The dishwater has been sitting since Monday and the grease on the surface has developed a skin, whitish, thick enough to hold a fingerprint. Emma puts her hands through it. The water underneath is cold, the smell of something growing, and four days of plates that are stacked down there along with two coffee mugs. Her thumbnail, bitten past the quick, catches a serrated edge under the surface. Fork tine or lid. She pulls her hand out, checks for blood. Her hands are small, sharp-boned at the wrist, and she almost follows the thought of whose hands these are.

On the couch Leo is eating cereal and watching something with animals. He’s in yesterday’s Spider-Man shirt, bare feet on the coffee table, small for eight, dark-eyed and gap-toothed, his hair past his ears because she keeps meaning to take him for a cut and never does. Her fault. She forgot laundry. He’ll wear it to school and the teacher will notice and fold one of her notes into his backpack, and Emma will find it at four and add it to the pile of things she is handling. She should tell him to get dressed.

Her father left for the warehouse at five. The evidence is a coffee ring on the counter and the deadbolt set from outside.

Mail on the table, growing since Thursday. Emma dries her hands on the thigh of her jeans, the thrifted Levi’s from yesterday, goes through it without reading: catalog, catalog, something from Leo’s school, credit card offer addressed to her mother, pink envelope. The electric company sends pink at sixty days. She knows the color code. She puts the pink envelope at the bottom of the stack.

She passes the hallway mirror. Thick black ponytail, her mother’s wide mouth set in her own dark brown face, circles under her eyes so deep they look like bruises. School in forty minutes.

—

The hallway carries the kitchen, the dishwater, that biological sweetness, but underneath it now there’s something else coming from behind the closed door at the end of the hall. Thicker, staler, concentrated, sealed in. She hasn’t opened this door for days. Whatever is behind it has been building its own climate. Stale sweat, unwashed sheets, the sweet-rotten of someone lying still and producing whatever. She knocks with the back of her hand. “Mom, I’m leaving for school.”

Nothing.

She turns the knob. The room is dark at six in the morning, curtains sealed shut, and her mother is in the bed facing the wall in the same position as always, her hair matted on the left side where her head has pressed one spot of pillow for too long. Her breathing is wet and open-mouthed, a click of tongue on each inhale. The room is warm in a way the rest of the apartment isn’t. Body heat with nowhere to go. Emma breathes through her mouth.

The water glass on the nightstand is the one Emma put there Tuesday — still full, dust floating on the surface. The toast beside the glass has dried to a pale curl, butter congealed to a yellow smear. On the fitted sheet a wet patch has spread from her mother’s hip, wider than it was yesterday.

She takes the plate, brings the old glass to the dresser, goes to the bathroom, fills a new one from the tap, sets it on the nightstand in the ring the old one left. Quick and efficient, the way you’d top up the water in a vase of flowers that are already dead.

The curtains resist when she pulls them open. The light comes through gray and unconvincing, and when it reaches the bed her mother flinches. For a brief moment Emma sees the other version. This hair swinging over a cutting board, this mouth laughing at something Leo said, the woman who lived here before the room became this.

Emma stands in the doorway. “I love you, Mom.”

Same breathing.

She waits.

She pulls the door shut.

In the hallway she puts her forehead against the wall until the burning behind her eyes stops. She goes back to the kitchen. Leo’s voice from the couch, not looking up: “Is Mom coming out today?”

“She’s resting.”

Leo nods. The nod he’s been giving since spring. Complete, asking nothing else. He doesn’t ask why Emma signs his forms. Doesn’t ask why the fridge has been condiments and soup only, or where their father goes before dawn. He’s eight.