“And then what happened,” I would demand, watching him eagerly, pushing him to tell the last detail of some office anecdote. Or, “I mowed the back lawns today and it took forever. I wonder if we need a new mower, there seems to be something wrong with the starter and when you do get it going the blades sound as if they’re going really slowly, it just creeps along. It took almost three hours, and if it takes that long I don’t have time to get a proper meal ready. I wanted to go out and pick up some mushrooms and bean sprouts so we could have Chinese food tonight, but I really just didn’t get a chance, so we’re going to be stuck with baked ham, I’m afraid. Did Elliott tell you what his teacher said today ...?” And on and on, and he listened, patient, puzzled, wondering, he must have been, what was happening to me, and I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t understand it myself.

At the same time, running alongside my curiosity, my need to fill myself with everything I could find out about the lives of these three people, a strange kind of indifference, a neglect that had never been there before, was developing, and that frightened me more than my own vacancy. I wanted them with me, and when they were, I was filled with irritation. I didn’t cook good meals, and it was not because I didn’t have time to shop. I spent less and less time on the house. By the time Katie was seven, in Grade Two, the only gift I had thought I had for them, my concern for giving them a loving home, had dwindled until I scarcely bothered with any of it. Katie’s questions annoyed me. I began to tell her and Elliott to do things because I said to do them, skipping the explanations Stephen and I had decided they should always have. I thought I loved them. I began to cry during the day, until I lost the energy for that. I was thirty-two years old, almost thirty-three.

When they were not there, I was empty. I felt as if I did not exist. I had no power, no way to be known. There were months filled with that kind of emptiness, the motionlessness of a mannequin in a fairy tale who only comes alive when real people appear. I could laugh a little at the picture I presented, so I must still have been a little sane. “I am a metaphysical problem,” I told myself and giggled. “Do I exist when there is no one here to see me existing?” But it was not funny, and I could not really laugh, because it seemed that the answer was no.