I’ve added lots of my own touches over the years. For one, I’ve filled the room with all the books I’ve stolen from my mom’s room: fiction, histories, biographies, art books, piled on shelves, tucked willy-nilly wherever they aren’t supposed to fit, perched on my nightstand. (Other things I’ve stolen from her include a silver whistle engraved with a shell, a pair of silk slippers, and a matchbox from a restaurant she must have gone to once.) There is a second bed in the room, and a second set of blankets and pillows that my mom has stored in the closet, as if she’s always expecting company. I’ve made the bed a fort for all my old stuffed animals. There’s a loud, ticking old clock on the wall.

I’ve put lots of my own sticky notes on the wall around my bed. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. And Sweet dreams, sweetie. On the mirror: You look taller today, sweetie. And Those crooked front teeth make you look distinctive, sweetie. I try to encourage myself with things a normal mom or dad would say, because if I let myself feel sad about not having a normal mom or dad, I’d fall into a black hole and never climb out.

Now I sit on my bed and pull onto my lap the story I was reading to Germ.

I open my closet and take out the pile of others; there must be a hundred or more. My heart gives a lurch. These stories have always felt like they fill in a half of me that’s missing. (I don’t know whether it’s missing because of my mom, or my dad, or something else, just that it is.) They’ve always been my way of spinning my feelings into something comforting, like spinning grass into gold. I also retrieve, from my dresser, my lucky pen and my blank notebooks.

I shuffle them all together. Then I carry them down to the metal garbage can that stands outside the kitchen, off the patio, and dump them in. I know how to handle fires just like I know how to fix the refrigerator and reset the furnace and order everything I need on the computer with a credit card—after years of having to do things Mom doesn’t.

I get the garden hose unraveled and ready, to be safe. Then I take a match and drop it into the can, and watch the papers begin to burn. All those words I’ve spent so much time unfolding from my brain—tales of injured dogs that find their way home, elves who give the breathless new sets of lungs, stories about rescues against all odds and lights in the darkness—flame up into ash before my eyes and float away on the ocean breeze.