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of her.
    “It’s all about timing,” he added, palpably relieved.
    Timing meant my mother would survive.
    Gail didn’t. She rallied, relapsed, rallied again, but only briefly. It was a long, difficult struggle. She died on April 29, 1985, eleven days after her first grandson was born. They were in the same hospital, my mother told us, when she was finally able to say anything about it at all. Gail dying on one floor; her grandson born on another.
    “Thank God Mom had the surgery,” my sisters and I told each other.
    Timing, it was becoming clear, was everything. Timing was different from time. Time was an abstraction, impossible to understand. When I was little, my father took me once to the planetarium in Chicago and when I tilted my head back, trying to comprehend the artificial enormity, he whispered that everything we saw in space had already happened. It took light so long to reach us, he told me, that the stars we were admiring might already be dead.
    Time, you couldn’t do much about. Timing was different. Timing meant managing what you were allotted, making things work, taking control. Timing meant being on guard.
    Timing meant we didn’t define ready the way other people did. We always had to be ready. We were like evacuees, belongings squashed at our feet, waiting at an unknown border. There was no time to spare.
    I don’t remember exactly when I told Jacques all of this. Was it early on, in those wild, love-drunk early days of dating, staying up all night in his old Accord, naming constellations, lying back in each other’s arms, enchanted with our different night skies and early histories? Or later, planning soberly, putting his house on the market, signing job contracts for DC? I don’t remember a time when he didn’t know what I know about my medical history.
    I know he wasn’t especially concerned. “Why worry? You can’t control the future,” he said.
    I appreciated how calm he was, but underneath, I was afraid it meant he didn’t really get it.
    I tried to talk to him about heredity. About what we pass on.
    Jacques shrugged. “Everyone has something,” he said.
    I didn’t feel like I had “something,” though. I felt like I had this . Known, assailable. Like a sharpshooter was out there, eye to the scope, waiting for me. Wherever I went, I stayed inside his compass.
    Every so often the researchers at Creighton University mailed us diagrams, each woman in our family represented by a small circle. The ones who’d died from ovarian cancer had their circles colored in black. In the spring of 1985, they colored one in for Gail. The diagram looked grim, like the models of molecules we used to build in high school chemistry. Ours had way too many black circles in it—long life looked like a trait we hadn’t been lucky enough to inherit.
    In our twenties, my sisters and I dealt with this by staying busy. Sara was teaching elementary school in the Pacific Northwest, where she’d lived since graduation. She and Geoff, her high school boyfriend, married right out of college. Jenny was born a few years later, and then Rachel—both before Sara was thirty. Between teaching and being a mother, Sara barely had time to read the paper, let alone worry about our family history. But once she was done having children, she decided to go ahead and get the surgery over with—well ahead of schedule. Julie looked like she was on the fast track, too. She’d whizzed through law school and gotten her first job all by her midtwenties. She and Jon were both working a zillion hours a week and had already gotten married and bought a house in northern Virginia while I was still struggling through my orals.
    For my part, I got through my twenties with a mixture of superstition and denial. I paid my parking tickets promptly. Finished my dissertation. If I was “good,” whatever that meant, I figured the fates would leave me alone.
    Just in case, I added a hefty dose of high Alpha Medicine. In graduate school I