I rocked.

“You can sit down,” she said abruptly. She waited, then spat: “It’s right behind you.” I stepped back gingerly, until my leg bumped the seat. I sat. She still stood. Her talking came from over me, still near the fire. Still far away.

“What did you come here for?” She sounded exasperated. I was suddenly a teenager, railing against a college rejection letter, or appealing punishment for breaking curfew. She was my mother. She was suddenly my mother. I cried.

Clink-clink, metal on brick. The fireplace poker. Impatience. I had to get myself together.

“She’s dead. She died,” I said, almost saying “my mother,” but I’d been training myself out of that. I’d been straining them apart in my mind: one slipping through the sieve holes, the other caught. Two mothers.

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” She still stood, cornered. My chair was between her and the door.

“I wanted to meet you,” I said. “I remember you.” I wanted her to remember me. Something precious and wriggly; something that looked like her. “You kept me,” I added. “For three years…” Instead of feeling abandoned, I felt chosen. Three years! Almost a thousand days. She could have given me up from the hospital bed.

“I didn’t write for three years,” she said. “Not anything complete. Pieces. I wrote Gloria, if that means anything to you.” The only mother her books had ever had. The children who were sticky, who terrified the protagonist. I was the sticky one. I climbed. I clawed. I consumed. I was the monster: small, agile, full of tricks.

The fire sighed. Wind in the chimney. My face and hands were hot; the backs of my legs were cold. I looked at the fire, which was a jagged-edged blob to me.

Another memory shot up in me like a rocket. The dog. The one she carried on the island trip. What had happened to the dog?

I must have asked out loud. She said, “It ran away.”

It did. I remembered it now. I was only two, but I remembered. She put it down in the garden and opened the gate. It ran away.

“No one could take away the money,” she said. “It was mine. It bypassed my parents. I threw it at you. I buried you in it. I hired that girl. She carried you around. She carried you. But you just kept reaching. Your arms were… so horribly long.” She shivered. “The girl wanted you. It was easy. Keeping you was hard.”

I shot up out of the chair. “What about boarding school? You didn’t need to… to sever. Why didn’t you just stretch?” Would weekends have been so horrible? Holidays?

“You!” she bellowed, from a deep, echoey space in her chest. “You’ve never had a child, have you.” It was an accusation, not a question. She panted. She snorted.

Men have wanted to put one in me, but I’ve said no. I’ve never wanted one. I didn’t know what she meant. What is there in having a child that makes boarding school not far enough? She must have really loved me, to have required such a vicious severance between us. You wouldn’t use an axe to slice bread.

“Did she steal me away?” This was my last fantasy. That I’d been wanted by both of them, only one had been more clever and more determined.

“I left open the garden gate,” she said, with a high, trickly laugh. That was the dog. Did she think the dog was here?

I shouted back, “I’m not the dog! I’m the baby!”

Suddenly we were old. Brussels was suddenly fifty years ago, Brussels was suddenly another country. I was here, in a cramped, too-warm cottage, in England, sturdy England.

“It was a long time ago.” She exhaled.

“I was born in the summer, wasn’t I?” I said. A Leo.

“It was hot,” she agreed.

“She changed my birthday. December. She celebrated my birthday in December. Was that when she took me?”

I laced my fingers, squeezing rings against knuckles.

“I’ll tell you how it was,” she said at last.

“She was friends with Gin,” she explained. “They double-dated. Gin thought she was all right, a nice girl. Bland, but Gin would like that. She liked being the one to sparkle.

“She was jealous of me. Of both of us, me and Gin, but of me especially, because of the baby.” She meant me. I was the baby. “She fussed over me, and brought me cold drinks that horrible, hot August. She offered to be the nanny. That was fine with me. She liked going fun places; she didn’t have the money herself. She liked being a better mother than I was. She liked that a lot. We were the pretty ones, Gin and I, and I was the brilliant one. And she was the… good one. None of us minded that. We all got to be the best at something.

“There was only one time it got out of hand. In Brussels. She chided me. The stairs multiplied, and you didn’t want to walk. You wanted to be carried. You’d been eating chocolate, and expected to be picked up. I said no. She wanted to lift you, but then what? Go all the way back to the hotel for a change of dress? I said no. She wiped your hands on her slip. She pulled it out from under her skirt and wiped your dirty hands with it, streaking the white linen muddy. It was disgusting. I was embarrassed. I told her I’d said no. She kept going. She even spat on her hand to swab at the most stubborn marks. Then she lifted you and passed in front of me, preceding us up the stairs. You waved your damp palms around as they dried to tackiness.”

I didn’t remember that, none of it. Not chocolate, not sticky hands, not those stairs, nor that time being carried, waving my arms.

“She was smug at the top of those stairs. The hem of her dress had a brown stain, and her slip had gone askew and was showing out the bottom. You put your hands into her hair and ran the fingers through. I looked away. It was…” Her breath shuddered. This was Gloria. This was where Gloria came from.

“I told her to take you back to the hotel and change. She left with you, but I saw her later. She looked the same. She hadn’t changed. She hadn’t even put you down. She was still carrying you, and you had ice cream, and it was falling onto the front of her dress. A white linen dress embroidered with pink and yellow flowers. The ice cream was vanilla, but its white was thick and yellowish and showed on the fabric. It showed as much as if it had been blood. She bore it like stigmata, the sacrifice of motherhood. She even tickled you to make you shake. Drops of melted ice cream festooned her frizzy hair like dew on a spider’s web.

“She was claiming you, as if she’d swollen up around you and squeezed you out. I don’t know why she didn’t have a child if that’s what she wanted so badly. It’s not difficult to get a child. I know that. Anyone can have a child. Even my mother had children, and she despised my father. She fought him off. But there we were, Gin and I.”

I never saw her, the nanny, touch a man. Not my whole life. She never left me with a babysitter for a weekend away, or had a man over for dinner. She worked as a secretary at my school during the day. “What was her name?” I asked suddenly. It had only just occurred to me that I didn’t know.

“What do you mean?”

“She called herself Linda Paul. She pretended to be you. You let her be you. What was her real name?”

“I don’t know,” she said. That answer just popped out of her: no caginess, no shame, no reaching deep into the bag to see if it might be in one of the corners. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“She said my father…” I’d never said that phrase before: my father. Compared to my mother, it hadn’t seemed important. “… was her-your-accountant. She had a picture of him, in white tie. At a party.”

“He certainly was not.” She snorted. “Our family accountant was a pig-bellied dirty old man.”

“Who was he, then?” I asked.

“A man in white tie at a party? Any one of thousands, I would imagine. It doesn’t matter, you know. They don’t matter.”

“I just want to know,” I explained carefully, wary of using up her willingness to speak, “in case it turns out to matter.”