The diapers were now tucked away under the downstairs bathroom sink, ready to be deployed for future emergencies, and I was feeling pretty good about getting Kelli’s intestinal trains running on time, when an entirely different issue arose.

She started getting up at night.

This was extremely bad news. When Kelli started getting up at night, you never knew why and you never knew how to stop it and you never knew how long it would go on. All you knew was that Kelli had murdered sleep — not just her own, but yours. Because Kelli didn’t like to be up alone.

“Oh god, it’s just like when you were babies,” I remember my mother moaning at the breakfast table, the two of us peering red-eyed at each other over our tea as Kelli snoozed into the afternoon. She never had any trouble getting back to sleep after the sun came up, unlike my mother and me. “It’s exactly like having a newborn. They wake up, they cry, you don’t know what they want, all you can do is pace and sing, give them something to eat, but it just goes on and on night after night until you turn into a zombie.”

That’s how Kelli’s bouts of sleeplessness went — they were cycles, you knew they would abate eventually, but after a couple of weeks you felt like you’d been dipped into a vortex of blurring days and nights, of clocks without meaning. You stopped believing it would ever end.

I felt the hot, chubby knuckles dabbing at my forehead. Kelli produced heat unlike anyone I’d ever met; her knuckles felt like two warm little pixie feet tiptoeing across my brow.

“Karie sleepin?”

“Oh, Kelli!”

I exclaimed Oh, Kelli! as opposed to What’s wrong? because the experience was so viscerally familiar — it took me right back to the last time this had happened, when I was about sixteen and I felt those chubby knuckles dabbing at my head every night for two weeks straight, sometimes multiple times a night — and my sleep-deprived instinct after a certain point was to leap out of my bed and fasten my hands around her throat.

I sat up and tried to pull myself back to the present. I wasn’t sixteen. This hadn’t been going on for days on end. I didn’t want to kill my sister.

“What’s up, Kell?”

“Sleepin.”

“No, I’m not sleeping anymore. Are you ok?”

“Gettin up.”

I rubbed my hands across my face.

“Yeah, I’m up. You’re up. We’re both up.”

“Who up, Karie, who up?”

I flung the covers off and sat on the side of the bed. I wasn’t sure, but I interpreted this question to mean that Kelli wanted clearer proof I was indeed “up.”

“Karie’s up,” I assured her. “Now what’s the problem?”

Kelli hummed and whispered to herself briefly, looking at the floor. I waited.

“Baffroom,” said Kelli.

“Kelli, you know how to go to the bathroom yourself!”

“Baffroom self,” Kelli agreed, turning to go.