Carly had her arms crossed tight over her chest. She was looking out the window, at the field, where the bounce castle was swaying and kids were spilling out of the slide. "Do you know what it's like," she said, "to listen to your baby breathe for four years? Do you know what that does to you? You don't get to stop. You can't stop. Every cough, every time he's pale, every time he gets tired going up the stairs, you think, this is it, this is the valve, this is the night. I had a notebook. I wrote down his oxygen numbers every four hours for two years. I'd wake up at two and three and four in the morning and go in and stand over him. Galen was on a boat. Galen was in Gary, Indiana. Galen called at nine o'clock and said how's everybody doing, and I said fine, because what was he going to do from Gary, Indiana?" Her voice was getting higher. She stopped and brought it back down. "And Elsie was fine. She was always fine. She was the one thing in my life I didn't have to worry about. Do you understand? She was the one thing that just worked."
"She wasn't fine," Mrs. Fjelstad said. "She was quiet. Those aren't the same."
"She never asked for anything!"
"She asked you for a cupcake this morning," said Mrs. Fjelstad. "In front of thirty people."
Carly turned and looked at her, and for a second I thought she was going to get up and walk out. Her face was red and tight. Then something in it gave way, just a little, at the corner of her mouth. She looked down at the two stories lying side by side on the little table. She put one finger on her own, on the line about the closet, and moved it along the faded pencil.
"My mother hung my sister's medals on the wall in the living room," she said, very quietly. "In a glass case. My dad built it. There were thirty-one of them. I used to count them." She was still looking at the paper. "I got a ribbon for perfect attendance in fourth grade and she said, well, that's because you're never sick, Carly, that's not really an accomplishment. And she was right. I was never sick. I made sure."
Nobody said anything.
"I swore I wouldn't do that," Carly said. "I swore it. When I was pregnant with Elsie I used to lie in bed and think, she's going to be the center of everything, she's going to have everything I didn't. And she was. She was, for two years. Galen, tell her. She was."
"She was," I said. It was true. I remembered Carly in those first two years, the way she was with Elsie, singing to her in the bath, sewing her a Halloween costume by hand, a ladybug with wire antennae, staying up three nights to finish it. I remembered.