There was wonder left inside her. I could see it. It ran through our blood. You’re so curious about the world.

Tilly had the ocean like her son had the sky. A space fiend, he called himself, and Tilly loved this about him. It was something she’d seen from the beginning. Now she could claim another world as well, its tender monsters shimmering across the flatscreen. “I love those whales,” she said. “Running on their songs like fuel.”

Later, I found her crouched in the darkness of the living room, barely visible, perfectly silent, like a feral creature waiting for safety.

“Tilly?” I said. “What’s happening?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” I said. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m fine.”

Her breath smelled bad when I bent close. Not only drunk but souring. I helped her stand and kept her steady while we took the stairs—slowly, each one precisely balanced—down to her room. I felt sure of myself for once, my pale arms like liquid moving through the dimmer liquid of the darkness, gin ribboning through tonic, as I helped her undress. I saw a bruise on her leg, violet and shadowy, from falling God knows where, God knows when. I told myself it looked larger than the hurt felt. I hoped. I caught sight of myself in her mirror—bending over awkwardly in this posture, trying to help.

She drifted in and out of sleep, murmuring about her first days as a runaway: a house with roaches and melting light, veggie stir-fries, vivid hallucinations that plucked her mind like it was made of guitar chords, music in the dark. She told me about the man who’d watched her making love. That fucker, she said. He ruined lives.

“You were so young,” I said. “You must have been lonely.”

“I was.”

How ridiculous the phrase seemed, her problem, as if she needed the same stupid words I’d used about myself or my hipster friends, their own finest spin doctors, who went to rehab to make the stories of their lives more interesting. Tilly was a drunk. But she was also a woman I saw every morning. She liked TV programs about the ocean. These were ordinary things. She wasn’t doing well. She took four or five baths a day.

How had Lucy put it? My whole body itches. The water left her more shriveled than she’d been before. Like prunes, people said, but she said something else: There were little fires all around her edges, and the water put them out.

I thought back to my nights drinking at Lucy’s, that solace, to understand why Tilly needed it so much. I’d been blanketing my mind with small dark points of forgetting, moving from point to point like hopscotch, black to black, afraid of getting trapped inside some moment of memory. I practiced this sport without calling it by any name.