In the afternoons sometimes I called my mother. Look at this! I would say and show her something or other. A picture E had drawn maybe or a tracing of B’s hand. Look! And of course it was all amazing. Open a window, my mother would say. I can’t see anything. She would ask about M and the answer was always that he was at work. Well he was. And what about you, she said. But there never was much time to talk. There was always so much to do, so much to get done. Au revoir, I’d say to her. What’s that? she’d say.

One morning, while I ran to the pump, my keys were stolen. I’d given them to B to suck on, but, when I got back, B was holding a handful of sticks and grass and my keys were gone. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled all around the blanket looking for them, but they had vanished. I asked E what had happened but she only shrugged, as if keys and all such grown-up nonsense were quite beneath her and B only burbled and blew bubbles and was generally no help at all. I felt maybe like shrieking, but of course I didn’t. I just looked again and again and again in the grass, clicking my tongue and circling the edge of our blanket like a spider spinning a web, or like those seeds that drop, spiralling from the maples each fall. Going round and round like that.

I couldn’t ask the other people at the park what had happened, I didn’t have the words. Bonjour, I could say. Merci. But of course those weren’t the words I wanted. There was usually some way to make everything better, but sometimes there wasn’t. I made a note to myself to learn the word for help.

I thought of the door to the apartment, locked firm and fast and me and E and B on the wrong side of it. I thought of how cool the rooms might be mid-morning, with the shutters still shut against the sun, our beds all unmade, undone and scrumptious, the covers spilling this way and that and ready to have us back again. I felt such a sinking then, without the keys, without any way back into that place where E and B and I could be alone together. It was like a hole opened up, there in the park, there in the ground underneath me.

B began to fuss and I picked him up and held him close. The bedroom windows looked out onto the park from behind a little fence and I gazed at them almost hungrily. That’s when I noticed. The bedroom window, my bedroom window, was slightly open. Just a crack, but big enough I thought to slip through. I shoved all our things together, horribly jumbled into my bag, and ran over to the fence. It was a little fence, easy to get over, but still there, marking something. A neighbour’s yard perhaps, but it ran right beneath my bedroom window. I hesitated, but then we were all suddenly there at the window and I was lifting E up and setting her inside the apartment and climbing in myself, one hand pressed against the back of B’s soft baby head to steady him. I was actually breathing hard from relief, and I felt tears prick my eyes and wondered what it was I’d been so afraid of at the park. After all, keys were only keys, I could get new ones. Shakily I made my way to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and found, beside the cooktop, my keys. Set there so sweetly as if waiting for me, as if they had been returned. There’s a word for that in French. Coming home, and maybe, in French, anything could do it, come home I mean. Les clés sont rentrées. I ran and checked the front door to see if I had somehow left it open, if everything could be explained in that way, but it was locked.