She let the napkin drop, stuck a cigarette between her lips and lit it. I could hear the crackling of the paper burning. She looked up then, with the cigarette stuck between her lips, and her face, facing me was different, not mysterious, just tired, lonely maybe and I saw immediately the foolishness of what I was doing. Standing in the street in my scrubbed face, waiting to be asked to sit down.

Back inside the apartment, I ran my hands over the kitchen counter and checked three times that the refrigerator was shut tight and not open at all. I sat at the table, then lay down on the kitchen floor. I closed my eyes, hoping that the hum of the refrigerator would put me to sleep. M had been gone a week and I pressed my face into the warm kitchen floor as if I were pressing it into his back. I wondered if he came home right then, if he opened the door, what he would have said, finding me there like that.

Morning came, like it does, and I was on the kitchen floor and I had been there all night and I peeled myself up off it and got on with things. My hands shook a little when I held B. I couldn’t dress him anymore, he seemed to change every minute. Sometimes he was too big for his clothes, sometimes he looked lost in them, swimming in loose fabric that could twist around his neck the moment I looked away. Every minute was capable of bringing such terrible things. I left him in his pyjamas.

E dressed herself. We got to the park early in the morning. We had the water pump all to ourselves. I had forgotten to pack the tools so E made do with her hands. Scooping the water onto the sand tiny handfuls at a time. She mounded the wet sand up around the giraffes, coaxing it into small hills, from which the giraffes, buried up to their long necks, cried for her help.

Sometimes she would rescue them right away, sometimes she would ignore them, piling the sand higher and higher, building houses, whole towns, out of sticks on top of them, and bringing smaller sticks, people, to live inside. All the sticks knew to ignore the sounds coming from underneath their feet. It hardly mattered, the water from the pump would always, eventually, wash it all away and the giraffes would be cleaned and welcomed back and tended to. Here, she would whisper to them, telling secrets in their little brown-painted plastic ears, here I am.

We played the days away and I marked them off on the calendar, all businesslike. At night I swept up all our things and cleaned as if we were expecting guests, or as if we were guests in someone else’s house, it didn’t matter. It took a lot of energy though, I feel I should mention, the playing and the cleaning up after. Staying on top of things. Sometimes my heart would start to beat very quickly and if E noticed or if E said, You’re sweating, I was quick to make a game of it.