The most heartsickening part was that I had come to recognize the bare, vacant expression before it had fully settled on Sarah’s face. This time her eyelids fluttered. Her breathing became alarmingly shallow. She convulsed once and then came back to me as quickly as she had slipped away. Seconds. Her focus became what it had been.

When Sarah was just months old, she would scare me nightly. She performed a sort of stopgap breathing that left one wondering when and if the next breath would come. I would fall out of bed and stand over her until it did, and then she would breathe on as if all was right with the world. No one ever warned us about these sounds. I felt completely unprepared to care for this creature.

“What are you thinking about?” Sarah asked.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s your move.”

“Oh.” I studied the board. She was moving me around. I could sense the end coming. “I guess I need to move my king.”

“I love you, Dad.” This came from nowhere.

I looked at her face, but she was staring at the pieces in front of her. “I love you too, bug.”

“Do you like baths?”

“What?”

“Baths, do you like them?”

“I suppose. Gotta get clean every now and then. Why?”

“Theresa says that baths are better than sleep.”

“Better how?”

“I don’t know. More restful, I guess. I told her I didn’t like sleeping and she said I should take baths.”

“Why don’t you like sleeping?”

“I don’t know.”

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In those frightful, horrible flashes of seizure, I apperceived what it would be like to finally lose, surrender my daughter. The episodes were small destructions, and I withered alongside her each and every time. Mere seconds. Infinite seconds. I felt bad, guilty even, for feeling a perverse happiness at having witnessed the seizure alone. I wanted all of my daughter that I could get, and I wanted her selfishly. I wanted to cache moments and freeze them for parceling out over the balance of my so-called life.

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