I’d thought—Not abuse but punishment. And not the worst punishment either.

“VIOLET! THESE BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS ARE FROM LULA.”

A half-dozen pale pink roses in a vase, on the table beside my bed.

Irma blushed, adding—“Your mother.”

As if I might not know who Lula was! A wave of emotion for my aunt swept through me, a mixture of anger and love.

Wanting to believe but no. Irma had bought the roses herself. For there was no card from my mother, Irma couldn’t go so far in deception, forging a card from her older sister who happened to be my mother.

“Aren’t they pretty? Lula was very worried about you . . .”

Irma’s voice trailed off, uncertainly. Badly I wanted to say Was she! Really! But I remained silent.

In fact I was touched to have received two cards while I’d been in the hospital, from Miriam and from Katie.

Get well soon! Love.

As if I’d been stricken with flu. As if wellness could be expected to come soon.

After five days in the Port Oriskany hospital I’d been brought home to the tidy beige-brick house on Erie Street. Weakly ascending the stairs. Out of breath at the top of the stairs. Thinking—But maybe I have died. This is one of their tricks.

The slightest exertion left me breathless. Had my heart been damaged?

If my heart had ceased beating in the ER, it had been shocked into beating again.

And of this too I would remember nothing, or almost nothing.

The reluctance to wake. A conviction that wakefulness is an unnatural state.

My heart is broken. Silly, sentimental.

Not living with my family but with relatives. Far better than a foster home or a detention facility for runaways.

It wasn’t clear that anyone from my family had actually called while I’d been in the hospital. Since Irma had not told me about specific calls I had to assume there’d been none but truly, I did not know, for my parents might have wished the calls to be secret. I was sure that my parents knew about Mr. Sandman, for Irma had to have told them. And they had to have read about him. (Though my name, as a juvenile victim, was kept out of the papers.) It seemed to me likely that Irma and Lula spoke on the phone frequently, even daily while I’d been hospitalized.

It seemed to me possible, that the sisters spoke on the phone frequently. And their subject had to be me.

Me. Most piteous syllable in the language.

Anyway, something I’d have liked to believe.