I bought tomatoes and a bag of oranges. I bought two bottles of wine. Local stuff. Chasselas. E picked a bag of chocolates wrapped in the colours of the Swiss flag, and I thought why not? And I smiled at her and bought them. Why not why not why not. The shopping bags were heavy and the little plastic handles cut into my hands. I didn’t have the stroller so I carried B too and walked slowly down the street like an apple tree with everything just hanging off me. E laughed and skipped ahead and I made my face ready to smile, just in case she looked back at me but she didn’t, so I let my mouth sag because sometimes it just is what it is.

A tram pulled up and the doors opened and E ran ahead into the crowd screaming and laughing like I had done at the beach as a child chasing gulls. Well what difference was there anyway. We made it home and I hoisted us up through the window and I put away our food in all the places that I had determined were the right ones. Tomatoes on the counter and so on.

The apartment was dark though it was barely afternoon. I wheeled the shutters down on the back window anyway. The metal slats shrieked a little as they slipped into place and I thought I should really tell the rental company about this because soon the whole thing might rust up tight and trap us. I was thinking this, thinking, I should call them right now and tell them, when I saw something in the darkness, something that crept up behind the closing shutters, something like a face but also not, something with eyes made out of dust maybe, eyes that were so familiar and so strange. I blinked though and it was gone and I thought, something is wrong, but also I thought there’s no time for anything to be wrong, for anything not to be fine and exactly right.

Later, I put E to bed early, tucked her in tight. I pulled the sheet down on top of her and pushed it under the mattress inch by inch. She fell asleep while I did this, while I told her goodnight goodnight sweet dreams.

When E was little, I mean when she was a baby, before B was born, M was very good at singing her lullabies when she couldn’t sleep at night. Many nights, when she cried out, he went to her instead of me and picked her up and walked her gently in circles around and around and around her room. I would listen to them, her maybe crying a little, maybe beginning to calm down, him singing quietly. Just a handful of songs but over and over and over again. Promising her, I suppose, that everything was beautiful and nothing would ever end. It would have been easy to listen to that song I mean and think it was a promise like that.