EMILY TURNS HER cat’s eyes to me.
‘How did Uncle Liam die?’ she says.
‘He drowned,’ I say.
‘How did he drown?’
‘He couldn’t breathe in the water.’
‘In the sea water?’
‘Yes.’
It is important to be clear about these things-Emily needs to dismantle the world before she can put it together again. Rebecca’s mind is a vaguer sort of machine, anxiety sets her adrift. Sometimes I wish she would focus up, but who is to say which is the better way to be?
‘I can swim,’ says Emily.
‘Yes, you can swim, you’re a great swimmer.’
‘Couldn’t he not swim?’
‘Sweetie, he didn’t want to.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you want a hug?’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Well, I want a hug. Come here and give your poor mother a hug.’
And she comes over with outstretched arms and a big fake smile for the ‘Poor Mummy’ pantomime. I should think of her as selfish, but I don’t-I think of her as utterly beautiful in her selfishness.
‘I think it’s OK to kill yourself,’ she says into my chest. ‘You know, when you’re old.’
It is hard to remember that they don’t mean to hurt-or don’t know that they do. I push her back from me and I say, in a tear-thickened shame-on-you voice, ‘Your Uncle Liam was not old, Emily. He was sick. Do you hear me? Your Uncle Liam was sick, in his head.’
She lingers at my knee and draws with her fingernail in the smooth nylon of my tights.
‘Like seasick sick?’
‘Oh forget it, all right? Just forget it.’
She jumps in to hug me, her victory won over all my concerns. And then she runs off to play.
For a week, I compose a great and poetic speech for my children about how there are little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind. Just tiny little thoughts-they are like a cancer, there is no telling what triggers the spread, or who will be struck, and why some get it and others are spared.
I am all for sadness, I say, don’t get me wrong. I am all for the ordinary life of the brain. But we fill up sometimes, like those little wooden birds that sit on a pole-we fill up with it, until donk, we tilt into the drink.