“As much as we like to cuddle, sweetie—even as small as we are—I think we’re too big to sleep all night in a twin bed,” my mother said; she sighed dramatically. She let me know how sad she was about it. She told me we could always sleep in the same bed together, and we would—provided the bed was big enough.

Even in that North Conway bedroom with the twin beds, we would cuddle together in one of the twins—if only until one of us fell asleep, usually my mom. She’d been skiing all day; when her last ski-school class was over, she took a run or two with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan. These were black-diamond runs, for experts only. For a few years, the Vinter brothers could keep up with her; then they got too old to try. Abigail and Martha could never keep up with Little Ray.

Skiers at Cranmore Mountain mostly remember the Skimobile—those little cars on the wooden track—and the European-run ski school. But I remember those sleepovers with my mother. How we would talk and laugh. How soon I forgot how much I’d missed her. How quickly my resentment vanished.

My mother didn’t drink a lot; she said she was “too small for alcohol.” She drank only beer, at most one or two. She told me two beers made her tipsy, but I liked her when she was silly—when her voice was a girlish whisper, or when she giggled like a child. Sometimes, on a two-beer night, the most confounding non sequiturs would slip out, often following a pause in her speech. She would speak in a childlike whisper—secretively, as if someone could be listening to us. We would be lying in the dark, and my mom hadn’t said anything for a while; naturally, I was beginning to think she’d fallen asleep. Then her whispering, seemingly apropos of nothing, would start.

This happened in one of those twin beds in North Conway. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was already listening to Moby-Dick—my paying attention to language was more advanced than the rest of my development. (I had my mom’s small hands—and, according to Henrik, my poor penis was like my little finger.) I was in the gentle process of disentangling myself from my mother’s arms; I was about to get into the other twin bed, where I would have more room.

“Have you seen them?” my mom whispered in the dark.

I waited until I thought she’d gone back to sleep; it had sounded like something she might have said in her sleep. I felt her lips brush my ear. “You haven’t, have you?” my mother whispered.

“I haven’t what?” I asked her. “Have I seen whom?”

“Oh, silly me!” my mom exclaimed. “Was I talking in my sleep?” At the time, I thought she was.