It is the evening. Soon James will come and sit beside the bed and read aloud—at the moment it’s Le Petit Prince, a book I used to read to Tom. James loves Saint-Exupéry too, for his writing and for his bravery as a fellow airman of the desert. Soon my strong medicine begins to tinge the small innocent words with brilliance so that each one falls like a raindrop, wobbling and plunging through low light, and my comprehension of the story is lost in a drugged wonder and then I fall into the strangest dreams. Last night I dreamed with certainty that babies grow up in the afterlife and that therefore Catherine was fourteen now, living in the Alexandria of my youth, a foundling. Nobody knew who she belonged to, but a family I didn’t know had taken her in. All she knew was that she lived in Cleopatra with her tante and oncle.

She wasn’t remotely pleased to see me. She tossed her head and flounced off. I called after her, “P’tite sauvage!,” which is what Maman used to say to me.

I could never imagine Catherine at twelve or eight or three. Tom came after, so he was always too late in his rolling, crawling, rhyming, counting, he was always showing me how she might have been four years previous. I’m glad we had a boy afterward. Think of leaving a ten-year-old girl behind, using my last breaths to tell her about sanitary towels and diaphragms and what men do, all jumbled into a basket for the jolting journey to come.

Catherine won’t be fourteen. That was just a dream. She’ll still be a baby, I know, one of those hundreds of thousands of early babies who come flocking into the afterlife before their mothers. Who lie waiting just as babies wait in a nursery at the end of the day for their mothers to come from the factories or fields and take them in their arms and hold them to their faces and smell them. The thought of all those babies is daunting. I’m sure there will be people to help me find her, help all the other mothers like me, who never saw their children.

Hard to push the pen along. Great unwieldy thing. Letters sprawling outside the squares. Mais quel gribouillis, Yvette!

—

James, I’m sorry. Don’t let Philip spoil everything else. Like when you open an ink bottle underwater in a clear pool

Don’t let the pollution funnel up and color everything. Remember the apple blossom raining from the tree

Tom butting my breast like a lamb, nine days old,

and you laughing

Don’t lose this, James, don’t let his little face be shadowed by what I did. Please don’t lose

Don’t lose the best of us

—

Take my ashes and Catherine’s

Put them together but

Do not mix them

She is she and I am I