Kelli looked up at me when I came in, lips closed around her straw — and, for the moment she kept her eyes on mine, it was like she was ten years old. The truth was, and this was something I’d forgotten, Kelli could be kind of a sweetheart when she was sick. Her usual mulishness left her and, after whatever convulsions and agonies had passed, she’d lie docile in her bed, uncharacteristically willing to follow orders.

“Feeling better, Kelli?”

“Feel better.”

“How you doing with that tea?”

“More tea,” Kelli said, handing me the mug.

“That’s probably enough for now.”

“Nuffer now,” Kelli agreed.

“If you have to go to the bathroom again,” I told her, “you call me, ok? Don’t go by yourself.” Kelli was capable of going to the bathroom herself, but she was not so capable — as far as I knew — of maneuvering her way out of an adult diaper.

I felt her forehead. It was cool. Was it a stomach bug? Food poisoning? Could there be such a thing as a bad Timbit? They probably made them with eggs, and eggs could go bad. But Trevor hadn’t had a problem, and he had eaten most of them himself. Trevor had reported to me that Kelli only had about four of the Timbits in addition to half of a beer. Beer usually gave Kelli no problems — it was just another liquid she had to be stopped from gulping down too fast, which was why she was permitted only half.

“Were those Timbits good, Kelli?”

“Good,” said Kelli, uninterested. She didn’t want to talk about food.

“They tasted good?”

“Timbits,” said Kelli.

This wasn’t really getting us anywhere. I felt her forehead again and Kelli made quick eye contact as I did.

“Mumma comin home,” she said. It was almost as if she were being deliberately casual, throwing it out as a quick gambit, perhaps hoping I’d forgotten our conversation in the bathroom and would just absently agree.

“No, she’s not coming home, dear,” I said, taking my hand away. “It’s like I told you in the bathroom.”

“Trebie home,” said Kelli after a moment.

“Trevor’s gone home, yes,” I told her.

“Coming back,” said Kelli.

This was sort of interesting, because I’d never witnessed Kelli make this kind of intellectual leap before. It seemed as if she were comparing two different absences in her life — Trevor’s versus my mother’s. Trevor’s version of gone was the kind that got allayed every once in a while — he came and went, like the tide going in and out. Whereas my mother’s gone was unadulterated, like a lake drying into a crater.

“Yes,” I said. “Trevor’s coming back. But Mumma’s gone now.”

“Gone. She gone now,” said Kelli.

Kelli got it. She didn’t like it, but she got it. There was no point hedging, or being euphemistic. I couldn’t have her mooning in her perch by the window, expecting any moment that our mother might stroll up the walk, and it wasn’t as if Kelli were a child who could conjure up pictures of angels and pearly gates if I were to tell her our mother had gone to heaven. My sister understood the basics, here and gone, and in this case that was all she needed to understand. But I believed that Kelli understood death too — she had accompanied my mother to innumerable funerals over the years. She was intimate with caskets, priests, black clothes, weepy aunts, stiff uncles in sombre suits. She had to know that funerals meant the axis around which here and gone revolved.