The real injury does not have a specific date, not one you can mark on a calendar, unless of course you consider it to be the day she was born, as we in her family now do. My mother knew during Arden’s childhood that she was somehow very different from the rest of us and from other children. My mother didn’t realize then how deep the trouble went.

We bundle the dog into the car, my husband and I, and fill up the trunk: books for one sister, the teapot my mother wanted, an article for my father, something for the baby. The trip down will take us two hours, three in heavy traffic, and the familiar terrain—the cattle on the hillsides, the billboards, the iron-worked toll bridge—slips by as we play our versions of Botticelli and Ghosts.