5

The days grew hotter and hotter. Soon it was too hot to eat anything but lemons. We squeezed the juice over sugar and ice. I stopped cooking. Even boiling water for pasta could not be done. Instead I bought bags and bags of lemons at the market. I walked up and down the stalls, between the laden tables, pulling E, pushing B. In the apartment we stacked the lemons in bowls, crowding the small kitchen table with gleaming yellow towers of fruit. B loved to play with them, their intoxicating shapes, he would bat at them if I put them on the floor and send them rolling. He had a tooth now and he loved to sink it right into their bright delightful rinds.

I liked to have a bowl of lemons in the guest room. The best bowl, the best lemons. I dragged one of the rental-company chairs into the little room and set the bowl on it. The chair was the wrong colour, but the lemons, the idea of them, was right. It was so hot though, in there, that the lemons turned to rot. Always, almost within hours, they broke out in a pulpy grey fuzz and I would have to take them out and throw them away.

The fruit seller, a large woman with sunburnt hands and a faded apron, began to know me. She began to nod at me when I arrived at her table in the afternoons. It felt like an achievement. It really did! Well, what more could one achieve really? I was careful to nod back at her, moving my head exactly as much as she did. I didn’t want to seem stand-offish but neither did I want to appear overeager.

One afternoon she gave E a paper carton of glistening red berries. Back at the apartment we tasted them together, dipping them one by one into a bowl of ice-cold cream while the baby slept. We licked our fingers. We popped the berries between our teeth. With children the future is always unimaginable, it is so uncertain as to be nothing. Less than that. As a mother, I had had to learn that, that the only sweetness you’re ever guaranteed, the full extent, is right now, the moment right between your teeth.

The next day I steered E to a different table to buy the lemons. I was worried the woman would think we expected another gift. It was so hard, it was always so hard to know what was right. I nodded at the lady as we passed though and she nodded back at me.

I began to fall asleep sometimes. Sometimes when I didn’t mean to I mean. I would just wink out like a candle, like the shutter of a camera closing, and then, click the shutter would open and I would find E staring at me as if she’d asked a question and I hadn’t answered her. Or as if I had answered her and the answer hadn’t been right. Anyway, I began to be afraid that I might fall asleep and E might wander off, out of the apartment, without me. So I began to remind myself always to lock the apartment door when we were inside. B was beginning to crawl a bit so I also began to lock the windows. It was just a question of practicality, of having to outsmart myself because, well, I couldn’t quite trust myself. Not all the time. It made the apartment hotter, the locked windows, but it seemed the only way to keep us all safe, at least until M was back and I could sleep properly. At least until then.