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much to us, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t shared with you. You don’t know us.
    But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there.
    What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?
    Why do you think you should get what is your right?
    You’re so uncaring, so unreasonable. It must be a defense mechanism of some kind. I’m sure that it is.
    But Sam says that’s ridiculous of me. Even to think about you that way.
    It’s late at night and neither one of us can sleep. I say to him, I’m sure that the yeti must have been hurt. Very badly. At some point in his life he must have been very badly hurt. Or he’d understand our side. No one can care so little about other people unless they’ve been very badly hurt.
    Not necessarily, Sam tells me. Maybe the problem is he’s never been hurt. He can’t imagine real pain because he’s never experienced it.
    I can feel his hand reach across the bed for my arm.
    Or maybe some folks are just bad.
    He wraps his fingers around my wrist.
    Maybe some folks are just bad.
    My poor sleepless husband.
    He says that to me twice.
II.
    On the day of the mammogram I was more worried about the technician seeing all the bruises on my arms than about the results. You’ll be lucky, I told Sam, if they don’t come and arrest you for wife abuse.
    I hate to see you look like that.
    I was standing in just a bra and panties. The bruises were all different colors, the newest ones purple, the oldest turning yellow. It’s not so bad, I said. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t know he’s hurting me.
    I know he doesn’t mean it. I’m not angry at him—you know that. I just hate to see you this way.
    It’s nothing big, I said. He gets upset. He can’t talk to us, so he lashes out.
    But I understood that the words were pointless, just filling the air between us with sound. There was nothing I knew that Sam didn’t know. There was only this ritual of repeating back and forth what we both already knew.
    We kissed in the door and I watched him pull out his car—just behind mine in the driveway. He didn’t wish me luck and it never occurred to me that he should.
    S o, first there was the mammogram, at which I stood with my breasts and my mottled arms exposed. As the technician squeezed my flesh into position I mumbled something about having fallen off my bike. I bruise very easily, I said. Not: My son had a stroke while in utero and is severely brain-damaged. He isn’t a bad boy at all, but he has these moments of violence and these are the results.
    Not that.
    Then came the letter ordering me back for more tests, an ultrasound, the biopsy, the meeting in my doctor’s office—this time Sam right there by my side. And through all of this, about three weeks, right up until the surgery, all I could think about was Todd. Not even what would happen to him if I died—I couldn’t die, that was out of the question, not on the table for discussion—but little things like who would watch him while I went in for the biopsy, and could I possibly take him to the doctor’s office with me and have him there in the room.
    It used to seem so simple: you’re young, you go through school, you fall in love, you marry, you get pregnant. And then the road takes a certain kind of curve. Your sense of self can disappear.
    Todd: cannot speak, cannot walk, barely hears, is blind in one eye. Cannot control his bladder or his bowels. Does he know us? It’s never been clear. Until now, I’d always hoped that he did. I’d always hoped that it gave him some kind of comfort to have me and have Sam there with him. But now I’m not so sure that I want that anymore. Now I find myself hoping sometimes he never really knew who I was.
    Now, my yeti, I find myself hoping he may be like you. And so won’t ever miss me when I’m gone.
    T here was spread