TWO TERRIBLE DAYS split by a terrible, lonely night followed. I lay awake for hours, waiting; we didn’t talk in the daytime and the humidity and the low skies were worse than ever, none of us left the house. Helena wanted ice-cold water upon waking, coffee, an orange she peeled very slowly in tiny increments, and all we could manage for dinner was bread and olives; it was as though we’d all been consumed by illness.

Olga looked different. She was no longer the same person. My memories became hazy and violent and I was not doing well. I was unsure of what had happened and the only way I could check was by playing the same mental images again and again until they no longer seemed real. I turned inward. Talking to Helena my voice sounded weirdly sludgy, like a recording in slow motion.

I picked a pomegranate and peeled it for dinner. One of the chambers was full of rotten seeds—just one of them, brown, sticky, a sick section in the otherwise-healthy fruit. There was no transition, only a boundary where the seeds on one side were red and bright, and ruined on the other. A deformity. I tossed the whole fruit; I didn’t want to touch anything that had touched the rot, grown inside the same casing.

But the second night I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep again, there was rain, then thunder. It came out of the darkness, the cats screamed and took shelter. It made the window’s wooden hatches rattle. It brought with it a scent of seaweed and salt from the sea, sand and dust from the streets, it drenched the towel I’d left hanging over the balcony railing, it pulled cold air and noise into my room. I saw a flash, like a wink, and started to count until the rolling thunder. It wasn’t far away. The sound was so powerful that it seemed like the storm might tear the house from its foundations, the sound alone, shatter all this stone, this city, let it float off and sink into the sea. An island is exposed. I imagined the coastline, the hillside, the stones of the beaches and the dry, pitched slopes, the pine groves and the docks, everything coming down, crashing.

There was another lightning strike, soundless. The slash of light. Then the crash. Rain beat the steel roof; the weights on the mosquito netting rattled. Shipwreck.

Olga came to my room. She came back to me. I didn’t see her until she was right next to me, by the bed, she wore her sheet like a cape, I couldn’t sleep. I said: come here. I took her hand. She didn’t resist. Let’s count, I said. One one thousand. Two one thousand. The thunder was coming closer. The lightning made the night look like something else, a strobe light, a dream as we lay next to each other, gazing out.

Did the storm scare her? Was she not too old to be scared of thunder? Would she have sought comfort elsewhere if I hadn’t been there, would she have sought it from her mother?

I pressed her hand and she held on harder when the room lit up, the storm was right above us, it was so exciting, I could’ve screamed. Instead I just held her harder. I held on to her like a splinter from a wreckage. We waited out the storm. We counted the distance between light and sound. It grew bigger and bigger, seven one thousand, eight one thousand, as the rain kept rushing down and washing everything away, leaving nothing as it tore through.

She squeezed my hand. She came to me. She had nowhere else to go. I became her mother that night, I rocked her, I nursed her.