This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

At that moment, Ari lifts his head from her breastbone and twists around in the sling. He raises his hand and seems to point at something beyond them, beyond the window, at something only he can see. “Ah dang-nang-nah, ah bleuf, ah blee,” he says. It is a long and complicated utterance. His fist opens and closes. Lucas looks at him, properly; his nephew looks back at him, fixing him with an intent, questioning gaze. What a child, he is about to say, but doesn’t because at that moment he feels, for the first time ever, not quite the presence but the possibility of another child, to the back and slightly to the side of him, a form, a being, standing at his leg. It isn’t so much a visitation or a haunting, just the idea of someone who might yet appear, might still exist. Lucas puts his hand to the worn wood of the sill; he concentrates on this sensation, careful not to turn around, to scare it away. On the greenish glass in front of his face, his exhalations appear, then fade, appear, then fade, the unseen showing itself, over and over, the invisible making itself known.

Anyway, the older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it. Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She’d said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you’re describing comes of growing up, but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not? Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.