I hesitated, smiling already, the spell of my writing broken—a muffin. I put down the pen, remembering Papa roaring aloud when he arrived at Mr. Dickens’s description of the tiny Paul Dombey just so. Papa! I smiled down at my handiwork. Even though I had written little about him, there he was. I lowered my head again and this time began to write him down in truth. That morning in January, I felt my life commence to beat once more, faintly at first and then stronger as I determined to take up Miss Grange’s proposal. I made a pledge to draw the world round me, and hold my papa close, in tiny blackened scuff marks upon this page.

Thus increasingly, throughout that bleak January, then February, the household’s silence stretched from top to bottom story, its occupants intently putting pen to paper: Mama, enwrapped in her letters, spent long afternoons at her table in the sitting room, and I upon the third floor, in my old schoolroom, installed at my pages, each day notching Papa up inch by inch from where he had lain for so long in my mind.

Yet I soon found my page loosed its margins, for as I set down the smell of uncovered earth telling of spring advancing even beneath the winter chill, my mind might recall an afternoon upon a bench in the park with Papa. I would write the conversation, the bent of his body as he spoke, my blue gloves folded, and, word for remembered word, I’d call him to me, recalling him through the rich blue-black of my own ink, and falling further back in time to childhood, quickly rendered, until I arrived at the moment when Papa first began coming home in the afternoons to give me lessons, when my narrative grew quite complicated. Writing Papa in this way, I found him first here and there in the crannies of memory, not stuck upon a single thread with a beginning and an end. And so I carried him carefully now, with small deliberate hands, weaving myself upon the page with he whom I missed.