“There’s my girl,” my dad says. He gives me an air kiss instead of a hug, which I appreciate — he’s headed to the bathroom to wash up. “Can you clean up the kitchen from Jonah’s snack? He got his hands into the oatmeal, and I wanted to get him washed up first.”

“Sure.” I step into Jonah’s room to say hello. It doesn’t smell, apart from the powdery whiff of wipes: that means no poop. Always a relief. He’s usually a late-morning pooper, which means during the week someone else is getting Jonah cleaned up, and despite the years he’s been in school, it never stops feeling strange and worrisome to me, someone I don’t know providing such intimate care to my brother. I hope they are patient with him. I’ve been to his school a couple of times, and everyone seems nice, but . . . That doesn’t mean that no one gets frustrated with Jonah when no one else is looking. And if anything happens that hurts him, he has no way of telling us.

“Hey, sweetie.” I reach up and give him a quick hug, catching sight of the spray of whiskers on his chin and upper lip. He doesn’t tolerate the shaver very well. I tighten the clasp of his helmet, surprised my dad didn’t notice it was loose. Jonah is perfectly capable of getting injured when he falls from a seizure, even with the helmet on — he’s had more stitches than a baseball (literally — my dad has kept count). So a loose strap is a nonstarter. Even if the friction against his chin bothers him.

“Bao Bao,” he says. My name. He leans down to me until the front of his helmet rests on the top of my head. That’s just for me — he has never done that with anyone else. I hold his hands and sing to him —“Greensleeves”— a song that my madrigal group does each winter, and one of his favorites. He listens, silent except for the squeak of one of the floorboards as he rocks back and forth. I rock with him.

When I finish, I stand there, enjoying our stillness, until he deems the moment over. Then we make our way down the stairs to the living room and pick out one of his nature videos. He reaches for one of his favorites — Majestic Birds. He noises happily, making the sign for bird. I praise his signing with a pang in my chest. It’s so easy to make Jonah happy: nature shows and birds and potato chips and cookies . . . That’s all he needs. But he can’t spend his life staring at screens, and he can’t eat just junk food all day. I wish he could. I wish he could be happy all the time.