The Cartography of Unlived Lives
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
She found the memory in her mother's coat pocket—a single mitten, child-sized, knitted in yarn that had once been red. It carried the absence of a hand that had never existed, belonging to a daughter her mother never had. Hannah's father had come to the university in Boston soon after she was born; she had no other siblings. The fingers were felted from the daughter's furtive rubbing of them together, and they were frayed at the tip from nervous biting.
Hannah's mother, a low-level functionary in the biology department, had taken to wearing her dead-daughter's mitten clutched in her hand, fingers threaded through the hole in its wrist so that it wouldn't slip out and be lost. She only left it in her coat pocket when she was trying to hide just how far she had slipped away.
Her mother noticed the mitten was gone that evening, and Hannah held the knowledge to her, savored it, feeling its weight like warm coinage. Deliberately, she tucked it under her pillow to dream on.
That night her dead sister came to her. She was tall (she would be), slim as they both were. But where Hannah was a series of places flowing into each other, all lines and slopes like the diagrams of human anatomy her mother had taken to poring over, her sister was a series of points and circles, jagged angles where things met.
"This was not well done," she said. "Give it back."
"It's not yours," Hannah said. "She's forgotten it. You've forgotten her now; you never even met."
"You don't understand," the dead sister said. "That mitten is a placeholder. A promise of nourishment for the Wolf. But give him a hand to hold, and soon he'll want an arm and leg."
"No," Hannah said.
"You don't remember me," her sister said. Wide green eyes, blond hair pale as Hannah's and far straighter.
"No," Hannah said. "You were a dream mother had. You were almost gone, until she rekindled that ember. If that's not what you wanted, you should have slipped away."
The ghost sighed. "I was always you and you were always me, till the world of possibilities lessened," she said. "If you carry a girl child in your body, the world will tell you ghost stories. Ghost stories featuring that child. So I was made, and so I was gone. But no child should fall between the Wolf's teeth."
"Then don't fall," Hannah said stubbornly. "Stay here, while she goes."
She gave the ghost every chance. Every day. And the ghost became more and more willing to stay. "Let me touch through your hands," the ghost said, and Hannah acquiesced. "Let me taste through your mouth, and smell through your nose. Let me taste of the world," the ghost said, and Hannah let her.
Her mother followed the mitten to Hannah's room, and took the steps to stand within her door. Hannah drank in the moment, then said, "I'll keep what's mine."
Her mother said nothing and everything, her eyes nervous and afraid, the way a dying rodent's are. "What steps in my footsteps leaves no print," she whispered, and went away, carrying the daughter she had remembered back into oblivion.
Hannah stood, walked into the kitchen. Her mother sat there. She brought a cup of tea, set it on the table by her mother's elbow, and said gently, "I would have gone with you, if you'd asked."
Her mother said, "I know. But every old animal knows when it's time to walk off into the woods, and when it walks away, it walks alone."
"I know you didn't want to die," Hannah said. The six months since the dead sister had appeared stood between them. "You laid a trail of breadcrumbs you could follow back if need be."
Sipping her tea, her mother stared straight ahead, past Hannah. The past came flooding back between them: all the moments in their life together that they had both remembered in the past months, that Hannah would continue to repeat to herself, that her mother would not, so that the memories faded and grew bright by turns.
"The dead sister would have been a comfort," her mother said softly. "Helped me make my way through the thicket and the thorns."
"The Wolf would have been grateful," Hannah said. "He comes to everyone eventually."
"Not everyone," her mother said. "Only the ones lining the way with those minimemories, those anchors. Sometimes the fear of leaving outweighs the necessity, and sometimes we don't have a choice how we go through the next door, but those doorways always go two ways."
"A Cookie Trail, then," Hannah said.
She kept the dead sister all her life. The ghost had hinted, several times over the years, that she would like threads to knit another mitten with, but she always laughed it off as a joke. A single mitten is a mysterious and beautiful thing, because you do not know where the other is. And Hannah had no daughters, for reasons both gentle and harsh, of which the dead sister was well aware.
She like to think, though, as the end approached that she might catch glimmers of those other lives, alternative ways she might have gone. Sometimes she thought her dead sister might crumble into glimpses of other daughters leading back to her mother.
In the end, she will let the dead sister guide her up and out of the world, away and onto lights as numerous and bright as the eyes of wolves. The dead sister will take her footsteps and fade into daughter footprints in the snow, clear and crisp, silvery specks covering the frozen blue skin. Footprints the wolf can never follow.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title