“Hey,” said Trevor. “This was my idea. I’m the one who brought this mess to town!”

It was not an expression I’d ever heard before.

Trevor left after the dishes and a final beer. (“See you Tuesday, girls. Same bat time, same bat channel!”) And maybe I should have been lying awake in bed thinking about that, but I’d had three beers myself and once I had started playing the old arguments with my mother on a loop, the loops circled faster and tighter into a compulsive, steady spiral that I couldn’t pull myself out of. I lay there in the dark with my eyes wide open and every once in a while I’d realize my lips were moving as if I were back there — back here, that is — in this very house, furious and trapped and blaming her. Blaming them both, but mostly her, because she was my mother, she was supposed to take care of me, and all she seemed to want was for me to disappear into this life along with her. Plus, how could anyone blame Kelli for anything? Kelli was just there, through no fault of her own. Blaming her did no good. She was the stone idol, wordless and eternal, at whose feet you lay your sacrifice.

Oh, you and your life! You and your precious young life! These were the words my mother spat at me at one point during the angry summer’s sweltering peak.

That sounds like an evil thing for her to have said. But it was also at the peak of one of our blow-outs and I had been pushing her. We’d been standing outside on the same patio where Trevor had barbecued, the barbecue itself neatly covered, still early in the first decade of its disuse. We were out there so Kelli wouldn’t hear us, because she cried when we argued (this being one of the less illustrious consequences of life in girl-world — everyone was always bursting into tears). And, yes, I had pushed my mother. Oh god, had I ever, in all my young righteousness. I was ambitious, I had potential, I had big plans (unlike you, was the ongoing subtext), I needed expanded horizons, expansive vistas, freedom, Mother. Freedom to accomplish all the wonderful things the young, vivacious, ability-crammed me was so clearly capable of.

And oh, the grotesque understanding behind those words: your precious young life.

The awful, acerbic emphasis on precious.

Before then, I’d had no idea my mother was even capable of sarcasm itself, let alone vicious sarcasm.

And I had brought it out in her, this ugliness.

You’d think I would’ve been the one to burst into tears at that moment, but it was her.

Well, go, she’d said, turning toward the patio screen door and struggling with the magnet that held it in its frame.

To think I’d always considered that moment a victory.

Monday I called Gorsebrook to see if I could book what Trevor had called a “more official” visit, and was thrown off my moorings by the warm and caressing voice of a woman named Marlene. Oh, Karen, she said into the phone once I explained my situation. I was taken aback by the wincing sympathy of these words, as I’d practically been speaking in bullet points up until then, trying to keep things straightforward and unemotionally professional. And then Marlene bludgeoned me a second time with: Karen, you poor dear. And it was game over.