I flick back a few pages to a report about child soldiers in South Sudan. There’s a photo of a man slumped forward in a jeep. In the background my father is crouching down beside a boy with a rifle in his hands. In the foreground lies a shattered cowrie necklace. My mother took this photo before she began to fear for her life.

I’ve calculated. That would be about right. It might have happened out in Africa. My mother never talks about when she met my father and what happened afterward. Nor does she say why she came here from Paris when I was four.

Malcolm asks drowsily from the bed, “What are you reading?”

I pick up the file, sit down on the edge of the bed, and show him the Time cover with my father’s face on it.

“Is that Daniel Craig?” he asks.

“Close,” I answer. It’s true that my father does slightly resemble Daniel Craig, a serious loner who gives the impression that he doesn’t know how to laugh, but his hair is darker than Craig’s.

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s sleeping, like you.” Malcolm obediently closes his eyes and within seconds he’s asleep.

When, in my state between waking and sleep, the letters start to blur before my eyes, I carefully replace the files in their boxes and push them to the very back of the wardrobe.

Write about the world to understand it. Write about people to make them visible. Write down my thoughts to stop myself from going mad. I bought myself a notebook last year to do all those things, but there it lies, unopened, as if to suggest, What have you got to say anyway?

I gently roll Malcolm a little closer to the wall and lie down on the narrow strip of bed beside him.

What would have happened if my father and my mother had stayed together? I imagine that he wouldn’t be in a coma now. I don’t know how Eddie fits into this picture, but maybe, somehow, she’d be here regardless.

Still attempting to cram my father, my mother, Malcolm, Maddie, and Eddie into one picture, I fall asleep and dream of the little comatose girl. Her face is floating under a thick layer of river ice, staring up at me against a backdrop of black sea. The sea parts, and I fall into a dream I used to have even before I went to school—a dream that the pediatrician said was a pavor nocturnus, a night terror, and that the child psychologist described as a stress reaction to a traumatic experience.