Forlorn—the word you’d cry into the door of our bedroom when I would shut it in your face (although now I wonder where you got it from)—is the past participle of a verb extinct for centuries that used to mean to part with or be parted from, to cease to possess or to fail to maintain

When the phone rings the ground drops out and Zoe is gone

It rings like a drill, insistent. Amy hears their grandma take a drag off her cigarette, and then she picks it up. Amy is lying on the sofa, back to the TV like she is taking a nap, although she isn’t sleeping.

A gash opens up in her head, and she brings her hands up to her skull as though to keep it all from falling out.

Their grandpa says not to mess up her pretty hair. Their grandma shushes him. Then she hangs up and comes over and puts her hand on Amy’s shoulder. Amy curls up. Their grandma says very quietly in almost a whisper that her sister has just been wheeled into surgery. She does not say that everything will be alright. For one second, Amy reaches around and grasps her grandma’s hand. Then she jumps up and runs into the bathroom and vomits. You can’t eat anything before surgery, so all she throws up is fluids from her own body, which taste like poison.

4

Amy tried to count to ten in Russian, and then to twenty. The nurses had left a curtain half-drawn and she could see a clock that said 11. It didn’t say if it was day or night.

Amy didn’t know what to think about except for time and numbers. She could barely even keep the numbers in her head.

Minors weren’t allowed inside Intensive Care as visitors, which meant that Zoe couldn’t come.

Next to the clock there was a phone. Next to the phone there was a box of latex gloves and a chart that said the word Conversion and something else Amy could not decipher. The ceiling was connected to the walls by bears and fire trucks.

Amy imagined Zoe sitting somewhere just outside Intensive Care, just like Amy used to do when it was Zoe on the inside, a coloring book still black and white and open on her lap. Now she felt guilty and important and excited.

According to the math of sacrifice, Amy had come to a solution to the problems that had puzzled her so long. But how could she certain of where Zoe was? A sudden burning exhaustion knocked her back into her pillow.

While her sister’s in the hospital, Amy is in charge of the dog

She tries to teach it different tricks like fetch to surprise Zoe when she gets out, but the dog won’t learn.

After a few days, Amy is allowed to visit. She is so scared her sister might have changed personality from the surgery that her hands won’t stop shaking on the way. When she walks into the room she sees an alien lying in a little bed with all kinds of different tubes and wires coming out of its body. It takes her a second to understand what is happening. Her sister’s long streaked hair is all gone, and all across her bare little skull is a jagged dark red wound. Without wanting to Amy bursts into tears. Her hands fly to her face to cover it up, but it is too late because their mother is already angry. Before she is dragged back out of the room she gets a look at her sister’s eyes. They are dull, and hollow.

Amy lies on her grandparents’ couch all day with her face in the cushion, curled up like a seashell.