But over the next months when we weren’t talking for the first time in my life and I didn’t know how she was doing, guilt would be heavy on my chest, like a large animal hunched down. Some crime I’d committed but couldn’t quite remember. Leaving my mother? Dropping Reed? Sometimes I would be unable to speak, terrified to say the wrong thing and wound others with the slightest mistake. I followed her out of the house and stood near the door. At the gate she turned and waved: the flap of a bird’s wing in the sharp white light.
