Friday morning I went to Petco to buy Daphne more food. Now that we have a dog, I know that I am a liar. While I don’t lie outright, I don’t run up to people and say the opposite of what I am thinking, I do smile, I do wash and dress myself a certain way, I do try to suggest, by being friendly and through other tricks and schemes, that I am a normal loving person, with such great reserves of love that I can waste it, that I can shower it even upon a non-human, an animal I have taken into my home.

My mother, by the way, is a person who does hold these kinds of natural reserves, and a few nights ago, when she was over at my house she saw our dog, Daphne, sitting in the corner, staring at me. Carey, she said, Daphne is looking at you so significantly, and I looked over and saw that in fact, Daphne, who had seated herself in that strange way she has, with her back legs folded uselessly under her, was staring at me with a look of naked longing, or anxiety. I said that Daphne was probably just waiting for me to give her food, but I worried that she was trying to communicate with my mother, trying to tell my mother that my she should take her home, that I don’t really love her, that I am not as I seem.

So now we have established the ground rules: I have a dog, I believe she is a dog, and not a person, and that there is a difference between the two, and yet, at the same time, I am afraid of her as one is afraid of a ghost, or bogeyman—I am afraid my failings are far greater than they should be, that they will take form, attach themselves to her, and be visited upon me.

At Petco, cleverly, they keep the dog food in the back. To get to it one has to walk past the snack bar, the inanity—isn’t food, to an animal, food?—of which struck me particularly forcefully that day, and through various aisles: I chose the aisle filled with dog toys my dog would rip apart in five minutes and ingest. Then I staggered back to the line carrying my bag, and waited while the cashier rang up two women ahead of me. She was offering them the chance to donate to Petco’s foundation for homeless pets, and as I listened to the cashier talk about the charity, and how good it was, and how little of its money went to administrative costs, and then, also, how the cashier’s cats loved the exact same thing the customer’s cats loved—there was some other stuff in there, too, some just general friendliness towards the customer, and knowingness about cats—I thought, I don’t think I am going to give a donation to this charity.

When it was my turn to pay, the cashier, still cheerful from ringing up the customer before me said, Would you like to make a donation to the Petco foundation? and I said, also cheerfully, as if she had offered me dessert, No thanks! And then, when my purchase had come to some number nine cents short of a round dollar number, she said, Would you like to round up and give your change to the foundation? I said, Oh, that’s all right. I kept my nine cents. And as I signed the credit card slip and pulled on my gloves I felt great satisfaction at doing exactly what I wanted, and being truthful, and true to myself, no matter how ill anyone might think of me.

When I was younger I gave little thought to maintaining myself, keeping track of myself, keeping myself together, because I had no idea that I was dissolving, and that I would find, thirty, twenty, fifteen years later, that this younger self was an apparition, familiar to me because we shared memories, but otherwise increasingly, unknown. I should have written everything down, is one thing I think today, is one thing, in fact, I write down, but maybe seeing my younger self on paper would have increased my distance from her. Maybe it would have embarrassed me, and made me turn away. In any case, part of younger self’s charm, don’t you think, is that she hadn’t yet thought of these things? That she was so dreamy? That she imagined life as something that would happen to her, and that she imagined she would drift through this happening and find herself essentially unchanged on the other side?

My grandmother didn’t die suddenly, but I was far away, and very pregnant. I found it hard to let go. When my son was born I believed, privately, and without any system of belief, that she had been reincarnated in his form.

My son had curly hair and a head that, at least early on, drooped forward on its slender stalk.

In my dreams I changed my grandmother’s soiled pants.

They both loved me.

I’m not suggesting these things are evidence. There was no evidence for the belief, nothing that couldn’t be explained easily, gently, plausibly by my own psychological needs. Once, crossing the Chaussée de Waterloo after my grandmother’s death, but before my son’s birth, I passed a woman I was convinced was her spirit. She didn’t even look at me. It didn’t matter.

Now we’ve moved to a very old house. It was a farmhouse, and then a school, and then a private house again. It is porous, open to pests, and sometimes because of this and sometimes for other reasons, it creaks and rattles. The doors are blown by empty breezes. We moved here when our younger son, who is not my grandmother’s reincarnated soul, was less than one year old. He started talking soon after we moved in, which surprised us. One thing he liked to say when he and I were in his bedroom was that he saw people, sometimes behind me, always when there was no one there. At first I was, against my will, alarmed by this. It was nonsense, I told myself. I would not allow myself to imagine anything. But later, after I understood to what extent our house was infested with animals, I welcomed ghosts. I wanted to believe in them. I prefer ghosts to things, and to nothingness.