“Honey, look, the doctor’s just come in and I’ve got to go. You go get some rest now. I’ll see you in a week. Christmas, baby girl!”

She hangs up first. I stare out the window over the bathtub and try to see the snow instead of the pictures in my head. What you imagine is always worse. It’s got to be. Because if it’s not, if all the bandages and brokenness I see when I close my eyes are true, then I can’t think how a person ever fully heals after that. Will he know my name when he sees me? Will he still look like my grandpa?

I turn to study myself in the mirror. Whenever I grumble about the freckles on my nose, Mom says I have him to thank. I tilt my head in the light. Brownish hair. Blue eyes that are sometimes green depending on the sky. And all those freckles that I will never complain about again. I look down at my chair. That’s the first thing people see anyway. I had a pink sparkly one when I was little. But this one’s black with purple racing stripes I stuck on to jazz it up. There’s really not much in between—you get either My Little Pony or the kind you see old people wheeled around in at the airport. Will Grandpa go home in one of those?

I hit the lights and roll down the hall into my room, a Pepto pink from floor to ceiling that was awesome at eight when I picked it out and makes me want to vomit now. I don’t bother with pajamas, just heave myself out of my chair and into bed, which is harder without Mom’s help, but I don’t want to bug her.

I try to let sleep take me. But my legs are doing that twitching thing they do when the muscles get stiff and I’m restless. Every time I close my eyes, I see Grandpa’s busted face and I twitch.

Mom looks terrible the next morning. If she did sleep, it doesn’t show. She sits at the kitchen table and picks at the fake wood that’s flaking around its edge. It is not a nice table. Nothing in this place really is; we just like it because it’s cheap and doesn’t have stairs.

I hand her the orange I was peeling and grab another one. She takes it and we stare at the TV. The map of the middle of the state is whited out. The weatherman says I was right. Almost every county is out of school. But the snow’s already melting, and it’s more gray than white from the grit off the road.

“We need to talk,” Mom says, real slow like she’s about to tell me I’m adopted or something.