Your greatest living fear was to lose my body for real. To misplace it in a big-box store or a fairground or on the subway. My body was more important to you than your own. When I was three, playing in the driveway as you were taking groceries out of your Datsun, the car began to roll backwards towards me and you dropped the two plastic bags you were holding, exploding milk on the pavement, and dashed towards me, hurling your body against the back of the car, shoulderchecking it, digging your heels in and locking your knees to halt it full-stop. You threw your body at the car to save my body. It was pure instinct. Your body’s doing.

I still remember the smell of that Datsun when we’d climb into it after it had been in a sunny parking lot, its hot interior smell of car plastic, seat fabric, and browned apple cores in the cup holder. The metal seat belt clips scalding like cattle branders. The Pointer Sisters cassette permanently jammed in the player, every drive underscored by “I’m So Excited.” The plunging in my stomach when you’d take a hill too fast, like the plunging in my stomach now as I consider your body.

Lying there in bed you seem no different than the dishwasher in the kitchen. A dead thing. An ignoble appliance somehow affixed to the house, part of the architecture. This bed in the bedroom of this house that you bought after I moved out, the house you downsized into, a house of no significance to anyone, just another container. A house that changed the acoustics of your life, from the muffle of carpet to the clarion of hardwood. That subtle ring of modernity, the chastening echo of a life newly oriented towards simplicity and cleanliness. A house in another suburb, even newer, with a marauding night population that keeps you up into the early hours, lighting off firecrackers in the park or racing down the straighter roads in their cars, their mufflers modified for maximum aggression. It’s a neglected corner of a sleepy city. A city that teenagers living here love to hate. The kind of city people say is “a great place to raise a family,” ringed along its edges with fields where teenagers go to drink and get into loud fights after dark, bordered by Cineplexes and oceans of asphalt and wide culverts filled with stray shopping carts. A city of generous on-ramps and off-ramps with swaths of no man’s land in between. Of power-tower corridors flanked on either side by low-rise industrial parks. Where subdivisions back onto wilderness and joggers encounter startled deer on their morning routes.