When my brothers were still wetting their beds, they sometimes spoke about our mother. They did this in front of me in the same way that they would later read aloud to each other in front of me, boasting and prideful, knowing that I had no way to join them. They said the following about our mother—when they said “our,” they meant the two of them. She had long black hair. She was beautiful. She was sad. She often hugged them, but sometimes she would slap them with great force and without cause. She sang the same lullaby to them every night until they fell asleep, but they claimed that they had no memory of its melody or its lyrics. My brothers, for all I know, were telling each other lies.

What I wanted to know was the scent of my mother’s hair. I hoped it was lavender water, as it eased my temples when they throbbed. I wanted to know the color of her eyes. I hoped that they were dark brown and ringed with green, like mine. I wanted to hear her voice, the exhale of her breath.

What will my blessed second remember about me?

Patricio, if you are reading this, you must be a bird.

If my blessed third is a boy—please bring him to me, God, not upon the waters of these seas but let him wait until we reach Santa Maura, the island where his brothers were born—he must be a bird as well. For them, I must imagine flight.

During my years inside, I had imagined nothing—I woke, I ate, I slept—and my words began to dull and fade. Once they came back to me again, it was as if I were learning their meanings for the very first time. There was the joy of “sunlight,” uninterrupted by leaves and petals. The rays that fell between my father’s house and the church in the Fortezza were sharp needles, pushing themselves into the cloth of my dress and the straw of my bonnet. There was the joy of my own “breath,” my own “pace,” my own “body.” There was the joy of the “bells” of the church beginning to toll, joined moments later by those in the center of Kapsali town. The thick walls of my father’s house had dampened even them. I could feel their ringing with my whole body again, and it felt as if I were surrounded by a back-and-forth sea.

When I was very young, a pair of hands had dipped my body into the Ionian, let me go, and then pulled me back again. I remember these movements repeated, perhaps many times. I remember that I was left to drift toward the rocks. I remember that I was always just an arm’s length away. I was being taught to swim, I tell myself. I was not being given to the sea. In truth, only the pull of the currents and the opposing strength of the hands have stayed with me with any certainty. I believe this to be a memory of my mother. I never shared it with my brothers because they would have taken her away from me. I believe the memory to be true because those hands were stronger than the sea.