It seems obvious to me that our daughter, Tessa, cannot sleep with the dead squirrel, which she has named Dickie. It's a dead squirrel and she is a three-year old child. In no world is it okay for a child to sleep with a dead squirrel. I tell her this. Joe tells me to calm down, that he's handling it.

Tessa stands in the middle of her bed as if it's a stage, clutching Dickie to her chest. She wails. She sounds like Janis Joplin. She could be clutching a bottle of Southern Comfort, wailing to a guitar riff only she can hear. Her hair is stuck to her face with snot.

I'm exhausted. We're bigger than she is. We could just end this.

Joe kneels in front of our daughter, says it's her choice, asks her to let go, tells her it will be okay, that we love her, that Dickie is happy, that he's with Grandma now, with Charlie. He sounds so calm, so sincere I almost believe it myself.

Tessa takes a breath and I think it may have worked, that Joe's infuriatingly calm approach might have done it. But she closes her eyes and starts wailing again, too tired to make words anymore, and I see her there on stage, swaying, the world she doesn't understand—or doesn't want to understand—thrown over her like a weighted blanket.

My head is killing me.

"Give me Dickie," I say, "I can fix him."

She opens her eyes. I think maybe she knows it's bullshit, but she also knows she hasn't got much left. She continues to hold the dead squirrel, but her wails get softer, slower, low and raspy gulps now. She looks from Joe to me and back to Joe, as if she knows he's the one who will always tell her the truth, as if she knows I'll always be the liar in the family. I can see her at eight, at 15, at 29, furious, stubborn, loud, so much like me that she won't even be able to look at me.

She's still waiting for confirmation from Joe, a sign that I'm telling the truth, that it's okay to let go of her friend, and even though I'm not looking at him, I know he hates me. Not all of me, but a piece of me.

Tessa holds the squirrel out, and because it's already too late to do anything else, I take it.

.