In Chicago, the immigration line is short. February is too cold for visitors. More than the dull fluorescent lights and the stale, clean smell of airports at night, I notice the cadences: American and overclear. I’m so used to living in languages I partly know. Now, even in my native tongue, I’m slow to stretch sounds into meaning. Where I grew up, in the Northeast, speech is snippy, syllables ziplocked and released with precision. Accents from the South, fat on the tongue, grate the ear there. My mother buried the last of her Texas accent when she met my father. She wanted to sound educated. That’s what Clara Ann always said — Clara Ann, who couldn’t bear to be called Grandma or any variation of it. In the North, she’d say, speech forgot its sing.

I slide my passport to the immigration officer. He has gold buttons on his shirt and a white mustache that twitches as he reads the visas, marks the countries I’ve visited, and squints to reconcile my face with my photograph. He sees what I can’t — whatever binds me to myself.

“Well,” he says, stamping my passport, “welcome home.”

The sound lingers, the hum of the m.

Some people leave home and never return. I’ve been abroad ten years, and the home to which I’m traveling is a house I’ve never seen. My journey has the shape of a return but isn’t one, because we are supposed to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, and because itinerant heroes and prodigal daughters bring wisdom in their baggage, and any wisdom I’ve accrued is in storage in Brussels with my canvases, keyboard, summer dresses, brushes, and sketchbooks — the things I drove there from Paris because it was cheaper.

After immigration, I board a tiny plane to the town where my mother moved three years ago. I should have come sooner. The flight is short, but our landing is thwarted by heavy fog. Twice the buildings come even with my sightline, but we nose up after grazing ground. A voice over the loudspeaker says it wishes it had better news, setting off sighs throughout the cabin. From the air, I sense my mother’s disappointment, and I wonder whether my ambivalence has drawn out the fog to delay my return. The plane will fly back to Chicago.

I’d have preferred to return to an America I know — Massachusetts, where I grew up, where my father still lives. But what homecoming is ever straightforward? Think of Odysseus. My mother would. She teaches ancient Greek literature to university students. And this isn’t a homecoming, really. This is just a visit. Ten days.

Just over a year ago, when Clara Ann died, my mother asked me to fly to Texas for the funeral. When I didn’t show up, they must’ve called me cold, unfeeling, self-important — a Northerner. But I can’t stomach funerals; closeness to death brings on a nausea that lasts years. And everyone knows that it’s after the funeral when people need you most — when well-wishers taper off and go home, leaving you to life with a piece missing. This is part of why I’ve come. Not to Texas but to my mother.

There will be buses from Chicago to that town across the plains, hours and hours by road, and my mother will probably retrieve me past midnight from some tiny bus depot, her barking dog in the car fogging up the windows.

When she left my father, my mother’s vowels softened, but they’ll never be Southern again, like they are in the home movies on Super 8 that my grandfather made in the ’70s: my mother in a wide-brimmed hat, thick hair spilling down, curled with plastic rollers. Clara Ann cut my mother’s ponytail the day she turned thirteen and kept it in a box. Clara Ann couldn’t stand to see things die. When my mother went gray, the three of us inspected the old ponytail. We found it thick and brown, still in its ribbon, still the hair of a girl but coarse to the touch, dry, like the hair of a horse. In the film image, Clara Ann is sharp cracks of laughter, honey vowels, pursed lips blowing cigarette smoke across the lens. Jesus, Clara Ann, you always got to be messing, my grandfather says, setting the camera down. The screen goes blank.

Chicago reappears, a night-green nebula. I wish we could hover forever, burning fuel. But the cabin lights go down and the ground swells up, large and light. The man next to me rocks in his seat.

Morning comes suddenly. She lifts the shade and there is light. She is singing, her voice growing faint as she moves down the hall. I don’t wonder where I am. I’ve never seen this room but feel her style in the way the green duvet matches the marine curtains and flecks of teal in the carpet. Her voice reaches me from another room.

“Isn’t the sun wonderful?”

It reflects off the snow-coated ground — light from all sides and angles. On the wall across from the bed hangs a still life of poppies by Clara Ann. Above the bed is one of my old paintings, a thin blue circle with a gap in the bottom. The cobalt outline fades before it breaks at the base.

In the kitchen, we have black currant tea with heated milk. It’s the same brand from when I was little, but the packaging has changed. My mother wears sheepskin slippers and a nightgown under her robe. There is sun in her eyes. She is Clara Ann as she returns the box of tea to the cupboard. Then she turns back to me. The impression fades. She recovers her own delicate skin and full cheeks.

“There is also jasmine green or ginger hibiscus,” she says.

Black currant is fine. I ask her about the nightgown because it has ruffles and lace at the neck. Her style is usually clean lines.

“I like it,” I lie. “Is it new?”

“It was my mother’s.” She shrugs and becomes a small girl, ponytailed.

I feel seasick, untrusting of my vision here. My mother laughs and assumes her usual shape: “It reminds me of her. Silly, isn’t it?”

Here, with my mother, spaces come alive with significance: the arts cinema, the taco shop, the coffee bar, the pet-food store with its crates of stuffed squirrels for dogs. Beyond the clapboard houses of the town, farm fields are layered with snow.

Yes, there’s something alive, a pulse to this town. Winter air pulls close until the traffic light turns and the car rolls back a bit before we drive on. As we gain speed, I apologize.

“For what?” My mother looks at me; her gloved hands slide along the steering wheel.

“For not coming back when Clara Ann died.”

She looks back at the road abruptly, as if I’ve pressed some pocket of sadness.

“People can only do what they can. I trust you to do what you can.”

I look out the window and consider this.

The month before Clara Ann died, I sold two paintings, both from a series I called Crushed Squares, bars of red on white backgrounds. (The buyer was a friend of a friend.) It was the first time I’d had money in ages, so I bought a holiday in Asia, not too expensive. From a guesthouse in Vientiane, I thought of sending poppies.

“Did she say anything?” I ask.

“About what?” My mother is careful.

“I just want to know if she said anything before she died.”

My voice is raw and timid, but my sigh is my own, so I sigh again. Outside the window, the fields are erased by snow.

“She said she’d found what she’d been looking for like a fool her whole damn life.” Her voice, for a moment, is Clara Ann’s. Southern vowels. “A way home.”

“Nothing else?” I ask, knowing that Clara Ann hadn’t said what I needed her to.

My mother shakes her head. “At the end, she was talking with the dead, her mother and K — she was in pain. She had no idea what was real.”

Kieran is the name she won’t say. It still sends a shudder through me. I swallow my anger. We park and cross the fields, making tracks. The dog in her delight sends sprays of powder into the air. Gradually, the light fades, the night goes quiet, and we talk of new things. We bake bread, and the smell of it fills the house for days. I turn my cell phone off. For the Chinese New Year, we have dollar dim sum by the university and hot sake, which moves through the body, wakening the blood.

They had held Clara Ann’s funeral on New Year’s Eve. From Laos, I dreamed of a wake: stories, laughter, swing music, Four Roses, photographs of her in all her phases, flowers, the corpse’s green eyes under closed lids, twinkling with mischief and rage as they had in life, still withholding what she should have made known.

Too close, too tight, the family, too many things that needed to be said now buried with Clara Ann. She’d put a finger to her mouth, urging me not to tell or cry. We’re strong, baby girl. I’ll set it right. She sewed up my torn dress, cleaned it with soapy water. But it happened again. I was older — fourteen — and that time I told. The fighting began, my father wanting to press charges, my mother screaming at Clara Ann, who hated my father for taking her daughter away. Clara Ann wouldn’t ruin Kieran, who was, at forty-five, just a boy. He was her baby brother, fifteen years younger. There were no lawsuits, and things ended quietly, even between my parents. Their marriage would have ended anyway, they told me.

Now fifteen years have passed. Kieran is dead. He drove his truck into a cement culvert a week before his fiftieth birthday. The family said a man like Kieran couldn’t grow old — he was some kind of immortal — but I understood. I loved him too, in spite of everything. When Kieran died, Clara Ann cried so hard that scar tissue formed on her eyelids from all the rubbing, her green eyes hardly human. Her family goes back, my grandfather liked to joke, hundreds of years to the tribes in Ireland. There were druids in that line.

My father cut contact with the family. I should have too — except that they are in my blood, in the expressions that cross my face. What had it cost my mother to leave the incinerating warmth of that closeness? Now, with Clara Ann gone, there’s no way back for her. No return.

But my mother lives well here, at least, with her dog, her students, her love of things strange, and her books. I’m alone in my falling, unable to mark my surroundings with signs of who I am and what I need. I write on water and drink wine and smoke when I can’t sleep to blur where my body ends and the world begins. Freckles hide the age of my skin, and the clothes I like to wear drape my body beyond recognition. Places press into me, different and the same, cities where I flutter rootless, spitting on rooftops with paints like hailstones, looking without seeing, hovering, unsafe, above the real.

Ten days pass quickly in sheets of snows and our careful choreography around the house. In the kitchen, we sing Patsy Cline and Nanci Griffith, our old country songs, and I forget the blandness of my life: networking, waiting, not painting.

On the morning of my departure, my open suitcase balances on the arms of a rocking chair. My mother sails in, and it clatters to the floor.

I replace the suitcase and start folding again. She sits on the bed and asks: “Where will you go?” She knows I’ve given up my apartment. Then, realizing she has asked this before, she refines her question: “What I mean is, where will you stay?”

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling suddenly very tired. “With friends. I just don’t know yet which ones.”

“Won’t they need to know?” she asks, then stops herself. She stares at the carpet’s weave. “You don’t have any money,” she says, figuring it out.

Shame splinters through me, and I continue packing. My sweaters have holes. There are three hundred euros in my bank account, but a friend of a friend owns a café in Montreuil and needs a server. I’ll stay on couches until I earn enough to leave — Valencia or Granada — somewhere sunny and cheap, far away from the art parties, where I can actually paint.

“I’ll manage,” I say, dreading and craving the view from the plane window. I think of the charm in the French word for takeoff, décoller, and tell my mother about it.

“And coller means ‘to stick,’ the way you’d attach a poster to a wall. So the plane detaches from the ground. It becomes unstuck.”

She gets up and begins to make the bed. I watch her smooth the duvet and think of suction sounds made by things unsticking — surfaces, screens, forces, frictions, and the word transcendence.

“Stay here,” she says.

I hear the humming of the vents, the birds outside.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” She fluffs a pillow.

“Because I can’t. There’s a change fee.”

“I’ll cover it.” Her expression reveals nothing. Her voice is authoritative and childlike. Light is catching at odd angles, illuminating the softness of the duvet and the carpet’s thick weave. I think of arriving at Roissy, the press of crowds, the heat and dirt of the RER. I think of how long it has been since I’ve painted — five months.

“For how long?” I ask.

“Forever,” she says, her face impassive, her eyes very blue and clear in the light.

A door opens into a living room with oriental rugs. Dim chandeliers catch the stuccolike textures of wall-size paintings. I want to go closer to look, but the artist, a thin woman, her gray hair gathered in a scarf, kisses my mother and ushers us to the kitchen.

It’s been a month, and my mother thought it would be good for me to meet other artists. She knows Angela vaguely from the university. My mother described her as an amateur painter and professor of anthropology who had lived for years with the Mosuo tribe in Yunnan.

As we follow her down the hall, my mother turns and whispers — as if she has just remembered and is charmed by the universe’s humor — that the tribe Angela studies is one in which daughters are never made to leave their mothers. She says it lightly, but her humor peels at my nerves. I remind myself that this is a caesura, a beat in life.

In the kitchen, Angela serves us watery wine and potato chips and introduces us around. Half a dozen people are perched on stools or standing around a kitchen island. A grad student from my mother’s department says she’s heard a lot about me. I’m unsure where to put my hands.

“When your work was in Kyoto” — Angela touches my shoulder — “we saw the card for the exhibit. Your mother was so proud.”

“It was small,” I answer, embarrassed. “Through a friend.”

“Even so,” she says warmly.

I’d been working as an artist’s assistant in Budapest, supplementing my income with a cashier job at a paint shop for three thousand forints (ten euros) an hour. I was flown to Japan for a show at eN arts in Kyoto — to represent the artist I worked for. In Kyoto, I fell in love with a man who ran a bar where he let live butterflies roam. He invited me to exhibit my own work there. I quit both jobs. Months later, overcome by the urge for flight, I left so suddenly, so rudely, that I abandoned my paintings, small ones.

As soon as I can, I slip away into the living room to look at Angela’s paintings. The technique is good: fine brushwork blended with grand gestures — impasto from a palette knife. I most admire the precision because it’s different from what I do. I move around the room, looking in on Angela’s enchanted worlds: majestic birds with human faces, wings spread over nests and rosy-cheeked children. Ferrets, eyes full of mischief.

In a room across the foyer, smaller canvases seem to be united by a telluric theme. Only when I look closely do I see that the earth, shrubs, and trees have eyes and hands. In a painting named Persephone, tiny pomegranate seeds sprout eyelashes.

I go back to the main room. A man in a greatcoat is standing next to one of the paintings. His cheeks are pink with cold. He rubs his hands together, cups them over his mouth, and blows. Sheepishly, he smiles and tells me the name of the painting series: Fairy Tales and Bloodlines. The smaller room, from which I’ve come, is Chthonic Cults and Earth Goddesses. He has a well-trimmed mustache and looks to be my age, though I forget how old I’m supposed to be, having grown childlike here, comfortable.

“Egg layers and egg snatchers,” he says, pointing to a ferret-like creature holding an egg and slinking toward the edge of a canvas. “Stealing the eggs, see? Before they can hatch.”

He gestures to the next painting, which shows a boy climbing out of an egg. Testing out his plump little legs, the boy doffs his hat to a black eye peering out from textured plumage.

“But this boy has made it — against the odds?” I ask lightly, to say something.

“I don’t know if he’s done it on his own,” the man says.

I look at him, questioning. He tells me seriously that, as Americans, we tend to overvalue self-reliance, and that his name is Colin.

“You’re a grad student?”

“Angela is my mother,” he says. “We work in the same field.”

He takes off his coat, laying it on a chair. He looks more human now in the glow of a standing lamp. He’s studying the role of gardens in matriarchal societies. He asks if I’ve heard of Bachofen and Mutterrecht.

“No.”

We hear something break in the kitchen. Someone has dropped a glass.

He tells me about the tribes he’s spent time with and their gardens: the Nagovisi, near New Guinea, and on Lugu Lake, close to Tibet, the Mosuo, with whom he and his mother lived when he was young.

“Is it true that Mosuo children never leave their mothers?” I ask.

He laughs and tells me about tisese, or walking marriage, sensationalized as free love but much simpler: a woman’s partner comes at night, and children are raised in the mother’s home.

“Never-never land,” I say quietly. “Is it stunting?”

“Stunting,” he repeats. “Stunting in relation to what?”

“Don’t worry,” says Angela, coming out of the kitchen with my mother, “it brings luck.”

Every day is a choice, and every day I stay. A certain stillness can generate power. For years in gray cities, I never learned the names of my neighbors. Like a top note out of tune, I soared higher than I should have. In this small town, they already know my mother’s daughter at the coffee shop, the movie theater, and the grocery store. Her students are the docents at the three-room art museum, and they work at the pizza parlor and the bakeshop. They greet me because I am with her.

I drive alone to the art-supply store in the next town. I want acrylic, no oils. The smell of turpentine would be too serious. My mood is light: cadmium red, diarylide yellow, ultramarine. Titanium white for tinting. Three brushes and a palette knife. Four canvases. At the counter, I hesitate. Why begin again? I add watercolors, a few more brushes, and absorbent paper. Start small.

It’s cold, but I sit on the patio in my coat and fingerless gloves, staring at the yard and the paper in front of me. My mother is planning a garden for the spring and wants my help. It’s what people do here. My thoughts begin to fade as the loose knot that lives in the gut works toward visibility. I do four quick watercolors. Studies. One of them I like. It’s only when I work it up in oils that I understand its flaw. Everything — for me — is in texture, the way paint encounters the canvas. If I work from studies, that encounter is foreclosed: no risk.

I hear the door slide open. My mother stands beside me on the patio. We can both see our breath. I look at the canvas and try to see it as she does: streaks of yellow, clots of red — untethered from the gesture, the emotion, that made them. The moon has risen already, almost full behind thin branches, though the sky is still light. The door slides shut again.

The last time I saw Clara Ann was three years ago, five years after Kieran’s death. She told me she wasn’t fixing to die. I’m not any older than forty. That was all we said about it, her dying. She loved to lie about her age and didn’t trust doctors. She wore gold earrings and fire-red lipstick and tinted her white hair blond. Her face was tanned and wrinkled, and the skin around her cheeks had collapsed to make small hollows, which gave her a new fragility I didn’t recognize. On that last visit, there was a wistfulness too, which, for a moment, lent her the look of someone watching a boat unmoor and sail off.

She made crawfish étouffée, poured bourbon, and laughed. People flutter to her like moths, my grandfather would say. Her laugh would erupt like tin on tin. Even while she raised five children, cooked, and cleaned, she made dozens of paintings — fields and flowers. She loved to paint the ocean too, though she’d only ever seen the muddy swells of the Gulf at Galveston. Her seascapes were calm, her sunsets peach-gold. She was good, despite her subjects. She didn’t like my paintings: Why put in all the gashes? God knows you’re capable of just painting, been in school half your life. (Clara Ann was self-taught.)

I see them all — Clara Ann, my grandfather, aunts, uncles, and cousins — sitting at the round table, letting laughter layer over what we could never name. Why dig up the past? Old dirt, leave it lie. She would pull me close. My family is mouths spread wide like wounds, telling everything but the story that must be told.

Being here starts to grate at me, the way a garment tag scratches.

“Look, Madrigal,” my mother says. The sun is out, and the dog is rubbing her thick coat in the mud-grass. “You’ve made the spring come.”

The path through the park is soft, leaving wet dirt on our boots. There is the sickening smell of the ground coming alive.

“The earth is soft,” I say. “We should plant.”

“It will freeze again,” my mother says. “There’s always a last winter storm this time of year.” Silence creeps between us. “But let’s plant a few things anyway.”

When we get home, my mother cleans mud from the dog’s coat with paper towels. I go to the sunroom to pick cilantro from the herb pots my mother brought in for the winter. I have to pass my barely used tubes of paint and brushes. I stare out dumbly at the sky.

The art, maybe the passion, isn’t there; there’s a terrible part of me that wants only absence. I’m just painting the hole in the visible world through which I slink away.

After lunch, my mother fetches seeds and soil. Neither of us knows what to do, exactly, but with a spade and rake we churn through a patch of soft earth next to the rhododendrons. Their buds are hard, green and closed in their thicket of dark leaves, saying it’s not yet time. We decide to plant kohlrabi because my mother likes the name and the picture on the package makes me think of sea monsters. We make furrows and sow, not too deep, covering them over with earth, packing it slightly so that the seeds won’t wash away with the first rain.

“They will probably all die,” I say. The knees of my leggings are muddy.

“Maybe one will survive,” my mother says, but she is distracted. She has a seminar at four and hasn’t prepared. It’s Homer today, the episode in which Odysseus’s men are turned to pigs. She frowns at her hands. She hates getting them dirty. This primness never fails to make her strange to me.

I stretch into the leather chair in the sunroom. My body feels soft inside the house, too fleshy and pasty. I hear my mother in her study shifting papers, humming. I will probably sleep years if I let my lids fall. My limbs grow heavy, lose their separateness, and fuse with the leather. Over each eye grows fine webbing, threads spun from my tear ducts weaving inward toward the irises and pupils. The yard and garden blur. I have felt it often here, a dulling of the hard edges of the world.

When I wake, the sun has turned bright gold on the lawn. A gray chenille blanket covers me; my mother must have come in to tell me she was going. Unpeeling myself from the chair, I put on running shoes. The day has been warm. I won’t need a coat. I set off past the coffee shop and the university. My bones ache as I pound down on the asphalt, my body unused to this sort of movement.

The town ends, and I’m alone on a flat country road, where cars slink up fast, almost noiseless. Soon, there is only a silo, lone farmhouses, and fields. I stop to climb a low fence. I’m tired of the road and want to sit in a field. Above is what my mother calls a mackerel sky, clumps of clouds like fishes, lit from behind. The sky turns to fire, and I watch until I grow cold and the land darkens, a blue chill running over the fields like water. By a cluster of bushes, I hear the sound of hooves. Black cows like shadows, maybe ten, clumping close in the sudden dark.

Now there is my own heartbeat alive in my throat, my breath coming in gasps. I run back to the road, retracing my steps, lost, exhilarated. I don’t know where I am, but the road is a straight shot and can only lead to town. It is suddenly very dark, and there are no stars. My sweat has gone cold. I run.

The cars rush by, too close and fast, and each of them is Kieran’s Mazda pickup with its burnt-orange tape stripes and “Sundowner” in bubbly letters across its side. He is at the wheel, tapping the leatherette seat beside him. I get in and breathe his smell, my young legs sticking to that vinyl. I pause a moment in a shallow ditch beside the road, hidden. Headlights send their long beams through the dark.

I plunge across the fields. My shoes are soaked. The mud hardens under me like concrete. I run faster, almost blind through the fog, trying not to lose sight of the road. Finally, the lights of a town appear. I permit myself no reflection until the first houses are behind me — houses I don’t recognize. Following the lights takes me to a street of shops: a Busey Bank, a restaurant, people eating calmly behind a large window, a co-op. Relief. I’ll ask to use their phone.

As I near the glass doors of the co-op, a car draws up. I put up a hand to shield my eyes from the headlights.

“I got lost,” I say to Colin’s stare from the rolled-down window.

“Jesus, Madi, you’re shaking. Get in.” He makes room, tossing a grocery bag to the back seat, then hands me a red plaid blanket from the back and turns the heating vents toward me.

At the traffic light, I’m still shaking, and Colin takes off his large red sweater and hands it to me. It’s warm from his body.

“Your lips are blue,” he says after a few minutes.

I press them together. Outside the fogged-up window is the university.

When we arrive, the dog starts barking from the dark house. My mother isn’t home yet, and I’m relieved when Colin offers to wait with me.

“Get yourself a hot shower,” he says.

I run the shower for ages, revived by the hot water. There is a pricking at my tear ducts, a little hit of hysteria. I dry and dress.

Colin has found the soil in the sunroom, still unpacked from earlier in the day. He is looking through the seed packages.

“You’re not putting this straight into the earth?” he asks.

I shrug. “Kholrabi and spinach are supposed to be hardy.”

“They’ll die,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

We don’t have germination trays, so we take egg cartons from the fridge. Colin’s thin fingers fill the pots with soil, and he makes shallow indents in the dirt. I drop in the seeds. Our fingers, clumsy, colliding, spread soil over the holes. We move the plants into the sunroom on laminate breakfast trays.

“What’s the painting?” Colin asks. “I was looking at it while you were in the shower.”

He points to a print of a woman holding a pomegranate, her red lips curled in a sneer.

“My mother loves it. Rosetti’s Proserpine. She has one in her office too.”

“She looks like a vampire,” Colin says. “I guess she is, sort of.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Persephone.”

I look at her again — of course she would sneer.

Colin steps around me, his body stirring a current of air. He’s wearing his red sweater again, and his black hair is too long. He looks like the boy in Angela’s paintings.

By the time my mother arrives, Colin and I are drawing dogs and vegetables in loose dirt on the kitchen bar and drinking beers from his co-op bags.

My mother seems surprised. Her cheeks and nose are red with cold. We clean the counter and show her what we’ve planted.

My mother asks Colin about the Nagovisi and their gardens over dinner — we make green curry with eggplant — but he shifts the subject back to her yard garden. He tells us how to arrange the crops in rows and explains the best order for planting. He offers to put in a raised bed for us.

The last winter storm comes, as my mother said it would. After two days marooned by snow, we are irritable. The dog paces the kitchen. Her bark is shrill. We feed her more than we should.

When the sun returns, we need to go somewhere. The dog has to run.

On the spring equinox, snow still on the roads, we coax the dog into the car and go forty miles to a homestead Angela recommended. It’s run by a woman called Beth, who grows fruit trees from seed, makes jams and cheeses, and sells eggs and unpasteurized milk.

We arrive at midday. Beth is expecting us. She serves us a lunch of her cheeses and a tart of kale and carrots grown in her cold frames. She is a tiny woman, her face a sea of wrinkles. We take lunch scraps and carrot peels to the chickens before Beth gives us a tour. The farm has been in her family for five generations. My mother wants to know how she keeps it up all by herself, and Beth runs down the list of those who come to help her. We buy eggs and raw milk, which she packs for us in portable coolers, then sit with Beth in her living room and introduce our dog to hers. They circle and sniff each other. Beth has put on red lipstick and started a fire. Over hot coffee, I listen to the crackle of the logs, far from all the lives I haven’t made.

As we are leaving, Beth presses into my palm a smooth stone that turns silver in the light. “Keep this with you,” she says, her lips shiny in the glare of the foyer, where she has laid out our coats and boots, coolers, and boxes of pie.

The stone is oblong. It feels good to hold it, though I don’t believe in such things. I can’t imagine how even the strongest Earth iron might quicken my resolve.

“It’s for self-regard,” she whispers, closing my hand around the stone. Then she darts outside in her slippers to retrieve her dog, who has climbed into our car despite my mother’s efforts to restrain him.

The sun is sinking. I offer to drive.

“What did she tell you?” my mother asks. She picks at the stitching of her gloves. The dog utters a long, hoarse sigh from the back seat.

“I don’t know,” I say.

I expect my mother to ask more, but she talks about putting brussels sprouts in her garden because the ones in Beth’s greenhouse looked like cheerful miniature trees. We stay silent awhile. The fields loom large around us, the sky flushing the shade of wild salmon. A lone farmhouse rises from the fields, lit up in the storm of color.

“It looks like the house in Texas,” I say.

It has the same wide porch and shape. All that’s different is the snow around it. I turn down the gravel drive to get a better look, wondering how we could have missed it on the drive up. From up close, the house has the same pink siding, gold-hued in the light.

On the banister, the paint will be peeling in all the same places. Suddenly it is summertime years ago, humid, and there are gnats, moths, and, soon, fireflies. From the porch, I watch the sun fattening on the horizon. Clara Ann’s hands are tying back together the bows of my sundress. The smell of her perfume is musky and sweet, pushing out the lingering whiskey and his breath, sticky, still on my skin. It’s part of things, she says. That’s all it is. They don’t get it, but we do. We know. But her hands shake as she ties my dress.

“Are you okay?” my mother asks, her hand on my shoulder. “Should I drive?”

We switch places and get back on the main road.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally.

“Sorry for what?” I ask, my voice full of a rage I don’t recognize.

Her “sorry” is Clara Ann sewing up my dress, retying the bows.

“You asked . . . ,” she begins again, but her pause is so long that I think she won’t continue. “You asked if Mom said anything before she died.”

I let out the breath I’ve been holding.

“I’ve been thinking about why you asked that, what you needed her to say — ”

Her carefulness with me. I am a child again.

“She couldn’t admit — she couldn’t say — how sorry she was that Kieran hurt you. She spent her whole life making sure no one knew.”

I call up Clara Ann’s seascapes, her paintings of lilacs in vases. Even when she was dying? I want to ask.

“It was a different time, and her shame was — ”

“Her shame?” I look up.

She glances back as if she knows something. Her pupils are small in the light.

“I would release you from it if I could. And Mom would’ve have given anything to undo the pain he caused. At some point, though, you’ll have to move through.”

“So it’s my fault,” I say. “I just need to get over it!”

My mother turns to stare at me, her eyes blue and cold. I break her gaze to touch the wheel. She eases the car back into our lane.

“I’m not saying she was right,” she says softly, “but it might help to know her story.”

I wait.

“No one knows — not even your grandfather. Mom pushed it so far under that I’m sure if you told it to her, she’d look at you like you were mad. She was fourteen, starting high school, when her father’s brother lost his job. He had nowhere to go, was on disability, and they didn’t want him drinking. He came to live with them until he could find work. They didn’t have anywhere to put him, so they hung a curtain in her room. It was a different time. There was so little money. A year later, Kieran was born. And everyone said he was Mom’s baby brother.”

She looks at me to make sure I’ve understood — and I do. It was in the way Clara Ann had always hushed me.

“I suspected for a long time,” she says, “especially after what happened to you. Then when Kieran died, her reaction was . . . But I didn’t know for sure until she died. I found his birth certificate in her letters.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone,” I say, imagining her with her father, brothers, and sisters during the funeral week. The sun is still burning somewhere, but the light is gone.

I am six years old, sitting on the carpet of the room where she paints, asking to use her new mongoose brush — which has a dark, silky tip and which she loves to say comes from China — to color something, maybe a flower.

On the night before my departure, I sit in the sunroom with the dog on my lap and wait for the sun. I need to get my things, but after that I don’t know what I’ll do. Ship them here? Or ask for the job in Montreuil so that I can save enough to move to Valencia, marry a bookmaker, and bring our child, a little boy, to visit my mother in the springtime.

At takeoff, Chicago’s buildings will rise like fortresses from the fog, and then blocks of houses will go on and on, the once-wild terrain a circuit board. I’ll take with me the house and all the color, and when I get to where I’m going, I’ll paint land and sea, long shadows on the terrace, cries of gulls and the breeze heavy, having traveled over Israel and Lebanon, across Cyprus and Sicily, to brush my forehead and cross the deserts of Andalusia. Unsticking.