The precise disquiet of her face, the self-annihilation of all facial expression, eyes staring right at you as if you were the most dangerous thing in her life, not with fear, but the capacity for fear, as if any movement you made, any movement, would cause her to cower in terror. She was already sitting on the floor, backed up against the cabinet. She sat like a child, like someone trying to find the smallest place possible to hide herself, and making do with this corner. If she could have fled into the cabinet she would have. You’d lie there prostrate on the floor if you thought that would make her feel better. But all you can do is speak softly and kindly and then move slowly, imperceptibly, into her fear, at first in her view commensurate to it, some phantom horror of her past, the hollowness of her missing years. You are not a person to be feared, your movements tell her, for you are sitting by her side with your arm around her and she lays her head on your shoulder and you can hear the quick breaths of her anxious sobbing and you breathe slowly and calmly until her breaths soften to yours, and sometimes the anxiety leaves her so terrified that all you can do is walk away, come back in ten minutes to see if she is all right. You hope she knows you’re coming back. You’ve told her this before, she’s told you this before, to leave and come back. But you aren’t quite sure what she remembers at times like these, what she is capable of remembering, for the anxiety is—you now understand—all-encompassing. Whole years of her life, twelve and thirteen, are absent to her. Her past is a vise, anxiety holds her in its peremptory grip. She is two people, this present of slow explosion, the complete terror expanding out of her past. It must seem as if it might last forever, as if this was to be her life from now until her death. As if—still worse—she might never die, and persist, live always in terror. So you cannot pull her out of it, you can simply sit by her side when she lets you, and sometimes she doesn’t and you sit there anyways, hold her anyways.