I wonder now why my mother didn’t plead guilty and cop some sort of deal. Did they not offer her a deal? Did her lawyer think he could plead self-defense? Didn’t her lawyer know that the only thing harder to win than a rape case is a woman defending herself in a domestic violence dispute?

“And where were your husband’s hands during this exchange?”

“On my throat. He was choking me.”

“With both hands?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Did you believe he would kill you?”

“I feared for my life,” my mother had said. I can see now that they coached her to say that. I had not been in the room when this altercation occurred. I had been in my bedroom with Gabby watching American Idol on an old laptop, the screen of which was crusted so that Ryan Seacrest seemed to have a large mole on his face. But I did not doubt my mother. My father often strangled her, although he did not try to crush her windpipe, but simply cut off the blood flow through her carotids until she passed out, and then he would lay her on the floor, where she would splutter, almost instantly, back to life, just as mad as before, and he would say, “Jesus Christ,” like she was just too much for him and why couldn’t she just stay passed out, just for a minute, just for once. Her relentless consciousness was galling.

“Had he ever strangled you before?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” she said, sure that this was the right answer. He had been bad, he had been bad two times, he had been bad many times! God, how many times had he strangled her!

“And the times that he strangled you before, had you ever feared for your life?”

“Yes,” my mother said.

“And yet, fearing for your life, you would not call the police or separate from your husband?”

“Well, I’m sure that I did, but—”

“What about this time made you fear for your life so intensely that you picked up that knife?” the prosecutor went on.

But it had already happened. I could see it on my mother’s face, she had lost the thread of her righteousness. She had never believed he would kill her. Not in the past, not in that moment. He would never have let her die. If anything, my father would have killed my mother by accident. But her body did not know he wouldn’t have killed her. Her body was fighting for air and trying to get him to stop, and her body picked up a knife. My poor mother did not have the vocabulary or wherewithal or ability to try to make such a distinction in that courtroom. It was all happening too fast. She was too intimidated by the prosecutor and his glossy brown beard and his purple forehead vein. I still remember he applied cherry ChapStick. The ChapStick brand one. He kept one in his suit pocket and he applied it at least once an hour. I thought it was so weird. I had never seen a man wear ChapStick before, even though I understood it was normal. I had just never seen it before, and it stirred something in me. It seemed almost lewd, this man constantly bringing attention to his rosy lips.

In the end, my mother did not know why she had stabbed my father. It was her body that had stabbed him, but not her. Even in that courtroom, she still loved him. And after her failure to be able to adequately explain this to anyone, she became withdrawn. She guessed too soon that the trial was already over, and maybe part of why she lost is that she stopped fighting. Her eyes glazed over. She didn’t listen to the testimony. She looked bored, but also ashamed. And she was ashamed. Because she knew what the lawyers and the judge and the police and probably the jury thought she was, and she knew, too, that their thinking she was trash would make her trash. Her future didn’t matter to anyone. Her love for her children was as theoretical and easy to discard as a bitch’s love for her pups. Everyone but her knew what was best. And how could she argue? She loved a man who was bad and bad to her, and that was shameful, shameful the way loving food or drink that is bad for you is shameful. And so she let them. She let the trial happen. She let us move into foster care and then into Aunt Deedee’s house. She let everything happen around her, like events were so many petals falling from a bouquet of flowers left too long in a vase.

The thing Bunny said after she met my mother was: “Wow, I had no idea she would be so much like you.” We looked alike. We talked alike. We had the same blend of morbid and dorky in our jokes. Both of our mouths jutted with slight, uncorrected under bites. We had a joke when she kissed me good night, we would call them “piranha kisses” because of the shape of our mouths. We shared a flair for the dramatic in our language and our looks, pale skin, dark hair. She could get angrier at me than at my sister or even my father because she expected true friendship from me. I was her companion, her comrade.

If my father was too drunk, we would catch each other’s eye. If my sister was being a glutton or a brute, we would tease her together, mercilessly ganging up on her until she cried. Gabby was a brash, fat, and happy baby, uncomplicated and selfish. We both envied her, loved her, coddled her, and hated her. Why couldn’t we be more like her? we wondered. Why couldn’t we be like my father, for that matter, drunk and demanding and happy and charming? Why were we always watching, afraid to speak in the moment, thinking up clever replies days later? Why did we need, so badly, to paint our stubby nails with black nail polish? Why were we so drawn to books and movies about witches? Why were we destined to be neurotic prey, trembling rabbits clamped between the hot jaws of larger, better, more vital animals?

For me, watching my mother give up during her trial and fall into the depression that consumed her throughout her prison sentence was a betrayal of such epic proportions that it became one of the great before-and-afters of my life. I learned something deep about myself, about her, about love, and it was a lesson that could not be unlearned. I remember being a kid and thinking it was kind of fun when someone broke their arm, jealous even that they got to wear a cast and have everyone sign it. And then I remember being with my mom after my dad broke my little sister’s arm, which of course we hid completely (the official story was that she fell jumping off a swing), and standing next to my mom, fingering the sleeve of her sweater as the doctor explained the odds of the fracture healing well, and understanding that Gabby’s arm would never be the same, never be as good as it was before. It was that kind of lesson, the lesson I learned during my mother’s trial. Maybe it would have been easier for me if she and I had not been so much alike.

But we were.

Now I think I have assembled something, fragile and piecemeal as it is, that might be called understanding, but when I was seventeen to even think of my mother was to enter a world of memories I could get lost in for hours, and even if I set out to remember or understand just one thing, for instance, I was always trying in those days to conclude whether my mother was a good person or a bad person, I would find myself almost drowning in remembered details: how trash collected in her purse, and how she would have to empty it every few months, the dense mat of receipts and gum wrappers that settled in the bottom, how her face looked as she was listening on the phone, the way her mouth was always slightly open to accommodate her underbite, giving her a look of expectant excitement, her short, bestial-looking thumbnails, her love of overpoweringly sweet perfumes. She was intensely dyslexic and she couldn’t spell anything, would get lost spelling the word “Wednesday,” but she was also a kind of genius. She had an extraordinary memory, though her encyclopedic knowledge was limited to music trivia and pop culture. She knew every nuance of Britney Spears’s life, for instance, and talked about Britney as though she were, if not a close friend, then perhaps a saint, someone whose story could be consulted for guidance as one moved through one’s own life.