The strangest part of these calculations is that I don’t even mind. Being hollow is the best way to be. Being hollow means I can fill myself with stars or light or rose petals if I want. I’m glad everything I once was is gone and my children are here instead. They’ve erased the individual and I am grateful. The individual was not special in the first place. And, really, these new humans I made are a million times better than I ever was.

•

The bedcovers look gray in the dim light of chargers, laptops, and phones scattered around our bedroom. In this ghost light I am alone. The night asks again, Who are you? Who will you be when everyone is gone? My children are growing, and when they are done I’ll have to become a human again instead of a mother, like spirit becoming stone, like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. I’m not looking forward to that.

Who are you?

The answer is easy in daylight. But the night’s untethering almost always turns me into someone I’m not. I spend nights thinking about the different women I become in the dark. Where am I keeping these women when the sun is up? Where do they hide, these women who have breached the sanctity of my home, who know things about me so secret even I don’t know these things? Maybe they are in the closet. Maybe they are hiding inside me. Maybe they are me trapped somewhere I can’t get to, like in the DNA markers of my hormones, those proteins that make me a woman instead of something else.

You may ask, Are these women who bombard me at night real, or do I imagine them? You may eventually realize that is a stupid question.

I think about fidelity. To Sam, to myself. The light is still gray. The night is still so quiet. I let the women in, an entire parade of them, the whole catalogue, spread out on the bed before me. Sam is gone and these women keep me company. Even if they terrify me. I let the other women in.

An author lived for a time in a modern house behind mine, on the other side of a eucalyptus grove. She had recently divorced. She is a great writer, though she has written only one book. The book takes a frank approach to sex and bodies. I try to copy her writing. Her book is about prostitutes, so I assume she was once a sex worker. Or maybe she just wants her readers to believe that, for street cred at book parties, in university settings.

I could kind of see into the rear windows of her house at night with a pair of binoculars. These voyeur sessions never lasted long, because all she ever did was sit there. Maybe once or twice I caught her walking to her kitchen. It was boring. She was alone all the time, and while she was no doubt thinking amazing, fantastic thoughts about the nature of art, my binoculars could not see those thoughts.

The town we live near is so small, it was inevitable that we would meet. We did, many times. We once even shared the dance floor at the local bar, a Mexican restaurant, really. We momentarily danced together like robots from outer space. But then each time we met again it was, to her, as fresh as the first time. “Nice to meet you,” she’d say. Once, I had to deliver a piece of misdirected mail and she invited me in for a glass of wine. In an instant, I developed a fantasy of the famous writer and me as best friends. I dropped that fantasy quickly, because it was clear that her alien-robot routine back in the bar had not been an act.

When I mentioned that I had three children, her jaw came unhinged. “Oh, my God.” Her hand rose to her face as if I’d said I had three months to live. Maybe that was what children meant to her.

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I went to hear her read at the local library once when I was very pregnant. During the Q. & A., she spoke of child rearing with great disgust. Likening motherhood to a dairy operation. She said that children murder art, and though it was easy for me to dismiss her comments as ignorance—she’d never had a child, she’d never made a life or a death—I could not prevent the other people in the audience from looking at me with pity. “How did you like that?” a number of my neighbors asked me afterward.

“I enjoyed it very much, thanks.”

When I was at her house she dismissed me after one glass of wine. “I have to eat my sandwich,” she said, as if that sandwich were something so solidly constructed it would be impossible to divide, impossible to share. I left.

The next time I saw the famous writer, she was in the grocery store. Once again, she didn’t recognize me or acknowledge the four or five times we’d already met, the wine we had drunk together, so I was able to freely stalk her through the aisles of the store, to spy the items of nourishment a famous writer feeds herself: butterfly dust, caviar, evening dew.

I stood behind her in line at the fishmonger’s counter, my own cart bulging with Cheerios, two gallons of milk, laundry soap, instant mac and cheese, chicken breasts, cold cuts, bread, mayonnaise, apples, bananas, green beans, all the flabby embarrassments of motherhood that no longer embarrass me. I heard her order a quarter pound of salmon. The loneliest fish order ever. I stepped away without ordering, scared her emaciated loneliness might be contagious. She kept her chin lifted. Some people enjoy humiliation. Maybe I used to be one of those people, but I don’t feel humiliation anymore. The body sloughs off cells every day, aging. After all that, what is left to feel humiliated? Very little indeed.

•

The commuter bus that runs between here and the city is one small part of America where silence still lives. It’s a cylinder of peace moving through the world swiftly enough to blur it.

Once, on a return bus, there was a woman seated in front of me. People do not speak on the bus. At least, no one who rides with regularity. We understand that this hour of being rocked and shushed is the closest we’ll get to being babies again. But this woman was not a regular. She’d gone down to the city for the day. She was ten to fifteen years older than me, mid-fifties, though I never saw her face. I could feel she was buzzing. She’d taken a risk travelling to the city by herself, such a risk that accomplishing it had emboldened her to try other new things, like the voice-recognition software on her smartphone, that newfangled device purchased for her by an older child who’d grown tired of having a mother who lived in a technological backwater.

There was nothing wrong with her hands, but she wanted to demonstrate that even though she was middle-aged and less loved now than she’d been in the past, she could be current with the modern world. She could enjoy the toys of the young. So, on the quiet bus, she began to speak into her phone as if recording books for the blind, loudly and slowly. Everyone could hear her. There on the silent bus, the woman shouted multiple drafts of an e-mail to a friend, laying plain her regret, fumes of resignation in the tight, enclosed area.