Above her head, a security camera and grainy, grey images of us on a screen. She lifts her chin off her hand and asks, That all?

Yes, that’s all.

Then I go home and write.

I press the words out. To recover is a kind of forgetting. I do not want to forget. The words will not stay in place. Find the correct home in each phrase for each word. The exact common word. The precise formal word. There must be no drama for drama’s sake. There must be only correct telling. There is a correct word for each feeling. Resist the decay of imprecision. Find the simple word and the clear image, planets in a dark universe.

Only pain resists words. Approach it as a silent supplicant and leave all that you are on a distant shore.

—

After I finished writing, I stacked the pages on my desk. History changes, like borders. The story changes according to who tells it.

An unexpected storm blew up. Mam was out gliding and sudden winds took her far away. Her wing caught, they said, on a thousand-year-old tree growing from the rock of the escarpment and the fuselage smashed down and snapped like balsa wood. Her jaw and both arms were broken. I almost lost her.

While she was recovering, her arms in casts and her jaw wired shut, I sat with her. Each day the same: wake, get up, lift her, pivot her and slide the legs over the bed, then shift to the front and hold her under the armpits, try not to jostle her. Put her on the commode. Wait, wipe and sponge bathe. Change her clothes and strip the sheets and put them in the wash and prepare her liquid breakfast and hold the straw and then hold her from the back the way I did when Biddy was learning to ice-skate, walk with her across the room because she refused a wheelchair. Keep the legs strong. We devised a primitive system of blinking to talk, one blink for yes and two blinks for no.

On the third day she refused to take the straw. I asked if she wanted a vegetable drink, two blinks, was she in pain, two blinks, did she want the commode, two blinks, did she want to practise walking, two blinks, was she depressed, two blinks, well then what the hell? Her eyes moved and rested on my notebook and pens and I asked if she wanted me to read her what I had written, one blink.

On the telephone that night, I told Edina about reading aloud.

Edina asked, Did she like it?

Who could like such a story. But she likes hearing what I write. We will finish tomorrow.

Edina laughed, I like my daughter’s work too. Whatever she does. The daughter redeems the mother’s life.

The next day I read to the end. After the testimony of Merima, Mam cried, and I reached over and dabbed her face.

Shall I finish?