“I’m happy to hear it if it’s all right with your mother,” I said, striking a compromise.

Eggy regarded her mother fiercely. Miranda sighed and nodded, and then I felt the child’s hand on my head as she pulled my ear toward her mouth. In a loud, excited whisper that felt like a blast of wind on my eardrum, she said, “My daddy was in a big box, and it got very sticky and wet in there, and so he dis”—she paused—“peared. ’Cause he’s magic.”

I wasn’t sure whether Eggy believed these words were inaudible to her mother or not, but I saw Miranda grimace for a moment and lower her eyelids. I turned to Eggy and said, “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

The young Eglantine gave me a flirtatious smile. “You have to swear and hope to die.”

“I swear and hope to die,” I said.

This seemed to delight her. She beamed at me, closed her eyes, and then inhaled loudly through her nose, as if we had just exchanged smells rather than words.

When I turned back to Miranda, I found her regarding me with a shrewd expression, as if she were penetrating my depths. I have a weakness for smart women, and I smiled at her. She smiled back, but then stood up, effectively ending the interview. The abrupt gesture provoked a sudden desire to learn her story, to find out all about this woman, her five-year-old, and the mysterious father the daughter had assigned to a box.

Before they walked out the door, I said, “Please let me know if you need anything or if there’s anything I can do before you move in.”

I watched them walk down the steps, turned around in the hallway, and heard myself say, “I’m so lonely.” It shook me because this sentence had become an involuntary verbal tic. I seldom realized I was saying it or perhaps didn’t know that I was speaking the words out loud. I had started to experience this unbidden mantra even while I was still married, mumbling it before sleep, in the bathroom, or even at the grocery store, but it had become more pronounced in the last year. My father had it with my mother’s name. While he was sitting alone in a chair, before he dozed off, and later, in his room at the nursing home, he would utter Marit over and over. He did it sometimes when she was within hearing distance. If she answered the call, he seemed not to know that he had spoken. That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed.