My mother said it was our opportunity for a solid life with a tangible future. The Mists would never be anything more than a run-down idea, his computer program would never be finished, and we wouldn’t know how to function in the real world. Besides, our father had Wildflower.

My mother got custody of us and she decided we would live with her during the week and spend weekends with our father. She packed up, taking us but not her sandals and her hippie dresses, nor her beaded necklaces and patchouli oil, her Tibetan singing bowl and her gong. She left all her glass jars with dried herbs. And the strewing herbs tied with string and hanging from the rafters — the lavender, sage, rosemary, and meadowsweet. The vestiges of Apsara, she said. From then on, she would only answer to Matilda, her real name.

We had to share a bedroom in our house in town, in the Valley, but it was big enough for two single beds. She bought us Cabbage Patch dolls and Barbies and My Little Ponies. We had a Lite-Brite set and an Easy Bake Oven. She took us for supper with our grandmother every Sunday. Morgaine became very quiet, and she would climb trees and hide in the high branches until my mother would find her and send me up to bring her down. My sister could climb effortlessly, even with tears on her cheeks.

For all his sobbing, my father carried on as though our mother had never even been there. Wildflower moved into the tree house. Ocean said that to everything there was a season and love had many seasons. We were forging reality at the forge of life, stoking our fires, and moulding and bending our paths, pounding, shaping, and polishing, and then casting once more into the embers, reshaping yet again.

Our mother was into material comforts, Ocean said, despite her heritage. It was an affliction which had taken hold of society. She was a woman, and women were more vulnerable to material wants. This enraged her. And even then I doubted his logic, endlessly circuitous and never debatable. No matter what happened, you could put it off on the universe. It was meant to be out of your hands. Quitting midstream was hearing the call of another path. Changing paths was merely answering the calling, not lacking the tenacity to stay the course. My father had retained the same sense of wonder children had. He would try anything. He was not afraid of eccentricity. He was not afraid of the edge.

Looking back, it’s easier to understand why my mother wasn’t more concerned with our weekend visits. She was exhausted. She worked through most of her pregnancy. All through my twenties I hated her, no matter how my stepfather tried to explain things. Then I blamed him as well.

At first we did see Ocean every weekend, but he was busier than ever. My father lugged an enormous telescope to the balcony and we saw the North Star and the constellations, Orion’s Belt, the Big Dipper, the Milky Way. Later that summer he showed us the Perseids. He thought nothing of getting us up in the middle of the night or before dawn to see a celestial sensation.