My mother was not made for reading at bedtime or disinfecting scrapes, for whistling loud and long when the streetlights come on at dusk. She could whistle, it’s true, and profess a love, one of beating down doors, of slinging small bodies from rooms, unvarnished fingernails wound tightly through tufts of fine hair, callouses scraping devotion against blooming cheeks. She had two hands, one for smoking, one for drinking, but she wasn’t simple. She could use either one to weigh differences, use both to point out shapes in the trees in the dark, in the deep basin of her terror, where men in hooded cloaks roamed our neighborhood in twos or threes or, singly, stood on the wall of our backyard and peered through windows, fading into smoke at any twitch of the drapes. Her head was filled with birds, with balloons, light and grave and essential as air. She saw shapes in the woodwork, faces possessed, former residents of our rented rooms, she saw shadows sprung on the bathroom walls, heard heartbeats through floorboards. It’s no surprise my mother finished in flames, her body the fire she left-hand held for decades without a moment’s pause, the cherry brushing my skinny arm, ashes the only possible end. He found her, the Wednesday half-light of winter, grey-blue and puffed, early snow dazzling the city’s skin. We should have known, coming like the tunnel-pricked light of a train, we should’ve seen it settling. We should’ve known it, always whispering her ghosts, the cards held in our hands, our lips pressed to the edges, pretending, making us blind.