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that they’re not coming back. I can’t,not yet. I can’t even believe that they’re gone. Maybe this means I am in denial, as the advice columns say. Maybe it just means they haven’t even been dead a week and they were plenty alive last time I saw them.
    The night before they left I heard them talking. Ma said, It’s not too late to stay. Dad said, I don’t want to stay. I want to go. Ma said, I worry about her. Dad said, Well, stop. They went. Now they’re dead. I can’t believe that, but I also can’t process it. Process is a very popular advice column word. So is issues.
    Most of what I know about how to act and what constitutes psychological disaster, I’ve learned from advice columns. On some level I know this is absurd. It’s troubling to know I study the emotional range of humans as if I’m not one. But after a while you see patterns. Patterns help you figure things out. The columnist almost never says, Do this. Or, That’s not normal. Or, Leave him. She says, Think about it. She says, Be clear about what you want. Or she says, There is no normal. There’s only what’s right for you, and being honest.
    I like There is no normal. It appears several times in the Normal Book. But whether I am normal or not, whether my life is a good one or not, I know it isn’t my perception that matters. Ma’s did. Dad’s did. Amanda’s does. Really, my perception seems to matter less than everyone else’s, if it even matters at all.
    Thinking of the Normal Book reminds me that Amanda’s coming over. If I’m unlucky, this Angelica person will too. There are a number of things I want to hide from my sister—the envelopes of cash, the food she threw out that I reclaimed—but above all I don’t want her to see the book.
    I find the Normal Book on the floor of my room. I must have dropped it when I fell asleep. I look for a place Amanda won’t find it. Under my bed is too obvious. There are many nooks and crannies in my attic space, but there must be somewhere else more secret. I head downstairs to the library.
    Midnight is curled up on Dad’s leather chair. I shoo her off. She sniffs a few things, investigates a few corners, and yawns ostentatiously. Ostentatious is one of my favorite words. I learned a lot of words when I was young by the same method. When I read a word I didn’t know, I looked it up in the dictionary. Then I learned whatever was on that page. When I first read the word osteopath in one of Dad’s medical books, I opened the dictionary to osteopath , and from that same page I learned ostentatious , and also osso buco. This worked well except for once. When I was ten, my mother slapped me for the first and only time, because I told her she was niggardly. It was on the same page with Nietzsche and night-blindness.
    The dictionaries are here, nestled among all the other hundreds of books in the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. This is where Dad spent most of this time when he wasn’t at the hospital. His leather chair is here, and his desk, with another chair behind it. The desk is a broad, flat slab of wood, with legs but no drawers, therefore no hiding places. I look at the walls of books instead. The Normal Book would be at home here, but thinking ahead, I can’t chance it. Amanda didn’t finish what she was saying about the will. Maybe Ma and Dad wanted their books to go to charity too. It won’t work.
    I walk out into the hall and remember when Ma chose the paint. Mountain Sage out here, Irish Oatmeal in their bedroom, the master bathroom in Ice Blue Gloss. She gave me the samples from the paint store and I cut them out in little identical squares, playing the game of remembering which was which, knowing every color by its name.
    The carpets on the second floor are soft under my bare feet. The next room down is Amanda’s, a pale buttery yellow called Chardonnay on the walls, boxes of shoes still under the bed. Then my old room, now a spare, painted in the same color. Another bathroom, its