The first wish had been small. She was twenty-three, the apartment had a mold problem that the landlord would not fix, and one morning she had wished it gone with the precise, private intensity that most wishes had. By the end of the week the mold was gone. She had not understood what had happened for several months, until she noticed the gap: a summer afternoon from that year, a specific afternoon at a lake with her sister, which she knew had occurred because there were photographs, but which she could not feel. The memory was there like furniture in a closed room. Present but unreachable.
After that she had been careful for a long time.
The third wish had been necessary. The fifth. The seventh had been for her daughter, when the diagnosis came the first time, and afterward she had lost six months of the year her daughter was born. She knew the year. She could not get back inside it. Her daughter did not know this.
The illness had returned eight months ago.
Deven sat in the chair beside the bed. The room was quiet. Her daughter's breathing was measured and even, which was good, which was what they wanted. The night was the kind that made everything feel like a decision. She had been sitting since eleven and it was now three in the morning and she had not moved from the chair.
The mechanism was not selective. She had tested this once, accidentally, by wishing for something small when she was already in grief, and the mechanism had taken the most recent memory with sufficient weight to balance the exchange, which had been the last conversation she had had with her father before he died. She had known the conversation happened. She had lost the specific words, the specific light, the specific weight of his hand when he had squeezed hers. She knew he had squeezed her hand. She knew this the way you know something from a photograph. It was not the same.
She could wish. The wish would work. She did not know what it would take.
She sat in the chair. Outside, the street was empty. In the hallway, the light was still on. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of the building settling. Her daughter's breathing. The small sounds that fill a room when you have been still long enough to hear them.
When the morning light came through the curtain, she was still in the chair.