“I don’t remember that it’s exactly what I wanted,” I said, and I heard Selma smile and say, “But I do.”

“What should I do now?” I asked. “And don’t tell me to do exactly what I would do on any other day.”

“But there’s no okapi involved,” Selma said.

“It feels like there is, though.”

“You’re getting mixed up there,” she said. “I’d take a quick shower. You sound like you’re in a sweat.”

The doorbell rang. Alaska stood up.

“The doorbell,” Selma said.

“It’s him,” I said.

“I suspect it is,” Selma said. “Deodorant works, too.”

The doorbell rang again.

“What should I do now?” I asked, and Selma answered, “Open the door, Luisa.”

OPEN THE DOOR

After I had closed my eyes under Selma’s kitchen table on the day Martin was buried and pressed my face against her shirt that was as black as the bow on a funeral wreath, I didn’t open them again for a very long time.

At some point Selma had crawled out from under the table with me in her arms. I held tight to her neck with both arms and she sat down on a chair with me on her lap. I slept.

My parents came, knelt next to Selma and me, and tried to whisper me awake. My mother had the hiccups. She always got the hiccups from crying. Because she was responsible for all the funeral wreaths in the area, she also made the one for Martin’s burial. “Not that one,” she had said at first, “I refuse to make that wreath.” She made it after all, the night before the burial, and until the next morning there was no other sound in the entire village and the surrounding forest aside from my mother’s hiccuping and the rustling of the bow in her hands.

“Luisa,” my mother whispered. “Luisa?”

“Let’s lay her on the sofa,” my father whispered. He carefully tried to loosen my arms from Selma’s neck, but it didn’t work. As soon as my father tried to lift me from Selma’s lap, I just clung to her more tightly, and I was surprisingly powerful in my sleep.

“Let go,” Selma said. “I’ll just sit here. She’ll wake up soon.”

She was wrong. I slept for three days. Selma later claimed it was a hundred years.

Because I wouldn’t let her put me down, Selma carried me for three days without interruption. A sleeping ten-year-old is much heavier than one who is awake, and Selma wondered if Martin could have held me up asleep for even a minute.