“You’re descending the stairs,” she says. “Down another flight, then another. Descend the very last flight and go out the back, down the bank to the courtyard, down through the passageway with its closed doors, all the colours. Now…which one?”

I still smell our tent canvas and Mont Royal’s night air, but I see the doors.

“Green.”

“Open it….So…where are you?”

“Snuggled in a soft, woollen cloak. My mother’s face is looking down at me.”

“Which mother?”

“My mama.”

“Which mama?”

“Don’t!”

“How big is your hand?”

“What?…My hand?”

“Raise it between your face and your mother’s.”

“Tiny. My hand is tiny….Am I a baby?”

“I don’t know….Can you understand the woman?”

“I know how she feels. It comes through her eyes.”

“What does?”

“She’s sick of waiting. She waited a long time for me. My father’s no good—he’s old and he’s not a good companion. She waited for me to be born, and here I am, but I’m not—” I feel unbearably sad.

“You’re not what?”

“I’m not what she wanted….”

My mother’s loneliness is too deep for me to mend. I am just one baby. I look around to see if there are other babies who might help.

There are flowers outside my blanket, yellow in the grass, but no other babies. My mother’s eyes are wet like big plums. I grow wary of the plums.

“What’s happening?” Sophie’s voice reaches me.

“She’s only pretending to love me….Really she’d like to go away, far from her baby. And she does. She goes inside the house. I’m still outside. She gets smaller through the glass, which I touch. I dislike how cold it is, and hard. I see her in the shadows doing solitary things.”

“Like what?”

“Snipping dead leaves off her begonia. Writing letters. Pretending she doesn’t know I’m here.”

Silence. I can feel Sophie waiting.

“I’m shivering. The whole day goes past. When my mother comes back she says, ‘See? You learned. I told you you’d learn.’ ”

“Have you learned?” asks Sophie.

“I don’t know!”

My mother did this often.

My father never knew, and Betty wasn’t with us yet.

My mother would leave me all day and then come back and whisper, “You’re not mine.” I tried to tell her I belonged to her and no one else—I cried with all my heart: I am yours! And she said, “Very soon you will not care about pleasing me, so I am not going to care about pleasing you. So there—live as your father’s soldier-son, you little-red-dimpled not-mine.”

Has Sophie fallen asleep? Half the time when she gives me an ancestral consultation or a hypnosis treatment she’s the one who relaxes—I suspect she hypnotizes herself. I open my eyes.