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stutter or shut down. If I go to a noisy dinner party, I can easily press down on the accelerator instead of the brake on my way home. Because I didn’t learn howto drive until I was almost forty, the act of putting my foot on the brake isn’t the same kind of habitual memory as tying my shoe. It’s frightening when the part of my brain that’s supposed to process all those stimuli being hurled at me won’t do its job anymore. I get terribly frustrated with myself and with friends who don’t understand. My judgment isn’t always the best either. I think I’m able to handle much more than I really can.
    “You have to drive back, you know,” said Natalia. “We didn’t put me down on the rental. Maybe we should do that tomorrow.”
    “I’m fine. Let’s keep going,” I said.
    I was packing more journals to take back to the hotel when Natalia found a big black trunk with brass trim. We hauled it out and yanked the top open.
    “Jesus,” I said. “I thought these were lost.”
    Inside were family photos we thought we’d never see again: our mother at sixteen, smiling from a tenement window, our father’s black-and-white glossy for his first book, our grandfather standing with a menacing grin in the garden, holding a pair of pruning shears. And nestled in a pile of loose photos was my sister’s and my baby album. I skimmed through the pages till I came to a picture of my sister as a chubby toddler, sitting on top of a baby grand, looking at my mother, eyes closed, playing with abandon. My sister seemed frightened in the picture, as if she were about to fall. I imagined her during the fourteen months before I came into the world—an infant living with a gifted and beautiful mother who lived in an alternate universe, a brilliant father who drank himself to sleep each night. A bit like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I thought. I put the book aside to bring back to the hotel.
    Natalia and I continued mining. Inside the trunk, there were pictures I had drawn when I was small, report cards, my art and music awards. I picked up a small plastic grandfather clock to toss into the garbage pile. “Look at this crappy old thing,” I said. “I can’t believe the things she saved.”
    “There’s too much here,” said my sister. “I can’t take it all in.”
    “I can come back tomorrow by myself.”
    “Don’t exclude me. Stop thinking that you have to do everything. It’s annoying.”
    “I’m sorry it’s just... Nattie, there’s something inside this.”
    I pried open the little glass window below the clock face—inside was a drawing of two little rabbits, and below the rabbits was a drawing of a tiger. “There’s another picture hidden underneath!”
    On the back of the picture was a list of birth dates for those born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which included my mother, and a detailed description of feline carnivores written in tiny script. Underneath the tiger my mother had placed a photo of my sister and me at ages five and six. I look stiff and unhappy; my sister smiles at the viewer and strikes a girlish pose. Behind the photo was yet another picture, cut from a 1960s Life magazine—a still life of red and green Christmas ornaments and holly. Was she trying to protect us? Did she believe a drawing could be a talisman against the forces of evil in the world?
    Back at the hotel that night, as my sister and I got ready for bed, I wondered what lay ahead. The next day or the day after that, our mother would be moved to a nursing home for hospice care. How long would she hang on? Days? Weeks? My sister, who suffers from insomnia, performed her nocturnal rituals to calm her nerves. She took an aromatherapy bath, stretched, and read before inserting her earplugs. She put on her eye mask and turned off her lamp. We are both vigilant sleepers: she can’t fall asleep; I wake at the slightest sound.
    “Good night,” she said.
    “Night, Nattie. I’ll turn off the light in a little bit. Sleep