I phone Helena and invite her to come over, I need a few groceries. Yes, that is something she can help me with all the same. If she has time.

She seems pleased. I can do the shopping, she says. Just tell me what you need.

After twenty minutes I hear her car driving up in front of the house.

It’s me, Mom, she calls out. As if it could be anyone else. And then she says no more for a few minutes, before standing in the kitchen doorway.

The application form, she says. It’s still lying here.

Disappointment. Her face and her voice, her hand with the letter.

She gives it to me. And now I have to open the envelope, I have to look at the sheet of paper with the blank spaces where Simon’s name should be. I have to say oh, I have to say I must have forgotten about it. I have to find an excuse, she is right to be displeased with me, she has taken over that role. It is the intention that I should feel ashamed.

I’m a bit disorganized, I say and apologize to my daughter. She says it’s all right, Mom. Fetching my glasses, she places them in front of me on the table and puts the grocery bags on the counter. Sit down in the living room, Mom, I’ll sort out the groceries. I go into the living room and put the application form down in front of me on the coffee table, closing my eyes as Simon usually does. Open them again. From the window I see a flock of sparrows gathered on the terrace. The radio is playing the Beatles. It must be the Beatles, Simon likes them, he has never been too old for the Beatles. What’s that called, the song they’re singing. “Michelle.” It’s a long time since I heard that. Simon should have been here now.

The newspaper is lying folded on the table. She is busy tidying up out there, opening and closing the doors to the fridge, the kitchen cabinet. I read the newspaper headlines upside down, managing to read a whole column, a whole paragraph. I watch the sparrows. Michelle, ma belle, these are words that go together well. Simon loves that song.

Or am I the one who loves it.

Do you remember that book Dad liked so much? she shouts. The history book.

I know what she means. His great hobby, battles of the First World War. She is still standing in the kitchen, shouting. Yes, I say.

I promised him I would read it.

Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble.

But the truth is I haven’t got the time.

Très bien ensemble.

I don’t think I’m going to do it, she says, there isn’t really any point. Now.

Is it written to a sweetheart, I wonder. The song. It really must be.

I don’t understand why they haven’t delivered the newspaper, I say. It didn’t come yesterday, but today it was there again.

I really should bring it back here with me, she shouts.

What do you need to bring with you, I ask.

She clatters the dishes, putting them into the dishwasher, pushes the door closed. The song is finished, there is someone talking now.

She stands in the living room doorway. Helena, who has always been the youngest. She sits down beside me, stretches out her arms and embraces me, rocking. I accept the sign of affection and hug her back. If you fill out the form, I’ll fetch it for you meanwhile, she says.

What, I ask.

The book, she says.

Why does it not matter anymore, I inquire. What do you mean?

I just mean that I won’t actually be able to tell him if I like it, we aren’t going to be able to discuss that book now.

She strokes her hair with her hand as she speaks, pulling it behind her ears. I can bring it to you, she says. I can come in again afterward in any case.

Yes, I say.

Mom, she says, giving me a hug.

And then she leaves.

SHE WANTS TO return the book she has borrowed from him, as though there really is a rush. An hour later she phones to say that it took awhile to find it. As though I have asked her to do it, as though there is a hurry and it’s important. Take your time, I say. I’m here.

But just after that she is standing in the house again. With the book and frozen raspberries she was out picking in our garden earlier in the summer. Everything is contained in two bags. She couldn’t be bothered to read it. Although she feels, she says, that he still wants her to do it. The book means something, he was so enthusiastic about that author, the historian who has written it. They talked about it. It was one of the last conversations they had together, when Simon at least spoke a complete sentence to her. Perhaps that was why it seemed so important, she says. She has picked up the book, placed it on the coffee table.

We remain standing for a moment.

I’m always trying to guess what you’re thinking, Mom. Are you? I say. You know I talk all the time. No, she says. You don’t.

I OBSERVE MY daughter, the dark hair, the blue eyes. Exceptionally blue. Simon’s eyes. I study Helena, there is something I have always regarded as glassy, brittle, about her. She was always afraid when she was little, afraid of the water, of the attic, of the dark.

Perhaps it comes from the fear she has inherited without actually knowing what she is scared of, could not know.

At one time I must have thought it would protect her. Not knowing, that it would make her, make them, safer. But when I look at her now, it strikes me that it has had the opposite effect. Maybe it works that way, that what you guess at terrifies you more than what you are told. The blurred, nameless apparition.

As a child she invited friends to visit on her birthday. They arrived in starched party dresses, eight eleven-year-olds, stiffly dressed up and critical, going around looking at everything we had in the house, lifting things up and peering at her belongings. No one talked to her, they ate our food, delivered their presents, chatted together in her room without letting her in. She did not complain, I think she was afraid I would be angry with them.

A few hours later, they traipsed home.

I don’t know why, there seemed to be no reason. When I asked her, she just said that she was not very popular.

In time she became like me, like us, she began to read, withdrawing more into herself. Her sisters are tougher. Helena is the only one who is a teacher, like me. She teaches science, mathematics, nothing as intangible and vague as literature. I think it is an appealing subject. She teaches at junior high school, I like the thought that she stands facing them, explaining something so solid and certain.

I take one of the bags with me into the living room. I still feel uneasy, perhaps I have acquired her uneasiness. The clock is ticking, suddenly I hear it.

She leaves, and I think about the application form. That she forgot to ask me if I had filled it in.

I REMEMBER SOMETHING that happened once when we were on the way home from a trip to the mountains, just Simon and me, we had been driving for hours, we were on our way down after staying at a little hotel for a few days, it was some occasion or other, and we were driving through a valley that reminded us both of some other place, a place we had been before and enjoyed. We were exhausted. Hungry and thirsty. As we drove over the newly paved highway, I saw a sign saying BYGDETUN, a local museum. I recalled something like this from my childhood, a vague memory of a day spent in the sun at some place like that, and there was the same heat outside the windows while we were driving that day. I said that to him, we could stop, I said. We could get something to eat.

Simon wasn’t sure, he drove on, I thought he wanted to pass up the idea. But he pulled onto the side at an exit road and turned the car.

It was later in the day than I had realized, and when we parked the car in the row of other vehicles, I saw that people were already on their way out of the museum, though there was still no sign of anyone dismantling stalls or packing up. Children at one end of a playground were having a good time with a pony, two boys on the stage were trying to grab hold of the microphone, talking into it, splitting their sides with laughter, but the equipment was obviously switched off. There were still families sitting on the wooden benches with thermos flasks and coffee cups. But there weren’t many people all the same, and perhaps it would have been different if it had been more crowded, if there had still been a queue in front of the stalls as I expected there would have been earlier in the day, if people had their eyes focused on the stage, at something going on up there. It didn’t take long until it dawned on me that we had become an attraction, although that is the wrong word. We were being noticed, or more than that. Passersby were looking at us skeptically, I thought it was skeptically, at least there was no feeling of being welcome. What I had been trying to relive, the pleasure I remembered from the encounter with a similar museum as a child, had completely vanished. Instead I was the stranger, we were the two strangers, who had sneaked into a location where we did not belong.

We continued to stroll around for a while, Simon bought a cup of coffee, I looked at a hand-knitted scarf, I felt I was being watched. Even by the children.

When we returned to the car, we did not speak. We had both, I am quite certain, the same realization of not being wanted. It was a feeling of shame, that we might have misunderstood, read the signs of hospitality so wrongly and believed that it embraced us, that we also without any fuss might fit in and be accepted.