It is enough to say this.

My mother was asleep on a rusted camping cot, near the furnace, wrapped in a heavy winter coat though it was the middle of June.

She did not stir when we came down.

She did not stir at all.

She had been pushed into a deep, unnatural stillness by the pills that sat, in their unlabeled bottles, on a folding chair beside the cot, the black-market sedatives my sister had just described, upstairs, as sleep aids to keep her from bothering the tenants.

I stood at the foot of those stairs and looked at my mother, unconscious in a basement, in a coat, in June, and I understood, all at once, the thing that had been nagging at me for six months.