My mother saved my life once, with a phone, with a phone call that is. I was maybe two, in the bathtub, playing in the water, and she’d fallen asleep on the floor next to me. She must have been so terrified when she woke up and found me. You were blue under the water, you were just like those swimming-pool tiles, she always said, when she told the story. Blue! Then she’d say, Why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you scream or splash around, or something, she’d say, Jesus. You just let yourself slip under. Phones were screwed into the walls then and she’d been able to call 911. She’d been able to put her fingers on the right buttons and find a person on the other end of the line when she’d needed, really needed, to scream for help. Help!

Always have your phone, she’d told me after E was born. Her one piece of advice. Ohforgoodnesssake, she’d say if she tried to call me now and I didn’t pick up. Well, it was stuck maybe between the couch cushions. It could have been any old place. I curled up beside E in her bed and went to sleep.

*

The next morning B woke up early and then we all did. There was no yogurt so we had to go out. The sidewalk was already too hot. We walked so slowly. E sometimes stopped altogether. B was sweating in his bassinet. It was such a short distance to the store. I could have flown there in ten heartbeats if I’d been a bird. I felt myself becoming unreasonable. I was unhappy with the way I was dressed, with my uncombed hair, my lips, barnacled with dead skin, were like tide pools. E stopped to watch a man wash the concrete in front of another building. Everything was always being scrubbed clean here. The concierge wiped my fingerprints off the front of the mailbox every morning after I checked it for letters.

I felt my breath begin to catch in my throat. I was beginning to sweat. I pulled E towards the store, harder than I meant to, and she began to cry. We only need two tubs of yogurt! I said to her, as if this could have explained everything. At the store E was mad at me but I made my best horrible face at her and said Boo! and she laughed and we were friends again.

When we got home there was a bouquet of flowers lying on the doorstep. Aurelie, the card said in beautiful looping fountain-pen French. The letters looked delicate, as if eyelashes had just happened to fall in that particular pattern on the page. I looked up and down the hall in front of the apartment door but there was no one there. There was no one there to tell me that these flowers weren’t meant for me. I grabbed them. The petals were cool against my cheek, cool and remote. As if they had only just now appeared in the world. I filled a vase with water and settled the flowers inside. There was nowhere in the apartment to put them. They were that marvellous.