My mother’s bedroom door was open, but something about the way the light filtered through the hall made me know she wasn’t inside. I chewed the ragged skin around my thumbnail and crept slowly down the hall with the shoe in my other hand. When I reached the top of the stairs, I crouched down low because I could hear my mother’s voice. I flattened myself out on the landing and leaned my head as far out onto the step as I could.

“Slow down.” She was talking on the only telephone in the house, which hung on the wall in the kitchen. I pictured her winding the cord over and over, making little white nooses around her finger.

“You can handle this. It will be okay.”

I had a mosquito bite on my ankle. As hard as I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t resist scratching it. I raked my fingers across the skin, gently at first, but then harder and harder until it started to hurt.

“You will figure it out,” my mom was saying.

She whispered something that I couldn’t hear, so I inched myself closer, but then the shoe slipped out of my hand and went careening down the stairs. I watched as it fell, making a muted thudding noise as it hit each step. I only had a few minutes to decide what to do. I thought about tiptoeing back to my bedroom and crawling under the covers, but I was tired of being a coward. I sat up on the step, crossed my arms across my chest, and waited for her to come find me.

She hung up the telephone, walked to the staircase, and looked up at me. Her hair was folded around her head like she had been tossing and turning for most of the night.

“What are you doing?” she said with a sigh as she lifted her hand to her forehead and massaged her temples with her fingers.

“Listening to you.” I walked down the stairs so that we were standing eye to eye. “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?”

“Nothing that concerns you.” She turned and walked into the living room and flopped down onto the couch.

The room was dark, but I followed her and hit my toe on the coffee table, which made me even angrier.

“Maybe if you told me what was going on, I wouldn’t have to eavesdrop in the middle of the night,” I spoke it into the near blackness, not seeing or caring what impact my words had.

“Why do you always have to make things difficult?” She leaned back so that her head was resting on top of the cushion.

Once my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see that both her hands were up, covering her face.