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PROOF OF LIFE
ALL I HAVE to do is go to sleep—quiet my mind, relax my body, and go to sleep. But no
matter how I will it, sleep just will not come. My brain is an unfamiliar room and
trapdoors are everywhere. Carla’s voice loops in my head. Maybe she never recovered
from what happened. What does that even mean? I look at the clock. 1:00 A.M. Seven
hours until Carla comes back. We’re going to do some blood tests and send them off to a
SCID specialist that I found. Seven hours. I close my eyes. I open them again. 1:01 A.M.
I can’t wait for answers to come to me. I have to find them.
It takes all my effort to walk instead of run to my mom’s office. I’m sure she’s asleep,
but I can’t risk waking her. I grab the handle and for one horrible moment I think the
door will be locked and I will have to wait and I cannot wait. But the handle turns and the
room lets me right in like it’s been waiting for me, like it’s been expecting me.
Her office is perfectly normal, not too neat, not too messy. There are no obvious signs
of an unwell mind. Crazy, jumbled, chaotic writings don’t cover every inch of the wall.
I walk over to the big desk at the center of the room. It has a built-in file cabinet, so I
start there. My hands are shaking, not a tremor, but actual shaking, like an earthquake
that only I feel.
My mom is meticulous and extravagant in her record keeping. She’s kept everything
and it takes me over an hour to get through just a handful of files. There are receipts for
big and small purchases, lease agreements, tax documents, warranties, and instruction
manuals. She’s even kept movie ticket stubs.
Finally, toward the back I find what I’m looking for: a thick red folder labeled Madeline.
I pull it out carefully and make myself a space on the floor.
The record of my life starts with her pregnancy. I find prenatal vitamin
recommendations, sonograms, and photocopies of each visit to the doctor. I find a
handwritten index card with two check boxes—one for boy and the other for girl. Girl is
checked. My birth certificate is here.
As I search through, it doesn’t take me long to realize that I was a sickly baby. I find
pediatric sick-visit reports for rashes, allergies, eczema, colds, fevers, and two ear
infections, all before I was four months old. I find receipts for lactation and infant-sleep
consultants.
When I’m about six months old, just one month after my dad and brother have died,
I’m checked into a hospital with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). I don’t know what
that is and I make a mental note to google it. It was severe enough to keep me in the
hospital for three days.
And then her record keeping becomes less meticulous. I find a printout about RSV from