“What did you tell her about me?” I asked Frank when it was clear to me that something had happened and he was avoiding the conversation. More than what they might have done physically was the sickening thought that he had shared any intimate details about my life, my mother’s death, our children, our dogs; it was the era of Margot and Rudolf, Margot winding down, cloudy eyes and gray streaks in her muzzle, her apricot coat laced with white as well. I felt threatened and protective of anything linked to our home.

“Oh, come on, Lily.”

“Don’t call me that!” I nearly spat in his face. “Only my mother calls me that.” I said how there is nothing cheaper and more superficial than someone unauthorized stealing and using another’s pet name.

“Did you tell her our word?” I said.

“Of course not!”

I had found little traces and pieces: a note in his pocket—a phone number, a street address on the fringes of Cambridge, which I later drove past—a pink office memo slip like the secretaries in his department used to fill out and leave in his mailbox (“While you were out . . .”). One remained rolled up there near the matchbooks on his dresser: a call at 3 on a Wednesday afternoon; the message: “Tomb Time.” Book title? Lecture idea?

I asked myself: “Can you spell stupid? Can you spell b-l-i-n-d?”

March 2017
Southern Pines

Have I ever told you two how often in the dull waking of morning I sometimes have the sensation that I am there walking our old neighborhood? I pass your elementary school, I pass the yard with that strange sculpture we never figured out (you two called it the Giant Egg; the neighbors called it an eyesore), and I pass the mailbox I always used, that beautiful chestnut tree on the corner, and the house with the beautiful rose garden, and I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t someone walking along Aspen Avenue or Grove Street in these moments who thinks she glimpses someone she’s never seen wandering there, that dogs and babies stop and stare out into the nothingness of me as I pass through my old life. My feet and hands are never cold, as they always were, and I am never worried about my little dance school, which was almost always in the red, or what to prepare for dinner or if I have called to check on my father. The thoughts are just about walking, about one foot in front of the other, about making my way around our neighborhood and anticipating you two coming home from school. Sometimes, I wake with a vivid recall of a certain sweater or a pair of shoes, or with my fingers pinched, as if I am holding a feather or a rock or a leaf or a penny, all those things I have always collected.