The second pregnancy, the twins – whose names have escaped Kate now – they changed something in her daughter. Where with her first baby she had been angry and depressed, pushing everyone away, with the twins she was invigorated. Well, she would have had to be, with two of them – Kate remembers what that was like, the endless feedings, the always growing pile of laundry. It’s as though some basic survival instinct kicked in, as though her body got itself together and decided that it either had to find the energy to do this or it was going to die. So her daughter found the energy for two, maybe embedded somewhere in her twin DNA, who knows. Whatever happened, it left her first-born on the sidelines with her grandmother, both of them looking in.

Not that Kate and her granddaughter didn’t have fun. They spent a lot of time reading, and baking in the kitchen. Kate taught her how to ride a bike and how to use a camera. In the summer they played in the yard, collecting wildflowers and drying them in between the pages of the things you read; in the winter they built snow forts in the yard the way Walter used to for their girls. When her granddaughter went to school, it was as though Kate’s entire life’s purpose had been ripped out from under her – the same way it had, years earlier, when her own children started getting older. And over time, Kate slowly became invisible to her granddaughter. Which is why it seems impossible, now, that they are here in this car together. When did things change? Was it today? Yesterday? Or is Kate forgetting years of bonding, of shared secrets, of inside jokes that she should be laughing at?

Ahead, inexplicably, there is a stop light. Perhaps they are in a place where people live. Kate sees a place for cars on her right-hand side, where they sell the stuff that makes the car go. Maybe we can just pull in for a moment, she thinks, until I can gather my thoughts. But then she gets mixed up – the things at her feet, what are they, what do they do? And the girl is screaming and the car is speeding up and there are horns honking and people outside shouting and the sun is blinding through the windshield, the steering wheel unresponsive beneath her hands. Then they are bounding up over the place where the people walk and into a field of buttercups and thistle and Queen Anne’s lace, coming to a stop among these silly flowers whose names are right there when Kate wants them when everything else is buried so deep she’s not sure if she will ever be able to uncover it.