There was no window.
There was no bathroom.
There was a laundry area and the furnace and storage.
And in the middle of it, on an air mattress on the floor, my mother.
She was asleep.
Her medications were on the floor beside the air mattress, the bottles that I had arranged carefully on the bedside table upstairs.
She was on an air mattress.
My seventy-year-old mother who was on her third week of chemotherapy, who could barely manage stairs on her good days, who had been installed in the first-floor guest room because of the proximity to the bathroom and because of the stairs.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs and I looked at her.
She stirred.
She opened her eyes.
She saw me.
She said: Sara.
She said it with the specific quality of someone who is not sure if they are waking up or dreaming.
