I can ask as many questions as I want: about tidal waves, my sinuses, nuclear war. Illustration by Adrian Tomine

I am eight, and I am afraid of everything. The list of things that keep me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.

An assistant teacher comes to school with a cold sore. I am convinced he’s infected with MRSA, a skin-eating staph infection. I wait for my own flesh to erode. I stop touching my shoelaces (too filthy) or hugging adults outside my family. In school, we are learning about Hiroshima, so I read “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” and I know instantly that I have leukemia. A symptom of leukemia is dizziness, and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses.

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him.

My fourth-grade teacher, Kathy, is my best friend at school. She’s a plump, pretty woman with hair like yellow pipe cleaners. Her clothes resemble the sheets at my grandma’s house, floral but threadbare, and with mismatched buttons. She says I can ask her as many questions as I want: about tidal waves, about my sinuses, about nuclear war. She offers vague, reassuring answers. In hindsight, they were tinged with religion, implied a faith in a distinctly Christian God. She can tell when I’m getting squirrelly, and she shoots me a look across the room that says, It’s O.K., Lena, just give it a second.

When I’m not with Kathy, I’m with Chris Conta, our school nurse, who has a perm and wears holiday sweaters all year round. She has a no-nonsense approach to health that comforts me. She presents me with hard facts (very few children develop Reye’s syndrome in response to aspirin) and tells me that polio has been eradicated in America. She takes me seriously when I explain that I’ve been exposed to scarlet fever by a kid on the subway with a red face. Sometimes she lets me lie on the top bunk in the back room, dark and cool. I rest my cheek against the plastic mattress cover and listen as she dispenses medication and condoms to high-school kids. If I’m lucky, she doesn’t send me back to class.

No one likes the way things are going, so at some point therapy is suggested. I am used to appointments: allergist, chiropractor, tutor. All I want is to feel better, and that overrides the fear of something new, something reserved for people who are crazy. Plus, both my parents have therapists, and I feel more like my parents than like anybody else. My father’s therapist is named Ruth. I’ve never met her, but I once asked him to describe her to me. He said she was older, but not as old as Grandma, with longish gray hair. In my head, her office has no windows; it’s just a box with two chairs. I wonder what Ruth thinks of me. He has to have said something.

“Can’t I just see Ruth?” I ask. He explains that it doesn’t work that way, that I need my own place to have my own private thoughts. So I take the train uptown with him to meet someone of my own. For some reason, when we go to appointments to help my mind, it’s always my father who comes. My mother comes to the ones for my body.

The first doctor, a violet-haired grandma-age woman with a German surname, asks me a few simple questions and then invites me to play with the toys scattered across her floor. She sits in a chair above me, pad in hand. I have the sense she will gather all kinds of information from this, so I put on a show that I’m sure will demonstrate my loneliness and introspection: bootleg Barbie crashes her convertible with off-brand Ken riding shotgun. Tiny Lego men are killed in a war against their own kind. After a long period of observation, she asks me to share my three greatest wishes. “A river, where I can be alone,” I tell her, impressed with my poeticism. From this answer, she will know that I am not like other nine-year-olds.

“And what else?” she asks.

“That’s all.”

I leave feeling worse than when I went in, and my father says that’s O.K., we can see as many doctors as we need to until I’m better. Next, we visit a different woman, even older than the first, but she’s named Anni, which is not an old person’s name. We walk up four flights to her office. My father sits with me this time and helps me explain the things that worry me. Anni is sympathetic, with a funny high laugh, and, when we walk out into the night, I tell my father she is the one.

But we are here just to get a referral, my father tells me. Anni isn’t accepting new patients.

And so my third session is with Lisa. Lisa’s office is down the block from our apartment, and my mother, sensing some trepidation, pulls me aside and says to think of it like a playdate. If I like playing with her, I can go back. If not, we’ll find someone else for me to play with. I nod, but I’m well aware that most playdates don’t revolve around someone trying to figure out whether you’re crazy or not.

In our first session, Lisa sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Lisa is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a suit, sheer tights, and black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

Lisa lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Robin, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she can fix me.