Anxious

My eleven-year-old niece calls me once a week, on average, to ask if she can come live with me if her parents and older brother are killed. We don’t live in a war zone, or even a big city; the nearest thing to us anyone would recognize on a map is Sioux Falls, and that’s an hour away, and as far as I know nobody is out to get Sioux Falls. But my niece knows that people can die anytime, anyplace. Her thin skin prickles at the thought of it. So she plans. She is okay living with her older brother if he is not killed. Simon is seventeen, and he would certainly be capable of keeping her alive and clothed and enrolled in school, if it came to that. But in her worst-case scenarios, Simon is killed too, all of them are killed, usually in a fiery car crash, but sometimes in other ways.

One of the worst, she tells me, is the carbon monoxide leak, because she is the one to find the bodies. In the carbon monoxide leak, they all die in their beds one night, and only Liz is spared because of some freak arrangement of the furnace vents. She awakens to a strangely silent house and creeps to her parents’ open door: they are still as stones, their skin waxy and their eyes staring, and a silent scream sticks in her throat. She forces herself to approach Simon’s room, even though my sister, Shellice, Liz’s mother, has strongly advised that she leave the house and go next door to the Jordans at this point. Simon is splayed on his back, one arm half off the bed, mouth open but eerily silent, and she knows he is dead too. She manages to get herself downstairs and out the front door, and at that point the screams come. The police find her rolling hysterically on the lawn, this slight, dark-haired girl in a Vikings night shirt, and she is taken to a mental ward and drugged until after the funerals.

At which point, I pick her up from the mental ward, and she comes to live with me.

Perfect, Shellice said to her once. You and Aunt Marcy will have mac and cheese from a box every night of the week. You’ll never again have to eat food that isn’t fluorescent. But Liz is rarely in the mood for jokes when she’s just unburdened herself of another scenario. Shellice tries to be serious, to respond with rational explanations, but eventually, inevitably, she veers off into a joke. We’re not going to die in a carbon monoxide leak; Daddy checks the carbon monoxide detector on a regular basis. Simon is a strong swimmer or they wouldn’t let him be a lifeguard, and anyway I’ve never heard of a lifeguard drowning in the presence of five other lifeguards at a public swimming pool the size of a postage stamp. The house will never burn down because Daddy and I take turns roaming the house at night, sniffing for smoke and checking the wiring. Well, I do think I’m funny, and someday you will too.

You talk to her, Shellice finally said, about six months ago, and I didn’t need to ask why. Everyone in the family believes that Liz inherited this from me, the anxious gene making its way crabwise from aunt to niece. Nothing Liz says seems that weird to me, although we worry about slightly different things. She worries about death and public humiliation and terrorists releasing a computer virus that shuts down all e-mail forever; I worry about death and public humiliation and Amazon taking over the world so I can’t even go to a store to buy books and pants and things but have to do everything online. She worries about everyone she loves dying, and I worry about never really mattering because I’m not married and am not the nucleus of anyone’s world. These are big differences, but we speak the same language. So now...