My childhood smelled of antiseptic, fried eggs, and my mother's hand cream.
I cannot remember when I first understood that other children did not spend their Saturdays in hospitals. For me it was ordinary. My mother worked a shift, and I sat somewhere close with a book, and sometimes a nurse gave me a biscuit. I knew which doors were forbidden. I also knew exactly how long I could stand outside one before somebody noticed.
At six I announced that I would become a doctor.
"You hate needles," my mother said.
"I don't."
"You cried when they took your blood."
"I was four."
"You kicked the nurse."
"She was hurting me."
"She was doing her job."
"So will I."
She looked at me for a moment. "You're going to be a doctor because you don't like people hurting you?"
"Yes."
"That is not how medicine works."
"It should be."
She smiled. "Fair enough."
I followed her through the corridors. Doctors greeted her, nurses used her first name, and patients' faces changed when she came into a room. I watched her sit beside frightened people and speak as though they had all the time in the world. One afternoon a little girl was crying because she needed an injection. My mother crouched in front of her.
"Do you know what doctors are for?"
The girl shook her head.
"To bother children."
The girl stopped crying and eyed her.
"It's our most important job," my mother said gravely.
"Really?"
"No." She smiled. "Doctors are for helping when a body stops doing what it's supposed to do. And sometimes that means being brave first and being afraid afterward. Doctors make fear smaller. That's all."
The girl held out her arm. I do not remember the needle. I remember my mother's face, the way she made the fear smaller without pretending it wasn't there.
At home she was a different woman, not less kind, only off duty. She sang badly, she burned rice, she lost her keys while holding them, and she read medical journals while cooking, which is how she once salted a cup of tea. She took one sip, and I saw her face change.
"What's wrong?" I said.
"Nothing. It's fine." She tried it again, to be thorough. Her face gave her away before she could.
I began to laugh. "You made salt tea."
"Stop."
"You have a degree."
"I am aware."
"And you can't make tea?"
"I can make tea." She was looking at the cup as if it had betrayed her. "I made a different kind of tea."
"You made liquid sand."
She threw a dish towel at me, and I ran. For years afterward, whenever she did something foolish, I said, "Doctor," and she answered, "Patient," and I said, "Salt," and she threatened me with whatever was nearest.
Her friends became part of the household. Amara arrived without knocking. Ruth brought food nobody had asked for. Tobias fixed things badly, and Samuel fixed them worse, and both of them did it on her say-so, which was, she admitted, her own fault. A photograph of the five of them hung on the wall, taken the year I was born. My grandmother stood in the middle holding me. Amara was laughing, Ruth had a hand clamped over Samuel's mouth, and Tobias looked as though he had just been given bad news.
When I was eight, I asked my mother why Samuel looked so angry in it.
"He wasn't angry. He was trying to look serious."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Was he serious?"
"No."
"Then why did he do it?"
"Because Samuel is Samuel."
That answer seemed to cover everything.
Money was often short, and she never let me feel it. There were months when the electricity went out, and nights she studied by a rechargeable lamp after a full day of work. I would wake and find her asleep at the kitchen table, her glasses crooked, a textbook open under her cheek. I would stand there a while, then lay a cloth over her shoulders. Sometimes she woke.
"Go back to bed."
"You go to bed."
"I was studying."
"You were sleeping."
"I was thinking."
"With your eyes closed?"
"Advanced thinking."
I smiled. "Good night, Mom."
"Good... night." She was gone before she finished the word.
When I was twelve, I found a box under her bed full of her old school notes. The pages were yellow, some stained with coffee, all of them covered in small, neat handwriting. I carried it into the kitchen.
"What's this?"
She glanced over. "My past."
"You were a nerd."
"I was a serious student."
"You drew cartoons in the margins."
She reached for the box, and I held it out of range. "Give it back."
"There's a little man with glasses."
"That was not a little man."
"What was it?"
"A diagram."
"It has a moustache."
She stopped. I held up the page, and she looked at it, and laughed. "Fine."
"You admit it."
"I admit nothing."
I turned the pages. "How did you do all this?"
She went quieter. I had never asked before. She touched the corner of a page. "I worked."
"Was it hard?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you quit?"
"Because I wanted to finish." There was more to the answer, and I could feel it, but she only added, "And because someone was waiting for me at home."
"Me?"
"Unfortunately."
I laughed, and she pulled me against her side. "You were very demanding."
"I was a baby."
"You had standards."
Under the last of the notes, wrapped in a cloth, there was a small notebook with a green cover. I saw it. I put the cloth back over it before she looked down, the way you take your hand off a stove before you understand why. She took the box from me that evening and I did not see it again for years.