because she’s afraid of rotting. What’s the name of that hole newborn babies have at the top of their heads? Fontanel, sounds like fountain. That soft place that your fingers could go in. The younger, smaller Mauras are the worst, the yous that are at the farthest end of the tether from you. You remember something you heard in a science class once, which may or may not be true, that the feeling you get when you find something cute lights up the same parts of your brain as the desire to crush.

* * *

What’s that disorder—or syndrome? condition? you should know the difference between these three words by now—with the women who make their children sick on purpose? It’s a German word, it sounds like a kind of sausage. There was that true crime show you saw a few years ago, about the terminally ill girl who killed her mother, and when they found her it turned out she didn’t have any of the diseases she was supposed to have and she was five years older than her mother’d told everyone she was. You’ve never been able to get out of that Wikipedia-diving habit. It’s supposed to be something a woman does because she likes the attention—like what people say about teenage girls cutting themselves. By the time you were seventeen, which was the first time anyone could have plausibly called your situation life-threatening, your binder was thick and heavy as a textbook, and the Sharpie had faded and been written over again. When you finally started managing your own appointments, how surprised you were to learn that there was hardly any paperwork at all.

But you’re not being fair. While it was happening, there was hardly any attention. While it was happening, a Xanax prescription would manifest periodically in your mother’s medicine cabinet, and then disappear, and then come back again. While it was happening, not even you could have accused your mother of enjoying a moment.

* * *