“Withdrawal,” said her mother, raising her teacup triumphantly, as if making a toast. Once again, her resentment of her daughter’s lifestyle was vindicated; she got up to schedule an appointment with that psychiatrist she’d been recommending for a while now, then went to draw her daughter a bath.

The mother put the inside of her wrist under the running water, like she was testing the temperature of a baby’s milk bottle. It was a small bathroom, average, cookie-cutter: bathtub on the left, sink on the right, the lights above the wall mirror, the daughter on the toilet, in the middle.

They looked at each other in silence until the tub was full. Not in the eyes, but at any part of the other’s body that would avoid their gazes meeting. The mother turned off the water and tested the temperature one last time. Everything was ready but she still didn’t leave the bathroom; she stayed standing there, in the narrow space left to her between the tub and the sink, looking at her daughter on the toilet. And the daughter didn’t get up, either, or do anything, not as long as her mother was there. She wasn’t about to take off her clothes in front of her mother. She wasn’t about to try to take off her shirt with her trembling hands and then let her mother end up helping her. She wasn’t about to feel anything, she would be like a vegetable, a head of lettuce waiting for its hydroponic bath. And sure, her mother left food for her every day—not in a Tupperware in the refrigerator, but right in the pot, so the only effort she had to make was striking a match—but no, she still wasn’t about to get undressed in front of her. And so both of them stayed there motionless, their heels dug in at that short distance. And then, for a second, their eyes did finally meet. The prodigal son’s gaze that they’d shared since she’d returned to her mother’s home. The look of a lost sheep. The return of God’s grace. But the parable skips over a part, she always thinks. The part when the prodigal son stands up in the middle of the celebration, with his new shoes and his ring, and he listens to the music, looks at the banquet, the sacrificed calf, and realizes he is still unsatisfied, that he’s even more lost than before.

To be received with open arms is the worst punishment—the torture of compassion.

“What’s wrong?”

The daughter shakes her head.