My mother once told me how Anna Pavlova could stand on pointe for hours at a time, frozen like a statue. The longest I ever did was 11 minutes, the big wall clock counting my time, while I stared right into the photo of my mother I kept on the side wall, near the light switch; she had drawn a little circle around her face, in a long line of women dancing the cancan, arms raised and stocking legs kicking.

I’ve always wondered if prayers and messages to whoever might be listening are heard as easily when they’re said in our minds, or if it’s better to say the words out loud. It seems the latter to me—perhaps because I like to think that what happens inside my head is mine alone. I think if I were a younger person and more the academic type like your father, that is a topic I could imagine exploring and thinking about. As is, though, the idea simply began the habit I have of talking aloud. You’ve laughed at it; perhaps you’ve even worried. For years, I had a dog there as recipient, and I miss that. I keep telling your dad how we need one more. Just one more to take us all the way home (perhaps a smaller one, a little poodle mix), and I tell your dad how it will let him off the hook when I have something to tell. But those nights, in my little dance school, there was no one there to hear me.

“Momma,” I said, and sometimes still say. “You are missed.”

“Momma,” I said. “Please help me understand all that I don’t know. Send me a sign.”

One night in particular, in the studio at the end of the day, I could hear the clock ticking and the sleet against the window, and then I saw something from the corner of my eye. I knew that if I turned to look, I would lose my balance.

“I love what you’ve done, Lily,” I imagined her saying. “It was never supposed to end that way.”

“I know.”

“I would never have done that to you.”

“I know.”

And then the streetlight outside sputtered and went dark. “Good night.”

Your dad could explain it. Everyone could—it was in the paper; a car hit a pole, a teenager just learning to drive, with no business out in wintry weather, and that whole section of town was without power for hours that night. But for me it was a message: a miracle of timing, the promise that such connections are possible. I have never stopped believing.