Chapter 3: A Matched Set

The house came home from the hospital different, and it took me a few days to understand that the house was us.

Parisa was discharged on a Sunday with a bottle of Keppra, a follow-up appointment, and a list of instructions that my mother had transcribed onto three separate pieces of paper before we left the parking lot. By Monday the instructions had reorganized our entire household around a five-letter word nobody said out loud.

They stopped locking the bathroom door. Nobody announced it — it was simply understood after the hospital: if she seized in there, someone had to be able to reach her. The little button on the knob went out of service, and the first time I caught myself about to press it, I stood there a moment, feeling what we had all agreed to without a word.

Parisa’s diagnosis hit my mother the way every crisis hits her — she cooked. As though feeding Parisa correctly could fix her brain. We ate like kings that week. Nobody enjoyed any of it.

My father changed in a quieter way. He started coming home twenty minutes earlier. He never said why and we never asked, but the twenty minutes happened every day with administrative precision, and during them he found small reasons to pass through whatever room Parisa was in. Checking a light fixture. Looking for a document. A man conducting a casual census of his daughter, twice an evening, forever.

And Parisa let all of it happen around her with a composure that frightened me more than crying would have.

She took the Keppra at seven in the morning and seven at night. She set alarms on her phone for it, labeled with nothing — just the time, blank, because labeling it would have made it a thing, and Parisa was conducting a careful campaign to prevent any of this from becoming a thing.

She was back at her books by Tuesday. She answered our mother’s hovering with patience and our father’s census-taking with patience and the general atmosphere of held breath with patience, and to anyone watching from the outside she was recovering beautifully.

I was not watching from the outside. I have never once watched my sister from the outside.

I watched her do the arithmetic.

She did it in the evenings mostly, in her room, with a book open in front of her that she was not reading. I knew the face. I had been reading that face for eighteen years — the stillness around the eyes, the slight compression at the corner of her mouth, the face she made when she was working a problem whose answer she already suspected and did not like. She was adding up her new life. The license she could not get for at least six months. The swimming she was not supposed to do alone anymore. The word she would now carry into every room, every friendship, every application, every introduction, for the rest of her life — epileptic — and what that word would cost at each door.

She never said any of this out loud. She just did the math, evening after evening, and filed the results, and got up the next morning and took the pill from the unlabeled alarm.

On Thursday night I heard her crying through the wall. Very quietly, very briefly — maybe four minutes, the allotment she had decided she could afford — and then the bathroom tap ran, and then silence.

I lay in my bed with my hands in fists and did not go to her, because she had chosen the wall between us on purpose, and there are kinds of privacy you do not violate even fifteen minutes apart.

But something in me stood up that night and did not sit back down.

Brent came by twice that week, which was normal. We had been dating a month and he was the kind of boyfriend who showed up — I had already learned that about him, and the night on the kitchen floor had taught me the rest. He came Tuesday with my chemistry notes from school, and Saturday just because, and both visits were entirely ordinary.