“So tell me a bad story,” she said.

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get me to tell her about Nana, because while I knew all of Anne’s stories, she knew only a handful of mine, and I had always been careful to select the happy ones. She would at times try to get me to talk about him, but never directly, only in these foxy ways that I could always see right through. She would tell me stories about her sister and then look at me expectantly as though I were meant to trade. A sister story for a brother story, but I wouldn’t do it. Anne’s stories about her sister, about the parties they’d gone to, the people they’d slept with, they didn’t feel like an even trade for the stories I had about Nana. My Nana stories didn’t have happy endings. His years of partying, of sleeping around, they didn’t end with him holding down a job in finance in New York, as Anne’s sister’s did. And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.

    I said, “I painted my brother’s nails once while he was sleeping, and when he woke up, he tried to wash the nail polish off in the sink. He didn’t know you needed nail polish remover, so he kept scrubbing his hands harder and harder and harder, and I was watching him, laughing. And then he turned around and punched me and I had a black eye for a week. Is that the kind of story you want to hear?”

Anne took her glasses off and put them in her hair. She closed the MCAT book. “I want to hear whatever story you want to tell,” she said.

“You’re not a doctor. You’re not my fucking therapist, Anne,” I said.

“Well, maybe you should see a therapist.”

I started laughing, a mean laugh, a laugh I’d never heard before. I didn’t know where it had come from, and when it escaped my lips, I thought, What else is inside of me? How dark is this darkness, how deep does it go?

“He died,” I said. “He died. He died. He died. That’s it. What more do you want to know?”

49

For a week in high school, I had nightmares that woke me up in a cold sweat. I couldn’t remember what happened in them, but every time I woke from one, soaked in my own fear, I would grab a notebook and try to coax the dream out onto the page. When that didn’t work, I started avoiding sleep.

I couldn’t tell my mother what was happening because I knew that she would worry and hover and pray, and I didn’t want any of those things, so instead I would say goodnight to her and head to my bedroom. I would listen for the sound of her shuffling feet to stop, and then, once I was certain that she’d fallen asleep, I would sneak back downstairs and watch television with the volume turned low.

It was hard to fight sleep, and the television, at that volume, did little to help. I’d doze off in the recliner and the nightmare would shoot me upright, awake with panic. I started praying feverishly. I would ask God to stop the dreams, and if he wouldn’t stop the dreams, I would ask that he’d at least allow me to remember them. I couldn’t stand not knowing what I was afraid of.

    After a week of unanswered prayers, I did something I hadn’t done in years. I talked to Nana.

“I miss you,” I whispered into the dark of my living room, the sound of my mother’s snoring the only sound that could be heard.

“It’s been hard here,” I told him.

I asked him all kinds of things, like “What should we watch on TV tonight?” or “What should I eat?” My only rule for myself was that I could never say his name, because I felt certain that saying his name would make what I was doing real, would make me crazy. I knew it was Nana that I was talking to, but also, I knew that it wasn’t him at all, and to acknowledge that, to say his name and not have him appear before me, my fully embodied, fully alive brother, would ruin the spell. And so, I left his name out of it.

One night, my mother found me resting in that recliner. I looked up from the television and she was standing there. It was a wonder to me how sometimes she could move so quietly it was like she was incorporeal.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked.

Nana had been dead four years. It had been three and a half years since my summer in Ghana, a month of bad dreams. In that time, I had promised myself I wouldn’t ever burden her, that all she would ever get from me was goodness and peace, calm and respect, but still, I said, “Sometimes I talk to Nana when I can’t sleep.”

She sat down on the couch, and I watched her face intently, worried that I’d said too much, that I’d broken our little code, my private promise.

“Oh, I talk to Nana too,” she said. “All the time. All the time.”

I could feel the tears start to well up in my eyes. I asked, “Does he talk back?”

My mother closed her eyes and leaned back into the couch, letting the cushions absorb her. “Yes, I think so.”

* * *

—

    The night before she was to take the MCAT, I finally told Anne that Nana had died of an overdose.

“Oh God, Gifty,” she said. “Oh shit, I’m so sorry. All that shit I said, I’m so sorry.”

We spent the rest of the night huddled together in my twin extra-long bed. As the evening grew quiet and dark, I listened to Anne cry. Her body-wracking sobs seemed overly dramatic to me that night, and I waited for her to quiet down and fall asleep. When she finally did, I lay there fuming, wondering, What does she know? What does she know about pain, the dark and endless tunnel of it? And I felt my body stiffen, and I felt my heart harden, and I never spoke to her again. She sent me text messages the next day, after she came out of the exam.

“Can I come over and see you? I’ll bring a pint of ice cream and we can veg out.”

“I’m still so sorry about last night. I shouldn’t have made you talk about it before you were ready.”

“Hello? Gifty? I get it if you’re mad at me, but can we talk?”

The texts came steadily for two weeks, and then silence. Anne graduated, summer came, I went home to Alabama to wait tables so that I could save up some money before I had to go back to school. The next year I started over again, down a friend. I threw myself into my work. I interviewed at labs all across the country. I hadn’t prayed in years, but sometimes, before bed, when I missed Anne, I talked to Nana.

50

My mother was awake and sitting up in bed the day after I prepped the limping mouse for optogenetics.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you want to go out today? We can get breakfast somewhere. Would you like that?”

She smiled at me a little bit. “Just water,” she said, “and a granola bar, if you have it.”

“Sure, I have a bunch. Let me see.” I rushed over to the kitchen pantry and pulled out a big selection. “Pick one,” I said.

She took the peanut-butter-chocolate-chip one and nodded at me. She sipped the water.

“I can stay home with you today, if you’d like. I don’t have to go in, really.” This was a lie. If I didn’t go in I would ruin a week or more of work and have to start all over, but I didn’t want to miss my chance. I felt like my mother was my own personal groundhog. Would she see her shadow? Had winter ended?

“You go,” she said. “Go.”

She slipped back down under the covers, and I closed the door, rushed out to my car, simultaneously saddened and relieved.

* * *

—

    At the lab, there was cause for celebration. Han had gotten his first paper published in Nature. He was first author on that paper and I knew that his postdoc would be coming to an end before long. I was already starting to miss him. I bought a cupcake from the shop on campus and brought it to Han at his desk, lighting the single candle in the middle and singing an odd-patchwork version of “Happy Birthday” with the words changed to “Congratulations, Han.”

“You didn’t have to do this,” he said, blowing out the candle. His ears were red again, and I was pleased to see that familiar hue, wistful that it had gone away in the first place. The cost of getting closer to Han had been fewer instances of this strange and delightful trait.

“Are you kidding? I might need you to hire me soon.”