In the story that plays in my head whenever I want, my mother and I are walking. Because we are walking side by side, I do not see her face. At most, around the edge of my fur-lined hood, I see her legs in their woolen snow pants, her feet in their fur-lined boots. When the snow is deep, she walks ahead, and then I see her back and also her footprints, into which I place my own feet. When the path is too narrow for side by side but the snow is not so deep, I go in front, and then I do not see her at all. All I see are bare trees. Their branches thick in conversation with one another. Bare sky whose blue you could drink.
In the story that plays in my head whenever I want, although I do not see her face, I hear her voice. We sing while we walk. She knows many songs, some in a different language. “What does it mean?” I ask when she sings one of these. “It’s a song for a friend who isn’t there,” she says.
“Where is the friend?”
“That’s what the song asks.”
She tries to teach me. The words are strange in my mouth. The tune has two parts. She sings one and I sing the other, and although they do not match, they fit together. Like when I hold my palm up against hers.
When I get too tired to sing, she tells me stories. “Once upon a time there was a little girl called Ani who was brave and strong. She could walk on top of snow crust as lightly as a hare. She could see across glittering ice fields as keenly as a raptor. She helped her mother by keeping up and never complaining. This little girl had pluck enough to last the winter, and luck enough to steer them toward a new home.”
When she gets too tired for talking, I hear the crunch of her boots. The labor of her breath.
After a while her breathing comes to sound like a song.
Even now, if I listen hard, I hear its tune.
I think she must be on the other side, singing to me still.