“An-na,” I said one day when I was nine months old. I was sitting on the terracotta-tiled kitchen floor, watching her clean the dinner dishes, swatting at her dangling apron strings like a kitten with a ball of yarn.

My mother and father were in the living room watching television (the one activity they could share without fighting), perched on separate orange and yellow squares. In the weeks before my birth, my mother had banished all of my father’s casual beach-bachelor furniture to the Salvation Army. With modular the latest in-home fashion, she had purchased a living room set of orange and yellow cubes, which when strung together, created an L-shaped sofa. Whenever anyone stretched out, the cushions would roll apart. Daddy had twice fallen to the floor.

“An-na,” I said again, bouncing on the cool tiles.

“Senor, senora, es Jackie!” Anna called out excitedly. My mother jolted up from her orange perch and ran into the kitchen.

“Whatsa matter, hon?” Her voice was already slurred from martinis.

“Anna!” I repeated proudly for my mother’s benefit, as my father raced up behind her.

“Did she say Anna?” My father crouched down and examined me with keen interest.

“Si, senor.” Anna smiled proudly and lifted me into her arms.

My father tickled me under the chin, and I giggled, drool spilling over my bottom lip onto his shirt cuff.

“You’re crazy.” My mother yanked me from Anna’s arms. “She said ‘Mama.’ I heard it.” She kissed my cheek with chilled lips and bounced me up and down. “C’mon say it. Mama!”

I started to fidget, then cry.

“There is something wrong with this child,” my mother accused as she handed me back to Anna, who calmly rocked me while I howled and sputtered my outrage. My father was already on his way back to the television.

“She said ‘Mama’!” Merilee screamed in his direction. “I heard it clear as a bell.” She marched back into the living room and poured herself a fresh drink from the pinkish mirrored bar cart she’d recently installed.

According to Anna, I didn’t speak again until I was two.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. HOSPITAL ROOM

MORNING

DAY 17

“She fails to respond to Babinski, which we saw as a positive sign, but the patient lacks a gag reflex and is being fed intravenously.”

Daddy is standing along with five residents, listening to Dr. Foreman review my case. With his chin buried in his collar and red-rimmed eyes, my father looks like a lost child. His grief and powerlessness over my condition have no place among these notebook-bearing observers.

While Dr. Foreman continues his assessment, a rotund, bespectacled resident tagged “Dr. Tishman” sidles over to the window and gives a fast wave to the ever-present crowd of fans gathered below, eliciting a chorus of muffled cheers.