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so kindly. And you continued to cry off and on for weeks. You grieve; that’s the conventional wisdom. You grieve for the child you thought you were going to have, though maybe it’s also for the parent you thought you’d be. But soon—or so you keep hearing—you’ll find that having an answer provides some measure of relief. Because now you understand why she acts the way she does. You understand that some problems are neither your fault nor hers.
    You can begin to educate yourself; it’s hard to use Google if you don’t have the proper search terms. You can learn what kind of help your child needs, and you can find other people in the same boat.Eventually, you’ll feel less alone. A diagnosis, the conventional wisdom goes, is a beginning, rather than an end.
    You’re not quite there yet, though, to that place of clarity and relief. Now that you have the all-important label, the letters that will make your daughter eligible for the ominous-sounding set of benefits known as “services”—OT and PT and plain old T—now that you’ve gotten an answer that’s supposed to be definitive, what are you supposed to do about it? There doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus.
    Just one more week until the pest control people come to finish their treatment, and then all this will be over. The day they come to spray, you’ll stay in a hotel, just like you did the first time. It’s money through your fingers and not fun for anyone—the four of you crammed into one room, waking up in strange beds on a school day. But it’s better than putting your kids down for the night on mattresses still damp with pesticides. Better than bringing them home before you’ve had a chance to sweep up the white powder that settles on the floor as the toxic mist dries in the air.
    You collect pieces of clothing, keeping track as you go: underwear for yourself, a shirt for Tilly. Denim legs twirled in the corners of bedsheets, spun tight by the movements of the dryer. You pull like you’re playing tug-of-war at a picnic.
    Josh’s clothes are in here, too, mixed in with the rest, but you don’t take any of them out for him. He can find his own. There was a time, you remember with some astonishment, when you used to do nice things for him on purpose. It’s sad, and maybe you’ll reach that point again someday, but it’s not going to be now. You have a feeling of plague and panic, like you’re living through the black death or the influenza epidemic of 1918. In plague days, you’re learning, it’s every man for himself.
    â€œI am,” you think, and “I want.” And you have no idea how either sentence ends.

chapter 3
Iris
June 3, 2012: New Hampshire
    We don’t unpack right away, just drop our suitcases in the right rooms. We all sort of separate for a while, now that we’re not stuck together in the car. Mom’s doing something in the kitchen, making lots of busy noises, and across the room, Dad’s lying down on the couch with his eyes closed, though I don’t know if he’s really asleep. Tilly is walking around, telling herself a story about giant statues coming to life; I can hear her whispering “Spring Temple Buddha,” which is a really tall statue in China or someplace. And I’m sitting on my bed, wishing I was anywhere else in the whole world.
    I’m in our new bedroom, mine and Tilly’s, which I hate. The walls are brown wood, tall up-and-down planks with knotholes in them, and there’s a thin blue rug that I’m not ever going to walk on barefoot. Our beds are probably the same size as our beds at home—all twin beds are the same, right, so you know the sheets will fit?—but they look skinny and lumpy and just kind of sad. The bedspreads are dirty white with little flowers on them, and the pillows are so thin they barely even puff up the covers. I can’t believe