Our father built a lot of that house himself — the illegal extensions, at least — and he still occupies it in my dreams. An old, semi-detached brick Victorian house. When my mother finally sold it, she did so because she felt it was my father’s body she was living in, or a tomb for his body, or a tomb she had been left to carry around on her back, like some sort of creature that clings to your head and blinds you — a monstrous pangolin, for instance, or some sort of chimera. So she sold it, and she washed her hands of it, and we moved into an apartment for a little while, just the three of us — a period of derangement and freedom — in another suburb on the other side of the city. Our mother practised self-hypnosis and took up smoking again, and we each drank ourselves into other worlds. Finally, Tara and I moved out into our own lives, and our mother quit smoking for a second or third or fourth time, met a man called Bill Ventura, married him, and moved to the Gold Coast, where the blinding glare of the sun erased almost everything. That’s where they lived for a long time, on the seventeenth floor of a monstrous white apartment complex. I say this without snobbery. With only a trace of snobbery. I watched a storm from the large windows of that apartment one Christmas, a tremendous black mist crossing the ocean towards us. I understood the appeal of those windows.

After Sylvie was born, I used to talk to my mother on the laptop every Wednesday and Sunday, so that she could read a story to Sylvie and stay known to her. She was not what you would have called a hands-on grandmother. She was what you might have called a hands-free one. She was afraid of flying, she said, because it takes at least a day for the soul to catch up with the body. She sent Sylvie crystals in the mail, and worry dolls, which were choking hazards, and books about frightened unicorns who find their voices.