Emily Hunt Kivel

Emily Hunt Kivel

Your “Me” Report

One day, in the middle of what my confidantes described as a long and guilt-ridden “grieving” period following the death of my cat, Scampers, age twenty, I sat at my desk in the library circulation offices and signed up for an online service that promised to reveal everything that was wrong with me and how I could fix it.

Those same confidantes—namely my pregnant sister and Wilhelm, a German street person with whom I had formed a recent bond—also told me that this online service, called Your “Me” Report, seemed like a scam. But I’d been delighted and seduced by its title and the service it offered: a tidily-written psychological diagnosis, with practical steps for the client (me) to take in order to recover from whatever specific concoction of neuroses and traumas from which she (me) was suffering. I checked to make sure my boss, Hannah, was still pre- occupied with a large folio book that wouldn’t fit into the reserve shelves, then went beep bop click clack and entered my name and credit card information.

Hannah grew frustrated—in her timid way—and marched the folio back out to the circulation desk and left it there. When she returned empty-handed, she looked at me as if we were conspirators.

”Why do they make books that big?” she said, sitting at her desk. She said it like this was some big book secret that only she and I could understand. It was a Friday, and on Fridays, Hannah was inclined to say annoying things like that. Hannah was short and toad-like. Hannah was exactly what young children and dumb adults imagine when they imagine “a librarian” and this made me very depressed, given that I was also a librarian. Or a librarian in training.

“Who knows,” I said. I continued to read all about Your “Me” Report while I spoon-fed myself from a steaming takeout container of pad see ew, which I had brought from the new Thai place down the street from my apartment. The library often lacked appropriate plastic cutlery.

I had to admit that Scampers’s death hit me hard. I’d had the cat since I was eight years old, an impulse adoption my mother, sister, and I had made on the side of a Hill Country road a few months after my father died. We’d been contemplating this move, the procurement of a pet-friend, for a while; my father had been different versions of sick for years and he was, after all, the only real obstacle to cat acquisition. But when it was finally all over, his crazy rise and quiet fall, we were rendered sort of still. Surprised, maybe. He had been a large and formidable die-er. Scampers, however, looked so pathetic living in her ridiculous box on the side of the road, being touted and slung alongside four other felines (tortoiseshells, gray blob, black thing) and their exhausted owner. Seeing her shook us back awake.

We’d been kittens, both of us: she a tiny tabbycat with electric green eyes, me a human girl. We grew up. Eventually I took the cat in, over a decade later, when my mother sold our childhood home in Dripping Springs—a home that, admittedly, had come to resemble a bloated man sunbathing on a river rock: all stuffed and tired and browning—and moved to be closer to my sister, her husband, and me in San Antonio, where we were living approximations of adult lives. Scampers had always been my favorite.

I listened to the muted swoosh and thud of a book sliding down the return chute. If she had merely died of old age, I thought, I think I would have been alright. But Scampers had in fact died alone overnight at the veterinarian office just ten blocks down the street, waiting for a lab test. She’d had a UTI and was peeing everywhere around the apartment; the urine glittered with concentrated tract crystals on my hardwood floor and couch cushions. I took her to get cured and instead she’d just died.

I was understandably outraged at the fact that my childhood cat and best friend had presumably died alone in the middle of the night, traumatized within the office’s stench of wet dog and human sweat while I slept soundly in my high-rise apartment down the street. The veterinarian assured me the death had been painless and also not her fault.

“She was twenty!” she said by way of explanation as I cried in the exam room into which a receptionist had shuffled me after I started sobbing in the waiting room. I was not consoled. She was too young to be a veterinarian.

I maintained that Scampers died of a broken heart.

In Your “Me” Report, I hoped for a write-up that could either confirm or deny the malignant source growing within either me or, more hopefully, the world around me. I’d been looking at the website for weeks. I wanted a piece of paper that would sum up exactly what was wrong with my world and/or world- view and give a few helpful tips on how to cure it.

Later that evening, I walked home and clomped up the seven stories to my apartment. Then I sat on my couch and video-chatted with a woman in a lab coat for forty-five minutes.

I knew of course that the lab coat was sketchy. I knew of course that there was an element of pomp and circumstance to Your “Me” Report. I wasn’t an idiot.

At 12:57 p.m. that next day, Saturday, as I was sitting by the window and eating massaman curry, Your “Me” Report emailed me with my “Me” Report.

“Raw, libidinal urges supplanted by intrusive thoughts and violent ideations. 95/100 chance of becoming a serial killer,” it said.

My thought was that just because you haven’t yet thought of murdering anyone, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a serial killer, or a serial killer in waiting. I sent Your “Me” Report dozens of follow-up emails to this assessment. I received no response(s) other than a confirmation(s) of receipt(s). I took this to mean that they stood by their diagnosis and were, understandably, keeping their distance.

At the same time, I wanted to follow a path. As the sun set, I walked down the block to get pizza and tried to imagine killing everyone. Man with bulbous calf muscles running along the day-baked pavement, gray-and-orange university sports hat on head: just shoot him. Adolescent girls linked arm-in-arm, sunset glittering in their hair: drop some sort of anvil. Woman at the slice shop: slice her up into pieces. The pleasure derived from this exercise was minimal at best. When I exited the shop, gnawing on a slice of cheese with olives, I saw my new friend Wilhelm sitting alert and generally disenfranchised on the curb outside. He made a regal figure, backlit by the darkening sun, and I went back in to buy a slice for him.

“Pepperoni?” he said as I approached. He glowed.

“Always,” I said, and sat down next to him. I told him about Hannah and the folio, which was about all the news I had besides possibly being a serial killer.


I’d met Wilhelm a month previously. “Enjoy the path” was the first thing he ever said to me, after I’d handed him a slice of pizza and deposited exactly two coins in his sad Dixie cup outside this same pizza shop. Wilhelm was handsome and he’d looked up at me with electric eyes poised above a bushy, sand-colored beard. I’d fallen immediately in love and returned every evening to buy Wilhelm more pizza. Eventually we settled into a pattern of this. Over the past month, I’d learned that Wilhelm was German—which I should have known, given the thick German accent in which he said things like “das pizza” and “mein kitteh”—and Wilhelm had learned that I had a job in circulation and reserves at the library.

He’d also learned that I hated this job, that I planned to seek help through an online “Me” Report, and that my cat Scampers had died at age twenty.

“Scampers has gone away,” he’d said, drawing an imaginary frowny face over his actual smiling face. Wilhelm was always smiling because he was handsome and he got to eat pizza for free.


The second-worst part about Scampers’s death was the fact that my mother and sister didn’t care. At all. Rita was pregnant and my mother was surprisingly very excited about that. Rita’s husband Joshua was a podiatrist. He looked at/fixed people’s feet! It was noble. They were waiting until birth to find out the baby’s sex. I reminded her of the lunacy in this decision that Sunday.

“Are you CRAZY?” I asked. “Why would you wait for a thing like that?”

My sister rolled her eyes and stared at her toes. We were at a nail salon. When she was feeling difficult, my sister would only hang out with me if I agreed to go to the nail salon. At first it was difficult to understand why: she got the exact same mauve color every time. But these salons were whole, sterile, safe. I think she enjoyed the process of bouncing all pretty and baby-stuffed into the salon, putting her feet in the hot water, closing her eyes and saying “OOOH.”

“Boy or girl. We’ll be happy either way,” my sister said.

What bullshit, I thought.

“Absolutely either way,” she said again. She changed the subject. “See? This is just what you needed to get your mind off everything.”

By “everything” she meant Scampers.

“Rita,” I leaned over and whispered to her in her vinyl chair. It had a digitally-operated massage feature and was pounding her back violently. I winced. “I took an online personality test. It said I was a serial killer.”

Rita began cackling.


That afternoon, I walked to the pizza shop to show Wilhelm my new nails. They were orange. Wilhelm smiled beatifically and said, “Like citrus.”

I noticed that Wilhelm was breaking out. Wilhelm was a huge man, like a Viking, and it upset me to see his face marred by something as pedestrian as a pimple.

I sat down next to him. “You know, Wilhelm,” I said, “all of this grease isn’t doing your complexion any good.” “No?”

I told Wilhelm that good looks were something to be nurtured and cherished. “Real beauty,” he said, “is to be true to oneself.”

“Right,” I said.

“But beauty is only skin deep,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “And your skin is deeply suffering.”

He stroked his face with a loving smugness.

“What if I bring you something healthy next time?” I asked.

“We’ll try it,” he said.


That night I emailed Your “Me” Report asking again for clarification on a diagnosis that I hoped was either inaccurate or a sick joke. As usual, I received an automated response from a robot customer service proxy named “Ray” who did nothing but confirm the company’s receipt of my email, over and over and over. I imagined murdering Ray: lock him in a freezer.


The next morning, Hannah had redecorated the library’s circulation offices with new “art.” The art was mostly a lot of wall decals of library puns. When I entered the office and sat down at my desk, Hannah pointed to the decal above her desk and giggled.

“Awake with the morning Dewey,” it said. It was next to an image of a sunflower blooming a book. In the far corner of the office, something came tumbling out of the return chute.

The only piece of art that wasn’t a decal was a framed painting of a pig with a donut in its mouth. Hannah loved donuts. And I supposed she loved pigs, in the way that some people believe they love pigs. She too was breaking out. The pig was pink and cute but I didn’t put much stock in it at that moment.

I did however stare at it all day because it happened to be positioned on the far wall directly across from my desk. As I munched on my leftover curry and logged late BorrowRedirect books, I felt a certain calm. I realized that the pig’s eyes were the same electric color as Scampers’s, filled with the same bored fear. It was as if we were sharing a meal.

“What are you eating?” said Hannah.

This reminded me of my new plan to restore Wilhelm to his full health. It didn’t seem to me a crazy thought that with the right nutritional regimen, he would be restored to a fully-functioning, hot, German man who would be so grateful that he would immediately wrap me in his arms and demand my hand in marriage or at least ravish me aggressively in a normal-person way.

That evening, I stopped by the vegan bistro on the corner and purchased Wilhelm a bowl of quinoa, seaweed, and baked tempeh.

Wilhelm squinted at it but accepted. “It is sub-par,” he said. “I’m grateful all the same.”

“My boss redecorated the office today,” I said. “There’s a painting of a pig that reminds me of my dead cat.”

“Scampers, das dead kitteh,” he said. He did not make eye contact.


The next day, I stopped before work to give Wilhelm an almond butter and banana sandwich on pumpernickel. He looked at me skeptically. At work, the pig eating the donut reminded me of Scampers with her mouse toy. She used to shake it around in her jaws until its plastic eyes would fall out if its cloth head. It was frightening. She did this so many times that my mother, sister, and I had had to replace the toy dozens of times throughout the years, starting when she was two and lasting until she was nineteen. Then she died.

From across the room, Hannah told me she had a date that evening. “Look,” she said, kicking up her legs from behind her desk. On her feet were a pair of red kitten heels. “Day-to-night!”

I mouthed to the pig that I was sorry. My sister emailed me a few pictures of light brown- and cream-colored baby onesies and asked which I liked best. “Whichever one has a matching hat!” I answered.

“SO CUTE A MATCHING HAT??!” my sister replied. I think she was feeling nuts.

That evening, I stopped by the pizza shop on my walk home and saw that Wilhelm wasn’t there. I trudged the remaining seven blocks to my apartment fairly disappointed. My sister was waiting outside my building with a massive bag of takeout in her arms.

“Why does your apartment smell like the basement of a Grade C Thai restaurant?” she asked. She hurtled forward through the hallway, globular belly leading the way, and dumped the contents of her bag onto the coffee table. Buffalo cauliflower and French fries and burgers. Two strawberry milkshakes. My sister was starving. The milkshakes glowed pink and pretty like the pig painting in my office. I wondered momentarily how Hannah’s date was going.

“Oh my god,” said my sister, sitting on my couch and kicking off her sandals. She put her bare feet up on the coffee table. Mauve toenails. Gold toe ring that had begun to look like it was cutting off her circulation. Apparently I’d wondered about Hannah aloud. My sister also found Hannah’s existence exponentially depressing and feared that I would become something like her.

“I’m teaching my daughter confidence at an early age,” my sister said. “And that sun will do her good. And that there’s nothing wrong with being smart and pretty.”

“But you aren’t having a girl,” I said. “You are having a neutral-toned child.”

“Right.” My sister squinted at a French fry, dipped it in ketchup, and then stared at the yellow-and-red stick as if it were the most serious thing in the world.

“Let’s watch a movie,” she said.

“The people at Your ‘Me’ Report still haven’t responded,” I said. I turned on the television. Scampers’s old bed sat under my couch and I felt it with my foot, all that lumpy fleece.

“Oh, stop it with that thing, Isa,” my sister said. Then she turned to me. “Okay, let’s do a serial killer test.”

“Okay.”

She sat facing me. “Do you want to kill me?”

“No,” I said. “You’re my family.”

“Do you want to kill anybody?” she pressed.

“Maybe.”

“Have you ever—felt love?”

“No.”

She groaned. “I mean for anything. For me. For Scampers.”

“Alright, yes.” I said.

“You’re grieving a cat. Serial killers don’t grieve cats. Serial killers are sociopaths.”

“Not true. David Berkowitz had spiritual reasons for murdering everyone,” I offered.

“David Berkowitz?”

“The ‘Son of Sam.’”

“You aren’t the Son of Sam. Jesus Christ. Can we pick a movie?”

As we watched the television screen, Rita’s face glowed and darkened, glowed and darkened, her eyebrows moving up and down with the plot of the film. She had always been like this. Rita had grown skilled at emoting early on. Grace of our father. We develop certain traits in reaction to the failings of our siblings and parents: certain mechanisms learned in order to live around them. Pictures of us as children were often an experiment in light and shadow. Adults referred to us as mirror images. Teachers came to understand Rita and me as that effervescent, touched little girl and her gloomy younger sister.


On Thursday, Rita’s husband Joshua sent out an email inviting me to their baby shower. This I found somewhat unorthodox, given that Rita was due in less than a month. She looked like she was about to pop. What interest could she have in toggling around looking like an inflated balloon and making inane chatter at a co-ed baby shower?

Apparently a lot. The email directed me to download a PDF of an invitation. The PDF showed a black-and-white, stark photo of my highly-pregnant sister and her husband, standing in front of the antique gramophone they kept in their apartment. Rita wore dark lipstick and a peacock feather in her hair. Joshua wore a suit. Both barefoot. Why?

“A Remembrance of Things Past, a Toast to What’s to Come,” said the invitation. Did I want to murder Joshua? I studied his face. I was very eager to enjoy my path, to figure out whether this path was in fact the serial killing of other people or not, so that I could deal with it head on.

I texted my sister that it was a cute invitation. She texted me a picture of herself in a crystal store.

“Why are you in a crystal store?” I asked.

“Baby reasons,” she said.

A devastating thought: I hoped I wouldn’t kill the baby.

Then I emailed Ray once more, informing him of the immense psychological suffering my “Me” Report had caused me.

“If you really think I’m some kind of high-risk psychopath,” I said, “you might at least give me the tools to start rehabilitation. I’m freaking out.”

“Confirmation of receipt,” said Ray.

Hannah was in an especially good mood that afternoon. I wondered if her kitten heels had done the job she intended them to do. Hannah sat very still and smiley in her chair, peaking at me from behind her computer screen. She had a bag of almonds and an orange on her desk.

“How was your date?” I asked, giving in.

“It was WONDERFUL!” she said. She came around to my desk and sat on a tiny stepping stool and told me all about it.

The next day, I asked Hannah if I could move the pig portrait closer to me. She looked at me curiously and said, “Yes?”

Still Wilhelm could not be found.


Saturday, the same. It was the first unbearably hot day of spring. Why was Wilhelm hiding from me? I stayed inside and emailed Ray. I ordered cold spring rolls with peanut sauce. Ray confirmed receipt.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, things had cooled down, and I saw Wilhelm smoking a cigarette outside the Duckz Donuts. Once a mom-and-pop shop in the southern outskirts of the city, Duckz Donuts had devolved into what was the basic model of a Dunkin’ Donuts except everything inside was ducks. Ducks on the plastic tables. Ducks on the napkins. Ducks, even, on the sign outside. When Wilhelm saw me, he gave me a big, wide smile and I feared he was going to embrace me. I also wished he would embrace me. My family wasn’t very touchy. When I hugged Scampers before she was ready, she would bite my face. She rarely drew blood.

“Wilhelm, where have you been?” I said. I was trying not to act heartbroken/insulted, which I was.


“I’ve been hanging out by the river,” he said. This seemed enough explanation to him. He had a half-eaten chocolate donut in his hand.

“Donuts? Really?” I said. “What about nutrition?”

“I’m a man, not a child,” he said. His mood darkened.

I apologized. I told him it was good to start healthy habits, especially when you have natural good looks. I asked him if he’d let me bring him dinner the next day.

“Fine,” he said.

He was very beautiful. The sun gleamed off the top of the Duckz Donuts building and refracted across his beard. Under the sun, some people’s eyes are green. His turned an electric hazel. Two exploding globes of color, watching, quiet. I had always wished myself to be this kind of person growing up: a girl whose eyes could change color under the mysterious beam of a burning star.

Hannah took a three-hour lunch the next day. I tried to relish in the quiet of the office. There was no sound, nothing but the whoosh and thunk of a book going down the return chute every so often.

“I miss you,” I texted my sister.

“What?” she responded. “I’m here.”

“I miss you,” I said to the pig. It was now nailed to the wall immediately to my right. I had done this that morning. My desk was in a corner. Sometimes I felt safe; sometimes like I was choking. The painting was so close I could touch it, which I did. I let my fingers feel the textures of paint over the donut, the snout, the eyes.

“Where is Hannah?” I said to the pig. “Where is she? What am I supposed to do?”

This was a fair question. My daily duties largely relied on the various tasks and busy work Hannah handed to me.

What on Earth is she doing? I thought. Did I want revenge on her? For what? For taking a long lunch break? For going on a good date? I tried to imagine killing her. In my mind, I followed Hannah home from work. I snuck around in the dark behind trash bins and cars. My mind hid with a knife in her shower. My mind got bored and left. When it resurfaced in the library back office, I was looking at the pig and crying.

When Hannah came back, she looked happy and sheepish. Her lipstick— pink—was slightly smeared. She smelled like oregano.

“Date?” I asked.

“OOH YES,” she said.

It was hot again. I walked home that night intending to buy Wilhelm a shiitake mushroom and avocado sushi roll with brown rice. Wilhelm was also getting just a little bit chunky recently—thanks to whatever fool had been buying him Duckz Donuts and pizza “by the river”—and I was interested in reversing what looked to be a downward trajectory, saving him from this fate. Perhaps saving him broadly. My sister liked to say, before she was pregnant and pounding burgers and French fries, that a healthy body fed a healthy mind. But as I approached the slice shop, I didn’t see Wilhelm. Inside the shop, a group of young teenagers were laugh-screaming around a plastic table. In the far distant trees, bugs were starting to hum. I looked around the back for Wilhelm and couldn’t find him.

Well, if he’s so committed to acting like a slob/snob, good riddance, I thought.

If he doesn’t want my help, why should I help? I walked to the Thai restaurant.

Why doesn’t he want my help? I waited for my takeout pad see ew.

I walked to my apartment through the alley, which was cool from being shaded all day. I was lost in thought when suddenly I had the sensation that I was being watched. The fine hairs on my arms stood up. My neck burned.

There was a soft shuffling behind me.

A glimmer of low sunlight peeked through the rooftops. A shadow was following me. Large, bear-like: a masculine, pear-shaped thing that seemed to have—a beard.

“I vas vaiting for you,” said a deep German voice.

“Wilhelm,” I said, turning to greet him.

Wilhelm however did not smile or stretch his arms out for a hug. His eyes were red and dry. He regarded me with something like disgust. He even crinkled his nose.

He came toward me and my body froze and hardened, like a beetle playing dead. A product of evolution, muscle memory. I knew he was going to kill me. I thought back to the past month. I thought of Scampers with her mouse toy, shaking its eyeballs out of its head. I imagined once again her final mews, the soft caterwauling she must have emitted as she died alone in the dark of the animal hospital. I thought of my sister in her peacock hat, staring into the camera. I thought of Wilhelm, felt the yearning comfort of sitting by his side on the concrete step of the pizza shop, licking grease from our lips and talking about Hannah and Fredericksburg.

Then: a memory of Rita. She was almost ten, I was eight, and she had aggregated all the dolls in the house, some half-dismembered and deranged, on our living room floor. My sister wore two ribbons in her hair: one pink, one green. For some reason, I had a paper bag on my head; a single, mangled eyehole cut into its front. My mother came into the room, looked at my head, nodded to herself, and left. She never lingered for long. After our father died, she was a raw nerve. It was difficult for her to look at us squarely. Scampers padded softly behind. It was just the four of us and the dolls.

“This one, and this one, and this one,” my sister said, taking the prettiest ones as her own. Apparently we were picking teams. Who knows why. “Their names will be Nicola, Leila, and Bridgette-May. They’re ballerinas.”

“Mine are named Poop, Pee, and Jessica,” I said. I was cracking myself up. The bag fell off my head. “I want them to be ballerinas, too.”

In the alley, Wilhelm grabbed my hand. I waited for death. I thought of two green eyes. I closed my own brown ones.

“Give me your yummy food!” Wilhelm said. He snatched the bag of pad see ew roughly out of my hand and hugged it to his chest.

“Hey!” I said.

“I will steal the food from off your plate forever,” he cried.

“Wilhelm!” I said. He turned to go. I called after him. “Was that it? That’s all you wanted?”

Wilhelm turned back and spat in my direction. “Dumb girl.”

When I returned home, shocked and noodle-less, I called my sister. She came rushing over wearing a pair of lavender maternity overalls.

“Are you okay?” she said. “Are you OKAY?” she said again. “Do you need to be TESTED?”

“For what?” I asked. We sat across from each other at my kitchen table. It was dusk. Things outside my windows were fat and golden.

“I don’t know, scabies,” she said.

We watched a movie about a rich woman who, owing to a combination of unfortunate circumstances, is forced to work as the nanny to a rich little girl. My sister tucked her knees into her ginormous belly and sloped her shoulders with satisfaction. She looked at me. “I’m worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You could have gotten hurt. You seem lonely. It’s selfish of you, keeping all this loneliness to yourself. How did you meet this guy anyway?”

I explained to Rita that Wilhelm was just this handsome German transient who loitered around the pizza shop and how that in itself was intriguing enough. I told her that Hannah had gone on a romantic, three-hour lunch date.

“You’re prettier than Hannah,” Rita said.

“I thought he was going to kill me,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t think anyone wants to kill you,” she said. But she sounded unsure.


The next day at work, Hannah was pink and puffy-eyed. She hid behind her computer but did not peek at me. She sniffled constantly. I thought of helping, of inconspicuously moving the pig portrait nearer to her, in case that might bring some kind of cheer into the room, help illuminate her path. But in this too I was selfish. One look at the small pig’s electric eyes, and I just couldn’t.

When I walked home, I circumvented the pizza shop and avoided all alleys. I cooked myself rice.

“How are you feeling?” I texted my sister.

“Like I’m going to poop,” she said. “POP! I mean POP. Did you see him today? You could call the police.”

“He’s nowhere,” I said.

Things were quiet for the rest of the week. On Thursday, while Hannah was out again for an uncharacteristically long lunch—though she did not, I noticed, return wearing kitten heels and smelling of oregano—I took the pig painting off the wall, walked it home, and hung it above my couch. Friday evening, I stood in the middle of my living room holding Scampers’s old bed in my hands. I was deciding whether or not I was supposed to throw it out. It was not still warm from her old, tumor-riddled body, I knew that, but I thought I could feel the heat under my fingertips. I stored it high in a hall cabinet where I wouldn’t see. I crossed to my kitchen window and looked down at the street and studied the pizza shop. It was dark. I ordered Thai food to my door and weathered the disappointed face of the deliveryman who had been tasked with walking it the six wide blocks to my apartment.

I didn’t look at the pig painting as much now that it was in my home, but I wanted to feel its presence, glowing goofy and pink above me as I ate the delivery. Hannah had not noticed its absence. She’d been too distracted that week—dropping books and sniffling, cc’ing me on the wrong memos.

I had a restless night. At 4:00 a.m., I was half awake and half dreaming. My evening meal of mango sticky rice churned in my stomach. I was jolted back into the land of the living when my phone, resting on my bedside table, chimed “bing bong” like a bell. It notified me whenever an email flagged as “important” arrived and thus the device was often silent.

In the stark quiet and smelly heat of my apartment, seven stories above ground, I sat up in bed and stared at the glowing screen.

Dear Isabella, Let me extend my deepest apologies. Obviously that’s not the sort of service we offer. I don’t know what kind of service that would even be. We are a company full of professionals with a commitment to wellbeing. We are in the midst of some rather exciting changes here at Your ‘Me’ Report, most of which involve a revitalization of our diagnostics and reportage department—the addition of, literally, hundreds of mental health experts!—and I wonder if a communication team in flux had anything to do with this error. You know, some grumpy employee transitioning out, thinking, maybe, ‘Let me just stick it to the man once before I go.’ That kind of thing. A joke in poor taste. It’s sad, really. We should pity them. Or, do you, on the off chance, have any friends working in comms at Your ‘Me’ Report? Just a thought. I assure you we’ll be launching an investigation into whatever fluke created such a short and basically inaccurate diagnostic. Please let me know how Your ‘Me’ Report will be of service going forward. We’d like to offer you, to start, a comprehensive package of complimentary follow-up sessions with one of our board-certified psychologists, so that you can finally begin down a path to discovery.

Ray.


One month later it was summer and everything in San Antonio stank. Tourists went to the Alamo and came back disappointed. Something was turning the river mauve. Wilhelm had disappeared. I asked after him at the pizza shop and the teenager behind the register shrugged. The air conditioning in the library offices broke and Hannah and I were constantly sweating, averting our gazes from each other as we wiped cloths from the freezer across the backs of our necks and under our arms. Hannah was still red-eyed and sniffling, though less frequently. On the first of July, my sister went into labor.

I came to the hospital as soon as Rita would let me. My mother was running around the halls. She has curly hair and loves peanuts. She was holding a bag of peanuts. She was sweating. I don’t know my mother very well—sometimes it’s just happier growing up that way—but I have a good idea of what she looks like, and that day she looked as if she’d gone through labor herself.

“Mama,” I said. “Where is she? Well? What is it, a boy or a girl?”

“IT!” she said. “IT!”

I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or indignant.

“Go see for yourself!” she said. “I’m finding the ladies’ room.” She handed me the bag of peanuts. “Bring this.”

“I have flowers.” This was true. I had a bouquet of yellow tulips wrapped in plastic. I was wearing a yellow sundress and my hair was braided like a crown across the top of my head. I was trying to make a good impression on the infant.

“Just bring it!” she said.

I opened the door to see Rita and Joshua shrouded in light. Rita still looked pregnant, but she didn’t appear as if she’d just birthed a child four hours prior. She had some makeup on, parted her hair down the center. Josh was staring at her. Staring at the baby in her arms. Staring back at her.

“Isa,” she said. She smiled at me, big and uncontrolled. The room was safe and cool. We were in a cloud of cool.

“Congratulations,” I said. I hugged Joshua. I stared at the baby. My eyes were bugging out of my head.

“I’ll get you some water,” said Josh, although of course there was water in the room. He stood up in his huarache slip-on sandals and tiptoed out. He shut the door gently.

“You look like a princess,” my sister whispered.

“Well?” I said. “Well?” I stroked the baby’s head. It looked up at me with a pair of electric eyes. It was furious and searching.

“She’s a GIRL,” my sister said. And she erupted. “She’s a baby girl.” My sister started crying, “Boo hoo hoo.” She buried her face in my shoulder. Into the baby’s head. My shoulder. The baby’s head. The baby looked up at her angrily.

“A baby girl, a baby girl, a girl, a girl, a girl, a girl,” my sister repeated. I touched her face, full of light and shadow.

“A girl,” she said again. She wept.


When my father died, I was seven and Rita nine. He was in a hospice bed. We threw it out almost immediately after his final breath: the very next day, as I remember, though my sister says it wasn’t that soon. And of course, my mother did it, not me. And of course, we couldn’t have thrown it out; likely it sat outside in the front yard, waiting for days. Likely people had passed by on the sidewalk, seen it, and wondered what had happened. He was a bad, violent man and we didn’t miss him. His death was a long time coming. It had been a deep summer day, when the golden afternoon fades to purple dark, and for the purest of moments, everything is pink.