The Best American Short Stories 2013

JOAN WICKERSHAM The Tunnel, or The News from Spain

THE NEWS FROM SPAIN is terrible. A bomb under a park bench in a small town near Madrid. Fifteen people have been killed and dozens injured. Harriet tells the aide, who crosses herself; the nurse, who says, “It makes you want to stay home and never leave the house—but that would just be giving in to terrorism”; and her daughter Rebecca, who says, “Why do you spend all day watching that stuff?”

Rebecca is tired. Harriet has been sick on and off for years, more than a decade. Rebecca has just driven four hours from Boston to get to the Connecticut nursing home where Harriet now lives. She is taking two days off from the small bookstore she owns, paying her part-time assistant extra to cover for her. She’s brought a shopping bag full of things Harriet likes: rice pudding with raisins, shortbread, fresh figs, and a box of lamejuns from a Middle Eastern bakery. She has walked into the room, and Harriet has barely looked away from the TV to say hello.

What Harriet says is “They just interviewed a man whose granddaughter died in his arms.”

Rebecca puts down the shopping bag and kisses the top of her mother’s head. Someone has given Harriet a haircut, a surprisingly flattering one. Her head smells faintly of shampoo.

Harriet puts up a hand and feels for Rebecca’s face, briefly cupping her chin. “They think it was a Basque separatist group.”

Rebecca nods, and goes down the hall to the kitchen, to put the rice pudding and lamejuns in the fridge. The hallway is full of wheelchairs, a straggly becalmed flotilla of gray people just sitting there, some with their head lolling on their chest. On the way back to her mother’s room, she runs into the social worker assigned to Harriet’s case. Today is Halloween; the social worker is wearing a pirate hat and an eye patch. “How do you think your mom is doing?” she asks Rebecca.

“I think she’s still angry about being here,” Rebecca says. Harriet moved into the nursing home a month ago, after the rehab hospital said she had “plateaued” and the assisted-living place said they couldn’t take her back.

“I know,” the social worker says. “But they adjust.”

When she goes back into her mother’s room, Harriet is watching for her. The TV is off. “I’m so glad you came,” Harriet says.

“I just ran into the social worker in the hall. She says you’re adjusting.”

“Bullshit,” Harriet says. “Did you bring stuffed grape leaves?”

“I didn’t remember that you liked them.”

“I love them.”

“Next time,” Rebecca says. She pulls over a chair and sits facing her mother. Harriet is in a wheelchair, paralyzed again—it has happened before, she has some rare chronic spinal disease, but this time the neurologist says it is permanent. Rebecca had listened while he talked to Harriet about suffering and acceptance, about how what was happening to her was truly terrible, worse than what anyone should have to go through. Rebecca liked the doctor’s humanity and thought it might be somewhat comforting to Harriet; certainly Harriet has always found it gratifying to be admired for her bravery. But Harriet was furious. “He’s talking philosophy when what I really want to hear about is stem-cell research.”

Rebecca feels guilty about not making it down to see her mother more often. Harriet is always mentioning something she needs—lavender talcum powder, or socks, or an afghan to put over her legs when they wheel her outside, or, she sighs, “Just a really good turkey club sandwich.” Rebecca mails what she can, alternately touched by and annoyed by the many requests. (Are they wistful or reproachful? Both, she thinks.) (But they are also simply practical. These are the small things we live with, and Harriet now has no way to get hold of them.) She has talked to Harriet about moving to a nursing home in the Boston area. “It would be more convenient.”

“For you, you mean,” Harriet said. She is adamant about staying in this particular nursing home because the man she’s in love with is in the assisted-living place next door, and comes over to visit her nearly every day. Rebecca thinks it’s great that her mother has someone, though she could do without some of Harriet’s more candid reports. (“Ralph called me this morning and said, ‘I wish I could make love to you right now.’”)

“How is Ralph?” Rebecca asks now.

Harriet shrugs. “He thinks I’m mad at him because he didn’t give me a birthday present.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” They laugh. They talk. Rebecca heats up some lamejuns in the kitchen microwave and makes Harriet a cup of tea. They hear the woman in the room next door say loudly, angrily, “Who washed my floor?” A low murmuring answer; then the angry woman again: “In the future I must ask that you not wash my floor without first giving me notice.”

Rebecca looks at Harriet. Harriet says, “That’s all she ever says, on and on, day and night, about the floor.”

Some lamejun has fallen onto the front of Harriet’s sweatshirt; when she finally notices and brushes it off, it leaves a spot. “Damn it.” She wipes furiously away at it, but in the midst of the fury is also grinning ruefully at Rebecca—Can you believe it? How does it happen every single time? She’s a very large woman, and she’s been dropping food on her shirt for as long as Rebecca can remember. The last time Rebecca visited, on the day Harriet moved to the nursing home, the aide swathed Harriet’s front in an enormous terrycloth bib before bringing in her dinner tray. Harriet allowed it, looking at Rebecca with a kind of stunned sadness; of all the enraging indignities of that day, this was the one that undid her. “She doesn’t need that,” Rebecca told the aide.

“We do it for everybody.”

“Right, but my mother doesn’t need it.”

So that was one small battle that Rebecca was there to win for Harriet. Without Rebecca, Harriet could have won it just fine for herself. Both of them knew this—and yet, between them, love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over. Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn’t love each other couldn’t fight like that—certainly not repeatedly. Still, Rebecca has often wished for something quieter with Harriet. Are there mothers and daughters who can be happy together without saying much?

“You know,” Harriet says now, frowning, clearly resuming an argument she’s been conducting in her own head, “you jump on me about watching the news all the time, but it’s not because I’m just some morbid tragedy hound, it’s—”

“I know why it is,” Rebecca says.

Rebecca’s younger sister, Cath, disapproves of the relationship between Rebecca and Harriet. She thinks it’s unhealthily close. She says she is tired of giving Harriet inches and having her take miles. (Rebecca, who has never seen Cath give Harriet an inch, finds this declaration both funny and infuriating.) Cath is a sculptor who lives in Denver. She thinks Harriet is a monster. She thinks—and here Rebecca agrees with her—that their father, a quiet, scholarly, self-deprecating man who drank, had ended up drinking more and walling himself up more and dying lonely because Harriet took up so much room. Harriet always had another man, single, recently divorced, or widowed. “She had affairs,” Cath said. “She broke Daddy’s heart.”

“You think those were affairs?” Rebecca asked, remembering all those wistful, mostly handsome, young men who had always seemed to her to be intruding—What were they doing at the Thanksgiving table? Why were they hanging around on Christmas Eve?—eagerly passing the cranberry sauce and trying brightly and unsuccessfully to engage her father in conversation.

“Not consummated affairs,” Cath said, with exasperated authority. “Mom was never brave enough, or radical enough, to actually sleep with anyone else. Those affairs were all about noble renunciation of actual sex. They were all about deprivation and suffering.”

She has said, more recently, to Rebecca over the phone: “She’s going to live to be a hundred, you know. People like that, who only care about themselves, live forever, because every ounce of energy they have goes into preserving the organism.”

Rebecca and her mother had begun to get close only when, nearly fifteen years ago, Harriet seemed to be dying.

She was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer just when the revelations broke about the rotten marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Rebecca was going through her own fierce divorce at the time (it had started amicably, with a mediator, and then escalated to the point where the lawyers’ bills had become so horrifying, so disproportionate to whatever it was that she and Steve had been fighting over, that the two of them had met for a drink one night and agreed to do everything the mediator had suggested in the first place).

But when Harriet got sick, Rebecca picked up the phone and called her soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, who was on the board of a famous cancer hospital. She believed that Steve’s father, who had never liked her much and never done much to conceal it, was nonetheless fundamentally ethical and would do what he could to help. (Another belief, both bitter and accurate, was that he liked to remind himself of his own power by pulling strings and making things happen.) He got Harriet admitted to the hospital, and the surgeon who was supposed to be brilliant lived up to his billing.

The doctor came and spoke to Rebecca after Harriet’s surgery, which took an entire day. “I got it all,” he said, and went on to list all the places where he’d found it: pretty much everywhere, as far as Rebecca could tell.

“So what’s her prognosis?” Rebecca made herself ask, though she felt she already knew.

The surgeon looked seriously at her. “I have no idea,” he said.

Rebecca wanted to hug him for that, and would have hugged Steve’s father, if he had been there. She did hug Steve, who had showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and sat in the waiting room with her all day. They had spent most of the time hunched over a book of Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles; they screwed up each one irreparably, in ink, and then they would make a big blue X on it before moving on to the next one.

During that day, and right afterward, Rebecca thought that maybe the divorce was a mistake, and that she and Steve would get back together. But it turned out to be like the illness of Anna Karenina: a kind of temporary exalted goodwill, a glimpse of how lovely things might have been if everybody hadn’t felt the way they actually did feel.

She went out and bought People magazine, and a copy of Diana: Her True Story. Every day she read to Harriet, who lay in bed with tubes coming out of her nose, and puffy boots automatically inflating and deflating around her legs at intervals, to prevent blood clots. “She tried to kill herself with a lemon slicer?” Harriet said. “What’s a lemon slicer? Do they mean a peeler? She tried to peel herself to death?” The two of them sat there in the dark hospital room, laughing. Whenever the surgeon came in, Rebecca hid the book and the magazine in the nightstand, because Harriet didn’t want him to think she was the kind of woman who read trash.

Harriet would later say of that time, “It was a nightmare.” Rebecca, who, partly in reaction to her mother’s hyperbolic way of putting things, tends toward understatement, would say, “It was tough.” But while it was going on, it was, in some bizarre way, also wonderful. They liked being together, for the first time in years. One afternoon, a couple of days after the surgery, Harriet needed a blood transfusion. The drip was still running when someone, mistakenly, brought in a dinner tray. Harriet was not allowed to have anything by mouth, and so Rebecca told the aide: “We don’t need that.”

“Oh, you’ve eaten already?” the aide said.

Harriet, lying on her back with the blood still dripping into her arm, raised her hands and curved them into little bat claws and said, in what Rebecca somehow understood was meant to be a Transylvanian accent, “I’m still eating.”

Rebecca laughed, and her eyes filled with tears at the valiancy of it, the surprise of that sudden little flash of wit.

It was before Rebecca started the bookstore; she was teaching high school English then, so she had the summer off. She went to the hospital every day and stayed there all day.

Then Harriet went through her year of chemotherapy. Rebecca was teaching again, but she went down to Connecticut on a lot of weekends. The pope got colon cancer. They watched the networks grappling with the delicate challenge of reporting on a pontiff’s gastrointestinal system: lots of disembodied scientific diagrams juxtaposed with footage of worried-looking nuns praying in St. Peter’s Square.

“What do you think the nurses are saying to him right now?” Harriet said, lying on the couch and looking at a shot of the outside of the hospital where the pope had been operated on earlier that week.

“Okay, Your Holiness, scoot your hiney over to the edge of the bed,” Rebecca said.

Harriet laughed and laughed. Then she threw up.

So here’s the glib psychological explanation: Harriet had always craved attention and now, made vulnerable by illness, needed more; Rebecca had failed at her marriage and needed to feel like a hero.

All of which was true. But it was more that they both discovered, almost shyly, that they liked each other. That they were having, in the middle of all this dire stuff, a good time together.

It was also, Rebecca knew, that her mother was dying. She sometimes lay in bed at night and cried, alone, or with Peter Bigelow, who taught architectural history at Harvard and whose two children—he was divorced—went to the school where Rebecca taught. He held her and listened while she talked about how hard it was to be finding her mother and losing her at the same time.

But, Peter said, it sounds like the knowledge that you’re losing her has been part of what allowed you to find her.

Oh, he was a nice man, Peter. Back then, her romance with him felt too new, too green and slight to bear the weight of everything Rebecca was feeling, about her divorce, about Harriet. Poor guy, she had thought, looking at Peter’s kind, earnest face, his sandy rumpled hair, his open trusting bare chest, his hand resting on the sleeve of her flannel nightgown.

Are you sure you don’t mind, if we don’t, tonight?

Of course not.

I’m sorry, I thought I wanted to, but—

Rebecca. Don’t worry. It’s fine.

She might have been suspicious of his tenderness, seen it as his own need for heroism, or as a ploy to hook her before revealing his true selfish self (remember, she was just wrapping up a divorce). But she’d seen him for years with his kids. He was nice, period. He took her out to dinner and to concerts, talked to her about his work enthusiastically and not at all pompously (he was writing a book on H. H. Richardson), listened while she talked about wanting to quit teaching to open a bookstore, and was frank and relaxed in bed.

He advised her to pace herself, with Harriet. Her friends were saying the same thing, especially the ones who’d had sick parents. Go easy, take time for yourself, don’t let this take over your whole life. But her mother was dying, and Rebecca wanted to cram in as much as she could. In some unexpected way she and Harriet had fallen in love.

Incredibly, Harriet didn’t die. Her cancer never came back. She kept having more surgeries: to insert a catheter for the chemo drugs under her chest wall, to remove it again because of recurrent infections, to remove scar tissue in her abdomen, to remove more scar tissue. Rebecca kept driving down and spending time with her mother.

The glow wore off.

What a disconcerting thing to feel, to acknowledge! It wasn’t that she was sorry Harriet was still alive. It was more that she couldn’t keep it up: the attention, the rapport, the camaraderie, the aimless joy of just hanging around with her mother, watching the news. She had burned herself out, just as Peter and her friends had warned she might; but looking back at the time when Harriet had seemed to be dying, she couldn’t imagine having managed it any other way.

Harriet started feeling that Rebecca wasn’t visiting often enough. It was true, she was coming down less often. But oh, that “enough.” That tricky guilt-laden word that doesn’t even need to be spoken between a mother and daughter because both of them can see it lying there between them, injured and whimpering, a big throbbing violent-colored bruise of a word.

“What about Easter?” Harriet asked—plaintively? coldly? in a resolutely plucky way that emphasized how admirably she was refraining from trying to make Rebecca feel guilty? It could have been any of those ways of asking, or any of a number of others, all of which did make Rebecca feel guilty, and angry, and confused. The burnout took the form of an almost frantic protectiveness of her own time whenever Harriet wasn’t sick. If her mother needed her, she dropped everything and went; but if her mother didn’t need her, she wanted to feel free to say no.

Harriet, on the other hand, seemed to feel that the time Rebecca spent caring for her didn’t count. Hurting, drugged, frightened, throwing up—that’s not what Harriet called spending time with her daughter. (The watching-the-news part was engrossing, and sometimes fun, but it was more like a jailhouse party, a desperate entertainment concocted by people who have very little to work with.) Harriet wanted to travel with Rebecca—to go on a cruise to Alaska or the Panama Canal. Or see Moscow and St. Petersburg, for heaven’s sake—all those mythical places that you could now, suddenly, actually go to.

Rebecca had no desire to travel with Harriet, and she was getting ready to start her bookstore, looking for space, making a business plan, applying for loans. “A bookstore?” Harriet said. “With your education you want to start a store, and one that doesn’t even have a hope of making money?”

“It’s what I care about,” Rebecca said.

“I worry about you,” Harriet said. “What is your life adding up to?”

Rebecca was hurt, furious. What did a life, anyone’s life, add up to? Why did Harriet feel she had a right to say things like that? (In her head, Rebecca wrote the script for what a mother should say in this situation: “That’s wonderful.”) They had one of their old fights, made worse by the fact that Rebecca hadn’t realized these old fights were still possible. The recent long entente around Harriet’s illness had lulled Rebecca into a false sense of safety. She felt ambushed.

Then Harriet sent Rebecca a check, for quite a lot of money. To help with the bookstore, she wrote on the card.

“You can’t afford this,” Rebecca said.

“It’s what I want to do,” Harriet said.

Then she got sick again.

Pneumonia—not life-threatening, but it took a long time to get over. Rebecca drove down and made Harriet chicken soup and vanilla custard, and lay across the foot of Harriet’s bed, watching the vigil outside the Fifth Avenue apartment building where Jacqueline Onassis was dying. They watched while John Kennedy Jr. came out and told the reporters that his mother was dead.

“Poor Jackie,” Rebecca said.

She was remembering how much her mother had admired and pitied Jackie, in the years after JFK’s assassination, when Rebecca was growing up.

But “What’s poor about her?” Harriet said. “She’s been living with another woman’s husband.”

So this has been going on for years. Harriet ailing and rallying. Rebecca showing up and withdrawing. Living her life between interruptions—which, she herself knows, is not really a fair or accurate way to characterize it. Harriet has been sick a lot, needed her a lot; but most of the time she has not been sick or needy. Most of the time, Rebecca is relatively free. Maybe, then, it’s that Rebecca doesn’t feel that she’s done much with her freedom. That each interruption points up how little has happened since the last one.

She runs her bookstore quite successfully. She tried opening a second store in a nearby suburb, which did not do well; the experiment was stressful, but not disastrous; after a year she closed the new store, paid back the loans, and felt relieved.

She’s been seeing Peter for a long time. They enjoy each other. They trust each other. They spend a few nights together most weeks, but both of them like having their own apartments. His kids went away to college; his ex-wife remarried, and so did Steve.

Early on—a couple of years into their relationship—Peter asked Rebecca how she would feel about getting married. That was how he did it: not a proposal, but an introduction of a topic for discussion. She said she wasn’t sure. The truth was that when he said it, she got a cold, sick feeling in her stomach. This lovely, good, thoughtful man: what was the matter with her? She was nervous, and also miffed that he seemed so equable about the whole thing, that he wasn’t made desperate by her ambivalence, that he wasn’t knocking her over with forceful demands that she belong to him. On the other hand, she wasn’t knocking him over either.

Then his book on Richardson was finished, and published. He brought over a copy one night, and she had a bottle of champagne waiting. “Peter, I’m so happy for you,” and she kissed him, and they smiled at each other and drank, and she kept touching the cover of the book, a very beautiful photograph of the Stoughton House on Brattle Street. “Peter,” she said, and he smiled at her. Then he went into her kitchen to carve the chicken, and she began to flip through the book. She turned to the acknowledgments page, and her own name jumped out at her: “… and to Rebecca Hunt, who has given me so many pleasant hours.”

It was understatement, wasn’t it? The kind of understatement that can exist between two people who understand each other? (The kind she was always wishing for, and never getting, from Harriet.)

What did she want: a dedication that said, “For Rebecca, whom I adore and would die for”?

Here was something she suddenly saw and deplored in herself, something she seemed to have in common with Harriet: a raw belief that love had to be declared and proved, baldly, loudly, explicitly.

She saw the danger, the wrongness, of this; yet when Peter came in from the kitchen, carrying the chicken over to the table Rebecca had set in front of the fireplace, she said, “Pleasant? Is that what I’ve given you—many pleasant hours?”

“Some unpleasant ones too,” he said, humorously, nervously—he saw, suddenly, what was coming, and he was trying to head it off.

What came, though, that night, turned out to be not so bad. Rebecca was able to rein it in; she didn’t need to harangue him, or freeze him, although they talked less at dinner than usual. Peter said, “You know, I’m not sure what made me choose that word, but it was probably not the right one.”

“That’s okay,” Rebecca said, and it was, really. What they had together was pleasant.

But still the word continued to bother her whenever she thought of it. The fact that it appeared to be lauding, but the thing that it praised was a limitation. Thanks for not getting too close to me. Thanks for not getting too deeply under my skin. Peter had disowned it somewhat, said it might not have been the right word—but Rebecca thought that it was probably not so much an aberration as it was a revelation: one of those sudden, sometimes accidental instances when everything is brightly lit and you see where you are. Long ago, Rebecca had had a friend named Mary; they’d been close for a couple of years when they’d both been trying to keep sinking marriages afloat. One night they had sat on the front steps of Rebecca’s apartment building, talking about their husbands, and Mary had said, “You know those things in the beginning of the relationship—the things that bother you and you tell yourself, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter’? I’m realizing now: all of it matters.”

Rebecca and Peter, of course, aren’t at the beginning of their relationship. They’re more than ten years in. And isn’t that the problem really—that they are so far in, and yet not far in at all?

“Where do things stand these days with Peter?” Harriet is always asking. She means: Why don’t you marry him? Or, if you don’t love him enough to marry him, why don’t you move on and find someone else? (Both questions are unspoken; but the second, nevertheless, carries all the buried force of an ultimatum: if you’re too stupid to appreciate Peter, give him up, and then you’ll be sorry.)

She asks again on the Halloween when Rebecca visits her at the nursing home: the day of the bombing in Spain, the lamejuns, when Harriet is supposedly “adjusting.” It’s about a month after Peter’s book has been published; he has sent down an inscribed copy for Harriet, which she holds in her lap, stroking the picture of the Stoughton House.

“Things don’t stand anywhere,” Rebecca tells her. “Things stand where they always stand.”

She goes down again a month later, for Thanksgiving. She would like to take Harriet out for dinner, but this is impossible, because Harriet can’t go anywhere except in an ambulance or a wheelchair van, either of which would cost several hundred dollars. So they sit in Harriet’s room and eat nursing-home turkey with very wet stuffing. Then there is pumpkin pie—not too bad—and dark chocolate pastilles that Rebecca has brought because Harriet loves them.

“I had a very strange conversation with Cath,” Harriet says. “She called me, and she asked me why, when you girls were little and I would take you to a Broadway musical, why wouldn’t I ever buy you the original cast album when they were selling it in the lobby.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I didn’t remember. Which is the truth.” Harriet looked at Rebecca, puzzled. “Do you think she’s in therapy?”

This makes Rebecca laugh, and after a moment Harriet snorts too, and the two of them end up wiping away tears, trying to collect themselves.

The legs of Harriet’s stretch pants have ridden up, and Rebecca notices a bandage on her calf.

“It’s infected,” Harriet tells her when she asks. “It got bumped on the wheelchair, and I asked them to put some antibiotic ointment on it, but they never got around to it.”

They play Scrabble; Harriet is still pretty good. From somewhere down the hall, a woman begins to moan. The same words over and over: Take me home. Please, please take me home.

“She does that all the time,” Harriet says, her hand hovering over the box of tiles. “I don’t know if she thinks her children are in the room with her, or if she’s talking to God.”

“Either way,” Rebecca says, somber, not even sure what she means by “Either way.”

But Harriet makes it explicit. “Either way, she’s not crazy to want it; and either way, it isn’t happening.”

A man has been coming into Rebecca’s bookstore every couple of weeks. He buys a lot—no specific category, he just seems generally ravenous—novels, poetry, history. He is short, probably in his late fifties, with silver-rimmed glasses, a large shaggy graying head, and a big square jaw that reminds Rebecca of a lion. He grins at Rebecca when he pays. They don’t talk. Their not talking, which might at first have been shyness or reserve, has begun to feel deliberate, erotic. His name, on the credit slips, is Benjamin Ehrman.

Already Rebecca can tell the story two different ways. One ends with them getting married. The other ends with her looking back over a cratered battlefield of a love affair and wondering: What were you thinking?

Harriet calls late one morning, practically in tears.

“What is it?” Rebecca asks.

“I’m still in bed. They haven’t—when I woke up I said I needed the bedpan. And the aide told me it was too much trouble, I should just… go, and they’d come clean me up. So I did, but that was a couple of hours ago—”

Rebecca looks at the clock hanging on the wall of the bookstore. It’s eleven-thirty. “I’ll call you right back.” She hangs up, and then calls the nursing home and asks to speak to Harriet’s caseworker. She describes what Harriet has just told her and ends by saying, “That is not okay.”

“No, it’s not,” the caseworker agrees smoothly. “You’re right. But sometimes they can make it sound worse than it really is; there may be a little more to the story. Let me go look into it.”

Rebecca’s hands are shaking. “I don’t think my mother is confused about what’s going on.” She keeps picturing the caseworker in her Halloween costume: her eye patch, her blackened tooth, her little plastic dagger. And she says again, “This is not okay.”

She hangs up and calls Harriet back. “The social worker is sending someone to help you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mom. I’m sorry.” They stay on the phone until Harriet has to hang up because, she says, “Here everybody is, all of a sudden.”

Benjamin Ehrman comes in and buys the Oresteia and the complete Ecco Press set of Chekhov stories. Is he taking some sort of middle-aged Great Books course? Is he courting her, trying (successfully) to slay her with his taste?

He pays. He smiles. He doesn’t say anything, not even thank you. At the point when any other customer would have said, “Thank you,” he smiles at her again.

Oh, Rebecca, you tired, confused woman. You are so ripe for this kind of thing.

She goes down to visit Harriet at Christmas. (She and Peter have never spent the holiday together; she always goes to Harriet, and he is either with his kids or off skiing in Utah. This year, the separation bothers her. Not in itself—she hates skiing—but the fact that there is no expectation that they will make a plan together. How could there not be, after all this time? On the other hand, doesn’t the ease with which they go their separate ways—the pleasantness of it—confirm that she is free?)

She brings Harriet a beef tenderloin she has cooked, and she reheats au gratin potatoes and green beans in the kitchen microwave. The gray people in their straggly hallway flotilla watch, or don’t watch, as she walks by, holding dishes aloft. One woman looks at her and raises a forefinger, like someone timidly hailing a cab. “Excuse me,” the woman says, “but is this Washington Square?”

“No, it isn’t,” Rebecca says.

“Do you know how to get there from here?”

Rebecca shakes her head, and the woman smiles and shrugs.

Harriet says of the dinner, “You can’t imagine what a treat this is.”

“Yes, I can,” Rebecca says. “That’s why I brought it.”

Ralph’s children have taken him out for dinner—they all live nearby—but later that evening he comes to see Harriet. Rebecca likes him: he is blunt and loyal, and quick, like Harriet.

Rebecca sits trying to straighten out a piece of knitting (a red scarf, Harriet’s Christmas present to her, which, Harriet says, “should have been done ages ago but I keep screwing it up—you know I’m not domestic”), while Ralph and Harriet play anagrams on a table rolled up against Harriet’s wheelchair. They take turns flipping over a new letter and seeing if they can steal a word the other person has already made.

Rebecca, ripping out rows of Harriet’s impatient, thwarted knitting, is nearly in tears watching them: the speed, the sureness with which they play. Ralph steals risked from Harriet, adds his own T, and makes skirted. She steals donuts and makes astound.

One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of January, Rebecca goes to the movies by herself. She stands in line—a long one—not thinking of much. The smell of popcorn, and how sickening it is. The fact that the hole in the right-hand pocket of her orange wool coat has now become big enough that she ought to start carrying her loose change in the left one. Ahead of her in line a man is waving, beckoning, smiling. Benjamin Ehrman. She turns around to see if he means someone behind her; he grins, and points at her, and beckons again. So she goes to him.

“What movie are you seeing?” he asks, and she tells him, and he says, “Me too.”

She says, “So, you do know how to talk after all.” She feels like a jerk as soon as it’s out of her mouth.

But, “I know,” he says. “One of us was going to have to break that silence.” That sounds meaningful, erotic again; he defuses it by adding, “It was getting to be like those staring contests you have when you’re a kid.”

So they go in together, sit together, are deferential about the armrest, are aware of exactly where each other’s hands are in the darkness. The movie is a “little” one that has received doting reviews. The audience is enraptured with it, laughing, sighing. Rebecca hates it. She looks over at him and he looks back and rolls his eyes at her. They don’t know each other well enough to agree to walk out—they don’t know each other at all, so walking out would mean going their separate ways. They stay, sitting there through the whole thing grimacing at each other, sinking down in their seats, their shoulders growing conspiratorially closer as their silent agreement that the thing just stinks grows more and more intense. At the end they throw themselves out into the street, laughing. They go for coffee, but order wine instead.

A list of what shocks Rebecca, over the next weeks and months:

Bed. That something she’s done a lot of, and enjoyed in the past, could feel so fiercely new.

Underwear. He likes it, so he buys it for her, and she starts buying it for herself. Tarty, expensive stuff. And nothing in her objects—not the feminist part, not the shy part, not the part that is aware of weighing fifteen pounds more than she did in college.

Her hair. It’s long, it nearly reaches her waist; she’s always worn it up, or in a braid. He wants it down. She sits on the bed between his thighs with her back to him, and he brushes her hair, crooning to her. And she loves it—she, who has always disliked having anyone touch her hair since childhood, when Harriet used to yank a brush through it and say impatiently, when Rebecca flinched, “You have such a tender scalp.”

Pet names for each other. We won’t even put them in here, because the ones they make up are so incredibly silly.

German chocolate eggs with toys inside. He hands her one after dinner on one of the first nights he cooks for her. She thinks, Oh, how nice, a chocolate egg. When she unwraps it and breaks off a piece, she discovers a small plastic capsule inside; when she opens that, she finds six plastic pieces; when she puts the pieces together, they make a tiny pterodactyl holding a jackhammer. Oh, he says, the pterodactyl-road-crew ones are the best.

Jealousy. He is separated, but not divorced. Rebecca sees the wife around Cambridge, a narrow pretty greyhound of a woman, with a face that is at once anxious and arrogant. She looks rich. She is rich, because Ben is rich. Five years ago he sold his dot-com company and made the kind of money that can scatter people all over an expensive city in big houses: one for himself, one for his parents, one for a son and daughter-in-law, and then another one for himself when he moved out of the first one and left his wife alone there. That had happened a year before Rebecca met him. Rebecca hates seeing this woman—Dorinda. After a sighting she always has a sense of belated, alert panic, the kind you feel when you narrowly miss having a traffic accident. She sees Dorinda in the supermarket, and Dorinda’s eyes hold hers for an instant and then sweep coldly away. Is this just one person registering the presence of another, unknown one? Or is it the snubbing of a rival?

She asks Ben if Dorinda knows about her. Ben says he’s mentioned to Dorinda that he’s seeing someone, but that they’ve never discussed whom. Implying that they do still discuss some things. What things? What do they talk about? How often? How married are they? There is also another, much earlier wife: Carol, the mother of Ben’s three grown children. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Rebecca doesn’t know what she looks like and is not bothered by her as she is by Dorinda, though it does worry her that there are two of them, two of Ben’s former loves cast adrift in the world. Does it mean she will one day be a third? Is he a serial discarder? No, she tells herself: he is fifty-seven, he’s had a life. Rebecca is forty-five, and has a past of her own. Her quantity is equal to Ben’s: two. Steve, who had grown less and less interested in sex, and eventually told her that it would be okay with him if she wanted to go out and have an affair; and then Peter.

She has of course by now broken up with Peter, who, she thinks, barely seemed to notice. In fact, it’s Rebecca who has failed to notice. She is so far gone, so deeply drunk on love, that she doesn’t notice how surprised and hurt he is; how aware he has been over the years of his own caution and reticence; how miserably, suddenly certain he is that their long civilized mildness was fatal and largely his fault; how far from mild he is feeling now. He’s angry at her, but angrier at himself.

“We could still see each other sometimes,” she said vaguely, cravenly, at the end. (She was thinking that it had been so friendly all along, maybe it could just keep being friendly.) “I’ll miss you.”

“No. Don’t call me. Don’t call me again unless you mean it,” Peter said; and then he amended it to: “Don’t call me.”

It was very clear and clean, Rebecca thought at the time. They had met for a cup of coffee in Harvard Square, and they were done and she was walking home within fifteen minutes. She was relieved that there hadn’t been a scene, but also not surprised. She did feel sad: she would miss him. She passed the store that sold the chocolate eggs and went in and bought one to hide somewhere—Ben’s slipper, the piano bench. They’ve taken to stashing them all over his house for each other to find.

What does Harriet make of all this? Nothing. Rebecca hasn’t told her. She doesn’t know what Harriet would say, but she knows she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear anything from anybody.

She wants to be utterly alone with Ben: she wants to drink him, eat him, climb inside him, run away with him. She’s never felt this way about anyone.

What she has always thought, watching friends of hers disappear into similar love affairs in the past, is, “Uh-oh.”

But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like similar?

She gets calls from the nursing home. “I’m just calling to report that your mother fell this morning. She slid down out of her wheelchair. She wasn’t hurt.”

“We’re calling to let you know that your mother is in the emergency room. She has a pretty high fever, and the doctor was worried she might be dehydrated.”

She calls Harriet. “Mom?”

Harriet says she’s okay, or she’s tired, or she’s mad that they didn’t take action sooner, or she knows they’re short-staffed and that it’s not their fault, or that they’re a bunch of stupid uncaring assholes who just want her money. Rebecca murmurs and soothes, gets indignant, calls the nursing home to complain, suggests to Harriet yet again that they hire a private aide to keep a closer eye on her (which Harriet has always refused to do, because the nursing home is already gobbling up her money and once it’s gone she’ll have to go on Medicaid and have a roommate, the idea of which she finds abhorrent).

Rebecca has always been competent whenever there’s a crisis—but it’s different now, more automatic, because she has Ben. When something happens with Harriet, she does what needs to be done, but it feels more like Honor Thy Mother than it does like running into a burning building to save someone you love who is trapped inside.

“And you’re sure you don’t want me to look for a place near Boston?” Rebecca asks.

No, Harriet always says, because of Ralph.

She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver, “It’s time for her to live closer to one of us.”

(Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say, Okay, Cath, I’ve arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you.)

Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.

She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop—but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet’s death, and she doesn’t want that.

She asks Harriet one afternoon—it’s when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)—“Aren’t you tired of all this?”

“Yes,” Harriet says. “But I don’t want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story.”

“What story?” Rebecca asks.

“All the stories,” Harriet says.

“You’re so sad,” Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.

“My mother’s in the hospital again. Septic shock. Another urinary tract infection, which I guess they didn’t catch fast enough. I’m going to drive down there tomorrow.”

“I’ll make you a drink,” he says, and then he calls her one of the incredibly silly pet names, which for the first time fails to delight her. It seems irritating and ill-timed. “And then I’ll run you a bath,” he says.

“A bath sounds good.”

“And I’ll come watch you take it.”

“Come talk to me, you mean?”

“No. Watch you.”

That’s an aberration, not a revelation, she thinks. Being objectified, when she just wants to be accompanied.

“You’re so sad,” he keeps saying. It starts as sympathy. A week or two later it’s cool, a diagnosis. Then it becomes a criticism.

He starts wanting the underwear to be kinkier. And he wants her to wear it every time.

He used to talk a lot about divorcing Dorinda. But it’s been months now since he mentioned it.

Rebecca asks him about it one night, as they are lying in bed, happy, she thinks, naked, with scraps of underwear scattered all around them.

“I would love to marry you,” she says, with a boldness that is new and luxurious for her. She’s echoing something he has said to her many times by now. “I hate it that you’re still married to someone else.”

He is silent. Then he says: “You knew I was married when we started this.”

She tries to get out of it without too much self-abasement. She knows the uselessness of asking questions. She manages to sound less desperate than she is—but still, it’s more desperate than she would like to sound.

Women ask for explanations, over and over, when love goes. There is no explanation. The explanation is: It’s gone.

The whole thing, from the time they met at the little movie to the end, took sixteen months.

Back in her apartment, she’s cold. It’s a cold spring, wet, dark. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t sleep well, she doesn’t read, she doesn’t see many friends. She gets her hair cut to just below her jawline, knowing it’s an angry, masochistic thing to do, but hoping that it will somehow make her feel better. (And also because she can’t bear now to attend to it: shampooing, brushing.) She talks to two people, her assistant from the bookstore who has had something of a front-row seat for all this—she used to raise her eyebrows at Rebecca all those months ago when Ben would come in, buy books, and leave without saying anything—and an old friend from the school where she used to teach. Both of them are kind, but both seem to be saying, without saying it, “What did you expect?” (In fact, they’re not saying this. They’ve been watching Rebecca all this time with some concern because she has seemed so engulfed in Ben and remote from everything else, but they have also been rooting for her, wanting it to work. The “What did you expect?” is coming straight from Rebecca herself, spoken in a voice not unlike Harriet’s.)

Summer comes, then fall. Rebecca still can’t walk by the store that sells the chocolate eggs.

“What’s wrong?” Harriet asks over the phone. Her voice is feebler these days, hoarse.

“Nothing,” Rebecca says. “I’m just tired.”

“You want to hear something shitty?” Harriet asks.

“What?”

“They’ve stopped giving me physical therapy. They say I’m not making any progress. I said, ‘Well, how the hell am I supposed to make progress if you stop giving me physical therapy?’ But you want to hear something wonderful?”

“What?”

“When Ralph comes over, he moves my legs for me. And he makes me do arm exercises. So I don’t atrophy.”

The nursing home calls.

“We’re calling to let you know your mother is in the hospital again—she had a fever, and so we sent her over to the ER.”

The hospital calls. Harriet once again has a urinary tract infection that has gone undiagnosed—she can’t feel any pain, because of the paralysis—and once again she’s in severe septic shock. They’re putting her on antibiotics.

Harriet calls. Her voice is weak and shivery, but animated, excited. “Oh, my God—did you hear about the tunnel?”

“What tunnel?”

“It collapsed. Turn on the TV. It just happened, at the height of the morning commute, they said.”

“Where was this? What city?”

“I don’t know. It was my roommate’s TV, so I couldn’t hear very well, and then the nurse or someone came in and shut it off. But it sounded awful. People were killed, they think some people may still be trapped in their cars. You need to turn it on.”

“Mom, we don’t even know where it’s happening.”

“It’s in a commuter tunnel. The main one that leads to the city, they said. Or maybe it was the bridge that collapsed, the bridge that leads to the tunnel. But everybody goes through the tunnel.”

That night the hospital calls. Harriet’s fever isn’t coming down. They’re going to try a different antibiotic.

Early the next morning, Rebecca is trying to decide what to do—call in the assistant, or close the store for the day, so she can go to Connecticut? Stay here and keep in touch with the hospital and Harriet by phone?—when the hospital calls again and someone tells her in a clear, soft voice that Harriet is dead.

She sits there.

She needs to call Cath. (Who will say, “Do you think we need to do a funeral?”)

She needs to call Ralph. (Who will cry. Who will be heartbroken. Who will now begin to decline very fast.)

She wants to call Harriet.

It has all gone on for so long without Harriet dying that Rebecca lost track of the fact that Harriet was going to die.

Guilt: if she hadn’t gotten tired and distracted—if she hadn’t let herself be so easily dazzled—if she had not relaxed her vigilance, this would not have happened.

Even in the moment, she recognizes this guilt as irrational, bogus; but it pierces anyway.

Harriet died when Rebecca wasn’t looking.

She sits there.

She wants to call Harriet, more passionately than she would have believed, an hour ago, that it was possible to want that, or to want anything.

The only other person she finds she wants to call—and of course she can’t—is Peter.

She will, though. Not now. Not until almost a year from now.

She will wrestle during that time with questions having to do with forgiveness. Can she forgive herself for what she did to him?

(For the most part, yes. The two of them made their polite, inhibited, explosive mess together, she believes; it ended the way it might have been expected to end, although the particular trigger could not have been predicted.)

(But oh, the folly of that particular trigger.)

Can he forgive her? No way to know. She puts off the phone call for so long partly because she is afraid to find out.

She keeps pitting his final “Don’t call me” against his penultimate, “Don’t call me unless you mean it,” trying to figure out which one carries more weight.

And she gets tangled in that “unless you mean it.” Which she didn’t even really hear when he said it; which she has discovered in her memory since then. Unless she means what? She can’t define it explicitly, the thing that Peter insisted she had better mean—but she does feel she understands what he meant by that insistence, and it gives her hope.

By the time she finally does call him, she will know that she means it, even though it will be a scary phone call to make, and even if she still won’t be capable of saying clearly what exactly it is she does mean.

Harriet would have been quick to tell her, accurately or inaccurately. To guess, to analyze, to explain, to make predictions. Harriet was always the one who wanted to talk about the news, from Spain, or from the Vatican, or from some uncertain city where something had collapsed—from any place, really, where anything of interest might be going on.