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Or maybe there was no mystery at all; maybe it was just that the hole in my life could only ever be filled by her, and that things had just gotten worse since my father’s emotional vanishing act. I was still troubled by the strange thing he’d said to me in the solarium the day before, and his calling me “dear” that way, as if I were one of his groupie patients.
    After Ev and I came home from the nursing home, we went straight to bed and made love—you would think we had planned it in advance. Life against death. We took things more slowly this time and were less grasping than we’d been; for once we tried to please each other as much as ourselves. And I was fully there with him. Recently, helping myself to satisfaction, I’d had a fantasy about Joe Packer, the lanky, droll hero of
Walking to
Europe.
That was the first time I’d conjured up a fictional lover since I was thirteen and Edward Rochester rode into my imagination on his black horse.
    Sunday afternoon, Ev’s and my kisses were leisurely and deep, rather than desperate, but when he began to caress my breast, I stilled his hand and hissed at him, “What are you doing?”
    “I’m
touching
you, Al, that’s all. God, you’re so lovely,” he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to my nipple.
    Later, we talked a little, about my father’s decline, how pretty Suzy had looked, our separate plans for the following day, and how we’d meet up again in the evening. Not love talk, exactly, more like married talk, which offers its own pleasures. In that domestic closeness, I told Ev that I’d asked Esmeralda about his missing paperweight, and that she said she hadn’t seen it. She had seemed insulted by the question, as if I’d accused her of taking it, reminding me of how awkward I often am around household help. I still hadn’t mentioned my evil thoughts about Scott and the Clichy to Ev.
    I untied the black grosgrain ribbon on my mother’s folder. There were handwritten copies of several of her poems inside, with words crossed out and replaced in red pencil, in the same small, neat, girlish hand,
her
hand. My heart knocked at the sight of it, at the thought of what remains, but I examined the poems themselves at first with a more detached editorial curiosity. Habit, I suppose. I’ve always enjoyed trying to follow the trajectory of a writer’s revisions; why the specificity of “January” instead of “winter,” the decision against alliteration in one poem and the indulgence of it in another. I noted all the references to nature, and looked for literary influences.
    My father had given her volumes of poetry on occasions like Valentine’s Day or their wedding anniversary. These were usually supplementary gifts, accompanying the main offerings of jewelry or furs. He had chosen books by poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sara Teasdale, or anthologies of love poems, and he’d written inscriptions on the flyleaves of most of them. “Darling Helen, let me count the ways.” The ones she’d bought for herself included Cavafy, Bishop, Dickinson, and Larkin, and she’d annotated those pages with underlined passages, asterisks, question marks, and exclamation points. I began to see a contradiction among the things that had most moved or interested her—despairing irony and determined joy—and a favoring of interior rhymes and ambiguous phrases.
    She’d kept a careful record in a green ledger of the submissions of her own poems, when and where they were sent, and returned or accepted. Some responses from editors were among her papers, including those that began, “I’m happy to inform you . . .” or “We’d like to publish . . .” The kinds of letters I’d once dreamed of receiving myself, though from more significant places.
    There were a few standard rejection slips, but they were either hand-signed or had personal notes appended. “We’re swamped now. Can you send these back in the spring?” “This came close. What else do you