There is no seizure disorder. There is no epilepsy. There is no neurological anything at all.
There never was. Not one minute of it, in eleven months, across fourteen documented episodes with dates on them.
She is seven years old. She is completely, entirely healthy. She has been completely healthy the entire eleven months.
And she is going to stay that way, because I am the only person with a key to that front door now.
She sees a woman called Priyanka on Tuesday afternoons.
She likes her. She comes out of there most weeks talking about a lizard in a tank in the waiting room rather than about anything that happened in the room.
She asked me about her dad once. In the summer, in the car, with her face at the window.
I had four answers ready for that question, because Priyanka made me write all four of them on a card and say them out loud in her office until they stopped sounding like a script.
I used the shortest of the four. Eleven words.
She said okay, and then she asked what was for dinner.
That is how it goes at seven, apparently, and every adult I have asked has told me the same thing.
We are still living in that house.
I was certain I would not be able to stay in it. I had a realtor’s number saved in my phone for two months and never called it.
It turns out I can. It turns out the house was never the problem.
I finished that recording in August. Four months after I stopped it.
Not for the police. They had it. They had all of it from the first morning and it had been through two labs by then and a transcript existed with line numbers on it.
I finished it for myself.
At my own kitchen table. Two in the afternoon, back door open, Mira at school, nobody else in that house and nobody coming.
Because I had stopped it at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night in the middle of a sentence. And four months later it was still sitting in my chest exactly where I had left it.
There is about forty seconds of it after that seatbelt clicks. That is all. Forty seconds.
A car door. Road noise again. My brother-in-law humming along to something on the radio, badly, the way he does at Christmas.
