That intermediary space, marked off by the boards of the bed frame above and the floorboards below, was my favorite place from my earliest memories. My mother’s voice gets closer. I see her high heels come into the room. She calls my name one more time and leaves to go on with her search. She hasn’t seen me. That’s when I come out.

“Where had you gotten to?” she asks while she adjusts my clothes. She looks young. She has bangs and her hair is its natural color, dark. I love her so much. Sometimes, when it’s very late and she hasn’t come home from work, I imagine that she’s dead, that she’ll never come home again. I start to cry, and I try to call up her face in my mind. Sometimes I manage, other times I don’t. At that age, I thought that the only way to demonstrate how much you loved a person was to see them with your eyes closed, or remember their voice. If my mother didn’t come back it would be my fault, God’s punishment for my misbehaving. That’s how suffering was at that age, visible, exaggerated, for innocuous but concrete reasons. I never would have imagined how our roles would be reversed, or how pain could be a buried feeling that moves silently, building up resentment almost imperceptibly.

“You remember your dad lost his job, right?” she asks me in an ambiguous tone of voice. I nod. “Well . . .” she goes on cautiously, but doesn’t add anything. “Go say goodbye to Sonia.”

“Why? Where’s she going?”

“We’re going to donate her clothes. To an old folk’s home.”

“Am I going?” I ask with a smile.

I run to Sonia’s room, and I find her sitting on the bed surrounded by black plastic bags. She doesn’t notice me; she’s crying.

Her room is another of my favorite places. It’s white and looks like a hospital room. The objects that inhabit it are functional: bed, wardrobe, lamp, alarm clock. Sonia has lived with us for three years. From Monday morning to Saturday afternoons, when she goes to her “real home,” as she calls it when she’s mad at me.

I have two memories that characterize my life with her.