She kept a notebook on the kitchen table with the date written in large numerals at the top of each page. This was her primary anchor. It did not change the fact that at her daughter's Sunday dinner table she could simultaneously perceive the dinner, a dinner from eleven years ago at the same table, a conversation she had with her mother in 1998, and the morning she brought her daughter home from the hospital, which had been in the mid-afternoon of a Thursday in late autumn. All of these were occurring. The notebook told her which one to answer to.
Her daughter was thirty-two now. At the table she was also, simultaneously, three years old and sitting in the high chair they had kept in the corner until she was four. She was also seven, asking about a bird she had found in the garden. Both of these were as present as the thirty-two-year-old asking about plans to travel in spring. Heln answered the spring question, which was the one that was primary now, which was what the notebook was for.
It was not grief. People assumed it was grief, or some related condition of unresolved loss, when she explained it. It was not. Her father's death had been adequately grieved. The fact that he was also at breakfast with her this morning was structural, not emotional. He was there the way the kitchen was there, without her choosing to think about it. He had said something about the coffee that she wrote down in the notebook under the date, with the note: "ongoing, not primary."
The weight of it was not the simultaneous-ness. She had lived with that since her twenties and had developed enough strategies that she could navigate most situations without the layering becoming apparent to other people. The weight was the triage. Every moment required her to assess which of the several present occasions was the one that required a response, and to suppress the others sufficiently to respond coherently. She was good at this. It took something from her that she did not have a name for.
Her daughter poured wine and her daughter at age twelve was also there pouring water at this table, for a different dinner, a dinner at which something important had been discussed that Heln could no longer specify. Both pourings were equally present. She watched them both. The spring travel plans, she said, sounded good. What dates were they thinking?
Driving home afterward: her daughter's wave from the doorway. Also present: her daughter's wave from two years ago when she left for eight months abroad, which had been a different quality of wave, more self-conscious. Both waves were happening as she pulled out of the driveway. She drove with them both, one on each side, all the way to the motorway.