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unsure of how to ask Clare if I can live with her while they're gone. Mom's not even sure that my living with Clare is a "workable" plan.
    It's the only one we have, though, so it has to work.
    Last year, my parents were offered positions on a team going to Poland to help create a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in Krakow. At first they were going to bring me along, but what with eleventh grade being so pivotal to college acceptance and my having dyslexia, that option was ruled out. Krakow, apparently, is not crawling with education specialists.
    In June, they were still thinking about going and asked Rebecca if she could stay with me (the apartment she shared with Clare was too small for all three of us). I think my parents would leave me alone for a long weekend, but not a year. Rebecca was the clear choice as I'd spent most of fifth grade with her and William while my parents worked at a medical clinic in Africa. Da does a lot of this kind of work, including seven months at a refugee camp in Bosnia. Or in Serbia, but maybe it was Kosovo. Except that was, I think, later.
    Keeping straight what happened when during that war is really hard for me. Da thought I wasn't paying attention until Rebecca pointed out that I'd only been six when the Bosnian war began. She told him to get over himself. I thought this was unkind, and to make up for it I started keeping a notebook of things I should know but don't. They're almost always things I overhear or read.
    Write it down and figure it out later. That's something I can do.
    Anyway, about Krakow Rebecca said, why not, she'd stay with me, but then they decided not to go. I'm pretty sure they will now. I've even told Mom that she should go ahead and call the hospital. Make the arrangements.
    "Nothing's been decided yet, Leila," she said.
    "He can't go alone," I said. "You have to go with him."
    "Of course I do, but it's not, so simple," she said. "Your happiness is important to us."
    There was something so wrong about the word
happiness
in this particular conversation that we both fell silent. It was after midnight and it had been days since she'd told me not to stay up so late. I kissed her good-night after deciding I would find a way to help them go to Poland. The problem they have leaving me with Clare hinges on how much she travels, for both work and Gyula. We are in need of a better plan, which is something my mother can usually devise without help.
    My father can't stay here. It's out of the question. He can barely get out of bed. And when he can, his time is totally taken up being mad. He's beyond mad, actually. Volcanically angry is more like it.
    It turns out that Rebecca didn't make a last-minute decision.
    Back in August, she got the drugs she used to kill herself by writing prescriptions with Da's and William's DEA numbers. This did not look good to the police, who were all over their offices. The hospital where they both work is considering an inquiry. There is, in all the questions, the idea that either Da or William gave Rebecca the information she needed.
    "She was a hospice nurse," William apparently told the police. "She didn't need any help from us."
    The police, or so Da told us, looked at them blankly. One of them flipped his notes back a few pages. "Thought she was a cook."
    "Chef," Da corrected him. "Pastry chef. But she had been a hospice nurse."
    I love this image of my father trying to improve the police's vocabulary, but the real point of the story, as even I can tell, is that Rebecca planned, for many months, to die. She used her own training against herself. She risked damaging reputations. She turned my father into someone who's exactly split between grief and rage.
    I think that the more her death looks unforgivable, the more it seems obvious that she had cause—she had a reason—we haven't yet discovered. The note, which I had been so sure would explain, is of no help. Short, unaddressed, and left open on her desk, all it says is
Don't be sad. I