Erica was easy to keep an eye on, milling below with the other mothers while their boys romped. She pulled off her hat and her hair fell in a loose braid down her back, rendering her younger still. This woman ran Antonio’s life. She slept in his bed. She loved his children. She was like a fictional character I had conjured up so successfully that she roamed around paying me no attention and doing exactly what she felt like doing. It could have been me standing on a patch of grass in the flattening light of a winter’s afternoon while our boys played. I was the fiction. My own life did not exist.

Oscar was marching the others around lampposts and over the dead grass. He would grow up to be someone of importance. I saw it in the way he held his head, the way he shouted at his friends and laughed raucously before they had a chance to reply. He took up all the air, as ambitious people do. One had to cut off parts of oneself to be with them. Space and sound were oddly elastic between where I sat, the cluster of women, and the running children. I could barely hear their cries, but I could see them with dreamlike clarity, these boys who were free to play and grow up, never knowing they had a sister who had died. They would greet the news with puzzlement, then indifference: a fairy tale that had nothing to do with them.

Daniel had been trailing halfheartedly after the group. He broke away to follow his own path of widening circles, talking or singing to himself. Would he come to me? Nearer . . . Nearer . . . I caught my breath, not daring to move. He strayed so close I could make out the Velcro straps of his shoes, his slender wrists protruding from his cuffs, the soft spikes of his hair, finer and paler than Maddy’s. He stopped a few feet away and studied me, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I smiled. He smiled back, uncertainly, and turned to squint under the visor of his hand to where his mother was calling him. But he didn’t go to her. Instead he offered me his face again, appraising me with Maddy’s intelligent eyes, Maddy’s stillness. The seconds stretched and trembled. I held him in my gaze, refusing to let go until he did. In that moment, I held her too.

The boy turned and zigzagged down the slope without a backward look. At the bottom he joined his family and they moved off, growing smaller and less distinct until the ground dipped and they disappeared. No doubt by the time he got home he had already forgotten the lady on the bench.

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