Laura was an uneasy baby, though more anxious than fractious. She was an uneasy small child as well. Closet doors worried her, and bureau drawers. It was as if she were always listening, to something in the distance or under the floor—something that was coming closer soundlessly, like a train made of wind. She had unaccountable crises—a dead crow would start her weeping, a cat smashed by a car, a dark cloud in a clear sky. On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn’t cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.

She was particularly alarmed by the maimed veterans on the street corners—the loungers, the pencil-sellers, the panhandlers, too shattered to work at anything. One glaring red-faced man with no legs who pushed himself around on a flat cart would always set her off. Perhaps it was the fury in his eyes.

As most small children do, Laura believed words meant what they said, but she carried it to extremes. You couldn’t say Get lost or Go jump in the lake and expect no consequences. What did you say to Laura? Don’t you ever learn? Reenie would scold. But even Reenie herself didn’t learn altogether. She once told Laura to bite her tongue because that would keep the questions from coming out, and after that Laura couldn’t chew for days.

Now I am coming to my mother’s death. It would be trite to say that this event changed everything, but it would also be true, and so I will write it down:

This event changed everything.

It happened on a Tuesday. A bread day. All of our bread—enough in a batch for the entire week—was made in the kitchen at Avilion. Although there was a small bakery in Port Ticonderoga by then, Reenie said store bread was for the lazy, and the baker added chalk to it to stretch out the flour and also extra yeast to swell the loaves up with air so you’d think you were getting more. And so she made the bread herself.

The kitchen of Avilion wasn’t dark, like the sooty Victorian cavern it must once have been, thirty years before. Instead it was white—white walls, white enamelled table, white wood-burning range, black-and-white tiled floor—with daffodil-yellow curtains at the new, enlarged windows. (It had been redone after the war as one of my father’s sheepish, propitiatory gifts to my mother.) Reenie considered this kitchen the latest thing, and as a result of my mother’s having taught her about germs and their nasty ways and their hiding places, she kept it faultlessly clean.

On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for the eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura’s top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenie said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.

Reenie dug the hole. It was the gardener’s day off; she used his spade, which was off-limits to anyone else, but this was an emergency. “God pity her husband,” said Reenie, as Laura laid her bread men out in a neat row. “She’s stubborn as a pig.”

“I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.”

“I’m not going to have one either,” I said, not to be outdone.

“Fat chance of that,” said Reenie. “You like your nice soft bed. You’d have to sleep on the cement and get all covered in grease and oil.”

“I’m going to live in the conservatory,” I said.

“It’s not heated any more,” said Reenie. “You’d freeze to death in the winters.”

“I’ll sleep in one of the motor cars,” said Laura.

On that horrible Tuesday we’d had breakfast in the kitchen, with Reenie. It was oatmeal porridge and toast with marmalade. Sometimes we had it with Mother, but that day she was too tired. Mother was stricter, and made us sit up straight and eat the crusts. “Remember the starving Armenians,” she would say.

Perhaps the Armenians were no longer starving by then. The war was long over, order had been restored. But their plight must have remained in Mother’s mind as a kind of slogan. A slogan, an invocation, a prayer, a charm. Toast crusts must be eaten in memory of these Armenians, whoever they may have been; not to eat them was a sacrilege. Laura and I must have understood the weight of this charm, because it never failed to work.

Mother didn’t eat her crusts that day. I remember that. Laura went on at her about it—What about the crusts, what about the starving Armenians? —until finally Mother admitted that she didn’t feel well. When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I’d known it all along.

Reenie said God made people the way she herself made bread, and that was why the mothers’ tummies got fat when they were going to have a baby: it was the dough rising. She said her dimples were God’s thumb-prints. She said she had three dimples and some people had none, because God didn’t make everyone the same, otherwise he would just get bored of it all, and so he dished things out unevenly. It didn’t seem fair, but it would come out fair at the end.

Laura was six, by the time I’m remembering. I was nine. I knew that babies weren’t made out of bread dough—that was a story for little kids like Laura. Still, no detailed explanation had been offered.

In the afternoons Mother had been sitting in the gazebo, knitting. She was knitting a tiny sweater, like the ones she still knitted for the Overseas Refugees. Was this one for a refugee too? I wanted to know. Perhaps, she’d say, and smile. After a while she would doze off, her eyes sliding heavily shut, her round glasses slipping down. She told us she had eyes in the back of her head, and that was how she knew when we’d done something wrong. I pictured these eyes as flat and shiny and without colour, like the glasses.

It wasn’t like her to sleep so much in the afternoons. There were a lot of things that weren’t like her. Laura wasn’t worried, but I was. I was putting two and two together, out of what I’d been told and what I’d overheard. What I’d been told: “Your mother needs her rest, so you’ll have to keep Laura out of her hair.” What I’d overheard (Reenie to Mrs. Hillcoate): “The doctor’s not pleased. It might be nip and tuck. Of course she’d never say a word, but she’s not a well woman. Some men can never leave well enough alone.” So I knew my mother was in danger of some kind, something to do with her health and something to do with Father, though I was unsure what this danger might be.

I’ve said Laura wasn’t worried, but she was clinging to Mother more than usual. She sat cross-legged in the cool space beneath the gazebo when Mother was resting, or behind her chair when she was writing letters. When Mother was in the kitchen, Laura liked to be under the kitchen table. She’d drag a cushion in there, and her alphabet book, the one that used to be mine. She had a lot of things that used to be mine.

Laura could read by now, or at least she could read the alphabet book. Her favourite letter was L, because it was her own letter, the one that began her name, L is for Laura. I never had a favourite letter that began my name—I is for Iris —because I was everybody’s letter.

L is for Lily,

So pure and so white;

It opens by day,

And it closes at night.

The picture in the book was of two children in old-fashioned straw bonnets, next to a water lily with a fairy sitting on it—bare-naked, with shimmering, gauzy wings. Reenie used to say that if she came across a thing like that she’d go after it with the fly swatter. She’d say it to me, for a joke, but she didn’t say it to Laura because Laura might take it seriously and get upset.