After calling around to her contacts in the migrant community—no one is available now that the alert is out—Antonia decides to ask Beth Trotter. Would she mind keeping Estela for a few days while Antonia attends to a family emergency?

Beth hesitates. I suppose I can put her in the twins’ room. It’s warm enough; they can sleep in the screened-in porch. Do you know what she likes to eat? We’re not big on Mexican food over here, but I hear there’s a stand in the parking lot at Shaw’s where all the nurses go for lunch.

It’s so much easier when someone just says no, n-o, as Roger has no trouble doing, instead of dragging you through all their considerations. Antonia feels disappointed, not exactly in Beth Trotter, but in the oft-failed experiment of being humane human beings. More generously, Antonia reminds herself that Beth Trotter does work full time at the hospital’s OB-GYN practice and still finds time to volunteer at the Open Door Clinic. She’s also a single mom with two teenage daughters. (Officer Morgan on the night shift with nicks on his face comes to mind.) Everyone has a story. Sometimes in asking for the best of each other, it’s best not to know it.

And Antonia would feel the same way if someone parked their worthy cause at her door. In fact, someone did, knocked, and then vanished. I can try someone else, Antonia offers.

No, no! Just thinking out loud. Of course she can stay here, Beth Trotter insists. How can I say no to an old friend?

Actually, it was Sam who was her colleague on the staff of the hospital. In fact, Sam was on the search committee that brought Beth here. Is there an expiration date on the tendrils of a gratitude after the mother root expires?

I really appreciate it, Beth. I know it’s a lot to ask.

Are you kidding? Beth says generously. The least I can do. Did I tell you about the time that Sam spelled me when Emily had her ski accident?

Antonia has heard the story a number of times before. But she owes it to Beth to listen. In their small town, it seems everyone wants to tell Antonia their Sam story. A testament to how much he was respected and loved. These narratives are a kind of offering—to what god Antonia cannot guess. All she knows is that for the moment she is its reluctant priestess.

Mona and Tilly have booked side-by-side rooms at the Comfort Inn an hour out of Boston: Tilly and Kaspar in one, and Mona and Izzy in the suite, which has a pullout couch in the living area where Antonia can sleep. It’s only for a couple of nights, Mona points out crossly when Antonia at first insists on getting her own room. This isn’t childhood. Get over it.

Tomorrow morning the sisters are meeting with the psychiatrist; the hope is that Izzy will consent to go into residential care, where she can be evaluated and her medications monitored. Afterward, the three sisters will have to come up with a long-term plan for managing Izzy’s illness. Her bills will need to be paid as well as other expenses incurred in hunting her down and procuring this sort of happy ending. Realtor Nancy has convinced the motel owners to tear up Izzy’s purchase agreement. Everything under control, as their mother’s caretaker used to say when the sisters would call in for a daily report.

Izzy has retreated to the suite bedroom with one of her migraines, no doubt brought on by the fact that she is furious at her sisters for engineering this intervention. Not to mention, which she does, often, having the state police hold her like a common criminal. The room is dark, the shades drawn, when Antonia enters, announcing that she wants a big hug. Start with the positive.

Go fuck yourself, Izzy greets her back. This is more Tilly’s foul mouth talk than Izzy’s, whose frustrations tend more toward those air quotes and a lot of yadda yadda yaddas for stuff she doesn’t want to go into.

You’re all allowed to have your lives, but I’m not allowed to have mine. Like you’re all so competent and healthy. Izzy launches into her laundry list of the destructive, hypocritical behaviors of each sister: booze, cigarettes, weed, workaholism, greed, and the most recent, animal cruelty. Oh, yes! Mo-mo, the big dog lover and animal rights activist, called a shelter. The llamas have been taken away to who knows what grim fate. You’re all a bunch of narcissists. The problem with having sisters who are therapists, Antonia has often noted, is that you get all kinds of diagnoses thrown at you that you can’t defend yourself against.

We are awful. You’re absolutely right, Antonia responds, some long-ago buried instruction resurfacing to always agree with the mad and the furious. She is perched at the edge of Izzy’s bed after a sobbing reunion—on her part, that is; dry-eyed Izzy sits by, observing her with narrowed eyes. Antonia, too, has betrayed her, by joining this plot against her happiness.

On the other side of the closed door, Mona is speaking on the phone, updating the psychiatrist contact. Their sister is still refusing to cooperate. It seems the next step will have to be contacting a lawyer to issue an emergency guardianship order so the sisters can proceed in getting Izzy the help she needs. They have plenty of evidence of her craziness. Antonia is not sure she will volunteer the messages left on her answering machine. Of course she wants to help Izzy, but she is feeling a familiar discomfort at being in a majority against the lone holdout; so often in their family, that holdout has been she.

Antonia tries to reason with her sister. All you have to do is meet with this woman. A version of Izzy’s All it would take.

I’m not meeting with her! I’m not fucking bipolar!

Antonia decides to back off before Izzy goes into another of her rants. Hell has no fury like the eldest being subordinated by younger siblings she is used to bossing around. Ya, ya, she soothes Izzy. Let’s see what love can do, she soothes herself.

She strokes Izzy’s thin arms—a body she knows well from having one so similar. They are the two sisters who look the most alike. In childhood photos, it’s hard to distinguish between them. It didn’t help that their mother—the soul of efficiency—dressed them in identical outfits in different colors—Izzy’s, yellow, and Antonia’s, pink, a cliché girlie-girl color Antonia rejected in her rebellious adolescent years, though as a child she had gloated over having gotten the best color. Her crowing, though, woke up no envy in Izzy. Yellow was the absolute best all-around color, the color of the sun, without which, where would the earth be? In their hippie teens, she couldn’t resist pointing out to Antonia: Why do you think the Beatles chose a yellow submarine? Even now, in her sixties, Antonia doesn’t own a single piece of yellow clothing. Her big sister might come charging into the Town Hall Theatre or grocery store and rip off her yellow scarf or jacket, crying out, Thief! It’d be right up Izzy’s alley—making a scene.

What most moves her now is the birthmark airplane on Izzy’s left wrist. It seems like a lifetime since Antonia last saw it. An omen, Izzy had reported one of her many santera guides had told her. Was Izzy’s pursuit of santeras, her belief in omens and portents, going way back to when they were kids, were all of these proclivities already signs of a mental disorder? Antonia knows what her sister would say to that. Izzy once led the charge in her profession on the First World tendency of psychologists to pathologize the emotive and belief systems of countries and cultures like their own DR, demeaning them with terms such as underdeveloped, Third World, impoverished. Instead of the old conquistadors and missionaries, the rescuers are now well-meaning NGOs, Peace Corps volunteers, and development workers who come in with aid and answers. Another kind of conquest. Izzy can be razor-sharp in her dissections of systemic injustice, corporate greed, B.S. in general. There was a time, Antonia recalls, when Izzy was a hotshot in the field, invited to lecture to medical students at Harvard on culturally sensitive and respectful treatment of their “Third World patients.” Izzy would jab the air with her air quotes.

Izzy’s face suddenly softens. Gone is the wild look of the manic sister. How’s your little friend? she asks, her voice as composed as if all the drama has been just that, a production in which she had to play her part.

What little friend?

Izzy closes her eyes and expels a breath—the world disappointing her again. How can her own sister not know immediately what she, Izzy, is thinking? It’s a great effrontery to discover other people aren’t you. Here we go again, Antonia can’t help noticing: the same issue as with Sam. God made only one mistake, she’d challenge him. He didn’t make me you! That shut him right up. Ha! Finally, she got the last word.

The girl you told me about, Izzy reminds Antonia. She was about to have a baby.

Even in her worst crisis, Izzy has these moments when her heart opens and makes room for someone else. If only Antonia could hold her there “forever,” to borrow Izzy’s air quotes.

Antonia recounts the latest Estela news, including the sheriff’s visit, the imminent raid.