I didn’t doubt Em’s determination to try living with me, nor was I kidding myself; I knew Matthew was a big part of why Em wanted to try. “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you guys—I’m just playing house,” Em told Matthew and me, about the renovations in Toronto. “I’m just thinking I might like to try a little socialism,” Em would say later, just to me.

That winter of 1997, there was a lot of driving to and from New York. With Matthew in preschool in Vermont, there was a lot of staying with Molly in the Manchester house, too. I was grateful to my mom for teaching me to ski, and grateful to the old patroller for making me keep skiing. Although I would never be better than an intermediate skier, Matthew and I would have fun skiing together for a few more years.

With all the driving back and forth between Vermont and New York, Em and I were often alone together in the car. I was usually the driver, because Em wanted to practice reading aloud. In the coming spring and summer, there would be public readings to promote Come Hang Yourself. “As a writer who is relatively new to speaking, you’ll have to find your reading voice,” Grace had forewarned Em. There was no mention of Madeline.

While Em and I had been taking turns reading the snowshoer’s notebooks aloud to each other, this was usually at night, when we were in bed. Mr. Barlow’s notebook entries were not linear in nature—they weren’t sequential. The little English teacher wasn’t keeping a diary; her notebook entries were her observations, not necessarily connected to one another. This was not ideal for reading aloud on long trips in a car—no narrative momentum.

I knew Em had been waiting for a certain moment when she would finally read Moby-Dick—an upheaval of some kind, as she’d put it, signified (in Em’s nonspeaking days) by her tipping over a coffee table. Between Em’s urgency to find her reading voice, and the renovations to her house in Toronto, Em had found the Moby-Dick moment she’d been waiting for. Lucky me, I was thinking—someone I loved would read Moby-Dick aloud to me again.

“You can see why the third-person omniscient voice is a safer voice for Em to be in,” the snowshoer had said.