There were bananas for breakfast, just turning brown, milk. I made coffee and worked on my French exercises while I waited for B and E to wake up. Sleep filled the apartment like a magic spell. Soft breathing, the sweat of dreaming babies. Perhaps a wall of roses would spring up and protect me from the concierge. Perhaps there would never be a knock at the door. Perhaps we could stay here in this apartment and sleep for a hundred years. Perhaps we would never be unhappy. Malheur. Malheureux. Malheureuse.

I went to the bathroom to take a shower, leaving my coffee only half drunk on the table. This was of course a dangerous thing, a terrible thing, for a mother to do. A hot drink on the table, steam curling like a snake, tempting tempting little just-woken hands to grab it. I left it anyway, feeling already penitent. Already explaining myself to someone, the police maybe. I was often, almost always really, explaining myself to the police in this hypothetical way. Practising for disaster, for post-disaster, for the moment after, I guessed. Imagining my words, my hysteria. I had just stepped away for a moment! I would say, and I would be feeling like I did now, when I said it, with the panic rising in my chest, slipping its fingers between my ribs and cracking them open, or perhaps I would just be screaming when they tried to ask me. Perhaps I would be standing alone behind a wall of noise.

In the bathroom there was a mess of packets on the counter. A bottle of pills stood half open, painkillers that a pharmacist had prescribed to me for headaches. Packets of vitamin powder were spilled haphazardly in the sink. Several of the little foil and plastic squares that held M’s pink allergy pills were ripped open. The mirrored door of the medicine cabinet swung on its hinges. Bottles of shampoo lay on their sides, everything dripped. Everything was in disarray.

E? Had E done this? I should rush to her room, and wake her, take her temperature, make sure she hadn’t taken any pills, make sure she wasn’t now not sleeping, but drifting in some kind of drug-induced fever, unable to get up. I hesitated, waking a child was irrevocable. It could be nothing, the apartment was so quiet with the children asleep. I was in the bottom of a ship, I could have been all alone.

I crept once, when I was a girl, in the middle of the night into my parents’ bedroom and opened up my mother’s dressing-table drawer which, to me at the time, seemed like the secret key to everything about her. The drawer was filled with her tubes and bottles, her tiny glass jars. I loved to watch her take a dab of one thing, a pinch of something else. I loved to watch her looking at her own face in the mirror, making it, as I watched, beautiful. It was like when the peel falls from the apple whole, without breaking, her true face emerged like that.