The drive home was as awkward as any I remembered. Fear had not settled in but was looming. Sarah did not take her customary seat, right-hand rear, but instead buckled herself into the middle. Her confusion was manifesting as anger, a generalized, unfocused, silent rage. I daresay I was feeling some rage as well, as unfocused as hers, and I was doubtless no less confused.

Finally, “What did the doctor say about me?”

“We have to go to a different doctor,” Meg said.

“He didn’t even look at my eyes.”

“I know, honey.”

Olor columbianus. Two mandibles recovered from a pack rat nest. The species is a winter resident in Arizona. It will rest in deep water; however, it uses its long neck to feed from the bottom of shallower water.

A seizure. Sulking, if one could call it that, in the backseat, she seemed so normal, so much herself. I immediately thought that the seizure must have been brought on by a brain tumor. I reminded myself that I was no physician. I reminded myself as well that Peterson had not stated certainly that my daughter had had a seizure. I glanced at Meg, who stared straight ahead through the windshield.

“It’s good that we can see Gurewich tomorrow morning,” I said.

Meg did not reply but kept her gaze forward.

The worst feeling in the world is knowing your child is afraid, not startled or apprehensive as when about to take a test or ride a roller coaster but paralyzed by that icy cold in the pit of her stomach, confused because she suddenly believes her parents cannot make it all okay. When Sarah broke her tibia playing volleyball, I was of course concerned and hated that she was in pain, but that was manageable. Now, there might have been nothing wrong at all and certainly I was afraid, but the look of fear in Sarah’s eyes sent that same ice lance through my center, lodged it in my spine, and stayed there, unmelting, unmoving. My daughter was my reason for waking each day, and I wanted to kill myself for having in some fashion already resigned myself to losing some part of her. Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life. I bit my tongue hard enough to snap out of it.

But not hard enough to injure myself.

As always, though I could get caught up in a swirling current of anxiety, I was a lightweight compared to Meg. She was aerial; she could latch on to an optimistic balloon, ride it high, and then let go, spiral into despair at the prescribed acceleration of thirty-two feet per second. It is very difficult to catch someone falling from a dizzying height. It was good for neither fallen nor catcher and sadly was historically the reason for our disconnectedness. I understood at once and disappointedly that my spiraling was an unconscious effort to ignore the fact that something was wrong with my daughter.