My mother had terrible insomnia when I was growing up, she would go through periods of not sleeping so profound that she would begin to hallucinate, the edges of the house beginning to fall away, what was left beginning to bend around her. Not sleeping could be like that, could take you away, remove you to a place over which you had no control. The approaching night became a terror, so many hours to be alone in the dark. She tried various treatments but the one that I remember was the smiling therapy. She liked it, my mother, she thought it worked, and so for years she practised it, the therapy, in the evenings. The idea is to smile, even though you are afraid, or tired, or beginning to see the corners of the ceiling fill with bats, to smile continuously for minutes, for many of them, at various times throughout the day but especially at night. I remember finding her sitting still by herself with her mouth pulled into a wide grin, or cooking us dinner and smiling and smiling without stopping even though I could see that she was afraid. I tried this now sometimes at night, the smiling for many minutes, I imagined my teeth were like the bright phosphorescent things that float on the surface of the ocean at night. I imagined that and other things. The nights were so long sometimes. It would be good if M could make it home before too many hours had passed.

We went to drop off the clothes at the dry cleaners. It really wasn’t very far to walk. It really was very far for us. B in his stroller, E walking beside me. We have to do this for Daddy, I said. E brought her giraffe and we passed through the front door of the apartment which was beginning to feel to me more and more like a portal, a barrier that separated two different kinds of real, something that could not always be depended upon to open, to be openable. I had begun feeling a bit like a crab leaving its shell when I stepped out the door. I began to feel like that even though I knew the thought was silly and wrong and not right. I balanced the purple zip-bag over the handles of B’s stroller and we tried to pass for everyday people on the street. People who made sense here on this sidewalk in this particular part of the world. I tried to walk like a woman who could be spoken to.

Sometimes, walking like this, slowly, in the middle of the morning, behind and with and in between all the other women who were also pushing strollers, who also were carrying zip-bags for the dry cleaners and shopping lists in their pockets, it seemed that we were all ghosts, in the way that we were pale, yes, and in the way we lurched and glided, but also in the way that we were remnants, in the way we were unable to recall what had come before. Ghosts of business women or doctors or ghosts of shop clerks or teachers, and of course all of us were ghosts of little girls.