Going to art therapy puts my anxiety into overdrive. I don’t have the patience for painting, not even for the five-minute figure studies, and I’m not here at these sessions because I respond so well to criticism. The coffee dispenser is practically bottomless, though. It’s never good coffee, obviously; it’s free and unlimited; by my eighth cup I start to feel like I’m someone else, which, to my understanding, is the point of being here. Tonight, I keep catching someone’s eyes over the fruit bowl in the middle of the circle. I recognize the boots that straddle his easel. They’ve been scuffed and abraded from black to gray, and they’re so distressed that the shafts slump around his ankles like dead silk socks. I rise, to haunt the dispenser again. My hands shake as I press down on the lever. Boots conspicuously sidles up next to me and grabs a cookie from the table. “I’ve seen you around,” he says, “at, you know, other meetings.” He takes a bite of his cookie, flicking his short tongue over a protrusive chocolate chip and cocking his head. I turn back toward my seat, but, before I can escape, he’s choked down the chunk he bit so lasciviously and is chitting and chatting at me. “You’re so foxy,” he says crumbily. I turn my back on him and return to my shakily rendered still life. Foxy. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

Shortly after my older sister, Evelyn, took her first steps, her feet stopped working. She had a neurodegenerative disease. Nobody was sure how quickly it would progress or what exactly would happen, but it was clear that my parents’ lives would have to change to accommodate her needs. So, they imagined a new life in the country and moved from a multi-level colonial with a pool in the center of Lewiston, Maine, to a ranch house in Warren, Vermont, designed specifically for my sister, for however much time she’d have. Growing up, neither Evelyn nor I knew that we weren’t a real rural family. There were hints, like when our friends complained about having to pick peppers or sow blueberry seeds, tasks which were alien to us. Neither Evelyn nor I analyzed our lives much though. Evelyn couldn’t do any kind of fieldwork, and, despite not doing any kind of homesteading, there was plenty of housework for me to be roped into. Maman spent most of her time making elaborate meals, and she enlisted me to be her little sous chef. Maman was downright draconian in the kitchen: she would let a pot boil over for dramatic effect while she scolded me about putting an implement in a different drawer than I found it; she would use every bowl in the house to organize her neatly cubed vegetables and her infinitely subdivided ratios of liquids for sauces and braises; and she would only allow me to use two towels, one while I worked and one while I cleaned–the rest she hid somewhere I couldn’t find.

Evelyn was always jealous that I got to help Maman cook. Even though Evelyn could navigate the kitchen—it had been designed with her needs in mind, after all—she could not help Maman, at least not to the standard that Maman considered help. By the time she was old enough to be of assistance, Evelyn’s fine motor function was severely capped. Knifework was out of the question, as was handling and flipping hot pans. Evelyn couldn’t pick thyme without bits of stalk making their way into the mix, which Maman could never just swallow. At a certain point, all Evelyn was allowed to do was season, that is, until she broke one of Maman’s cardinal rules. Instead of measuring out a pinch of salt in her hand before throwing it into the demi-glace Maman had spent four days reducing to unctuous, lip-smacking perfection, Evelyn poured the salt directly from the box. She tried to shake gently, but she had a spasm or a cramp, and an avalanche of salt annihilated the sauce. After that, Evelyn began to grow bitter on the vine of inactivity. At dinner one night when I was seven, and Evelyn was eleven, Evelyn insisted that a farm should have chickens. Our friends all had chickens, most had pigs and goats and lambs and cows, too. Papa and Maman rejected the idea softly between bites of squab and swipes of anjou gastrique. Evelyn dug in. Lifting herself up to her feet, she insisted that if we had our own chickens, dinner might be edible for once, before swiping her plate onto the floor with a lame forearm.

Evelyn and Papa had a row over the chicken coop that night. That was the first time I heard Papa raise his voice. His monotone rarely wavered, but when it did it was with the pent-up force of a thousand forgotten explosions that he thought he could avoid or ignore. Maman always disappeared right before he blew his top. Like some kind of wily bird, she could sense a disturbance in our nuclear bonds and take flight before the fission started. Evelyn was undeterred and undaunted by Papa’s concussive blustering. She didn’t care about trivial things like being yelled at; her concept of consequence was different than mine or Maman’s. Papa’s stockpile of aggressive energy ran out before he could break Evelyn down. As he smoothed out the table cloth by Evelyn’s seat, she laid out her vision: the coop should be right next to her bedroom because she was going to be the big momma hen and watch over her baby chickies and make sure nothing bad happened to them ever at all, and she would listen attentively, attentively, attentively she promised, to their clucks and their cries, and she’d feed them, and when the time came for them to fly off into big coop in the sky, she wouldn’t grimace or make Papa or Maman do it, no, she would be the one to do the hard thing and help them along quickly, gently and quickly; she promised she’d be a grown-up and do what grown-ups have to do and make those kinds of decisions for her baby chickies, especially if she knew they were in pain.

The next day Papa took me into Montpelier with him to pick up supplies. After a long weekend of work, we presented our best effort to Evelyn for inspection. She was overjoyed; she cried almost continuously until Maman laid out a coulibiac of trout with Bearnaise sauce and salt baked beets for dinner. Maman brought out a raspberry and pistachio mille-feuille for dessert, just as a spring shower came down outside. The coop didn’t fall in the gale-force winds, nor was it washed away in the channel that always snuck out from underneath the back porch–it collapsed during the storm’s light drizzling preamble. Maman’s puff pastry would have lasted longer. Papa decided he’d given it the old Harvard try, but clearly powers beyond his control had intervened. Evelyn was inconsolable, animatedly moribund, until she became downright catatonic. She wailed about what a shame it was that she wouldn’t ever get to have any baby chickies, wouldn’t ever get to be a momma hen, not even never ever. Then she went quiet. Papa got up from the table to grab the phone book. Maman had already vanished. Papa looked at me, gestured towards Evelyn’s room, then sat down and started scanning the columns. As I slowly helped Evelyn out of her chair and toward the railing on the wall, I heard Papa greet our neighbor Allan in a voice I’d never heard him use before.

The next day Evelyn was practically in rigor mortis. She didn’t attempt to move from her bed or ask for anyone to bring her anything. Maman fussed over a paris-brest, not enlisting or allowing my assistance. The hydrangeas had just begun to flower in the backyard, and Papa spent almost all morning standing beside them, inspecting the petals. Around noon, Papa rearranged the wreckage of the coop into neat piles on the back porch. Allan arrived shortly thereafter and sat with Papa on the porch smoking cigars. I’d never seen Papa smoke before. Papa and Allan puffed and talked idly, the pace of Papa’s voice slowing and his timbre slurring as the tightly rolled cigars turned into dusty mounds of ash by his feet. Eventually, the piles came up. I came out to give Papa and Allan something to drink–a chamomile and hibiscus lemonade Maman threw together while her choux was cooling–and heard Papa explaining that he’d bought a prefab chicken coop from someone a town over. Allan, though he hated to break it to Papa, said that he’d been gypped, that whoever put those pieces together had no business building a home for ants, let alone chickens. Allan said he’d help Papa build a coop, that it should only take an hour or two, and all it would cost was another cigar.

Evelyn couldn’t help and Maman wouldn’t, so I was their solitary, toddling aide-de-camp. Allan was right, the project only took about an hour and a half, and probably would have taken less time if Papa, who was totally ignorant about how to build anything with his hands, wasn’t clearly sick from the cigar. To his credit, Allan didn’t embarrass Papa. Allan framed all his manual advice for me, even though it was clearly for both of us, while he measured, cut, and nailed. Allan and his wife Jessica, a beagle breeder, came over for a celebratory dinner the next night. Papa and Maman hadn’t hosted anyone in a lifetime; they struggled fitting into their old domestic roles. Maman drove to Montpelier, then to Middlebury, then back to Montpelier again looking for the right kind of guinea hen to serve, and to stock up on other luxuries necessary to have around when company was over. She got back later than expected and had to scramble to get the food ready. She gave me contradictory directions and berated me for needing so much instruction, muttering that she might as well have Evelyn for help. There wasn’t enough time and there weren’t enough hands to pull off Maman’s ambitions, so she scrapped two of her planned courses, dumping everything into the garbage and sticking me on dish duty so that Allan and Jessica wouldn’t be able to tell she’d jettisoned a third of the menu. Papa, who had been compulsively brushing his teeth almost all day, tidied and helped Evelyn get ready. The past couple days had taken a toll on Evelyn, and while her mood had been restored, her energy was still depleted, which gave Papa a lot to fret over. Tension built all day, and I was prepared for the worst, but it was all quickly assuaged when Allan and Jessica arrived. Allan showed up in the same pants he’d worn the day before, and Jessica was covered in so much dog hair that she might as well have been dressed as a werewolf. It was a lovely night, and easy: Papa and Maman’s cosmopolitan pretensions melted away as they warmed up to our neighbors.

Papa and Allan became fast friends, and Allan started bringing our family into the goings-on of Warren. Whenever Allan came over, he and Papa would smoke through odd-jobs, and I’d get a break from helping Maman in the kitchen while attempting a loitering kind of assistance for as long as I could stand the fumes. Gleaning off of Allan, Papa started working on all kinds of projects, always with a cigar clutched between his browning lips. He started smoking even when he wasn’t working. He would just puff and amble, “contaminating the country air,” as Maman always said from behind the sliding glass door. Sometimes I would go out after he had come inside to nap and try to retrace his steps, wheeling Evelyn around if she couldn’t stand her crutches. You could always tell where Papa had been by the smell. He always stood by the hydrangeas, and eventually their saccharine scent was completely subsumed by black pepper and burnt coffee, graham crackers and dark chocolate, molasses, nuts, and must.

As Papa’s projects became more elaborate, Maman’s meals became simpler. She stopped driving to grocery stores in Montpelier and Middlebury, instead stopping by our neighbors' farm stands and leaving a dinner invitation along with cash in their drop boxes. Maman’s dinner services moved away from vegetable terrines wrapped in caul fat and served out of porcelain, and towards ratatouille left in the same enameled cast iron vessel it was cooked in; the last pouch of saffron was never replenished; her whole repertoire of delicate pastries were replaced by one all-purpose pie filled with whatever fruit was ripe and nearby. Papa would sometimes chide Maman, between jocular pats of his belly, about the change in her culinary ways. She was unphased and took his remarks for the mere teasing that they were intended as, never missing an opportunity to softly grab his shoulders and tell him that he was getting fatter all the same. Before, Maman never enjoyed cooking. She enjoyed the end result, the admiration in the eyes of those about to feast on her labor. Now, she hummed, she joked, and towels spilled out of practically every drawer. Maman changed as the country life she and Papa imagined for Evelyn reified around them, as they let go of who they’d been and what they’d wanted before. I was caught out, though. As I got older and Papa and Maman got slower, they increasingly relied on me to take care of Evelyn. As Evelyn had once grown bitter, I started to grow envious. I would pretend to be sick or hurt, to catch a cold or to fall from a height, to see if our parents would afford me the same whimish desires as Evelyn. They never did; they only ever returned brief exasperation. Even when Evelyn was doing well, she was the subject of all their worry. My aches, pains, and ills were nuisances to them. They needed me to be healthy; they weren’t concerned as to whether or not I was happy.

I had proven myself–as Maman’s little sous and as Papa’s aide-de-camp–so, when I was a teenager and Evelyn was essentially bedridden, my puberty, though uneventful, was free-range. There was plenty of trouble to get into, and I was around it all, but my temperament was to observe rather than partake. That is, until I went to college. I had always loved Papa and Maman’s stories of life in the city and wanted to have my own urban chapter, a prospect which excited them to no end. I was given a litany of heuristics for city living, alongside a years-long itinerary of things I simply had to do or else not even bother leaving home at all. Papa and Maman bought a five-year planner and started penning in when they’d visit and for how long and which activities I should save to do with them. They shipped me out without much pomp or circumstance, framing my going away more as a prodigal homecoming than an escape. Although they had learned to love life in the country, they remembered city life as their natural habitat, and they assumed it would be mine as well. It wasn’t. I struggled to control others and myself, and when I came back home for Thanksgiving break, I looked a wreck. Not worse than Evelyn, though. Her condition was deteriorating rapidly.

I had been prepared for it all my life, but still, I couldn’t handle it. It was just too much for me. I returned to campus a few days early and tried to distance myself from home as much as possible. Papa and Maman didn’t have any time to visit, to check in, as they had planned to; they were too busy taking care of Evelyn, and without me there to help, there was more work for them than ever before. I began to wither away in the concrete jungle. My parents sent letters and updates, which I stopped reading. I stopped checking my mailbox altogether. I tagged along with other people who could no longer fill out their pants. We got into noise, not music, the totally inundating vibrating air next to a maxed-out amplifier. We spent all our free time in rooms and waves that rode us as much as we rode them. Those scenes were variably dismal and sensual, totally eclipsing any conscious worry with sensation. Towards the end of my second semester, a dean came to get me from class. My parents had been trying to contact me for weeks, they had sent a car, and I was to get in it and go home. I couldn’t bear it. As far as I was concerned, that sedan was a hearse, and I didn’t want to see anybody. I bailed, kind of ran away, retreated into the speed, pace, and stimulus that was so abundant in the city. I didn’t bother showing up at school for the start of my sophomore year. I kept not bothering until the spring, when a private detective helped my parents track me down.

They found me sleeping on a pile of fraying rugs in a back room of the hardcore venue I’d fallen into a job at. I woke up to Maman hitting me about the head, not hard, but frantically. Through my tangled strands of greasy hair, I locked eyes with Papa, who was standing out in the hall, well beyond the splintering doorjamb. I let them take me home. I sat in the back seat while Papa drove, and Maman scolded. It took her forty minutes and my nodding off a few times before she ran out of steam. Silently, Maman pulled a multitool out of her pocket, as well as a cutting board and a cooler out from underneath her seat. She started constructing a sandwich. She cut a baguette into thirds and put the two ends away, then split the middle portion. She shaved thin sheets off of a block of butter and put them on the bottom piece of bread, then coated the top piece with mustard. She started layering slices of chicken breast, with the well-seasoned skin still clinging to the slices’ edges, on top of the butter, adding a few thin pickles between the layers. Layer by layer the sandwich grew, up up up, until she’d compulsively stacked almost a full pound, then she topped the pile with a few segments of roasted red pepper, maldon salt, and dill. She all but threw it at me in the back seat.

Evelyn’s ghost sat next to me the whole way up. I didn’t know how to address her, I didn’t want to bring her up. I felt cramped. I huddled against the door. “The child lock is on,” Papa said ambivalently. The rest of the car ride passed in silence. When we pulled into the driveway, Papa parked next to a car I didn’t recognize.

“That,” said Maman, “is the nurse’s car. Her name is Jeanine.” I watched the color drain from my face in the rearview mirror. I clawed at the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge, so I had to roll down the window and lean my head out to avoid vomiting on the upholstery. I hadn’t expected that I’d have to face Evelyn. I eyed the end of the driveway. I could maybe hitch back, hitch anywhere, really run away. The smell of leather and salt, fire and brimstone, filled my nostrils. Papa was lighting up a cigar beside me. He opened my door and sat on the hood of the car.

“You know,” Papa started, staring off into the same distance as I was, “I never worried about you. I thought a lot of things, I thought a lot about why this, why that, but I didn’t worry. I can worry, I do, plenty, but not really ever over you. I don’t know if I’m ignorant or incapable, I don’t know what you want, but I don’t know. Yeah, Petra, I don’t know.” I sat down on the hood next to him and soaked in the words and the smoke. “I’m still surprised, even though it’s over, even though you’re home, that it happened at all. I don’t know. Evy can’t talk now, anymore. I don’t know if you got that letter. I’m not sure what you know. She can give a little feedback, sometimes more, sometimes less. We’re pretty sure she can hear everything. We talk to her like she can anyways, engage, I mean, like we always have. Jeanine rolls her into the kitchen while Maman makes dinner, which seems to make her happy. There’s something, a twinkle in her eye, I don’t know, something that isn’t there when we sit down, and she gets hooked up to her IV. But she’s a good sport, Evy is, I think we all agree we did the best we could. Maybe you don’t. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe we weren’t the right people for, for this life. But it’s a good life, it’s unfortunate sometimes, but it feels good to live it.”

“Papa, I–”

“It’s okay. We’ll talk more later. It’s okay. Later we’ll get into it.” He stood and started walking around the house, towards the backyard, towards the hydrangeas, surely. I went inside and found Maman furiously frenching lamb chops. The house had always been an open concept, but the kitchen had been rearranged like a full-on operating suite or a sit-com set to accommodate Evelyn’s observation. Evelyn’s sunken eyes tracked as Maman organized the lamb trim, cleaned the station, and prepared to truss the hunk of meat. Her skin was thin and olive, her countenance blank. Blue veins stood out all over her body like winter rivers covered in virgin ice, the kind you don’t even test your toe against.

I caught Maman’s eyes as she started leaning into a mortar and pestle. The scent of cumin, coriander, clove, allspice, fennel seeds, and anise snuck into my nose, all the way up my sinuses, and made me sneeze. Evelyn’s head didn’t move, but her eyes strained in their corners, trying to reach beyond the periphery in which I was hiding. I walked toward her slowly, on a diagonal, holding my left elbow in my sweaty right hand behind my back so that she wouldn’t see the track marks. I don’t remember what I said. I remember Maman looping twine over the clean lamb bones. I remember the capillaries like lava flows appearing in Evelyn’s eyes before the tears started silently tumbling down her cheeks. I remember wishing someone would stop me; rambling, not knowing what the point was, not just of my speech, but of anything, wishing someone would arrest me; looking away, looking for something to look at, Maman dressing up the portion of lamb with such precision, her head buried in it; it was so stark, the bone and the blood and the spices like moss, clinging like moss before being fired, and I was still talking and I didn’t know what Evelyn wanted and I’d never know, none of us would, if she wanted lamb at all; storming out and falling asleep in a bed that felt like a childish luxury.

I woke up to a blast–BLAM!–a gunshot. I got caught in a blanket I didn’t remember throwing over myself as I bolted upright, and as I scrambled out toward the noise, I shattered a plate that had been left outside my door. I shivered in the night air. I watched Papa’s shadow swing and lengthened underneath the full moon as he trudged from the chicken coop up the ramp onto the porch. “Check on your sister,” he said, holding a bucket full of chicken heads, “I’m sure that startled her.”

“But what–”

“Fox got in again.”

“But did you–”

“I think it got the last of them,” he shook the bucket–thoughtlessly, pendulously, playfully before dropping it from knee-height down onto the porch– CnnCKshnKsch! –“check on Evy, please.” I went inside and slipped into Evelyn’s room. It smelled putrid. I announced myself and groped around for a minor light source. I didn’t want to burn out her eyes. I couldn’t find anything, so I grabbed a scrap of gauze that was on her desk and covered her eyes with it, then turned on the light. “Sorry if you were asleep just now and I woke you up. I don’t know how you could have slept through that bang just now though. I, oh, shit–”my foot was bleeding–“sorry Ev, I’m bleeding on your floor, I’m, uh, okay I’m going to just grab a towel or something, and, well, I might as well just use this, okay so I’m just going to slowly pull this off your eyes, sorry if the change is too intense and it hurts. Well, all that happened was a fox got into the chicken coop, nothing else, no intruder or anything, nobody’s gonna come in and hurt you or anything. Are you okay? Can you blink if you’re okay? Or, if you can’t, just move your eyes from side to side? Ev?” I shook her shoulder gently. It was like trying to shake a marble statue awake.

I didn’t go back to school that year, just haunted the house with Papa and Maman. Maman’s cooking reached new heights, although we barely touched anything she made. I wanted to help her, but Maman didn’t want my help. I planted rhododendrons next to Papa’s hydrangeas. Whenever he went out to tend to his flowers, I went out and stood silently beside him, feigning landscaping. All summer I got stung by bees fleeing the dark cloud that hung over him, but I never mentioned it. I did try to go back to school the following autumn, but being in the city was just too much for me. After another, though shorter and sweeter, bender, I dropped out and came back home. Jessica was nice enough to let me work for her, so I’d have something to occupy myself with. She needed the help, too. None of her and Allan’s kids cared about breeding. I picked it up fast; I was interested in the work. Beagles are great dogs for fox hunting. Foxy. I leave my still life running colors and step outside. I pull a pack of cigarettes out and start one smoking between my fingers. I don’t puff on it. I just let the smoke wash over me until it burns out, then I light another, and another, hiding in the acrid haze.