She sat and patted the earth beside her. I remember the scent of sap and her hands as she cradled my face. It must have been spring. “You think I am hard on you,” she said. “You don’t like it that I have rules, and remind you of the reality of things. That I take care of your health, and don’t let you keep pets or eat hot dogs like American boys, that we cannot afford doctors and I sew up your cuts myself. And I do all this anyway, despite your complaints. I take care of your health because it is my duty. As I care for your body I must also tend your mind. We have discovered today that you have a sickness, there.

“You are probably promising yourself that you will never do such a thing again. You are thinking that you gave in just this once … And maybe that will prove true. But I do not think so. Yours is an old sickness, which has been in our family for a long time. My father—your grandfather—had it. I hoped that it had died with him. Maybe I thought that I could atone for it. A new world, a new life. I became a nurse because I wanted to save people’s lives.”

“What is it? The sickness.”

She looked at me and the beam of her attention was like a warm sea. “It makes you want to hurt living things,” she said. “I saw that, the night that I followed Father to the old place, the tombs under the iliz. I saw what he kept there…” Mommy put her hand over her mouth. She breathed hard into her palm.

“What is iliz?” It sounded bad, like the name of a demon.

“It means church,” she said. “Iliz,” she said again softly, as though her tongue were remembering. I had never before heard her speak anything but English. I understood then that there was another, shadowy her, made of the past—like a ghost and a living person bound together.

“Did you like it there?” I asked. “Do you miss it?”

She shook her head, impatient. “‘Like,’ ‘miss’—these are soft words. Such places just are. It does not matter what you feel about them.

“In this country, all the people are afraid of death. But death is what we are. It is at the center of things. That was the way in Locronan. In the iliz the ankou was carved on the altar. We left milk by the graves for him to drink, with one of his many faces. The cemetery was the heart of the village. It was there we came to talk, to court and argue. There were no playgrounds or parks for children. Instead, we played hide and seek among the gravestones. Life was conducted amid death, side by side.