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voice is thick. She doesn’t sound like herself. She isn’t herself, here in this apartment.
    Peony nods. As Clara starts down the hall to Ruth’s bedroom, she can feel Peony’s eyes on her back, watching her.
    Clara knocks softly. Is Ruth sleeping? For so many years, she tried to turn the doorknob without a sound, little feet padding across the hardwood floor. Quiet as a mouse, Ruth would laugh in the morning, opening her dark eyes to find Clara curled into a ball, tucked against her.
    “Wait a minute,” Ruth calls from the other side of the heavy door. Fourteen years, and these are her mother’s first words. Clara stands still. She is surrounded by all the ghosts of her former selves that have ever occupied this space. The toddler dragging a red crayon down the length of the freshly painted hallway molding; the first-grader racing around the apartment, desperate to find her mother; the teenager sneaking in, avoiding the floorboards that creaked on her way to her own room. She tests her memory now, pressing one foot down on a slightly warped piece of the parquet. It groans, a low, almost animal sound, just like it always did.
    “Come in,” she hears Ruth say.
    Clara’s stomach lurches. The last thing she ate was a protein bar at the airport. Her intestines squeeze and rumble in protest against the combination of too much anxiety and too little sustenance. She imagines herself perched on the edge of a high craggy cliff, like a diver she once saw in Portugal when she was a kid. Arms raised high, back arched, and then that moment—it looked to her like faith—of slicing purposefully, cleanly through the air. She pushes the door open.
    Ruth is sitting in a wheelchair by the window. No lights have been turned on, not even a bedside lamp. In the fading purple-gray dusk she is in shadows.
    “Hi, Mom,” Clara says. The word slips from her mouth, a lozenge, leaving behind the distinct taste of a young and bitter fruit.
    “You’re here,” Ruth says. Even bundled into black sweatpants and a thick fleece sweatshirt, she is all bones. Her face, angular to begin with, looks sharply etched, like a pencil drawing. A brightly colored scarf is tied around her small head like a turban.
    Clara’s eyes sting. She looks around the room at the medical paraphernalia: the dull aluminum gleam of a walker, an ivory-tipped cane propped against the wall, a portable commode on the floor near the bathroom. Orange plastic prescription bottles litter the bedside table. Robin was right. Clara couldn’t believe it until she saw it with her own eyes. Ruth is very sick. Ruth is—
    She leans against the side of the bed. She isn’t sure what to do. She’s afraid to go near her mother, and she’s afraid to stand too far away. There isn’t anything in the self-help section for this, no Idiot’s Guide to Seeing Your Mother After Fourteen Years.
    Ruth flips the brakes on her wheelchair and struggles to stand. She makes it to her feet, then sways to the left, catching herself against the window. Her face is the color of a blank sheet of paper.
    “Sit down!” Clara says. “Please don’t get up for me—”
    Ruth flashes Clara a look—there’s the old Ruth, those dark eyes capable of seeing through anything—as if to say, You silly child.
    “Could you fetch me my walker? I can’t reach it.”
    The walker. Of course. Clara goes to the far wall and grabs it, grateful for something to do. Then she takes it to Ruth, who doesn’t stop watching her—hungrily, possessively—a look that makes Clara feel smaller and smaller.
    “Let’s sit in the living room,” says Ruth. “I can’t stand being in this depressing place.” She shuffles forward, using the walker, her feet barely leaving the floor. Her jaw clenches with the effort. One leg keeps turning inward, nearly tripping her with each step.
    “Maybe if you just got back into the wheelchair, I could push you,” Clara starts. “It might be easier—”
    “God, don’t tell me what to