“Did Mari come by last night, fairly late?”

We were sitting at the breakfast table when my mother said this.

“Yes. How'd you know?” I replied, surprised.

“I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and she was in the kitchen making coffee, doing it in the pitch dark. I was still half asleep, you know, feeling a little vague, and it totally slipped my mind that she isn't living with us anymore. So I just said, ‘My goodness, are you still up?’ And then she said that she was and grinned at me, so I didn't think anything of it, and I just went back to our room and fell asleep again. So it wasn't a dream, then?”

“Nope,” I said. “She was here. She just showed up all of a sudden.”

Sunlight poured down out of the cloudless sky and smacked onto the thick accumulation of snow, making the space beyond the window so dazzling that it looked utterly new and clean. A peculiar feeling came over me as I gazed into that light, a feeling like I wanted to get some more sleep, like I was irritated about something. The television was bawling out the morning news, flooding the room with energy. My mother had sent my father off to work ages ago, and we were having a late breakfast together.

“Maybe things aren't going too well in her other house?” my mother said.

“Her other house? Mom, that ‘other house’ is her real house. She actually has a mother and father of her own, you know, real parents.”

I laughed. I knew what my mother meant.

“I really got to like her while she was living with us,” she said.

My mother never even mentioned my brother anymore. Instead she'd spent the last year taking special care of Mari, trying to distract herself that way. Sometimes I'd find myself wondering what all this must seem like to her, what sort of terrible fantasy it must feel like. Giving birth to a son like him, bringing him up, then losing him. I just couldn't imagine it at all. “Mmhm,” I said, nodding, and went on nibbling at my bread. Mari had spent her whole time in our house with my mother, helping out with the housework and carrying around shopping bags and doing all sorts of stuff like that. There wasn't much else for her to do, and it was probably pretty effective in helping her to keep her spirits up. Yet as much as she pitched in like one of the family, she still always gave a little smile at dinner and said how delicious everything was, and whenever she and one of us happened to want a bath at the same time, she'd always say very politely that she'd wait until later, and gesture for you to go first, displaying the palm of her hand. She'd been very carefully brought up, and her manners impressed me very much. But she wasn't really living in our house, she wasn't really alive. She just stayed there in the same space with us, a pleasant presence, like a resident ghost. She existed like a mirage.