You smile again as we turn onto our street, and your smile is so innocent, so bright, so seemingly unaware of the weight of the world. “The kind white-haired woman took me in there. She wanted to show me that quarter. And she wanted to help me a little more with my map.”

“Who is this woman, Pearl?”

“You passed her on the way in. You must have seen her. Besides, I already told you: she needs my help. She’s lost something that means a lot to her.”

I don’t know what to say to you, whether to warn or threaten or keep questioning. I often feel too old to navigate this parenting role again, with the first failed attempt so near in the side-view mirror of my life, where the objects are closer than they might appear.

“Pearl, be careful,” I end up saying, not sure what that’s supposed to mean. I want to ask you if this is somehow related to your father, if this woman knows him, but I hesitate to bring him up because the topic always makes you so sad.

You smile and squeeze my hand.

“Can I see the map? When we get home?”

“Not till it’s finished,” you say with a mischievous smile.

The First Drowning

We walk up onto the porch, I unlock the front door, and we are home. I can breathe again. I think of the tumor, the diagnosis, and I reach up and feel the lump under my skin. Still there. I think you might have seen me feeling it, so I try to turn the motion into a pushing back of my hair, a scratch of my ear. I smile down at you.

“Tea party?” you ask. I nod. And my mind spins back to Nysa.

I’m not sure why I was invited to Justin Thomas’s Halloween party during my junior year of high school—I have a feeling he wanted to have a large party, one he could brag about on Monday, so he invited everyone. I didn’t know Justin well, although I watched him from a distance. He was one of the chosen ones, one of those high school kids whose life seemed so easy, so enviable, with his path already cleared for him. All he had to do was take long, easy strides all the way to the top.

If I can’t recall why I was invited, I’m even less sure about why I went. I didn’t fit in back in those days. I found my own skin difficult to live in, as if my soul had been given the wrong size outer garment. It’s hard to explain. That discomfort led me to avoid people, more or less, but my parents were always trying to prod me into situations where I might make friends.

I wore an old sheet with holes cut all through it—a nod to Charlie Brown and his ghost costume. But my parents had not wanted to sacrifice any of their white sheets, so mine was an old sheet from the linen closet with small pink and blue flowers on it. When Mrs. Thomas answered the door, she took me in with a wry look on her face, more wince than smile, and motioned to the basement door. I nodded, the sheet shifting up and down, and walked to the stairs, holding on to the rail through the sheet. I was sure I would trip and fall the length of the stairway, breaking my neck, and the thought was a relief. Death was preferable. As soon as I walked into that house I wanted to leave.