“Mom, please. Please stop.” Again I hung up. The magazine’s main line started ringing, her name flashing across the caller ID. I took the phone and placed it beside the cradle. She called my cell and left voice mails until the inbox was full. As the screen of my phone continued to light up, my boss poked her head out of her office. “Hey, can you send those honorarium checks? They need to go out ASAP.”

“Sure!” I nodded so fast the room blurred.

“Why’s the phone off the hook?”

“Oh. I don’t know,” I said, and I placed it back on the receiver. “Sorry.”

At the Al-Anon meeting about a week into treatment, Bonnie had compared living with her husband to walking on eggshells. “I guess that’s why I’m always so afraid,” she said. Later, I found out that was the title of the seminal book on borderline personality disorder. It was a fitting analogy: the slightest misstep could unleash a force capable of shattering its recipient. Erratic, unpredictable cruelty usually coincides with the most vulnerable and tender moments. One must proceed cautiously and always be on the lookout, always withhold information and never reveal something that can later be used as ammunition. Never get too close because that’s when she’ll shoot. And if she does, always have an escape plan. It is essential to remember these rules. Yet this is the realm, the realm of my mother, in which I consistently forget how to survive.

“The thing is,” I said to the group the day after that meeting, “she can’t help it.” I had just described my last encounter with her, at the restaurant in SoHo.

“Well, maybe she can’t in fact help it,” said Richard, “and she probably doesn’t mean to be vicious—”

“She doesn’t,” I said.

“Right. But it still has an impact.”

One morning during my second week at the Ledge, we did something called a H.I.T. list: Healing Internal Trauma. We were working with Richard and one of the other counselors, Charlotte, a Bowling Green native who also led our yoga sessions. A tattoo decorated each of her forearms as well as her ankles, all of them Sanskrit characters. Her hair was deep brown, almost black, her nose slightly upturned, and whenever she smiled, she pushed the tip of her tongue into the sliver between her two front teeth. She dressed somewhere in between sparkling femininity and early nineties grunge, dressed in capris and a loose-fitting T-shirt.

Charlotte suggested that I do a H.I.T. list on my mother. The activity seemed silly to me, but I decided I might as well try it. I looked straight ahead and attempted to visualize my mother as instructed. All I saw was an empty chair. “I can’t picture her,” I said to Charlotte, who was sitting beside me.

“That’s okay,” she said. “Just go ahead and start.”