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in bed, avoiding liquids so I won’t have to haul myself to the bathroom, waiting for my mother to come home from work, which she does twice a day, to see if I need anything. She touches my hair, asks me questions, forces me to interact with the human world. On weekends, she helps me out to the car, heaves the folding wheelchair we’ve leased from a drugstore into the trunk, and takes me to Cedar Grove for an ice cream, to Brown Deer for a movie. She suggests foreign language tapes, educational videos, correspondence classes. She buys me a tape recorder and cassettes so I can record the collegeassignments my hands cannot write, the papers I’m supposed to be turning in by mail.
    Nights after supper, when my mother comes into my room, she throws on all the lights, sets up the Scrabble board. But my father stands helpless in the doorway. He does not turn on the light. Halfway in and halfway out, he tells his story, this story, the one he never talked about when, as a child, I asked questions. He describes the same details again and again: the squirrels that came to the window. The slow rotation of the TV. The man upstairs who wept each night until the others shouted him into silence.
    My father’s body forms the shape of a star against the bright backdrop of the hall. In the months since my illness began, our relationship has changed. Before, he was simply Dad , a stock character, like somebody on TV: the breadwinner, the tie-breaker, the one who threatened to put his foot down. You applied to him for money, or if you needed to borrow the car. Facts rattled in his pockets like change. One of those facts, of course, was love , but this was a coin that never got spent, one that stayed deep in the safety of his pocket, for the world of emotion was my mother’s terrain. But now all of that has been swept away. My father holds nothing back. He describes the slow passage of days, his exhaustion, his bewilderment. If I cry, he doesn’t leave the room but stays, the way my mother stays: waiting, weathering, solid ground.
    And when he tells me that someday what is happening to me will feel like a dream, like it happened to somebody else, I do not get angry the way that I do when other people, trying to cheer me, say the same thing. I don’t ask, How can you pretend to know how I will feel ? I don’t say, This time is all lost for good, and even if I get better someday, I will never get this part of my life back, don’t you see ? I don’t ask, And what if I don’t get better, what if things just go on and on the way they are ? which is all I think about during the long hours when he and my mother are both at work and my friends no longer call, when relatives and neighbors and people from our church go about their own lives, as they should, as they must, though they remember me—they are quick to assure my mother after Mass—in their prayers.
    My maternal grandmother lights candles for me, buys Masses to be said in Rome on my behalf. An aunt wants to send me to Boston, to a priest who heals by laying-on of hands. Everybody says they are praying for me. Everybody tells me that God has His reasons, that everything is part of His plan. But I no longer believe in God that way, as someone who cares about any one person’s problems, an almighty mechanic who charges stiff fees to repair what was in His all-knowing plan to break.
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    Alone in my room. Time doesn’t pass. It bleeds, blurs, washes me along. Sometimes, I strap braces on my wristsand poke at the typewriter my mother has placed on a card table next to my bed. She encourages me to write poetry, to identify the birds that visit the window feeder, to read the dog-eared books she brings from our limited public library. She is still looking for that silver lining. She believes—fiercely, inconsolably—that we have every reason to be optimistic, that the cup is actually half full. But I can’t raise my feet or point