When E was born, when we brought her home from the hospital, I was so overwhelmed with love that I wanted to speak to her in a different language. A language apart from the everyday chatter that carried on all around us, that I’d heard all my life. I wanted to speak to her in a language that existed only for the two us. I loved her like that, that much. Sometimes love is like that though, it can be blind and demanding, it can be such a beautiful trap.

At the park if E and B were happy for a moment I brought out my book, Easy French, and tried to make sense of the words. I read over the dialogues, mouthing out the words to simple questions. Trips to the pharmacy, the library, a movie theatre and the park. I tried to remember the answers characters gave to the questions they were constantly being asked. I tried to formulate answers to imaginary questions that someone might ask me. I tried to find it, the thread that would string the words together, the thread that could knit me into the afternoon.

How old is your baby? someone could ask me. Where do you live? Where is the supermarket? I am thirty-four years old, I could say. I have two children. A boy and a girl, I could say. My hair is brown. My hair is short. My eyes are blue and green and grey. Each word I could puzzle out was a victory, something plucked from the abyss, from the edge of the world. A marvel.

In my apartment I thought about Nell. I thought about her in her apartment, about the closet she must hang her long dresses in, about the places she settled her children down to sleep. How she must iron their pillowcases, hang their bath toys to dry so mould would never grow inside them. How mould would never ever grow anywhere inside her house. How she must have tucked the hours all around her boys, fluffing pillows, smoothing hair, making every minute seem secure. I pictured her living in a house perched high on a hill above the tram stop where everything was green and frothy with light, where the breeze always blew very gently through the yellow-draped windows. Aurelie with her flowers, Nell with her children, petals and soft cheeks, I could see them perfectly, in their perfect homes.

I didn’t have a job, not anymore. Afterwards, after E was born, after I quit, well, it was as if I had woken up on a very quiet island. An island where it was always afternoon and I was alone, alone with E. We could have made a raft, rowed somewhere. I could have, but where would we have gone?

Sometimes I yelled then, when she was a baby, just to make all the quiet disappear for a while. To push it back and away from us. All that quiet, all those hours, just her and me in our old house, looking out on our old street. Sometimes we’d just yell together and hold hands.