As a child it didn’t seem that outrageous. I didn’t know she couldn’t actually afford any of those gifts. I didn’t understand mania then. I don’t really understand it now. I still can’t sort where her naturally larger-than-life personality ends and the bipolar disorder begins.

When my mom came to see me four years ago, they’d just changed her meds. Her face was puffy, and her eyes were dull. She’d put on weight. She forgot my birthday entirely. Moony said these things were a good sign. I wanted to believe her, but it was worse seeing her like that—a gelded thing, all the fight cut out of her.

That’s how she was our first few visits after she dropped me on Moony’s doorstep. She evened out for a couple of years, and then showed up wearing a plastic tiara and overalls, her eyes bouncing like tennis balls, her words all strung too tightly together. I didn’t see her again until I was thirteen and she was back in zombie mode. I couldn’t bear to look at her all through dinner. Somehow, the tiara was better. When I walked her to her car that night, I told her not to come back.

She didn’t.

I press these memories deep beneath my sternum, tucking them into some unknown cavity. The softness toward her feels worse than the anger. All the fondest memories are tainted by her mental illness. I can’t enjoy them without a sense of guilt at knowing her sickness made her do it.

While my mom was preoccupied with bungee-cording my stuff into the hatchback, I ran into Moony’s room and snatched her vintage watch from the drawer in her nightstand. I held my breath the entire time, trying not to notice the way the mattress sunk in from years of cradling the heavy contours of Moony’s body. Now, I cup the watch in my hands as we pull away from the tidy lawns and houses. Moony wore it every time she left the house. The second hand beats a steady pace around the oval face. I imagine that, as long as it keeps ticking, she isn’t really dead. Somewhere, her body hums, keeping time with this watch. If I can hold on to it, I can hold on to her and what she gave me—a sense of place.

“Remember these?” I pull another rescued item from my shirt sleeve—a box of tarot cards, the only thing my mother left me the night she dropped me off and didn’t come back. I remember her pressing it into my hand, the corners digging into my little fingers. Her words were fevered and breathy like dried twigs rubbing together—Keep them hidden, Catia.

Her eyes slide to the box, to the frayed edges of cardboard where the flap that closed over the cards has worn away. “You kept them.”