Valerie’s time then was spent in a cycle of size-limited classes at her neighborhood school, afternoon lessons in music, riding, and art, and family time filled overtly with quality TV and national-park vacations and covertly with bickering. Her father was always passionately happy about a successful venture or miserably self-pitying about a failure, and he was then experiencing a string of bad choices in business ideas. There’s no doubt he was a challenge to his wife. But Sandy seemed to lack even the most basic emotional connection to him; she earned her living as an accountant and she approached everything with dollars-and-cents pragmatism, and as far as Valerie is concerned, her mother never understood how to just love Wayne and let him have his feelings. Even when he began to assert his unhappiness Sandy debated with him; Valerie will never forget the night she overheard her father beg for couple’s therapy. “Don’t be silly, Wayne,” Sandy reasoned in that grating calm tone of voice. “We don’t need that. We’re just going through a rough patch. All couples do. It’s not so bad.”

The next morning, on her two-block walk to school, Valerie saw the raccoon. It was in the far corner of the schoolyard, beyond the playground, where the trees and tall grasses hid empty Dorito bags. She’d seen animals there before but this one behaved differently: it walked round and round in a four foot circle, tail down, chirping lowly and wobbling now and then. It paid no attention to Valerie. She stared fascinated at a pale cloud of smoky lavender near the raccoon’s eyes.

“Oh,” she mouthed silently toward it. “I’m sorry. I hope this is not painful for you.” The animal paused and then wobbled on in its circle. Valerie felt it would be disrespectful to leave.

She remained at the spot until after the Animal Control truck arrived and the uniformed lady got out, until after she’d watched the raccoon roped around the neck and pulled over the chain-link fence and into a wire cage, until after she’d heard the lady say, “a lot of these fellas showin’ up lately with the Distemper.” Then Valerie resumed her walk to class, arriving late, wishing the raccoon a good death.

She tried to tell her parents about the event that evening, but Sandy and Wayne were distracted by their enmity. Her father’s latest venture had taken off and he was riding a wave of self-confidence again. He wasn’t needing a mate. Wayne had suffered a childhood contaminated by the toxin of parents who hated one another but stayed together for the child; he for one did not believe in toughing out a bad marriage. “Better,” he said that night and almost out of nowhere, as Valerie passed him the potatoes, “to split up now than continue to subject Valerie to this.”

“Excuse me?” Sandy sputtered in surprise. Her normally pale cheeks flushed red.

“I think we need to separate.”

“I think we need to talk about this somewhere else,” Sandy countered, and Valerie watched as a pale blue-gray cloud formed between her parents’ faces and then seemed to tumble upwards dissipating like smoke. Wayne became impassioned and began to yell, Sandy grew more didactic and efficient in tone, and still Valerie saw it fade away between them.

Valerie’s nightmares began that night and continued until she was twelve. Purple blue gray visions of death, everywhere to everyone she loved. During that year and a half she went to five psychiatrists, seven psychologists, an acupuncturist, and a herbalist. Sandy and Wayne divorced and each bought new houses and arranged shared custody. Valerie considered bulimia but really didn’t like to vomit. Her self-esteem wasn’t quite low enough for anorexia nervosa. Catatonia appealed, but she couldn’t figure out how to induce it. Her diagnoses were non-specific.