You don’t know what you’re doing, said the robotic recorded-operator voice that had been playing in my head on repeat since I arrived. Whenever I felt myself flailing, I’d sit down, try to focus my brain, but all I ever got was the recorded operator. We’re sorry. Your call is important to us. But you don’t know what you’re doing.

I spun around and went looking for my phone to call 911 — but it took me so long to find it (why I was searching under my mother’s bed and rifling through the basement cubby — why, for that matter, I didn’t just think to pick up the landline — I couldn’t tell you) that by the time I found it sitting in plain sight on the kitchen table I had convinced myself that I was being irrational. I sat on the top step leading down into the foyer, clutching my phone, monitoring the front door. This was about fifteen minutes into Kelli and Trevor’s walk.

Then I tried to distract myself by thinking about other things, but the things I started thinking about were a huddle of memories that had also been auto-replaying in my head for days, all revolving around the fight I had with my mother before she had to go into the hospital for her mastectomy, when I was thirty-five and she was sixty-seven. She had pleaded with me to come home and look after Kelli while she was in recovery. And I did as she asked, of course I did, but I wasn’t exactly gracious in my acquiescence. The request had come at a bad time. My marriage was on the rocks — just entering the early stages of its slow, five-year implosion — and in a panicked and nonsensical attempt to distract myself from this inevitability, I was busy applying to law school. And I was angry at her, irrationally enough. That was my response to her diagnosis — I was mad at her for terrifying me by getting sick. But I told myself at the time it was for not being as troubled as I felt she should be by my failing marriage. Because my mother had never really taken my marriage seriously in the first place since we didn’t formalize it within, as she put it, “the sanctity of Catholic tradition.” It had been formalized within the sanctity of a Caribbean all-inclusive package. So, feeling betrayed by the world in general and her in particular, I had taken the opportunity to lecture my cancer-stricken mother. This was not the first time the idea of putting Kelli into care had been broached, but it was certainly the first time I, her adult daughter, had suggested it to her. It was, you have to understand, a cardinal sin within our family theology. Forbidden, like uttering the name of G_d. It was something doctors — foolish, soulless doctors — had suggested over the years as my mother aged. Also well-meaning but ultimately idiotic friends and relatives who, behind closed doors, my mother and the dutiful daughter I used to be had sadly laughed at and shaken our heads over. Imagine — day-to-day life without Kelli! Kelli’s cartoon cackle, Kelli’s placid physical presence. Kelli’s needs, Kelli’s routines. Kelli’s helplessness, Kelli’s bowel movements. Kelli’s eczema and recurrent ear infections. Kelli’s stubborn physical strength and increasingly unmanageable girth. Imagine not knowing the joy of what it was to care for Kelli, day in and day out, until the cancer, nibbling away at your edges for so many decades, finally crept its way into your centre. And after a while, as my mother continued to shake her head and laugh sadly over the unimaginability of such things, I — as you can imagine — started to imagine them.