On a cold day in midwinter, despite my mother’s shallow and dying breath, she pushes out the words, I tried. What she means is that she tried to take a file to her teeth.
There would be many things I didn’t understand about my mother. Where she kept her heart was one of them. Pressing my ear to her chest, I would listen for the confirmation of a quiet and regular thumping. My mother, Landrine, was a masthead on a ship—her eyes forward, unafraid and unyielding, even in the worst storms. And yet, a mortal, living among us, she made clear her judgment of those who scampered or crawled from their own power and majesty. In the end, maybe it was just that I didn’t speak the language of her heart that made it hard for me to summon it.
When Landrine was seven, her parents divorced. It was the middle of the Second World War, and her father’s absence was an embarrassment, given that it was not due to his heroic death on the battlefield. Landrine’s mother began sewing small red threads into the hems of her daughter’s clothing to protect her from the possible snickering of neighbors, or their evil eyes.
With the divorce papers signed, Landrine’s father, a butcher, all but disappeared, as though caught mid- incantation in a magician’s trick; all that remained of him were the tightly wrapped paper packages of meat tied with white twine, for which Landrine and her mother were grateful, given the scarcity of so many essential things. The bundles began appearing under the auburn metal overhang at the back door. Landrine and her mother would discover the parcels tucked where the frame met the wooden lip, whose gray paint had been worn away long ago by so many feet, including Landrine’s father’s feet where he used to tap his shoes before climbing the stairs to their door.
It was shortly after the end of the war that Landrine’s father stopped delivering meat to her and her mother. One Saturday morning in mid-September, when the meat didn’t arrive, Landrine knew her father had left her mother for good but could not fathom that he had left her, too, for good. Landrine put on her best dress, not the olive green one with the Peter Pan collar that her mother had chosen and especially liked, but the blue dress, the one with the black silhouettes of crows and smocking through which Landrine would sometimes walk her fingers and caw softly to herself. She let the two ends of the pink sash hang on either side of her, tickling her bare knees when the warm autumn wind blew.
Before leaving, Landrine slid a small box out from under her bed. When the tin box had first met her hands, it had been placed there by her father and filled with birthday chocolates from the Woolworth’s in town. Now it held small trinkets also from her father—cards in their envelopes, rings with plastic gems, ribbons, and even a nickel for the trolley, a nickle which she had decided to keep, should she need to travel farther than her feet could take her. Landrine descended the stairs on her toes, so as not to wake her mother. The box was silent, except for the nickel that knocked sometimes on the thin walls. It was a beautiful box, yellow, made to look like a wicker basket. Farm animals were embossed on its lid—a cow and her calf, a sheep and her lamb, a chicken and her chick, a horse and her colt, and a duck and her ducking. Landrine liked the feel of these meandering animals and would run her fingers along the contours of their shapes.
Landrine and her mother lived at the crest of a hill. On this morning, Landrine carried her tin resting on the palms of her hands and began her walk down the sloping sidewalk. Have you seen my father? she asked the early risers, mainly shopkeepers and tradespeople. She asked the pickle man, the fishmonger, the fruit seller, and also the butcher, who knew her father. A grape-flavored purple lollipop was his reply. Undaunted, she decided to try again the following Saturday. The trolley cars passed her, and she considered hopping aboard, but she was unsure if they would travel to wherever it was that her father had gone.
As the days shortened, the temperature began to fall, and still Landrine went out every Saturday morning, holding her candy box in her now mittened hands. The tips of the mittens came to a point rather than a soft arch, as they were her mother’s first attempt at knitting. The delicate peaks were like compass needles, each one pointing in life’s cardinal direction: onward. I found those mittens once folded in a small gift box decorated with ropes of green and black leaves against a deep red background, one mothball lodged among the fibers to protect them from hungry moths.
Landrine continued to go out every Saturday morning into the labyrinth of the neighborhood. It was then that she began eating oak leaves. There had been no craving to argue or reason with. It happened because of a puddle she noticed on one of these early morning quests. There they were: ocher, sienna, umber—layered, floating, submerged—a glistening world of valleys and angular caves. The sharp branches of the trees from which the leaves had fallen made a reflected sky of black lines. Landrine, ungilled and too large to venture into the tiny abyss, put down her candy box and removed a mitten. Disturbing the surface, she lifted a leaf to her mouth, and tore off just a bit with her teeth, then more. Landrine stood there by a puddle-world, gnawing.
When her father stopped leaving meat at their door, a different ritual began. Every Friday evening after dinner, Landrine’s mother would sit her daughter down at the kitchen table to compose a letter to her father, watching as her daughter wrote the message, cautioning her to mind her penmanship, and suggesting details to add and details to delete. The intention, hanging thick and heavy, was to coax his return to the steps, through the door, back into everything that had been before, but better, of course better.
Dear Father,
I hope you are well. Mother prepares the brisket just how you like it. Perhaps you will
come for dinner next Saturday evening?
I love you. Landrine
Dear Father,
Today my teacher said I wrote a good essay. I wrote it about you. I hope that you are
not ill. I send you kisses and hugs.
Love, Landrine
Dear Father,
There was a cardinal by my window this morning. I drew you a picture.
I miss you.
Love, Landrine

Landrine tried to write her own letter between the lines, about the shooting stars outside her window and the shadows of creatures, oddly shaped, that traipsed across her ceiling on rainy nights, and how she let them because everyone wants to come in out of the rain. Letter after letter came back, “Return to Sender” stamped on the envelope. Landrine felt ambivalent about the letters because in her child’s mind she imagined her father to be away, and away always meant a return. So what was all the bother about the letters and the waiting and the wringing of her mother’s hands?
That winter, long after the days had turned cold and sharp, Landrine woke from a tangled sleep. Her legs felt weary from running up and down stairs, past windows tall and rattling in their wooden frames as they reached up into her dream’s infinity, beyond where she could ever see. Suddenly it all stopped when her forehead met the soft curve of a deep blue sky. She pressed her face to it, and woke up. Landrine knew then that her father was unreachable. Her nightgown under her winter coat, its black, matted collar pulled up, and her bare feet in her boots, she ran outside; in her arms she held the tin, with its sun and green pastures.
Beneath a patch of ice she found them again—the oak leaves. Shapes of air were trapped against the underside of the tiny frozen pond. Over and over again, Landrine pounded the heel of her boot onto the surface of the ice, which became white, then powdery, until finally a jagged hole appeared. The water stretched and rippled. Reaching her fingers into the puddle, she pulled an oak leaf out by the stem and devoured it. The biting cold in her mouth and on her skin soothed her, but ever after, when a wind blew cold, her mouth would begin to water.
One afternoon in early spring, Landrine made a decision. She brought her tin to the forested part of the park and began to dig, first with a stick and then with her hands, until she hollowed out a space, deep and wide, in the thawing ground. She placed the tin into the hole and covered it. Standing to brush the dirt from her knees and hands, Landrine heard a quiet rustling. Something was making its way out of the dirt. The animals, snuffing and flapping their way to the surface, were dragging the tin behind them. The cow and her calf, the sheep and her lamb, the chicken and her chick, the horse and her colt, and the duck and her duckling stood there, specked with dirt, their tiny necks straining to look up at her. Landrine, just a child, knew what they wanted. She knelt by the soft patch of disturbed earth and began to bury the box a second time. On the tin there remained only a swath of pallid green under a flat and dull sun, the grass of the pastures having been trampled and eaten. But this time Landrine gathered stones, flat and smooth, and piled them one atop the other to mark this place where she would leave her tin, and its contents. Satisfied, the animals went on their way, trotting over the wilted grass. Landrine watched them, her small fingers cold and dirty.
Winter was the season my mother loved best; the warmer the days, the more opaque she would become. She had me on the edge of springtime, which meant I did not begin to come into focus for her until the following autumn. One of my earliest memories is of her staring through a window to the street, her breath leaving a layer of fog on the cold glass. Little One, come and see, she said, lifting me up into her arms, pointing to the trees and the lamplight. I could not sleep, and she whispered quietly, The houses are sleeping. The trees are sleeping. The grass is sleeping. The ants are sleeping. The stars are sleeping. The moon is sleeping, and the ocean below, too. The stones are sleeping, all of them. We can’t forget the stones, piled high, or waiting forever to be born from deep in the hot center of the earth. And now it is time for you to sleep. I felt the heat of her hands and perhaps then, yes, it must have been then, as she held me, so small, I felt the beating of her heart. My lids, heavy, closed just before looking into the stormy colors of her eyes.
Angels danced on my mother’s chest. They would arrive, swooping with wide wings, feathers cutting the air like feet can cut the rug when the music is right. But should the tune fall suddenly out of key, strangled and guttural, the angel’s lips would take on a snarling shape with gnashing teeth. I never asked her about the angels, and now she’s gone.
I tried, she said, as she unwrapped her heart for me, finally, just as her fingers held the ticking hands, even the relentless second hand, silencing them under her grip.
Since then, I have seen my mother, tall and powerful, tending a large vessel that sits atop a log fire with fierce and licking flames. It is filled with stones that cast about in the boiling water. They clang against the iron. The air is crisp, and the steam rises, thick, obscuring her face. My mother reaches into the depths of the raucous water and gently lifts each stone with her bare hands, as though they were not red with heat. She arranges the stones into a forest of precarious sculptures that are only possible where reason and gravity are not.