She has been dead twenty years, and listen to what happened to me on the street. Of all the things I could have said to the woman on the sidewalk, the woman I had never seen before, the woman who, unprovoked, had made a fist and brought it down on the side of my face, what I had said was, “Get out of me!” As though the demon was not an overweight woman in an out-of-season straw hat who had said as she swung her fist at me, “This is what you want!”

The other day I was playing Scrabble with Karen. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?

Sometimes, in the kitchenette here, I open a French cookbook so as not to think about her. Better to try to find out, what is a pomelo? Where could one find lemongrass to crush with a mallet for eggplant?

Before I came here, I asked my father a question and gave him a year to answer. The question I asked him is: What is it about me that most resembles my mother?

And I will wonder during this year that follows, did I do the right thing? What will come of it? Will I get something valuable to have? And know that he will make something up, most likely, to give his daughter a gift. And in the year of waiting I will answer the question for him. The way you are most like your mother? You play tricks on people’s minds. You are unlovable. I see in your eyes the love of death.

I’ll give you one year, I said.

Have you detected a curious lack of medical authority here? It is only missing from my letter. There are counselors for us, wise and complex people who do not intrude but are always available—why have I not written about them sooner? They are one of the consolations, here in the present. They live in a separate wing of the main building, and drop in throughout the week. We can call them at night if we need to. Some are young and still in training. They follow the doctor, and are courteous and kind. They take it as an article of faith that bad things that happen are “occasions for transformation,” that creating distance from them is different from denying they were bad.

They are not averse to joining us in games. One time we all played charades. We were uniformly bad at the game. I pulled a hard one that no one could guess, no one came close to this person’s name. In a private session several days later, when my counselor asked if I had any questions, I said yes—“How would you have done ‘Nancy Reagan’?”

At the same time each evening, a counselor checks to see that no one is going out. What he asks us sounds like, “Urine for the night?”