There must have been a part of the night that passed without me realizing, because the next thing I knew, it was morning and I was waking up. I was pressed against the door of the guest room with my neck and shoulders horribly cramped, almost unmovable. I was waking up and it was morning and, well, I could feel that the thing was over. Whatever it had been. It was over, poof and gone like dust and I could stand and stretch and run my fingers through my hair. Hah! I could say. Hah! It was like standing on the top of a mountain, me saying it, the words all bold and free on my lips.

B woke up and was hungry. E woke up and was hungry. There were red marks on their faces and arms, a heat rash or kisses. We were out of yogurt. I got them ready and we all stumbled to the little store, half in our pyjamas and half out.

We filled our basket with warm croissants and almonds and milk from Gruyères, just because we could fill our basket with things like that. E found a package of lace-like cheese cut fine and curled in on itself, arranged behind its plastic window to look like flowers. We bought that too even though it was six francs because we were lucky and happy and when the checkout girl asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I nodded and said, Oui, merci, because we had. And also because miraculously, I’d understood what she’d said to me. Then she touched the side of her face and said something I didn’t understand, so I only smiled and said have a good day with my best words and my careful accent, Bonne journée, I said, like that, and took the plastic handles of the bag and left.

We ate breakfast by the pump. We ate yogurt with our fingers and uncurled the little cheese flowers with our teeth. We tore up the croissants and watched all the hot little pieces fall to the ground. We could behave like this, like wolves, because we had the whole place to ourselves.

I let B nap in the grass beside the pump. I let E cover up my feet with handfuls of sand a hundred times and when she looked up and said, Ready, I held my face and moaned. Oh my god, I said a hundred times. Oh my god where have my feet gone. Then E would find them for me, scraping away the sand from my toes and I hugged her, a hundred times. Oh I was so worried, I said a hundred times. I thought I’d lost them. Other women began showing up at the park mid-morning with their children, their strollers, their tiny buckets and shovels. I thought we should go back and get dressed but I also thought, a quick flash that wasn’t even really a thought, we should not go back, we should not go back to the apartment. We should not go back to that place. Besides, B was still asleep and E was saying please stay, please please stay. Sometimes being a good mother was just staying right where you were. So I leaned back into the pump and we played the game with my feet again and again and again. Some mornings could be like this if you let them.