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By Root 6813 0

but, alas, it was sharp as a knife. My life has been altered as a result. I’ve prayed to my Lord, I’ve tried in my way to serve others, and I’ve thought long and hard about a suitable monument." (Here he pulled out a handkerchief that was truly snowy, and blew into its starched folds a loud, prideful honk.) "Always, always I came back to the fact that your mother had loved flowers. You might say that she was responsible for bringing flowers to our great city, for making us aware of the blessings of natural beauty in an inhospitable climate. Of course I can never make full amends, but I do hope this little ceremony will give testimony to my terrible and continuing remorse in the matter of your mother’s demise. I am only sorry that your wife, I believe her name is Daisy, could not be with us today. Of course, I fully understand how difficult it is for her to leave a family of young children to travel across the continent, and I understand, too, yes I do, how emotional an experience this would be for her. We are bound forever to those who care for us in our early years. Their loss cannot be compensated. Our ties to them are unbreakable."

But Mrs. Flett in Ottawa, lying in her bed and awaiting her husband’s return, is thinking not so much of Clarentine Flett, her dear adopted Aunt Clarentine, as of her own mother who died minutes after her birth. How slender and insubstantial that connection now seems, how almost arbitrary, for what does Mrs. Flett possess of her mother beyond a blurred wedding photograph and a small foreign coin, too worn to decipher, which according to her father had been placed on her own forehead at birth—by whom she cannot imagine, nor for what purpose. She has never experienced that everyday taken-for-granted pleasure of touching something her mother had touched. There is no diary, no wedding veil, no beautiful hand-stitched christening gown, no little keepsake of any kind. Once, years ago, her father had mentioned a wedding ring that would one day be hers, but he has not spoken of it since.

Perhaps he has given it to his wife, Maria. Or perhaps it has merely slipped his mind. Tonight, lying under a light blanket and awaiting the return of her husband, a man named Barker Flett, she feels the loss of that ring, the loss, in fact, of any connection in the world.

Her own children are forgotten for the moment, her elderly father is forgotten, even his name reduced to a blur of syllables. She is shivering all over as if struck by a sudden infection.

She’s had these gusts of grief before. The illness she suffers is orphanhood—she recognizes it in the same way you recognize a migraine coming on: here it comes again—and again—and here she lies, stranded, genderless, ageless, alone.

Tears have crept into her eyes and she dabs at them with the blanket binding. The darkness of the room presses close.

These are frightening times for Mrs. Flett, when she feels herself anointed by loneliness, the full weight of it. Wonderingly, she thinks back to the moment when as a young woman she stood gazing at Niagara Falls; her sleeve had brushed the coat sleeve of a man, a stranger standing next to her; he said something that made her laugh, but what? What?

Her loss of memory brings a new wave of panic.

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her, a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life—she knows this for a fact and has always known it—but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternate versions. She feels, for instance, the force of her children’s unruly secrecies, of her father’s clumsy bargains with the world around him, of the mingled contempt and envy of Fraidy Hoyt (who has not yet written so much as a simple bread-and-butter note following her summer