I blinked at Trevor with my one working eye. I had forgotten how smallish cities like this one worked, the way people found things out about one another — and east coast people had a knack for this in particular. “Seaside” was Seaside Care Facility, which Kelli and I had toured the previous day. Irene had arranged for this squat, concrete sprawl of a building (which was out in Bedford and nowhere near the seaside, by the way) to become Kelli’s new home on the occasion of our mother’s death. It was my job to install my sister there by the end of the month. A bed was ready and waiting.

But the visit hadn’t gone well. I may have made a small scene. I think it had something to do with facing, all in one afternoon, the quivering bundle of unimaginable outcomes I’d managed to push from my mind my entire adult life, telling myself that there was simply no point in worrying about this now. And that entire bundle had been wrapped up in one ultimately unthinkable question: What happens when Mom dies? Now that she had, the bundle of terrors rapidly unfurled, right there at Seaside.

It hadn’t been a house of horrors. It was simply the kind of place where people like my sister go to live. But I hadn’t been to one of these places before. I’d been to Kelli’s cheerful friendship circle at the community centre and I’d been to various square dances and potlucks for Kelli and people like her, people functioning at the “severe” end of the spectrum — meaning not quite capable of, say, holding down a basic job, but not so disabled they couldn’t carry on, and enjoy, a simple game or conversation. I wasn’t troubled by a roomful of the developmentally handicapped, is what I’m saying.

I was troubled, if I’m honest, by the wheelchairs. The scrubs. The bedpans. There were people like Kelli, but there were also people at the outer reaches of the spectrum, people who couldn’t hold a conversation, who had no language, who spent their days strapped to wheelchairs and beds, regularly fed and diapered like gangly babies. There was nothing wrong with that, I told myself, in fact it was good — it was a fine thing that Seaside provided care for these people. It was just that it gave the place a feeling of being somewhere between a home and a hospital. That’s what I hadn’t been expecting. That bringing Kelli here would mean turning her into a patient as opposed to just Kelli, the person she had always been. And the understanding that this had been my mother’s horror all along; this had been her objection. And her objection had been justified.

So it was realizing that, plus wanting to turn to her and tell her so, plus discovering all over again the new, stupid, eternal fact of my mother’s not being here anymore. What happens is, you throw a minor sobbing fit in the administrator’s office.