Dad took Karina to the counselor every week, and afterwards he’d take her for frozen yogurt and ask her how she was feeling. Karina hated going to that office, which was just a room in the woman’s basement, with its own entrance from the street. There was no natural light except from the window wells, which contributed to her feeling of being underwater. Sometimes, she had nightmares from which she would wake to think she was lost at sea on a small, sinking raft.

“When do you most feel the loss of your brother?” the counselor asked Karina.

There was no time when she didn’t feel the emptiness where Prem used to be, the keen sense of imbalance in their family. “Mealtimes,” she answered. There were four bodies at the dinner table again, but Prem’s chair was half occupied by her grandmother getting up and down to retrieve warm food from the stove. Prem was not there to bore them with his accounts of entire episodes of Space Rangers, or to test out eight successive knock-knock jokes from his new book.

“And when there’s no one to vote with me for Clue over Trivial Pursuit.” Karina smiled. The sooner she could prove to this woman she was fine, the sooner she could stop coming here.

The counselor returned her smile. “What else feels different?”

“Well, we’re not getting a dog anymore. We had one all picked out.” Karina shrugged instead of trying to speak through the tightening of her throat.

“How do you feel about that?”

She shook her head. “It’s fine. It makes sense. You know, we couldn’t handle it right now. I can’t really . . . I can’t really take care of someone . . . something else. Maybe in a year or two.” She gave the counselor a bright smile and glanced at the clock on the wall.

“You’re going to be returning to school in a few weeks. How do you feel about that?”

Karina shrugged. “Okay. Fine. I mean, it’s high school, so that’ll be different. Bigger, I guess.”

“Does that make you nervous, a bigger school with more students?”

“No. The opposite.” Karina looked forward to being in a sea of people, most of whom didn’t know her. There might not be more kids who looked like her, but at least there would be more kids and she could lose herself. Less chance that someone knew all about her family.

* * *

Two weeks before Karina started high school, the orchids began to die. There were five potted orchids in their home, one for every room downstairs. Each had been delivered at different times in the weeks after the accident, but, as if in collective protest, they all stopped flowering at once. The purple one in the dining room was the last to drop its blooms, standing defiantly after the others had wilted. During breakfast one day, her mother touched the barren stem in the small pot for a long time. Her grandmother was going to throw them all out, but Karina wanted to keep them, to see if she could coax them back to life.