As she became someone else, my mother wrote herself another history. Maybe she wanted her altered state to roam as far from us as possible. To stray and linger, in unequal proportions, to her illness.

Maybe it just happened because it was always going to happen. But that didn’t make it any less catastrophic. I lost my brother, then I lost my mother, more or less, even as my father turned bitter and my grandfather, before the end, was no better than a thin, flailing beast. Sometimes my father summoned the nerve to lock him in a shed during his rages. Calmed into “thin milk,” as Father put it. Calmed so he could be let out, but muttering and sharp and surly and nothing like a person. Not what I wanted a person to be. Sure to make Father suffer for what he’d done. So Father shut him up less frequently.

Sometimes I felt his flailing, his rage, was Mother’s made manifest, in the body, in the world.

Mother’s rants were worse for being written down, for being quiet until read, because, when read, they seemed intent on burning up the world, on tearing it down with inchoate rage. The sharp marks, ripping the paper, so violent. That her vacant gaze made it seem as if something had been summoned into her. I never knew what she was going to hand me. “Con-flagration,” Dad would say, when they argued, and list the words around that, defining her—or that he would cast a spell, bind her, understand her.

Most of what she wrote was about my dead brother. But also about me, as if I had died, too.

I missed my brother, and here, in the letters, our mother had created this further life for him. Had written to him as if he were in college. As if he had gone on to get a job with his degree, begun to raise a family. As if he had been corresponding with her, telling her all the details of his days. Time became a miracle in these letters, so he might age a year in a month or not age a day in eighteen months.

While I, in these letters, these accounts of some parallel world, remained single. I remained single and always had a new boyfriend. I would appear at family reunions and be disruptive. I drank too much. I did unforgivable things. The Devil himself could not have come up with some of the accounts my mother did; at the end, she had more imagination than during the whole rest of her life.

It hurt, but it always hurt more that my brother was gone, so I read whatever she sent me. The delicate, curving handwriting in meticulous blue ballpoint pen on onionskin paper. Tucked crisp into sturdy envelopes. Sometimes trinkets fell out with the letters. Pressed flowers. Charms to add to bracelets I didn’t wear. Once or twice, money. I received it all, all that damage, just so I could hear about my brother, alive, in some other place and time.