Then it stopped, and I remembered what had bothered me about the story. I thought of my mother, opening the door and smelling fresh human feces. In her alarm she had thought first of cleaning me. My shame was still her own. And then the hands that held mine in the back of the truck. All those letters on the bed and under the pillows. Fine to write in that maudlin strain if you were dead, but … at least they were all kind letters, certainly the most loving I had ever written. But she must be very angry, she whose belly I had kicked in, who sadly wiped away my dirt. It seemed reasonable that the source of my life might not want to see how eager I was to discard it. She had not come to see me. She had not sat beside me in her most becoming coat with her purse balanced in her lap, as was her custom when visiting friends in the hospital. She had not visited me.

But two days later, when I was released, she was waiting for me. She was cheerful and matter-of-fact. She didn’t mention why we were both there. I was still stiff in the legs and this made a convenient excuse to put me downstairs on a sofa rather than upstairs in the defiled room. The failed room. Her failure and mine.

I stayed for two weeks. She telephoned from work two or three times each day, casually, and I answered casually.

A random poppy bloomed on the edge of the garden. I brought it in and put it into a jar of water. It sat on the desk for days. I watched it relax, loosen its hold on its wine-colored petals until they lapsed open, sluttish, drunken, allowing the musty purple core to protrude. The dark dust of the center had fallen onto the base of each spreading petal. The opening was a revolution of color, dark maroon to a blind, flat black that seemed to suck light greedily.

All that time I slept innocently. The narrow sofa warmed my back, the reading lamp cast a soft light over my head whenever I woke. In the days, I cleaned and polished and cooked to prevent the anxiousness my mother displayed, no matter how tired she was, if a blur of dust declared itself when she returned from work. It began to take a toll on her. She was accustomed to command it all, to dance from dawn to dark in a military surveillance of the premises. My presence was an interference. With the best intentions I could not do the dishes to her satisfaction. I made her a stranger in her home.