Outside, on the Yonge Street sidewalk, the young priest had disappeared—if he really was a priest, if we actually saw him. Em was annoyed that he’d taken her sign, whoever he was. I saw our reflection in a storefront window. I was wearing a pair of my Roots sweatpants, what I usually wrote in—we were just an old couple, still able to walk. Em saw us reflected in the window. “It’s a good thing we’re fiction writers, kiddo, or they might make us retire,” Em said.

Our reflections in the storefront window were transparent—we could see through each other. We knew we wouldn’t retire; writers can’t stop writing. But one of us would die first. I hoped it would be me—my head on my desk, in the middle of a sentence Em would finish for me. She knew me well enough. I didn’t want to find Em with her head on her desk. I couldn’t imagine finishing Em’s last sentence. There are no mountains to climb in Toronto—no last chairlifts for Em and me, only last sentences.

What do we want most when we’re children, and crave more when we’re old? Consistency is what counts the most. We want the people we love to be consistent, to stay the same—don’t we? I can’t really tell Em what I feel about my mom, because Em has no reason to love her awful mother—nor should she. We’re alone in the way we love our mothers, or in the way we don’t.

When I see Little Ray on the subway, when she and the snowshoer are just fooling around, I miss her when she was even younger than that—before she met Molly or the snowshoer, when I was a child and I was already learning to miss her. Now that my mom is gone, I miss what was constant about her—or the most constant thing about her. When I was a child, my missing her was the most constant thing in my life. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

The older I get, this is what I remember best about my mother. I’d told her I didn’t like the dark. Kids generally don’t like the dark, do they? I said I didn’t like the dark, or words to that effect.

“Hug the dark, sweetie, and the dark will hug you back,” my mom said. “But the dark has other dates to make, sweetie—if you don’t hold her tight, she won’t wait around all night.”

“The dark is a she?” I asked her, but my mom was gone. Little Ray didn’t wait around. She just vanished, like a ghost.

I try not to think about the vanishing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS