“I brought you some things,” my mother says, the reproof of my ungratefulness hovering where it always is under her vowels. She busies herself with the canvas bag at her feet so I can’t examine the look on her face.

Two slim books appear. “I can bring more,” she says, confusing her ravenous reading habit for my own.

I angle my head to read the spines. True crime, I see, and recognize this as an act of generosity. I would have expected her to have grabbed something more literary from her office shelves.

I close my eyes and think I fall asleep, but when I open them, she’s still there.

“Tripp Holmes,” I say, remembering an unresolved question.

“He’s in my intermediate class,” she says. “Sweet kid.”

“He read a Schiller quote”—I pause, and my mother gives me a sip of water—“at the memorial for Jay Kemp.”

“Did he?” There’s bemused satisfaction in her voice. “Such an impressionable fleeting thing,” she says, and I’m left wondering whether she means the poem or the boy.

I jolt up from a dream with the certainty that I was speaking German. Another dark vision of tubes and wires. A strange blue light. And the sudden feeling that a void has opened up around me—a crushing, staggering emptiness. The deepest loneliness I have ever felt.

But when I open my eyes, Teddy’s sitting at my side.

“Guten morgen,” he says, confirming my suspicions.

I grimace.

“That happy to see me, huh?”

“No.” I shift uncomfortably. My eyes are wet. “I just—” I go to rub my face but then stop myself. “It’s unsettling—all the German bubbling out of me.”

There’s a tremor in my voice, and Teddy reaches for the plastic cup on the table. Offers me a sip of water.

I shake my head, and he sits back.

“It’s not that strange, is it?” His eyes meet mine briefly, but then travel to the hall and the nurses’ station. “I mean, your mother’s German. She teaches German. It must have lodged itself in your brain without you knowing.”

I shake my head, not wanting to go into the million ways my mother combated such a fate. “Learning a language is more than just stringing words together. There are rules you have to memorize. It takes time and lots of practice.” Jesus, I think, I sound just like her.

But it’s more than that. The dream. The hospital room—similar but so different from this one. The German. It’s like the fire unleashed something buried deep within me. Like the language has always been there, and the fire set it free.

Teddy shifts toward me, a strange expression on his face. For just the briefest moment, I think he might kiss me, but then I remember. The burns, the scars, the hair, and the unspoken rule we adopted the first time this almost happened.