It would always be 5:00 a.m. when I woke up from this dream in a cold sweat. I would sit down at Umma’s desk and begin to write, my back bent over the desktop that was pathetically small for someone my size. My sentences formed like lines coming out of my fingertips. They kept on coming without my thinking about them, as if they had a mind of their own. Then I would get a whiff of something burning, and the sentences that had driven on and on like a mad little red car would come to a halt.

Whenever I thought about what my writing meant to her, I felt as lost as if I was staring down the edge of a cliff. I was already thirty, a legal adult for ten years, and was old enough to know that my mother did not exist solely to hinder my existence but was a person in her own right who had fought hard making her way through life. She just happened to be unlucky. In other words, the fact that our relationship had been so terrible was as natural as cancer or fungus or the rotation of our planet or sunspots. I knew this, but the feeling that she was the source of all my problems kept nagging at me. I kicked myself for thinking this about a dying person, someone who was only skin and bones at this point, but the thought refused to leave my mind.

Me at ten years old terrified over bleeding to death from holes all over my body, me at nineteen writing about my mother to earn some extra cash, and me at thirty whipping myself up into a frenzy of vengeful hate to write stories about people who’d been kind to me, for strangers who didn’t know me—all of these versions of me were sitting behind my mother that day.

Umma looked as hard and beautiful as ever as she gazed into the sunset. As I watched her, it suddenly occurred to me that she may indeed have read every one of my published stories and writings. Not that this would’ve changed anything, really.

She spoke in a sentimental voice.

—I used to feel that I’d been given the whole world when I held you.

Disease can turn anyone into a completely different person. Once upon a time, she’d been someone who was stronger than anyone else, who never looked back, who would rather die than say anything so sentimental, much less say such a thing as she looked into a sunset. It kept making me feel like I wanted to confess something, too.

—Umma . . . you know . . . there’s something . . .