In her first book, How to Eat, Lawson asks, “You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to?” My response had always been, “Yes!” I would be more than content to spend every day of my life eating at Vince’s rotisserie. But since I had my whole family with me in Long Island in the wintertime, with no restaurants open and no cheap ten-minute New York delivery services, I decided it was time to learn some new tricks in life. I read that during crises one should take refuge in comfort food. Simple and traditional cuisine connects us emotionally with fond memories, thus providing a sense of peace. For me, that had always translated into the typical Argentine empanada: a handheld turnover wrapped around a savory filling.

Along with the much-publicized shortage of toilet paper, there was also a shortage of flour because everyone had started making sourdough to relieve their anxiety. I finally found some on the Internet that came from India. It seemed a little expensive, but it was the only option, so I typed in my credit card. When the package arrived I realized that the steep price was because I’d ordered three thirty-three-pound bags of unrefined, unbleached flour (I must have misunderstood the metric conversion). I started baking, but each empanada came out with a brick-like crust and soggy beef, corn, or cheese on the inside. Still, I didn’t try anything else because I felt like I had a moral obligation to get through the lumpy white mountains of flour now overflowing from my kitchen cupboards. On account of the bags being open, no one would take them as donations.

Another disaster struck with grated coconut. I bought too much by accident and found myself adding a touch of tropical flavor to every meal thereafter. I’ve had nightmares in which I’m drowning in coconut balls sticky with dulce de leche. My failure to master American weights and measurements not only explains why I can’t follow recipes but also the heap of packages still lying in our basement.

Since no one could stomach my creations, the silver lining was that while everyone else gained weight during the pandemic, we emerged with bikini- and Speedo-ready bodies. We were ready for summer—if summer ever came, and if we were ever to venture outside again in anything other than the pajamas we had grown so accustomed to. The other part of my domestic goddess fantasy was getting the house to sparkle like in the ads on TV, which during the early pandemic seemed so essential for survival. The most popular cleaning products, however, were in short supply. I had turned into a New Yorker who knew only how to use commercial, disposable solutions, but now I had to resort to rags soaked in bleach and other old-fashioned methods like we used back home in Argentina. Plus, the dishwasher and washing machine broke right then and no maintenance workers were willing to come to the house.

My new mentor, Nigella Lawson, said that we live in a world so threatening and saturated with insecurity that the domestic goddess ritual serves, above all, to make you feel like “the universe is under control.” But I related more to Christie, who is often—though perhaps apocryphally—credited with having said that the best ideas for her crimes came to her while washing dishes, and that the chore could turn anyone into a high-class homicidal maniac.

I don’t have a knack for domestic goddessing: None of the home maintenance helped to refocus, distract, or entertain me. That said, imagining Agatha Christie getting inspired with sudsy hands provided a much-needed diversion; I couldn’t put down her books.

While my empanadas were burning in the oven, or while I was on hold for hours with different pharmacies, international mail carriers, hospitals, and clinics, I reread around fifty of her mysteries. Every night with the kids we watched the British TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot starring David Suchet, which Conrado and I knew by heart. We compared him with other Poirots, whose mustaches were never quite right: Ustinov’s practically swallowed his face, Branagh’s was baroque to the point of parody, and Molina’s was serviceable but forgettable. In the afternoons we would all ride our bicycles through the neighborhood, and as we passed the large Victorian mansions shut for winter, we would choose the most appropriate dwelling for each type of murder and debate where to best hide the body. We’d spent a lot of time together by that point, so this proved to be a new and exciting topic of discussion and a way to convince the kids to leave the house and overcome the agoraphobia we were all developing.

Besides, Poirot had been my first love—the star of the first grown-up books I devoured as a child. His only real competition came from Jane Austen’s heroines, but he held a clear advantage: Austen left us only six novels, while Christie seemed to have an endless supply of close to eighty mysteries waiting to be discovered, some with other, equally marvelous detectives like Miss Marple leading the investigations.

Jane Austen said that her job was like sketching with a very fine brush on two inches of ivory. It was extraordinary that she could create a universe in such a small space, but something similar happens with Christie. The world Christie depicts is limited, but she is such a skilled writer that it’s easy to completely immerse yourself in her narratives and forget about real life. What could be more appropriate for navigating a pandemic outside the home and a husband recovering from a serious brain injury inside?

According to Sophie Hannah, the author chosen to continue the Poirot saga after Christie died, the hook of the novels is not so much the whodunit, but how the seemingly inexplicable can be explained. With everyone locked in their homes, struggling to understand what was going on, and all the disconcerting, terrifying, and often contradictory news, Christie’s outcomes couldn’t have been a more appropriate balm.

It has been said that as long as there are people who enjoy trying to solve what seems impossible, there will always be people who read Agatha Christie. In essence, her books are literary magic tricks, and she is the greatest illusionist to ever exist. Agatha Christie’s detectives need no physical prowess or high-tech gadgets to solve the mysteries. They just put the “little gray cells” to work, in the words of Monsieur Poirot. This makes each reader feel like, given the clues, they, too, could discover who the murderer is. The competition this unleashed between my children generated heated after-dinner conversations on a topic that, for once, didn’t originate on TikTok.

In his essay “Cuentos policiales norteamericanos” (American Police Stories), one of Argentina’s preeminent literary critics, Ricardo Piglia, writes that detectives in classic English mystery stories embody reason; the crime is a problem to be solved; and the criminal is nothing but an individual fluke. In the noir of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or James M. Cain, however, society itself has become unhinged. “It is impossible,” says Piglia, “to analyze the structure of the thriller without taking into account the social situation of the United States.”

As we read on in our insulated Long Island enclave, social protests were unfolding in urban areas, and after the death of George Floyd the police became enemy number one. It was impossible to ignore the criticism that has always surrounded Agatha Christie: that the small, mainly bourgeois world of her stories doesn’t include elements of social justice and that she focused on how the crimes were committed and who was responsible, not the victims’ suffering. The police officers she created could be lazy and empty-headed, but never evil or corrupt.

In the real world, even if justice is served, the lives left behind are often destroyed. On the contrary, in traditional crime fiction, everything to an extent goes back to normal once the detective solves the case. This “confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe,” wrote P. D. James, in Talking About Detective Fiction. She sees something similar occurring in the novels of Jane Austen. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” Austen wrote in Mansfield Park. “I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” According to James, Miss Marple would have entirely approved of this attitude once the puzzle is solved.

That was the universe—the guarantee or perhaps the fantasy I needed to believe that both Conrado’s recovery and the pandemic would resolve themselves. I never found solace in cooking or tending to the house. But as I wrestled with decisions about ordering porcine peptides in a world shrouded in uncertainty, it was Christie’s tidy little murders that reassured me: Order would, improbably, be restored, and normalcy was always just a few chapters away.

That is, until a letter from the New York State criminal court arrived—addressed to me.

There is a book I would never have wanted to write. It won the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction, was a bestseller, and turned its author into an even greater cultural icon—so much so that she became the face of a Céline ad campaign at eighty. There was even a movement to put her on the ten-dollar bill instead of Alexander Hamilton. When she died at the end of 2021, The New Yorker declared that her books should be the universal answer to what we live for and why we write.

I would have done anything not to be her.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion reveals that her husband, John Gregory Dunne, briefly existed in the same coma bordering on brain death as Conrado—that dreaded three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, the lowest possible score. But she shares this fact only after reading his autopsy report, after 227 pages of dissecting his sudden death from a heart attack, trying to make sense of the senseless. Meanwhile, their daughter slips in and out of a coma.

The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005, but I only read it after Conrado’s accident. It’s a classic about “getting a grip and getting on,” in the words of The New Yorker. It seemed a suitable guide for me, whatever lay ahead. Reviewers with the New York Times stressed that the book was not, despite its subject matter, “a downer,” but rather “thrilling and engaging—sometimes quite funny . . . slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous.”

The reviews promised there would be no glorified sunsets or moments of epiphany, which I would have found impossible to bear. Didion’s title refers to how in moments of horror, even if you behave in an apparently logical manner, the brain ceases to be rational and various types of magical thinking take over. Didion was said to have analyzed all of this with cold objectivity, and that seemed exactly what I needed. I let myself fall into it, line by line.

Didion calls the first type of magical thinking the “ordinary instant,” a concept that resonated with my experience. The ordinary instant is the sudden, almost resentful realization that fate did not grant us a warning—no chance to prevent tragedy. Didion suggests that grief is intensified by this very shock, the instant in which everything unravels. “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” she famously writes.

For Didion, that moment came precisely as she and Dunne began their meal. In the middle of their conversation, while she was tossing the salad, he collapsed. “Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.”

In my case, that morning had even started on a sweet note—literally. For breakfast with my parents we´d had Rogel cake, the local delicacy: thin layers of crispy pastry and dulce de leche, crowned with a cloud of meringue. Fueled by sugar and nostalgia, I set off on a house-wide search for a missing glove, refraining—miraculously—from scolding Tato and Tomasa. Predictably, the bulky thermal glove turned up inside my boot.

Then came the familiar rush: dropping the kids at their ski class before making it just in time to join Conrado and Nacho in line for the chairlift. As we ascended, we reminisced about the 1980s, when Nacho had imported European fluorescent headbands for the South American slopes. Did that make them vintage now—and possibly, by some twist of irony, cool again? More importantly, had I, by some miracle, kept mine? I was almost certain I had—and felt that peculiar swell of pride one saves for treasures that matter to no one else.

And yet, only a couple of hours later, I was in the passenger seat of an ambulance, listening to the sounds of Conrado being intubated behind me. The scene must have been violent—the paramedic barked, “Come on, Conrado!” punctuating each failed attempt with a guttural string of expletives. Later, he turned to me, sheepish, and said, “Sorry about that. It’s hard not to get carried away in moments like these.”

I didn’t understand why he was apologizing. “Did Conrado react?”

The paramedic’s eyes were brimming with sadness as he realized I still had hope. He explained that the intubation had been successful, but calling Conrado by his name had merely been a technique—a way to steady himself and establish a connection with his patient in a life-threatening moment. Conrado had never been aware of what was happening, and the paramedic had never expected him to be.

After a battery of tests at the Bariloche hospital, a doctor gave me the specific diagnosis that would define our future, or the possible lack thereof: severe traumatic brain injury, a score of three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, diffuse axonal injury. The word “diffuse” sounded positive to me, perhaps synonymous with mild? Once again, I was corrected. It was one of the worst scenarios because it meant that the injury was spread throughout the brain instead of being concentrated in specific points.

“Is he going to die?”

“That is one of the possibilities, and a very likely one.”

“Is there anything that can be done?”

“We have to stabilize him first.”

“If he survives, will he make a full recovery?”

“There have been cases where patients survive, but they’re usually a partial recovery with severe disabilities.”

“How long will he be in a coma?”

“Impossible to know. But if he doesn’t die, be prepared for a stretch that could last some eight months before we begin to understand how much—if any—of his brain might be recovered.”

The doctor excused himself to attend to Conrado.

With this information, I had enough to act. I headed to the desk to complete his hospital admission, then stepped into the corridor to make a series of critical calls. Around me, a steady flow of injured skiers limped in and hobbled out on crutches, grumbling about missing the rest of their ski week. How I envied them, por Dios!

The first call was to Caird, Conrado’s colleague in New York, to tell him about the accident and ask for help with our U.S. health insurance, which, as I correctly imagined, was going to be complicated, impersonal, and often unnecessarily cruel.

My second call was to Miss Gonzalez, the former principal of my school in Buenos Aires—the cool teacher who, of all people, had once chaperoned us on a high school trip to Bariloche in the early 1990s. More than three decades later, Miss “Gonchi” remained the epitome of efficiency and organization. Within moments, she connected me with the administration office, where they assured me that Tato and Tomasa—who spoke Spanish but couldn’t read or write it—could start classes the following Monday, right in the middle of the school year.

The rest would be taken care of. Other parents and alumni would handle everything: uniforms, field hockey sticks and cleats, spiral-bound notebooks neatly labeled with their names. My kids would be invited to every birthday party, and a parent would pick them up and drop them off wherever we lived. If teachers asked for a bag of flour to bake heart-shaped cookies while learning about weights and measures, several classmates would bring extra to share on their behalf.

My only job, they assured me, was to take care of Conrado.

The motto of this century-old school—where several generations of women in my family had studied—was Friendship and Service. And I saw it put into practice immediately.

Then I called our family doctor in New York. One advantage of having a temperamental cheerfulness—while always expecting the worst (and being married to a lawyer)—is having every possible document in order, including an officially certified “Do not resuscitate in case of brain death” directive. In Argentina, such preparations are rare. And yet here we were, facing exactly that.

Unlike Didion, I was no stranger to paranoia. I’d always had my fair share of nightmares about some gruesome fate. Conrado used to tease me that my motto was Joseph Heller’s famous line: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

At least I knew what to do. I called Hongui, my dearest friend and New York neighbor—a doctor, so unlikely to panic, and, more importantly, someone with a key to our apartment—and asked her to find the folder clearly labeled In Case of Death.. Only then did I realize we had forgotten to add the words “or in case of severe disability.”

Still, I set out to follow Conrado’s meticulous instructions.

Then came breaking the news to the kids and Conrado’s family. What I dreaded most was calling my in-laws. I was the expert skier and Bariloche was my place in the world. How had I been unable to take care of their son on my home turf? Yet, true to their nature, they undertook to find practical ways of helping. First and foremost, they arranged for a lawyer cousin to drive all the way from Mendoza to Bariloche: fifteen hours from the north to the south of the Argentine Andes along Ruta 40, a twisty two-lane highway, sections of which are riddled with potholes or even still unpaved. She would accompany Conrado on a medical plane once we managed to fly him one thousand miles north to Buenos Aires so that I could travel with the kids.

To Tato, eight years old, and Tomasa, who was ten, I explained everything I could. “You know when something horrible and sad happens to one of the characters in your storybooks?” I asked them. “It’s hard to believe, but now that’s us. But I’ll be here with you no matter what. And not only that, I’ll make sure that you’re happy.”

I felt it was important for them to know the good times in life weren’t over forever, and that they could trust me entirely. After all, when people would talk about the highly sought-after work-life balance, Conrado would always quip we had achieved it. Only that he was “work” and I was “life.” I reminded Tato and Tomasa of this, and they agreed. Both trusted what Papá said.

They asked me if it now felt “like being asleep” for him. I nodded. Then they wanted to know what the doctors were doing. I explained that the first step was to keep Conrado’s body comfortable and at peace, giving his brain a chance to recover—but no one knew if that was possible, to what extent, or what would happen next.

Before they could ask, I added that Dad’s dying was also a possibility. But he wasn’t suffering, and everyone—from New York to Patagonia—was searching for the best doctors to care for him, just as he would have done for any of us.

Although they were obviously shaken, they took the news with a composure that surprised me. I think what reassured them was that they knew they were getting the whole truth; I wasn’t keeping anything from them. The situation couldn’t be worse, but there were no secrets.

The next morning I gave them a ski pass and sent them off to the mountain. It was a day of radiant sunshine. Tato and Tomasa knew their instructors would take special care of them, and I think they were looking forward to some hours of normalcy. They spent the whole day on the slopes and even celebrated poor Tato’s ninth birthday at the ski lodge.

Two days later it was my birthday. Some childhood friends from Buenos Aires wouldn’t let me ignore it, and they sent me a blouse they felt was “so Juana.” It became my official uniform for the hospital. I was at my parents’ house, where clothes were still ironed and heavily starched (in stark contrast to doing laundry in our New York apartment with one communal washing machine in the basement). Stiff and formidable, the blouse was ideal as my suit of armor. When everything was over, one way or another, my idea was to burn it. But my friends had been right: The blouse, somewhat asymmetrical with blue and white stripes and balloon sleeves, was indeed my style, and it had the audacity of looking good on me even when I cried. I wanted to be pragmatic to the extreme, so I decided not to turn anything into a talisman—which is tempting in these situations—and thus the blouse survived.