“I know that,” Mom said. “What am I going to do, count it? Ha!”

She followed the directions. The pasta primavera was very good.

There was no dessert in the box, so I served us each two Oreos on a square of paper towel. “Good dinner, Mom,” I told her.

“It was good,” she said, looking at my face. She wasn’t looking for eczema. She was just looking at me, smiling. “It’s warm in here,” Mom said. “Feels like summer. Let’s open some windows.”

“What about the bats?” I said.

We still didn’t have window screens. But we were rabies-proof now, and we decided to take our chances.

The Loft

It’s funny. The whole time my cousin Angelica was sick, I never even came close to talking about what had really happened that summer. And then, suddenly, she was better, and everything was officially great: Mission had come, Jesse and Sheila were happy, Mom learned to cook something that wasn’t eggs, we didn’t have rabies, and Sonia was so excited about the wedding that she Skyped me almost every night. But I couldn’t smile anymore. Not a real smile. And nobody noticed. I went dress shopping, and Sheila practiced doing my hair and we sent pictures to Sonia, and everyone told me how excited I must be. Part of me was excited. But part of me was really tired. I had been carrying something for a long time. I needed to put it down.

I knew where to put it. I had known that all along.

—

The Thursday before the wedding, when I couldn’t stand it one more minute, I asked Miriam if it was possible that Angelica’s face was temporarily paralyzed because she fell off the loft last summer.

“I don’t know exactly which way she landed,” I told Miriam, “but her head missed the woodstove by four inches.”

Miriam blinked.

“Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” I jabbed a finger at her notebook.

“Why, Bea? Is this important?”

I just looked at her.

She leaned forward. “We’ve talked about Angelica’s fall. And we’ve talked about the fact that it’s unlikely that her illness had anything to do with last summer. It was probably caused by a virus. And she’s better now, right?”

“Yeah. So far.”

“So far?” Miriam put her notebook down on the coffee table next to the gummy-bear jar. “Bea, do you think there’s something else about last summer that we should talk about?”

“Yes,” I said. Now we were both leaning forward, I noticed. We stayed like that until she said, “Bea, it looks like you’re feeling sad.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“Do you want to tell me what happened last summer?”

“Yes,” I said. And then, for the first time ever, I cried in Miriam’s office.

I Told Miriam