Had Ann Marie turned out to be such a lying, conniving sociopath because her father had handed down douche-genes, or because her mother had never loved her? Though of course Ms. Harriet thought of herself as a loving mother. Ms. Harriet lived in a world of doing, where her actions were as clean and formulaic as a sheet of Lego instructions. To clothe the child and feed the child and teach the child is to love the child. Those actions are the same as the metaphysical state for a person like Ms. Harriet.

For instance right now, hadn’t she rescued me in the hallway? Wasn’t she feeding me, comforting me? I was sure I would wind up in her evening prayers that night, and I was sure she would look back on the way she had absolved me, forgiven me, “Don’t tell me you think this was your fault,” and she would feel pride. She would never perceive herself as using even this meager opportunity to spread damaging, toxic gossip about a woman long dead. She was being so kind as to extend her sympathy to Bunny, who had obviously lost it or had some kind of “break”—whatever it was, it was obviously not normal, it was obviously sick and pathological and other and monstrous, and obviously we could never look at Bunny the same way, could we? No, we could never see her the same way, the same way we could never look at her mother the same way, for what Allison had done was also disgusting. A younger man. The selfishness of the affair compounded by the selfishness of the suicide. She was not a proper woman, not a clean and godly woman, and hadn’t we all known Bunny was not a proper girl either? I mean, she was too large, wasn’t she? We had all known when she grew too big that there was something wrong with her, and we should not be surprised now that the something wrong had come to light, and that the monster had been exposed for what it was.

“He never should have let that girl play sports,” Ms. Harriet said, out of nowhere.

“Bunny?”

“It’s what made her violent, I bet.” She stared off into the middle distance, as though her own daughter did not also play sports.

That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for. I should have felt sympathy for Ann Marie. Everyone else did. Everyone else took selfies in the waiting room with crying-eye emojis. Everyone else saw in her homely features and glossy blond hair something vulnerable and sweet. But I had never liked Ann Marie and I could not start now, even if she was in a coma. And I had always liked Bunny and I could not hate her now, even if she was a monster. Nor could I hate Allison for whatever she had done with Mr. Brandon. Nor could I hate my mother.

I knew that sometimes people found themselves in a moment. They found themselves pressed up against themselves inside of a claustrophobic moment. And you couldn’t see how it really was from the outside. You could talk all day until you were blue in the face about what Donna Morse should have done to not get murdered, or about what my mother should have done to get us out of there. But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back. You’ve kissed Mr. Brandon, or inserted the fruit knife into the pectoral muscle, or suddenly woken up on top of a girl whose nose was under her left eye. And there was something about me, but I always seemed to be right next to the kind of people who wound up making such decisions. I always seemed to be right there, loving the wrong person, betting on the wrong dark horse.

I have always loved buses. They carry their own unique enchantment called forth by the pneumatic squeak and whoosh of their doors and the drone of their massive engines as they lumber about the city carrying individuals who are daydreaming, all together, each pretending to be alone. On the bus home from Cedars-Sinai, as I was thinking about Bunny and about violence, I accidentally stumbled into a kind of reverie about my mother. I had not intended, exactly, to think about her, and then suddenly I was plunged into the deepest, darkest part of the water.

I suppose it had been triggered by a selfie my sister, Gabby, had posted. I monitored her Instagram and Facebook accounts much more often than I spoke to her. There was some kind of awkwardness between us, some kind of bad blood that I couldn’t seem to find the source of. When we met up, I would ask her questions about her life or about school and she would roll her eyes at me. The most I knew about her was what our mother told me. She would always give a little recap at the start of our Denny’s dinners. “Well, Gabby got a B in pre-algebra,” or, “Gabby has become obsessed with Lil Wayne and I think I’m about to lose my mind.” My senior year of high school, Gabby was in eighth grade. Is there a darker night of the soul than eighth grade? In the last year or so she had suddenly veered from potentially plump, otherwise known as “Wisconsin Skinny,” to damn-is-that-girl-dying skinny. Her thigh gap was a handbreadth. Her skeleton was iconic. In the particular selfie I was obsessing over, she and my mother were both dressed in weirdly slutty outfits, black bras under white wifebeaters, ripped denim shorts, too much eyeliner, and they were staring at the camera unsmiling and serious as court reporters. It was captioned “Cat got your tongue?”

I should have seen it coming. That my mom and sister would become friends, subtly excluding me the way that my mother and I had always subtly excluded Gabby. It was the age difference really. I had always been the old one, the reasonable one, the one who could be talked to, my mother’s confidant. I had been her bestie. And I had been relieved when she went to prison and this intimacy had ended, so I was unprepared for the flash of intense jealousy that sliced through me when I saw this picture of my mother and sister together. And all sorts of things came flooding back.

I had sat in the courtroom during my mother’s trial, which took two days. There was something about the way the prosecutor spoke to her that alarmed me. He spoke quickly, as though he were trying to trick her or make her look stupid by asking him to repeat himself. He was a white man with brown hair and a brown beard and lips that were very pink and a vein in his forehead that was tremulously violet. In every way he looked at my mother, spoke to my mother, referred to my mother, there was a careful detachment that bespoke visceral disgust. Of course, at ten years old, I had no words for what I was witnessing. But what I knew was that to this man, there were one hundred other things my mother could have done besides stab my father. Why had she been so stupid as to not think of them? It would have been so easy not to stab my father, this man seemed to suggest, that for my mother to have done so indicated some kind of violent fixation on her part. Why hadn’t she called the police, for instance? Why hadn’t she gotten the children into the car and left, even if it was to drive around the block until she could think of what to do? Why hadn’t she locked herself in the bathroom? Why hadn’t she left my father years ago, for that matter?

I was a child, and I had thought that the law would be concerned with doling out moral judgments. Honestly, I had thought we would be deciding whether it was my mother or my father’s fault that all this had happened, and in my estimation, it was mostly my father’s fault, and the idea that my mother would be held accountable for it—as though she wanted to stab him, as though she had put it on her to-do list: maybe stab Aaron for fun on Saturday!—was so absurd to me it bordered on surreal. The entire court scene was, to my eleven-year-old eyes, the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I had no idea they were trying merely to ascertain: Had my mother stabbed my father? Yes, of course she had! But didn’t it matter why she had done it? Wasn’t there any pity for the fact that she had been reduced to this? Why hadn’t she left him months ago? Because she fucking loved him and she loved us and she wanted her family to be okay, and that meant refusing to understand that her family was not going to be okay. Had they never lived life?