Arcadia

Garden of Earthly Delights

At the end of a sunset party in an apartment overlooking the city, when the Sibelius has given way to the ambient Icelandic rock of their late youth, when the goat cheese canapés and stuffed mushrooms have cooled to the sticky consistency of kindergarten paste and everyone has had enough of the sour local wine from the city’s rooftop vineyards to be mildly drunk, Bit finds that something in the air subtly shifts; a certain hilarity effervesces out of the partygoers and they pair themselves into odd couples, draped on the sofas or leaning against the doors, sharing the deeper secrets of their lives.

A woman stands before Bit, tall, her sparse eyebrows filled in with what looks like ash. Oh, I loved him, she says, her face gleaming with the beauty she must have had in her twenties. He lived in Venice. He was married. We met on a vaporetto. Her lips go soft, remembering.

Bit bites back what rises to his tongue: poor half-drowned Venice with its overwhelmed pumps. Poor Micronesia, poor Tuvalu, lost Atlantises. Instead, he nods. The woman’s face sags into the present. She winces and kisses his cheek and disappears into the crowd for more wine.

Bit presses his back against the glass wall to watch the party. His friends are lit in orange from the sun going down over the river. Dylan raises his wineglass to Bit across the room, and the liquid slides red against the curve, catching the light. Pooh, whose apartment this is, laughs so hard she has to put her drink down on a side table and dab at the corners of her eyes with her tiny white hands. Cole touches the chandelier with a finger, frowning thoughtfully. A half a century of life has creased his friends’ faces with wrinkles and made their bodies go soft around the middle, yet there lives a sympathy so deep in their marrow that a single word spoken by a stranger can spark the same light in each. A woman calling out. . trip?; and they think Trippies, skinny Kaptain Amerika in his flag sarong. Someone saying the word pure; and before them rises a phantom silver Sugarbush, sap ringing musically into tin pans.

He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.

For a breath, Bit can hardly bear the love he has for his friends. He goes out onto the balcony in the cold blast of air and watches the people move, perfect and tiny, on the street below. He imagines them all young, the men shouldering down the street, holding their excitement for the evening in their guts, the women with their high heels tapping codes. He thinks of Grete earlier, heading out to be with her friends, pausing in the dim hall of the brownstone to check her makeup in the pier glass, to touch her pink braids, to smile at herself as she turns toward the door. Contentment rises like a warm wave and dissolves just as it breaks over him.

He walks home through the quiet city until the party’s buzz clears from his head. He finds himself looking for stars he knows he won’t see. It is after midnight, and Grete still isn’t home. The brownstone folds itself around him. The long windows are open, and a cold spring gust comes in. To stave off bad images of his daughter lost somewhere in the city, he tries to read poetry, an anthology of 2018’s selected best. Poetry is what he turns to these days, finding in its fragmentation the proper echo of the disintegrating world. But tonight, in the strange slackness that arose in him after the party, he can’t concentrate on words.

He reaches for Grete’s e-reader, turns to the news for company. But there is a viral epidemic in Indonesia, the grave blond newscaster says, a sudden airborne event. Bit turns it off.

The monster is peering in the window. The ice caps have melted, the glaciers are nearly gone; the interiors of the continents becoming unlivable, the coasts so storm-battered people are fleeing by the millions. New Orleans and the Florida Keys are being abandoned. The hot land-bound places are being given up for lost; Phoenix and Denver becoming ghost towns. Every day, refugees show up in the city. A family takes shelter in the lee of Bit’s front steps, parents with two small children, silent and watchful. They arrive after the lights are off in the brownstone and are gone by morning, their only trace the wet concrete from their hose baths. He leaves food for them in a cooler. It is all he can do. As ever, his kind is frozen by the magnitude of the problem; the intentionally ignorant still deny that there is a problem. Bit spends little of his salary, saving for the future, when, he knows, the well off will survive. Abe took a month last year to outfit the basement with food and water and gear. There is a gun waiting for Bit down there, and at times like these, Bit can feel the weight of the Ruger in his hands, a comforting counterweight against the eventual.

During the bad nights, when deep sadness threatens to descend again, although he is ashamed at his selfishness, he pleads: Let Grete survive. Just let Grete make it.

On the street, a trickle of rats moves silver in the moonlight. The clock chimes two. Someone is singing a song that filters to him through plaster and lath and brick. At last, Grete’s steps come, uneven on the pavement. She looms into view, disappears in the cup of shadow between streetlights. That skirt so shameless, that top held on by strings, that face moonlike in its cake of makeup. His relief ebbs as she climbs the steps and is replaced with a low anger. She is only fourteen. He opens the door to find that she is already crying.

Baby? he says. What happened? She buries her head in his shoulder, and he feels her knobby back. She smells like vodka and smoke and sweat.

I hate girls, she says into his shoulder.

Oh, Bit says. He closes the door. You’re two hours past your curfew.

Shut up, Dad, she says. Can’t you see I’m so, so sad? I hate my life.

She’s just warming up. She needs to take it out on somebody. He is suddenly too tired for this same yelling Grete, again. She launches into the old refrains: he’s too wishy-washy, they’re poor, if only he tried a little harder he wouldn’t be so embarrassing, he wouldn’t be so lonely, he’s not totally repellent even if he is a shrimp.

The antique telephone rings on its stand. He still doesn’t have a cell, loving the anchor of the landline, and to escape from his daughter, he picks up the receiver. A mistake; Grete shouts louder. But she goes silent when she sees his face.

Mr. Stone? the voice in the receiver says again. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Oh, he says, lost. Through the wavery glass of the transom above the door, the streetlight repeats in a stuttering arc.

We’ll be there, he says and hangs up.

Dad? says Grete in a small voice. His daughter has turned stranger in the dim hallway.

Dad? Is it Grannah and Grumpy? she says. Please say something. Please.

He is unable, just yet, to speak. He reaches out a hand, and the feel of her cheek under his fingertips returns the words to him. Pack your bags, he says as kindly as he can manage, and he moves his body, thick and strange as if stuffed with clay, up the stairs.

Bit sits in the darkened room. The hospital churns around them; behind the closed curtains another dawn spreads across the landscape. A lump of Hannah is in the bed, a lump of Grete on a cot below. And bigger than the room itself, bigger than the hospital, bigger than the morning coming creeping toward them, Abe’s absence, biggest of all.

The scene plays over and over in his head as it has all night, in obsessive detail, repeating itself beyond his invention until it becomes truth. He sees his parents as they must have been a year ago, just after Hannah’s diagnosis. They would have been in the hospital courtyard, Hannah on a bench, Abe in his wheelchair beside her. A springlike day during the warm February of last year. There would have been neglected perennial beds with volunteer tulips crowning above the winter weeds. Plastic bags shushing as they slid along the wall. A comically fat bird, a Tartuffe of a finch, jerking upon a cherry branch.

Hannah stuck out her tongue. It was grayish and twitched as if there were tiny creatures inside trying to tunnel their way out.

Fasciculations, she said. Some of my lovelier symptoms. With her good hand, she squeezed Abe’s knee.

ALS, said Abe. I’ll be damned.

Apparently, Hannah said, I’m the damned one. He made a choking sound and she said, I’m sixty-eight, baby. Hardly too young to die.

Between them, like an unacknowledged child, their year of changes noticed but not remarked upon. Hannah had thought she was just getting old, swiftly declining. She could no longer open jars or tweeze the coarse black bristles from her chin. A hollow developed between her thumb and index finger. She tripped, mowing the patchy grass around their house, and cut her head on the blades of the motorless mower. Abe found her half-laughing on the lawn, her face streaked in blood. She choked on her tea. Words became strange in her mouth. Life was effortful.

She didn’t think to go to the doctor until late February, when she could no longer shovel the first and last snow of the year from the walk. This woman, who had mixed concrete by hand and kneaded dough for hundreds, who had picked her husband up out of a bath for over forty years. This strong woman, defeated by two inches of powder.

The sun warmed the skin of their scalps. A woman’s voice floated to them over the air. What are we going to do? Abe said.

We’re not telling Bit and Grete, said Hannah. I can’t be a burden.

All right, Abe said.

We’ll take all our baths together from now on, said Hannah. You wash me, and I’ll wash you. She brazened a smile.

I’ll build us a waterslide so that we can get in, Abe said, wiping his eyes.

The breeze picked up and blew lovingly against them. The finch chattered away.

When I twitch, Hannah said, laughing, it’ll feel like a Jacuzzi.

The details that Bit has concocted seem important: the bird, the tulips, the dialogue he worked out these last hours for accuracy. With details, he builds a barricade against the hopelessness, the rush of the hospital beyond. In the weak light from the crack under the door, he sees Grete’s face in its nest of pink braids. Only in sleep is she so still, his restless, skinny girl. He is old and lives on a single plane of existence where Grete is the primary object; she is young and comfortable on many planes, some he can’t fully guess at, lives at school, lives with her friends, digital lives. He crawls to the ground beside her to watch her breathe. When he wakes, the room is dark but the doctor is standing above him, her face obscured, her hand beckoning him outside.

There are too many people moving in the harsh light of the hall. The doctor hands him a coffee still boiling in its cup. Her sharp features look rested, though she was here to meet Bit and Grete when they came late in the night. When she speaks, she shows her huge white teeth. They make Bit think of ice cubes; when she met them at intake, he had longed, absurdly, to lick them. She hugs him, and she smells like powdered violets, such an antique smell for one so young. It unsettles him. Try as he might, he can’t remember this lovely woman’s name.

If you want to talk. ., she says, her voice fading.

I wouldn’t even know where to start, he says. He hears his anger only when she takes a step back. It is new in him, and not unpleasant. I’m sorry, he says. It’s so much to understand.

Will you sit? she says. He drops onto the chair beside her. Around them, people in blue and pink scrubs move with quick steps toward other people’s disasters. Some wear masks, wary of the new Indonesian virus, even so far away. She says, Tell me.

I have too many questions, he says. Why they didn’t tell us that Hannah was sick. For a full year they hid it. Why is she not on any medication, why did they let the disease go unchecked. Why the fuck they decided to kill themselves, instead of dealing with it like a family.

These are things you’ll have to ask your mother, the doctor says.

If she ever wakes up again, he says, I will.

Oh, Mr. Stone, she says, gently. A nerve has begun to twitch beneath her eye, and she hides it with a hand. Your mother was awake even when the Amish woman found her. Hannah just doesn’t want to open her eyes right now.

Bit touches his knees with his forehead and breathes. He has to restrain himself from rushing into Hannah’s room and shaking her. Gently, the doctor’s cold hand falls on his neck and steadies him.

In time, the doctor’s hand warms and it becomes only another weight on him. There’s a white flutter under his leg as she gives him the note in Abe’s beautiful script. Bit reads and rereads the note. His parents felt blessed to be able to go together, as they had lived together their whole lives, since they were romantic children. The doctor begins to talk of what his parents did. Such elegant phrasing she has, so empty of emotion or blame. He wonders if they teach such detachment in medical school. He holds himself still, so that some might seep into him from her skin.

Between the doctor’s sentences and those in the note, Bit finds the time to hang his own lines of grief. He can see the moment when it became too hard for his parents to take care of one another: how Hannah might have dropped something that Abe couldn’t pick up. Then, just after supper, Abe would have closed his book and wheeled himself to Hannah, opening his palm to show her the pill case. They would have put the house in order, leaving the spoilable food out on the porch for the skunks and raccoons and starving deer, cleaning the compost toilet, writing this note. How they dressed in clean clothes and lay down on their bed. How they split the pills evenly and chased them down with the same glass of cold water. Warm, they held each other and waited for everything to fade, to float away. Abe succeeded. Hannah failed. She returned to Bit.

He crumples Abe’s note, puts it in his pocket. He stands in the middle of one of the doctor’s sentences and walks down the long hall. He doesn’t want to be rude, especially to this lovely doctor with her twitch, but he longs only for a blank room and the clean cold of solitude.

It is noon, somehow. Grete has buried her face in her e-reader all morning. Bit feels suffocated between his furiously silent women. At last, he and Grete go to the cafeteria for sandwiches and discover flaccid rolls with morose greenhouse lettuce. Only a few years ago, crisp heads of iceberg had rolled abundantly up from Mexico. Such a small thing, signaling such change.

They have paid and are sitting down when Abe’s death cracks the ground beneath Bit. He would fall in, but for the glimpse he has of Grete’s long hands on the bread, the black chipped polish on the bitten nails.

What? Grete says, looking at him. Dad, what?

The world merges, colors trembling. He feels Grete’s touch on his cheek. Abe, he says.

Oh, says Grete, and there is a shift in her, too. She pulls her chair as close as she can. Together, they close their eyes against the others, the sad food, the sapping cafeteria light.

If Abe were here, Bit might throttle him dead again: what appears to be sorrow is rage. Abe was bedrock; Abe was his world’s gravity; since Bit could remember, his father was his one sure thing.

Hannah’s room fills with dried wildflowers. The local florist is resourceful, faced with the exorbitance of imported goods. But the dusting of pollen makes Grete’s face puff up, and even Hannah stifles sneezes in her bed.

Jincy and the boys arrive, and Grete runs downstairs to meet them. Alone for a minute, Bit goes to his mother’s side. He crouches before her, inches from her face, his eyes watering from her rancid breath. I know you’re awake, he says. Open your eyes.

Slowly, one eye opens in its nest of wrinkles. Hannah blinks. Almost so softly that he can’t hear her, she says, I would prefer not to.

He gasps. He laughs. But the fury quickly settles upon him again. You’re no fucking Bartleby, he says. Her open eye narrows at him.

Jincy and the twins run in, and Bit is engulfed in boy-smells, the funk of filthy hands and breath. Look at this! Oscar says, opening his hand to show the delicate cog of an antique watch. I found it in the playground at school and saved it for you. Isaac had brought nothing, but not to be outdone, says, Look at this! and does a handstand in the middle of Hannah’s hospital floor. Look at this!, the twins say. See me! Jincy has never had a husband or long-term boyfriend: Bit is all there is. When the twins stay over, they start the night cuddling with Grete in her bed, but the morning finds them curled together on Bit’s bedroom floor, faithful as dogs.

Bit pulls the boys to him, where they rest, bony creatures. He looks at Jincy in the door. Unlike the rest of the world, whose good looks slowly and gradually declined into gray hair and wrinkles, her attractiveness has remained stable. What was mousy for a teenager has held steady and turned her striking for a fifty-three-year-old. The spirals of her hair are threaded with grays, and her face is rosy and unlined. She is pleased and bashful under Bit’s admiration. She leans over Hannah and kisses her, brushes her hair from the temple, whispers something. Though Bit strains to hear, he can’t make out a word of what she says.

Grief as a low-grade fever. His sadness is a hive at the back of his head: he moves slowly to keep from being stung. Things bunch together, smooth endlessly out. Astrid arrives; Grete leaps from the chair outside Hannah’s door, shouting Mormor Astrid, I so hoped you’d come! Doctors huddle around Astrid; Astrid marches into Hannah’s room and orders her to sit. A well of surprise in Bit as Hannah painfully pushes herself up. The old friends gaze at one another from across the room, and the way they had been once upon a time washes over him: tall and young in Ersatz Quad, honey and white, Bit tiny, gazing up at their indecipherable stretch.

The car ride back to Arcadia takes a century. The radio reports a thousand dead in Java, sudden sickness, quarantine. Bit turns it off, but Astrid turns it on again, snapping, Ignorance is no help to anyone. He blocks out what he can, the way the disease sets in suddenly, twelve hours and people are dead, a doctor calling it SARS-like, avian flu — like, nobody knows the vectors yet. At last Astrid consents to classical music. Bit is sure that he’ll be bearded and bleary as a hermit when he looks in the rearview mirror, but his eyes shine, his cheeks are flushed. He can still feel the doctor’s small bones under his hug; her violet scent hangs in the air. Call me as often as you like, she’d murmured. Here’s my number. A last flash of white teeth, and he wanted to carry her away with him.

In the calm of the Sugarbush, the sun is tinted green and the birds bugle in the treetops. Bit has to tell himself to not be angry at them. They couldn’t possibly know.

Home is the same. In the pantry, the same rows of glass jars are full of the same beans and grains. The workshed, all tools ranged at knee level for Abe. The path into the Sugarbush, half-choked with weeds. The firewood snaked optimistically around the house, a fortress, a windbreak, an embrace. The heap of the hills purple in the dawn. The way the darkness moves like a creature in the night woods. The woods themselves, tens of thousands of acres that Leif had reclaimed from abandoned farms long before land was valuable again. Abe’s same favorite plate left on the top of the stack. The same double depressions that his parents’ bodies have carved over the years in their mattress.

Hannah’s silence, lifelong, the same.

It would be so easy for him to fall asleep here, to succumb to bed, but Grete is beside him, her eyes narrowed with disgust. Snap out of it, Dad, she says. He breathes and lets home wash and wash over him and busies his hands with tasks — scrubbing the reclaimed floorboards until they shine, baking cakes, making beds — taking solace in the stupid brute motion of his body, letting it lead him through the hours.

Moments, somehow, hatch a week. Now the memorial service. So many people have come. He is dizzied, can hardly see.

The sun is too high, the wind too strong, the Pond smashing against the bank. People feel the need to touch him. Bit is a short man, but they remember him tiny: they pat the crown of his head, and he resists the urge to crush their hands. Hannah’s arm in his twitches. Someone he should recognize in a navy robe is saying an incantation. People say things about Abe: he was the secret strength of Arcadia, he performed a miracle by renovating Arcadia House in three short months, he kept the community going for another decade. And the organizing he did in his old age, the marches on Washington, the impassioned fundraising letters alighting in their mailboxes like stern gray birds of peace. Abe was true to what he believed. Abe, the unswerving one.

Some of the original Circenses Singers, old and flabby, sway under their newest puppets. Their voices are cracked with age, more powerful for loss of pitch. Bit is moved from numbness to hurt. This, he thinks, is what transported means.

He looks up the hill to Arcadia House. Erewhon Illuminations abandoned it after Leif disappeared, and Astrid has left it vacant for two years. Ivy is choking the windows on the west side. There are saplings in the gutters. Pigeons sit heaped on the roofline, buttoning house to sky.

Bit and Grete and Hannah are given an urn. They uncap it. A black smoke of Abe pours into the wind over the Pond. A gray film settles like grease on the water, the harder pieces of Abe falling down to be nibbled by minnows. To wash, molecule by molecule, into the water itself, to be drunk by deer and bears and the muskrats just now watching this strange congregation of humans from the dark safety of their burrows.

Afterward, the mourners mingle in the downstairs of Arcadia House and someone puts Handy, raspy and young, on the sound system. Hannah is an empty flour sack, heaped on a chair in the corner. Through the music, Bit hears angry whispers about the changes Leif made to the old Homeplace, the downstairs wing of bedrooms now opened into a great hall where cubicles had formed a labyrinth. If the Old Arcadians saw the glossy gutted upstairs, Bit thinks, anarchy would spark again in their tired hearts. Poor Leif; he was one who never minded change. For a moment, Bit’s eyes sting for the eccentric who lost himself in a super-high-altitude balloon three years ago. He stares through a window at the graying sky and imagines Leif still there, frozen and peaceful in the balloon’s cabin, his eyelashes iced, his smile on his blue lips, his body scuttling in the wind at the edge of space.

They come to him, the people he loved when he was a child. But they have gone grotesque. Erik is fatty as a doughnut, spinach stuck in his teeth, an engineer, the sole surviving child of Astrid and Handy because he made boredom his lifeboat. Midge is a bald crone, so tiny that Bit must bend to her: this is the last time she will come here from Florida, she whispers through the green mask she wears against disease. She is too old to suffer the train ride. Tarzan is now entirely crafted of leather, the same suede brown from pate to hands. Simon has a toupee that had lost a corner of adhesiveness in the elements; when he kneels before Hannah, kissing her hands, his hair is like the black lid of a pot canted to check the boil within. Scott and Lisa shine with money. Regina and Ollie are baked by Bermuda sun into the perfect gold of their own cupcakes. Dorotka, blind now, has a rattail braided at the nape of her mullet that her lover tugs affectionately like the leash of a small dog.

The small, thin doctor from the hospital has come, and when she nears, Bit is glad. She is a new person: there is no weight of memory to her. There are cracks in the brown skin around her eyes. She kisses him on the cheek and disappears.

We feel so terrible for you, Little Bit, people whisper.

We loved your father so much, they whisper.

If there is anything we can do, they whisper.

They whisper, whisper, whisper. All whisper, save for D’Angelo, who shouts in his new voice of a Pentecostal reverend, God bless that old skinny bastard, Abe! as tears course down his face, unlined and baby-soft, miraculously unchanged.

Most leave soon. They have work, family, trains to catch. Dylan and Cole and Jincy and their broods are the last to go: they have rented a bus together to save on gas. Only when Bit walks into the humid Green house of the courtyard, which Leif had enclosed entirely in glass a few years back, does he see the Amish. The courtyard is a strange place now, the air heavy and damp. A stream trickles, hidden by the ferns and mosses and overhanging mist. The dark bodies of the Amish have gone vague in the fog; from where Bit stands, they could be Puritans just stepping off the boat into the New World, fearful and awed to have earth beneath their feet again.

He doesn’t want these people here. They are too close to a kind of God he has never been able to believe in, a flesh-eating, stern-browed, whipping-post kind.

One of the bodies separates from the group, comes closer, then clear. When she approaches, her little face is a white saucer, features like berries bunched neatly in the center: blueberry eyes, cherry nose, strawberry mouth. She reaches for Bit’s arm, and he understands, as the woman’s face breaks apart, that she was the one to find his parents in their awful half-success.

She says nothing, just squeezes his bicep again and again. He bears it. He looks up through the vast branches of the oak tree, his old friend. Through the soiled glass above, a black cloud has gathered. The first drops bullet overhead. He can feel, just now, what it’s like for the poor ancient oak, sleeping under glass. No more burn of sun on its leaves. No scour of winter, no smash of storm, no relief when its own dead weight falls away.

Bit goes for a walk to be alone. The rain has stopped, but wet grasses cling to his ankles, leaves shiver rain onto his head. The Sheep’s Meadow is gone, replaced by a low sweep of birch trees pale as girls in the dusk. There’s a feeling of captured movement, a slight tilting down the hill as if in a breath they will regain their human shapes and stumble back into a run. Where the ground lips into the forest, there’s a small opening, Handy’s spot, and Bit can see Handy as he’d been a lifetime ago, cross-legged, hair bound by a strip of Naugahyde, face beatific and froggish.

Bit sits where Handy had sat so often. Instead of grace, however, he feels the damp ground seep into his pants. Well, he says aloud. Let it.

The sky fades from gray to inky blue. The moon, bright arbiter, waits for him.

In one hand, Bit holds his life: his students, faces cracked with interest; the brownstone; the dates with lovely women who keep his attention for a night, a week, a month, until they drift away; the parties, the gallery openings, the brunches with Grete in the park. The civilization of the city. His calm, unruffled life, his books, his friends. In this hand, his sick mother would move to a hospital in the city, where Bit and Grete could visit her every day, bringing flowers, ice chips, news. If there is quarantine, if the disease arrives, he has water tanks, he has food, he has Abe’s gun in the safe in the basement. They could wait it out.

In the other hand, he holds Hannah’s death in Arcadia, the place where his parents were so happy. Where he was so happy as a child. (Or was he? Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.) In this hand, Bit stays in Arcadia with his mother, cuts the gnarled toenails, washes her skin, remembers her medicines, feels daily the bone-aching worry of it all. He remembers the births he assisted when he was young, brushing the sweaty hair from the women’s foreheads and rubbing their swollen flesh. Here, he would be a midwife to his mother’s decay, Grete beside him, watching it all.

The latter is the heavy hand, the difficult one. It involves action. He has gotten used to sitting quietly aside, to watching. He palpates his anger like the edges of a wound. Does Hannah deserve such care after what she tried to do? What would her decline do to Grete, his daughter of the city, who has barely seen death, only a speckle of flies on the sill, a rat in a trap?

He wishes for a sign, but the night pulls its drawstring tighter and the wind hushes the trees to sleep. Two choices. To float as he has done since he was young. Or to dive in, to swim.

It is night. Funeral pies are on the counter. The four of them sit around the table in the Green house. Bit tries to take his mother’s bad hand, which shocks him with its lightness and coolness, but she snatches it from him with her good one. In the low glow of the kitchen chandelier, his mother’s face looks carved from soap.

Astrid waits beyond the point of comfort to speak. Ever majestic, she is now blinding in her authority. The midwives whom Bit knows in the city speak of her with reverence; it wouldn’t surprise him if somewhere in the world there were shrines with her picture, the way Arcadia had been stippled with colorful altars to Gandhi, Marx, the Dalai Lama. Astrid had her bad teeth pulled in her fifties, and the dentures finish her face the way woodwork finishes a room. She wears long, loose clothes in earth tones that she manages to make elegant. Helle would have been like her mother, if his wife had chosen to share her old age with Bit. But when Grete sits beside her mormor, leaning against her warmth, he sees how his daughter is a second Astrid, leavened with Hannah’s honey. It brushes him, the good feeling that he is sitting in a fold of time.

I wish you could stay, Astrid, he says, surprising himself.

The old Astrid looks at him, her face soft. She shrugs, says, Handy.

Handy is demented. He thinks at night that he’s in Korea, shouts things like Off to the Repo Depot for you, soldier! and Ash and trash! Everything after his early twenties has been expunged: Arcadia a golden hope perpetually growing in him, his experiments with the doors of perception only glimpses down a long corridor. After his fourth wife left him, only Astrid visits every day. Fat Erik comes three times a year. Old-people garage, Astrid calls the nursing home. But there is a pool, gourmet buffet spreads; it is its own perfect place, in its way.

Into the silence, Hannah speaks. Her hair is still soft around her face, though white. The black dress bags on her, the pearls as sallow as her skin. The only thing I wanted, she says, was to not be a burden. Quick and painless, how I wanted to go.

But the Universe called you back, Astrid says.

For no reason, Hannah says.

You find the reason, Astrid snaps. Finish with the self-pity, and move on.

Bit is so surprised he laughs. Grete begins to cry: So mean, Mormor, she whispers. Astrid ignores them. First, I have hired a nurse, she announces. She is beginning tomorrow. Luisa, her name, a fine lady. When more help is needed, we will hire more help. Second, she says, Ridley, you must talk today to your department and take the rest of the semester off. Third, I have talked to Grete’s school in the city and the school up here. All is settled. She may start on Monday.

Wait. No, says Grete. I have a life. I can’t be here. I have college prep tomorrow. Right, Dad? We have to go home.

Oh, yes, says Astrid. Your father has decided. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you.

I wanted to, he says, ducking from his daughter’s glare. But you were out for a run.

No, Grete shouts. I will not.

The strange new anger rouses itself in Bit, and he hears himself saying in a tight voice, Grete, outside, now. His daughter shuts her mouth. They walk through the ferns into the Sugarbush, Grete’s face blanketed with darkness. Dad, she says, turning on him at last. Isn’t this already traumatic enough for me?

Since when, Bit says, has this been about you?

I don’t have to be here. You could be here and I could go home and stay with Matilda. Or Charlotte. Or Harper, you love Harper, she’s a total nerd.

I’m going to need your help, he says.

She looks trapped. But what about my stuff? she says.

I’m heading home tonight, he says. Make a list. I’ll be back when you wake up.

What about school? I’m not going to any shitkicker school. They can’t be as advanced as we are. I’m doing precalc. I’ll be bored.

It’s only the rest of the semester, baby. Probably.

I can’t. I can’t, Dad, Grete says, her voice sharp. I can’t be in the house. She smells like she’s rotting or something. I can’t be where Grumpy fucking killed himself, Dad, I can’t do it. You can’t make me. I’ll run away.

She sees the way he winces. Like Mom, she says, watching him. I’ll run away.

Bit turns. He can hardly see the ground. How did I raise such a selfish child, he says, so quietly he’s not sure she heard him. But when he walks into his parents’ house, he can hear her sobbing, then the heavy front door of Titus and Sally’s treehouse slamming over and over again.

When the others have gone to sleep, Bit takes Hannah’s ancient car. For the first hour of the drive, he loves the violence of the wind through the open window, how it chases off his cloud of dread, but when it gets too cold, he rolls up the window and turns on the radio. Classic rock, apparently, is the music he loved in his twenties. He finds himself singing along in a voice raspy with disuse. The announcer comes on, then three chords that make Bit laugh with surprise: a funk-flavored song, Cole’s one big hit. He’d struggled for so long, had so many bands, and this success out of nowhere had shattered him. He stopped playing music and bought a nightclub. Now he writes monographs on Palestrina, of all things.

At the end of the song, Bit turns off the radio to savor the pleasure of Cole’s young voice. The lights of the city rise in the windshield. He pushes through the flashing streets. There are fewer pedestrians out now that the disease is rushing toward them, and on most faces there are masks like glowing muzzles. He drives into his poorly lit neighborhood. When he steps from the car, he hears the deep, low hum of the city, both growl and digestion. He only ever notices this sound after returning from the quiet of the country.

Inside, the house is cool and there is the sweet rot of garbage he’d forgotten to take out when they left. He does the dishes, pays the bills, redirects mail, turns off the water, sets the lights to turn on randomly at night, makes sure everything is secure.

He takes a cooler of food outside for the family beside the steps. They are under a tarp, in two connected sleeping bags. The heads of the parents curl over the children, two small lumps close together. He watches them for some time and wishes he had the courage to rouse the father, tell him quietly that Grete and he will be gone for some time, to apologize for not leaving food every day now. But he can’t take the risk they’d try to break into the house, to squat there: squatting laws being what they are, it’d take months to get them out. He creeps away, unsettled.

He spends only a few minutes packing for himself. In Grete’s room he gathers everything he thinks she’ll need: the clothes he remembers her wearing recently, the shoes, the photograph he’d taken of her and her mother when Grete was a toddler, forehead to forehead like conspirators. How alike they’d been, two sections of one soul. He takes the stuffed frog from when she was little, knowing she’ll need it. She looks like an adult now, but there is still a sliver of girl in her that Bit would fight to protect: the uncertainty that steals over her when she’s talking about boys, the delight on her face when he buys her anything pink. The moments when the e-reader has fallen from her hands and she gazes out the window, biting the corners of her long pale mouth, dreamy as her mother.

He has been staring for a while at a yellow raincoat when he sees that its big pocket is bulging. He reaches in. When he opens his hand, he finds his own Zippo lighter from so long ago, rolling papers, a huge bag of weed. Something catches like a fish bone in Bit’s throat. It doesn’t dislodge again until he’s a half hour away from Arcadia, the sunrise burning in the rearview mirror. He steers down a long straight road with his knees and rolls a hasty joint and smokes it. When his head swims, he tosses the inch-long roach and the rest of the weed out the window in the direction of a maple thick with crows. A mile later, he goes hysterical at the thought of stoned birds, their wings failing them as they drop lazily from the sky.

The dawn echoes its quiet in Bit’s city-dinned ears. He is making pancakes to wake up Grete and can’t resist gobbling the first four down. Astrid marks Hannah’s medication bottles, and they’re drinking orange juice from powder. It is all they can get anymore, after the citrus blight. He misses pulp and the acid burn of real juice in the throat.

Honeybees, Astrid says out of nowhere.

Honeybees? Bit says. He wonders if this is a rational thought that his pot-slowed brain just can’t digest.

Passenger pigeon, she says. American bullfrog. I am trying to discover what we are, Arcadians. Going extinct. So many of us dead, dying, gone.

We are the dodo, Bit says and laughs. Abe’s shadow moves, brief and cold, over the room.

I’ll say honeybees, says Astrid. You remember before the die-off? Their funny fuzzy bodies. Always, they seemed to me, the symbol of happiness.

I remember, says Bit. But it’s not just Arcadians dying off. It’ll be all of us soon enough.

Astrid frowns at the bottle in her hand. That sickness hasn’t reached us yet, she says. It will be contained. It always is.

I don’t mean the sickness, he says. That’s just a symptom. Too many people, too little land, the oceans polluted, animals dying. It makes me think we don’t deserve to be saved.

She puts down the medicine and spears him with her icy blue stare. If this is what you think, she says, I don’t know who you are anymore, Ridley Stone.

He opens his mouth, but finds no words there. In any case, he can say nothing for the bald eagles, the bullfrogs, the honeybees, just now filling up his throat.

The house is quiet, save for the gentle ticking of solar panels on the roof. Hannah has disappeared into her room; Astrid has driven her rented car to the airport, promising to return when she’s needed, damn the fortune it takes to fly these days; Grete has gone for a furious run.

After so many days full of people, it feels good to Bit to have this solitude. He wanders into Hannah and Abe’s little office. It is shining, even the drafting table Abe had used as a desk. Abe kept some of Bit’s earliest photos on a shelf: Verda’s face, reflected again and again in a heap of tarnished silver; Helle standing on the boulder by the Pond, reflecting into two long girls joined at the ankle; Hannah, gorgeous and young and slender on Abe’s lap, both beaming as they hurtle down Arcadia House hill as fast as Abe’s wheelchair could take them.

He reaches out with his finger and brushes Hannah’s cheek. He can’t believe what babies they were. The reaction seems to well up all the time now. A few months ago, walking through the city, in the window of an old record store he looked up to see a huge poster of Janis Joplin with round glasses and feathers in her hair, and almost wept at how just-hatched she’d looked. Now, nestled behind his photos, he finds his first Leica, the one his Kentucky grandmother had sent him. He picks it up, marveling at its lightness. Since he begrudgingly began to use digital cameras, a few years back, began doing more commercial work and less of his own art, his own analog gear has sat neglected on its shelf. He has grown accustomed to the ease of digital life.

He rummages in Abe’s drawers and finds a shoebox of color film. He feels a dizzying upsweep of possibility: the rolls could be thirty years old and useless, true, but the distortion of age could make for the unexpected, the sublime: the emulsion cracked or melted, the plastic fragile and easily rent, the effects unreplicable. In his mind, the images unfold atop one another like layers of translucent tissue: ripples of off-white and red, a watercolor cloud composed from the silhouette of a tree, a bubbled landscape of grasses.

He wants to sing. How perverse, the possibility of beauty, unearthed when he least expected it. That there could be such surprises left in the world. He goes out into the sunlight, something softening and settling within him.

The winter before Leif disappeared was the last time Bit had walked out into the forest. He was usually in Arcadia briefly, to drop Grete off for a month in the summer or to spend a night during a holiday. That time, they had all taken a walk together on the twenty miles of trails that Erewhon kept up. His parents were hale, Astrid and Handy were there, Leif even let them see him smile. Bit pushed Abe easily over the frozen ground, his father turning around once in a while to beam at him, his grizzled beard full of ice. Every so often, employees would whip by, snowshoeing or running or in the sleek black uniforms of cross-country skiers, gliding over the hills like tall skinny birds. Grete was a little girl still, her long legs gawky as a fawn’s. She tried to pack the powder into snowballs and heave them into their faces. Their breath wreathed their heads, the crows shimmered so black they were green. It was just an average afternoon in the winter’s dim at the end of a forgotten year, but that day, everyone was happy.

Now the Pond is forlorn, with its lifeguard chair overturned on imported sand. A kickbuoy between two rocks makes a sad thumping sound in the wind-driven waves. Bit thinks of another man at another pond, long ago; the way Thoreau saw the moon looming over fresh-plowed fields and knew the earth was worthy to inhabit.

Bit is not so sure. Besides, there are no fields here. In what he remembers as the sunflower patch, he finds thirty-year-old trees, more enormous than the trees of his youth, greener, casting deeper shadows: all the extra carbon in the air. He follows a strange metallic scrape off into the brambles and, after some effort, locates Simon’s sculpture for Hannah in a wild raspberry bush. Swords into plowshares, the painful earnestness of the thing. Oh, he thinks, helpless before the squat sculpture. This could be a poster illustrating the early eighties. It is iconic, almost already in silkscreen.

He laughs, and the forest, which he has missed to his marrow, laughs back at him. He feels everything, the birds swinging on the currents of air, the early ferns uncurling, the creatures hunched somewhere, watching him. Faster, almost running, he goes through the woods that were once cornfields. These he remembers as sorghum, the Naturists bending in their sun-bronzed flesh to weed. He emerges onto the edge of the tennis court Leif put in, plunked in the middle of what had been the soy patch. Already, tiny trees have sunk roots into the clay. They stand, brave and budding on the fault line, like a small child’s prank.

Back into the woods, toward what he vaguely remembers to be the waterfall, the trail grows narrower, more overgrown. Hannah, when she could still walk, probably didn’t make it this far to trample down the weeds. Two years of growth have almost swallowed the path. The day dims into twilight. He catches spiderwebs with his cheeks.

He comes into a natural clearing, and a shriek startles his heart to flapping.

Grete stands at the far side, clutching a stick like a baseball bat, her face paper white.

Dad, she says in a wobbly voice. Oh, I’m so glad it’s you.

Lost? he says. He tries not to smile. What luck to find his daughter the one time he wasn’t looking for her.

She shrugs. Kind of, she says. But mostly I thought you were a bear.

He takes a photo of her as she picks toward him over the grasses in the last slant of sun. She stops when she is near. She stinks of sweat, has scratches on her face and brambles in her many pink braids, and her face is raw as if she’s been crying. She must have been out here for hours. They are miles from the Sugarbush. On her own, she wouldn’t have been back until deep in the night, if not the morning.

It’s this way, he says, gesturing into the throat of the woods.

Okay, she says. She starts, but stops and turns to him. I just. I’m sorry.

I know, he says.

I’m scared, she says. I don’t want to watch Grannah die.

Me neither, he says, pulling her toward him.

Grete’s teeth clatter. It is colder up here, away from the city; although it’s still late winter, he remembers summer nights so long ago, filled with exactly this fresh dampness, as if exhaled from underground. They come out into the Sugarbush when it’s dark, and the moon fills the tree limbs with a shifting, breathing light. The other houses sit in darkness, ownerless: Midge in Boca Raton for the rest of her days, Titus and Sally having died in a terrible car accident years ago, Scott and Lisa with too many houses to care much about the cottage they’d built in protest of Erewhon twelve years ago.

Bit and his daughter stand out on the porch of the Green house, unwilling to breathe the bad spores of Hannah’s sadness into their lungs.

Up the drive, however, come headlights. The car stops and the engine shuts off. A woman emerges, saying, Stone? This is Stone house?

Nurse Luisa? Bit says, remembering the name Astrid had mentioned yesterday. He flicks on the porch light and sees a very small woman shuffling up the steps. Her face is cracked with a broad grin; she wears a child’s pink backpack high like an extra hump on her shoulders. I lost for half hour! she says. So glad I find you!

The nurse surprises Grete with a hug. When she turns to Bit, she squeezes him fiercely around the middle and says, I come to make things easier. Now. Have anyone eaten dinner?

No, Bit says, and Luisa clucks. In you go, she says. Make the dinner.

Oh, he says. It’s been a long day. Nobody’s very hungry, I think, Luisa.

She beams up into Bit’s face and says, Times like this? Schedules are lifeboat. Make the dinner, make the breakfast, make the bed. It will help to be strict with yourself.

He likes this bossy Luisa, this plain brown woman, a stranger but familiar as an aunt. She pats his arm and gives him a little push inside.

He brings his mother a bowl of soup. She doesn’t open her eyes but accepts half the bowl in spoonfuls. How like a baby bird, he thinks, seeing her open her mouth, her eyes swollen shut, the skin so thin against the bones of her skull. Or, simply, a baby: tiny Grete gazing at him solemnly over a spoon full of pureed peas.

He goes to the closet to find Hannah another blanket. The night is cold, and the window was left open too long for the house to have retained its warmth. When he opens the door, Abe’s smell rises to Bit from the clothes: that clean sweat of him, the metal of him. The lingering last ghost of his father sideswipes him. He knows it’s absurd, but he closes the door to save a little of his father for later.

All weekend, Hannah won’t get out of bed save to drag herself to the bathroom. She sips at the soup Bit makes and only nibbles at the toast. Luisa comes at nine every night and leaves at five, and though it isn’t her job to clean, the house is scoured when he wakes in the morning.

Hannah still won’t talk to him, not a word.

On Monday morning, Grete is eating the last of the granola in the jar. Her face is so carefully made up that Bit stares at her. She touches her cheek and frowns. War paint, she says.

You’re going to blow these country kids’ minds, Bit says.

What if I don’t? she says.

Then they’re brain-dead, he says. Then they don’t have minds to blow.

She sighs and washes out the bowl. What are we going to do about Hannah? she says. She needs to get up. There’s no point in us being here if she doesn’t make any effort to be human.

If she hasn’t gotten out of bed by tonight, we’ll get her up ourselves, he says.

Okay, Grete says. She shoulders her backpack and says, with Hannah’s old wryness, Goody. That’ll give me something to look forward to while I’m getting wedgied.

They drive in silence to the school, and he gently takes her hand when she begins to chew her nails to the quick. In the drop-off area of the squat brick high school, Bit sits with Grete, gazing at the flickering clumps of students.

Boys, Grete says, frowning. They watch the boys buffooning around, and Grete says, I think I’m already starting to miss the all-girls’ pedagogical model.

Bit laughs. I’m having bad flashbacks of my first day in real school, he confesses. If I can give you any advice, it’s to smile and be cool.

Smile and be cool, she mocks him. She squeezes his hand. Then she squares her shoulders like a diver at the end of the board and steps gracefully out. A sudden magnet, his tall, bony daughter with her pink hair in this sea of sweatpants and hunting camouflage. Even in his car, Bit can feel the weight of the attention upon her. He has to pull away to stop himself from leaping out after Grete and dragging her safely home.

He sits in the dark room with Hannah. All day, he tries to feed her soft fresh bread he’s baked and reads her Tristram Shandy to make her laugh; she refuses both. Her breathing is labored. Radio, she commands, and he listens with her to a radical homemaking show (how to make dandelion wine; how to set your own broken bones) and, for as long as he can stay in his seat, to the news. They’re now calling the pandemic SARI, for severe acute respiratory infection. Oops, says Bit. Sorry! But Hannah doesn’t laugh.

Over seven thousand people are dead; the disease has spread to Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, San Francisco, Adelaide in Australia. The Centers for Disease Control, gutted by low federal taxes, have sent out a strongly worded warning for people to avoid hospitals and flights, and nobody is doing much more. Bit stands, agitated. Although it’s early to pick up Grete, he lets himself be chased from the house by the news. First, he’ll stop in town to pick up vegetables and coffee and tofu and rice milk. Muffin’s mothers still run the natural-foods store in town, and they fall upon Bit when he comes in. He finds himself squashed in a middle-aged lesbian sandwich smelling of herbal cough drops and celery. Cheryl and Diana cry, now, as they hadn’t cried at Abe’s memorial service.

Abe was the most practical man, says Cheryl. Infuriating as hell, but always got his way.

He was the last person in the world I thought would do what he did, Diana says. We always thought Hannah. . And she trails off, stricken, bulging her eyes at her wife.

That’s why Abe succeeded and Hannah didn’t, Bit says when the surge of pain has faded.

They show him pictures of Muffin’s children, all eight owlish in glasses, shirts buttoned up to their throats. Missionaries, Cheryl says with a snort. With two old heathens like us, it makes you wonder where all that religion came from.

Before Bit leaves, Diana hugs him and whispers in his ear, You’ll get your mother out of it. You always do.

Then she holds up a carrot from their garden. It is an odd, mutant thing that looks like two human bodies twined in coitus. Show Hannah this, she says. Our Kama Sutra carrot. We’ve been saving it for a special occasion. Alone in the car again, holding the lewd thing in his hand, Bit hears the ladies’ jollity ring in his ears and it makes him glad.

When Grete comes out of the school, he is so flushed with relief his hands tremble. She walks slowly, but her chin is dangerously high. She gets in the car and won’t speak.

Halfway home, desperate, he says, At least you have all your limbs, and she says a brief Ha! Then she says, Let’s just call it an interesting sociological experiment; and she won’t say any more.

Bit can barely park before Grete leaps from the car. She marches into Hannah’s room and throws open the curtains. That’s it, she says. That’s enough. She disappears into the bathroom and begins running the water in the tub.

Bit picks his mother up. He expects her to be light, but she is dense and he almost drops her. With great effort, he carries her into the bathroom. Whoa, he says. Grete has loaded the water with so much bubblebath that the foam is already a foot high.

What? she says. She smells bad. No offense, Grannah, but you stink.

You stink, whispers Hannah. She is crying. Both of you. You stink.

Together, Bit and his daughter unzip the dress and pull it down over Hannah’s arms and belly. They peel off the support garments unseen in the world for ten years: a bra pointy as a pair of missiles, sad orangey hose, a potato sack for underwear. They help her into the tub, bending her stiff limbs. She is still wearing the pearl necklace that Abe gave her on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. She was almost angry with him that night, saying it was wasteful, asking if she was the kind of woman who’d wear pearls. Everyone at the table had suppressed a grin. With the pearls around her neck, the shadow Hannah became visible, the debutante who lived in the old hippie. Had she fallen in love with a different kind of man, Hannah would now be hosting Derby parties, getting tipsy on juleps and wondering why the world felt so hollow under her well-gilded knuckles.

Bit tries not to see what he has already seen, that her right leg and arm have atrophied and twisted. The left arm is going that way, also. There is a strange gray tone to her skin.

Hannah hides her face in the bubbles. Grete builds devil horns on her head. And Bit takes the warm washcloth and slides it along his mother’s body to scrub away the stink of her mourning. When he is cleaning her feet, Hannah lifts her face and it is featureless as an Amish doll under the scrim of soap. Grete gently clears her eyes and mouth of the suds. Bad girl, she leaves the horns.

Clean, now, Hannah is at the table. Her hair is dried and braided, and she is in an ancient sweatsuit so soft it felt like her own skin when Bit put it on her. She manages an avocado — soy cheese melt and some chai. Bit puts on an old record, and while Joan Baez warbles through the house, Grete escapes for another run in the dusk. When her footsteps have gone, Hannah turns on Bit. This is cruel, she says. Her tongue is thick in her mouth, her muscles spasming in her chin. She says, Selfish of you to make me go through this.

Selfish, he repeats, very softly. A daddy longlegs skirts the edge of sun on the linoleum.

When he responds, much later, it is toward the kitchen window. The world held in a frame calms him: the sparrows darting over the green fields, the last flush of Arcadia House through the maple trunks. That small square is all he can take, just now.

When I was little, he says. When you’d grow sad and tired and sleep all the time in the winter, I used to watch you just lying there. In the summer, you were so loud and golden and happy, and suddenly one day you’d just go away. You’d become this pale changeling in place of my mother. It was so cold in the Bread Truck. Unless Abe came home early, I didn’t eat anything from breakfast to dinner. Sometimes I tried to kiss you out of it, but I never was enough, I could never get you to wake up. Deep down, I was sure it was my fault.

It wasn’t your fault, she snaps. And it wasn’t my fault, if you’re trying to say that I was being selfish. It was brain chemistry. You of all people know this, Bit.

He looks at her. Her jaw is set: she is fighting hard. In the window, the world is blue.

All those times, you took yourself away, he says. All I wanted was for you to come back.

He watches her try to pick the crumbs from the table with the fleshy pad of her palm. She gives up, and her hand curls beside the porcelain.

But I did, she says. Come back. This time too. You weren’t there, you didn’t see it. There was a sea. It was very warm. I was holding Abe. Then the waves worked their way in between us and he drifted out. I tried to swim for him, but he was gone. I came back.

They hear Grete on the porch, stomping the mud from her running shoes. She is singing something in the off-pitch voice Helle gave her. In the dim at the kitchen table, Bit and Hannah both wince.

I’m too tired, Hannah says, under her breath. I’m too tired, Bit.

If not for me, Bit says quick and low, for Grete.

His daughter is a silhouette in the screen. Hannah reaches out and touches Bit’s cheek with her good hand. Grete runs in. She drops onto Hannah’s plate what Bit sees is a handful of wild narcissus, ripped from the ground, bulbs and all. Grannah, she shouts, her cheeks pink with delight. Flowers! In February!

Hannah smiles. It is a dry, unconvincing smile, but she takes a tiny pale bloom from the clump and puts it on the back of Bit’s hand. For you, she says. Then Hannah asks Grete about her day and Grete’s face lights up lovely under her grandmother’s attention, and Bit leaves the flower where it is until his hand jerks in revolt.

They take walks. Twice a day, they go out, and Hannah stumbles against Bit; at first, she can only make it to Midge’s before she collapses into the weather-beaten lawn chair in front of the cave-house. She peers at her feet and says, Come on, you old clodhoppers, and heaves herself up and painfully presses on. She insists on showering alone. She dresses herself; it takes an hour. She swallows her antidepressants, pain relievers, laxatives, one by one, choking them down with a look of dour satisfaction. She goes to the bathroom; it takes a half an hour, and she comes out trailing toilet paper on her shoe. Fierce, now, she is grabbing what she can to her. Soon enough, you’ll help, she tells Bit. Soon enough.

Alone at night in the stark room where he sleeps, Bit dreams of the city. It is depopulated, shining with wet. The streets are long and gray, and the shop windows are so glorious they fill him with wonder: the mannequins are luminous, at the near cusp of human, their clothes made of cut paper, a pane of glass away from dissolving in the rain. As he walks, he hears noises behind him drawing nearer: the click of nails, indrawn breath, the slide of something heavy against a wall. But when he turns, there is always the street stretching behind him into the dark and nothing moves, and he is alone and not alone, and frozen in horror.

Grete goes to school. Already thin, she grows skinny. For a week, he presses his ear to her door as she sobs into a pillow. She is always on Hannah’s telephone, her cell not working in these wilds. Her friends must grow tired of her sadness, though, and Grete begins leaving more messages than talking. When they ignore her for days at a time, he wishes he could march them all off a gangplank. Pirate Bit with the baby face; just wound his daughter and see how savage he can be.

The doctor calls, and her smooth voice calms Bit for hours afterward.

Cheryl and Diana visit; the ladies Hannah volunteered with at the library visit; Hannah’s many friends from town visit. Jincy and the boys come up for an afternoon. They play in Titus’s treehouse, and when they come out their faces are swollen and red. At dinner, the twins cling to Hannah, kissing her cheeks over and over until Jincy calls them off. Let the woman eat, she says, and they all watch breathlessly as Hannah maneuvers a cherry tomato to the side of her mouth, slides it along her lips, finally gets it in.

Goal, she says, to make the boys laugh.

When Jincy says goodbye, she whispers, This’ll be the last time for a while. My friend at the Times says it’ll be a matter of days before we’re all on quarantine. She kisses him on the nose and says, I’m not surprised you found the safest place to be when the shit hits the fan.

Stay here, he says. Be safe. But she shakes her head sadly. Our life is elsewhere.

In the afternoon, when Bit and his daughter are in town at the pharmacy, Grete begs for a twenty and buys something that she hides in her backpack. When she comes out to dinner, her hair has changed to an inky black, blue swoops of dye still on the pale skin of her forehead. She stares at Hannah and Bit, daring them to say something.

Hannah puts down her forkful of pasta. Black, she says thoughtfully. It sets off your beautiful green-gold eyes, Grete. Grete scowls, pleased. Hannah negotiates the fork almost into her mouth, missing, and all three watch the linguine slowly unthread itself from the tines and slide back onto the plate. Meals these days have become thrillers. Here, Grannah, Grete says and twists her fork into the slippery noodles, and Bit watches, fighting to stay in his seat, as his daughter feeds his mother bite by careful bite.

Grete gazes out the window with the smell of bad Chinese takeout tendriling toward them from the backseat and says, In gym today we had to run a mile. And I beat everyone, even the boys. She says it indifferently but doesn’t exhale, waiting for him to speak.

I was fast when I was your age, too, he says.

She gazes at her fingernails, says, It’s dumb, but the coach wants me to run Varsity.

Bit says, How exciting.

She turns to him. But Dad, it means that you’re the only one all day long with Grannah. It’s too much, two extra hours every day. You look awful already.

Thanks, he says. Punk.

I mean it, she says. I think I have to say no.

You’ll have to say yes. It would make me happy to watch you run, Bit says. It would make Hannah happy to see you use those healthy young legs of yours. He imagines his mother stuck in her renegade body, watching Grete whipping around a track. It could be painful, the juxtaposition between her imprisonment and Grete’s freedom. But he says, She’ll live through you, and hopes it is true when Grete turns away to hide her smile against the window, her tattletale arms pricked with goosebumps.

Bit is woken by a rasp. It is Luisa’s night off, and at first he thinks it’s the wind against the screen. He sits, heart thrumming in his ears. The sound is coming from the room next door. He hurries over the rough planks into Hannah’s room. Even in the shadows, he can see she’s rigid with terror; when he turns on the light, her face is bluish. He pulls her to sitting, and supports her body as she gasps deeper, calming, quieting. He puts pillows behind her back and props her against the headboard.

Oh, Bit, she says. Can’t sit up. No air.

Scary, he says.

Stupid, she spits. Her fear has disintegrated into fury, he sees. She says, Wasted your potential, Bit. All your life tried to make people whole. What you could have done. If you didn’t have to nurse everyone. Helle, Grete, me. Students. You could have been an artist.

He says, very quietly, I am an artist.

She flicks her good hand at him but says no more. When her eyelids grow heavy and her head nods forward, he goes to the kitchen and finds the number that the lovely doctor at the hospital had scrawled on a napkin and pressed into his hand. He feels sick to call her so late; his heart beats in his throat. But she answers on the first ring. She is calm and clear, and there is only the smallest touch of sleep in her voice. He imagines her bedroom, spare and neat, imagines the straps of a chemise slipping from her shoulders. I’m so glad you called, she says warmly and makes sympathetic noises as he talks.

He looks at Hannah sleeping in the light of her bedside lamp. He feels how, out in the night, his sadness is prowling, watching the one lit window in the Green house, biding its time.

It’s like she’s slowly turning into a lump of clay, he says. A piece of rock.

Well, the doctor says and hesitates. He can hear a whine in the background, and Bit feels ashamed, thinking it’s a newborn — what a pervert he is! of course, she has a family! — but she says, Down, Otto, and he smiles to know it’s a dog. She says, Your mother’s not yet made out of stone. Not yet.

He is too tired to sleep, and sits under an old comforter on a rocking chair on the porch, watching the dawn slip in. He can’t remember the last time he quietly watched this drama unfold; what could possibly seem so important that it kept him from doing this? When did he become a person who stopped noticing? First the moon dims, and in the east there’s a slit in the belly of the sky. A trickle of light pours over the hills, over the Amish farms, over the country roads, over the limit of Arcadia, the miles and miles of forest, startling the songbirds and lighting the dew from within. He thinks of Linnaeus’s flower clock blooming the hours, chicory to dandelion to water lily to pimpernel, a gentler way to live time. In a breath, the day is full upon him. Hannah is calling him weakly from her bed, and in her voice he can hear the apology he wasn’t expecting he’d so badly need.

The doctor’s car is mud-spattered when she pulls up. Through the windshield, they grin at one another, and neither stops smiling when she gets out. They hug: her thinness beneath his arms, her cold hands. His mother is in a slice of sun on the porch. Hannah’s eyes flick, amused, from Bit’s face to the doctor’s and back, when the doctor does her exam.

But the more questions Hannah answers, the more serious the doctor looks, until she makes Hannah breathe into a machine. A spirometer, she explains. To measure forced vital capacity. When Hannah does the test again lying down, the doctor’s face turns grim. Without her permanent smile, she seems older than he thought: early thirties, not late twenties. Ms. Stone, she says, severely. Are you still against treatment? Riluzole, stem-cell therapies?

Ameliorative, yes, Hannah says. Palliative, she says, and pauses. Then she says, Hell, bring on the morphine.

The doctor relaxes. Good, she says. Martyrdom is overrated.

Hannah laughs aloud, the first clear Hannah laugh Bit has heard for so long. For some, she says. For my son, it’s as natural as breathing.

This time, the critique is infused with warmth. In Bit, though, a flash of bitterness like a bird winging away. Unfair, he says. She winks, and he can almost hear her say Not untrue.

Speaking of breathing, the doctor says and clips off to her car. She is so small and tidy; he thinks of a lithe brown cat. He avoids Hannah’s knowing grin. The doctor returns, bearing a pamphlet. I’m going to have you fitted for a BiPAP, she says to Hannah, so you can breathe better while you sleep. You almost scared your son to death last night.

She is finished with the exam but seems loath to go and Hannah asks about the pandemic. The doctor shrugs. SARI, she says. What a name. Makes you wonder who’s in charge. She sits on the steps and talks about quarantine, online tracking of the disease, precautions. I wear a mask in the hospital now, she admits. Everyone does. Mostly, it seems to be killing the immune-compromised, newborns and the old and the sick. Some healthy adults. But the onset is sudden, within an hour or two. I came here straight from my house without seeing anyone on the way. When she smiles, small parentheses go white around her mouth. She touches Hannah’s hand. If I ever suspect I could be carrying it, of course I won’t come out. I wouldn’t risk your health.

If you have it, Hannah jokes, come straight here. Save us all some time.

Bit studies the pamphlet in his hands. Death by pandemic and death by ALS: severe pneumonia in both cases, Hannah drowning in the sea of her own lungs. But between slowly being mired in her body and a half-day drowning, she may be right. Quicker might be better.

He hears a clip-clop down the drive and looks up. An Amish buggy among the maples. Hannah peers, shields her eyes with her hand. What a day, she says.

The buggy comes to a halt, and the saucer-faced woman from Abe’s memorial service climbs down from her bench and ties the horse to a tree. Glory, Hannah calls out, and at first, Bit thinks it’s an expostulation, but the woman gives a wave. She comes up the porch steps, a pie wrapped in a dishtowel still steaming in her hands. She places the pie gently on Hannah’s lap. Her eyes are sad, though, and skitter off Hannah’s face.

Hannah reaches with her good hand and grasps the woman’s wrist. She says, gazing up at her Amish friend, You young people, take a walk up to Arcadia House until lunch. It seems I need to do a little work at redemption here.

Indeed, the little Amish woman says in a low and guttural voice. You do.

The sun is hot on Bit’s shoulders. The doctor’s fine, tiny sandals are caked with mud, and Bit wants to take them in his hands and beat them clean on the grass. There is dirt worked into the cleavage between her toes. His own are irritated in sympathy, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Bit and the doctor walk up the ancient slate steps. They don’t talk until they are standing on the porch, gazing at the gnarled apples on the Terraces below. Leif had planted saplings on the lowest level, replacing the trees so antique they no longer fruited, but the young trees were chewed to nubs by starved deer, and now the Terraces are scribbled with brush.

The doctor tucks a wisp of hair behind her ear, her hands shaking a little, and a warmth starts in Bit’s stomach and spreads. This place, she says. My uncle said that for a while after the commune broke up, high school kids came up here to fool around. There was this story about these two kids who looked up in the middle of getting it on to find a scary huge hippie with an ax glowering at them.

That would be Titus, Bit says, stinging at the thought of his old friend.

Then, of course, the film company came, the doctor says. We used to take field trips out in elementary school. All the other kids on the planet wanted to be rap stars and marine biologists, but we wanted to be animators. Everyone had a crush on that blond CEO. I used to dream I was married to him and rode around on horses out here all day long.

That was Leif, Bit says. His sister was my wife.

Oh. Her eyes scan his face, and he can see her decide not to ask about the was, or about the wife. She says, It was pretty traumatic for Summerton when the company left the area. We were just getting a downtown back, then it died again like every other town around here. I had a clinic for a little while, but it closed and I had to move to Rochester.

It was in Leif’s will for the company to stay here, Bit said. But you know stockholders.

What ever happened to him? she says. Nobody in town really knew. You should have heard the stories. He was eaten by a bear, he was extradited by Homeland Security. It was nuts.

The truth is weirder. He was lost in a high-altitude balloon, Bit says. That family has a genius for disappearing. He looks at her profile, the teeth caught on her lower lip, the crow’s-feet as she squints out toward the hills. My wife disappeared, too, he says. Eleven years ago. She went for a walk and never came back.

I’m sorry, she says. He notices a short yellow hair curled on her breast and stops his hand from reaching for it. She flushes, then picks it off. My dog, she says. I thought he’d be good protection for a woman living alone, but he’s scared of everything. Lightning, strangers, ice, the dark.

I’ve never had a pet, Bit says. We were never allowed to have dogs here when I was a kid. We considered it animal slavery.

Otto thinks I’m the slave, she says. I pick up his poop, after all.

They watch a little red fox come out at the edge of the forest, crouch, pounce, and carry off something gray in his mouth. The doctor’s small hand touches his arm.

Bit, she begins, too solemnly, and something seizes in Bit: she is going to say it, the things he knows deeply but can’t stand to hear: his mother is going rapidly; she’ll be in a wheelchair within a month; it is only her stubbornness that has kept her from one so far; instead of going with the slowness he’s been fearing, she’ll go with dreadful speed. If he hears the words, he thinks, it will come true. He has to fight himself to answer. What’s that, Dr. Ellis? he says, at last.

Ellis is my first name, she says and tries and fails to not laugh. Ellis Keefe. I didn’t want to correct you in the hospital. All I was going to say is that I can see why you love this place; and she gestures toward the forest that spreads all the way to the hills in the distance. In the motion, Bit sees what Arcadia had been, populous and full of song. Now it feels empty. Without people, land is only land.

That’s it? he says. I thought you were going to say that Hannah’s disease is progressing faster than expected.

She peers at him sideways, her mouth twisted.

Oh, he says.

I can manage to come up a couple times a week, if you want, she says. I love it out here.

We’d be thrilled to see you as often as you can make it, he says.

She turns her head to look at him. He is acutely aware of the fact of her, solid and real, her gentle gravity, her breath on his cheeks. I would like to see you too, she says, then shyly looks away.

In a small clearing where the Sheep’s Meadow used to sprawl, Hannah is on a blanket, eating Glory’s applesauce. Bit takes a photo and she preens. It is a new compulsion of his to snatch Hannah’s face with the camera whenever she’s not looking. Words have thickened past the point of clarity in her mouth, but he thinks she says, Surely, you’ve shot lovelier cover models.

Never, he says. You’re by far the loveliest. She beams as well as she can, posing.

Soon she is tired; she wants to go home. She struggles and waves him back. A slow one-armed push up onto her knees, a wobbly stand. Hannah stretches as he packs up their lunch. She takes one step onto the path, and he raises the camera to his face. Then she falls out of the frame, and he looks into the world to find her crumpled on the ground.

Hannah, he says.

I know, she says. I know. He half-carries her home.

Grete comes in, wearing her track sweatshirt, smelling of perspiration. She sees her grandmother in Abe’s old wheelchair and says nothing. But in the night, Grete and Luisa conspire. And when dawn brightens the window, it lights up the wheelchair, where a pillow sits, repurposed from one of Abe’s ancient cashmere sweaters; the wheels sparkle with glitter nail polish; there are pom-poms on the handles. A queen of hearts is lodged in a wheel, and it whirs when Hannah moves. So you can’t sneak up on us, says Grete. Hannah gives a wheel a spin with the knuckle of her better hand; she laughs until she cries and cries until she laughs again.

These days, the house is oddly full of Hannah’s laughter. She laughs about everything: the way she can no longer speak, a funny story on the radio, when Grete in her eagerness trips on her own shoes; when she and Grete drink cocoa from the beautiful bone china cups of her grandmother and Hannah’s hand goes rogue and shatters one.

Are you happier now? Bit says, alarmed by this excessive laughter.

No, she garbles, I’m petrified! And this, too, cracks her up.

The track is recycled tires, and when the wind rises and blows across it, Bit smells highway, the American longing to go. All he wants to do is stay. In this place, in this bright day, the children flitting in their uniforms like vivid butterflies, Hannah’s jerking smile. He tucks the blanket around her legs, more in protest against the wheelchair than against any chill. It is a miracle they are even here at the track meet: at the eleventh hour, the school superintendent saw how distant SARI was from them and grudgingly gave permission.

Hannah’s neck is weak today, and she rests her head upon Bit’s palm. Her skull is heavy and overly warm. I’m happy to be here, she says thickly.

He watches the boys, the brutes hurling shotputs like marbles. A girl spins a discus, and the meat of her arm ripples as she throws. The children go blazing by, and their parents dance and shriek. How it would feel, Bit thinks, to be young again, to lift through the air on a pole, to fly over the sand and land in a great explosion. He loves the good sediment of time, wouldn’t trade anything to have to go through that adolescent pain all over again. But, for a moment, he longs to be one of these runners, these leapers, these fliers; to be one of the lovers standing there, that boy holding the willowy girl, so easily able to forget the world because a pretty young person longs to press close to him.

It is time for the one-mile. Grete sends a nervous smile their way, her black wisps blowing under the folded green bandanna. Bit can hardly bear to watch the runners assemble on the line. The gun pops. There’s a blur of sharp elbows. Within a hundred yards, the pack thins out. The slenderest pull away, Grete’s legs longer than the two in front of her, turning over more slowly. The runners pass for the first time in a patter that Bit can feel inside himself. They dissolve behind the high jump; they reemerge. The second girl falters, falls behind. Now the race is between Grete and the leader. The track goes quiet. People watch the two in front spin by again, dragging the slower girls like a lengthening train.

Come on, Grete, Bit groans, but Hannah says something that sounds like, Smart. Waiting.

Around again. When they pass, there is a sheen of sweat on the face of the lead girl; Grete is dry and watchful.

Voices begin to build. Around the last curve, one hundred meters left to go. On the straightaway, Grete moves even with the leader, easy, and her legs seem to blur. Side by side, the girls bear down into the sprint, and everyone is screaming. Bit himself is urging Grete forward with his voice, hopping up and down, frenzied, washed with a strange relief in this senseless shouting. The girls chest forward over the last ten meters, strong as horses. They tick down to a walk, nearly falling on their wobbly legs. It is impossible for Bit to say who won.

Now they wait, Grete in a swarm of petting hands, as the other girls trickle in. An official puffs over and confers with the coaches, then turns to the two leaders. He murmurs something.

Grete screams, Fuck! and throws her bandanna and stomps away.

Bit has to wait for the downswoop of his heart to steady. Apparently, he says, my daughter is a poor loser.

But Hannah’s face reflects back the sun. Got my devil in her, she says.

Bit leans closer. You were a poor sport? he says, knowing it’s true, even as he says it.

No. Fast, says Hannah. Together, they watch Grete composing herself at the fence. Fast, fast, fast, Hannah says, and she pats her wasted legs with her good hand, as if to praise them for everything they had once so easily done.

Bit is in the dawn in the forest, breathing the scent of water, all fish and sweet leaf rot, when the sun grows through the treetops and touches him where he stands, camera forgotten. He is so still the doe doesn’t see him and bends her elegant head to drink at the stream. There is a flash of red: a fox, startled, running fast and looking backward; it careens into the doe’s haunch and bounces back on its rear. The creatures gaze at one another, appalled. Bit guffaws, and the animals disappear in a blur. Alone now, Bit can’t catch his breath, and he laughs so hard that he goes dizzy. Something breaks in him, and the breaking, at last, feels good.

Grete has one friend. Her name is Yoko, and she has a sweet cupcake face, a trill of a laugh. She is a Japanese exchange student in this wee country place; now that Grete has come to school, Yoko is always at the house. She was supposed to go home but can’t: Japan is under quarantine, ten thousand dead already, the photographs of the streets swept of people, and those who can afford it wearing oxygen tanks. Yoko’s host parents in Summerton are dim, strict Christians who make her play the organ for hymn hour at night while they sing. When they pick her up at the Green house, they honk impatiently and never come in. Behind Grete’s door, there are sobs and Grete’s gentle soothing. When they emerge, both puffy-faced, Grete and Yoko bake cookies, watch movies, build panoramas of classic short stories for English class. A man and a woman at a little table; the hills in the distance, white elephants. A heart below the floorboards, and curled within it, the text of the story on a strip of paper that scrolls out; a tale-tell heart. A brain like a phrenological illustration, a bullet passing through it, the sections each filled with a tiny image of bliss.

Bit studies the last project for hours. During his white nights, he holds the shoebox in his hands and looks at the delicate drawings of happiness in the lobes. If he holds it long enough, his own scenes swim up. The long stretch of Helle under a white sheet, Cole’s adolescent face the first time he heard Houses of the Holy, a sea urchin in a tidepool on a trip Grete and he took to the shore, spiny as a horse chestnut on her fat pink palm.

Hannah can’t be understood. She must take Grete’s e-reader and pluck out the words with her two fingers that work. She barks with frustration; she weeps over nothing. At supper, which Bit cooks — peas and grilled tofu, soy cheese enchiladas, the old Arcadia standards he has been cooking for thirty years now — the conversation between Yoko and Hannah is a surreal play.

Hannah: Gwabway eel o aampee en ooah eewa, Oko.

Yoko: Sofunneee, Glannah! Ha-ha-ha!

They fall into stitches, and Grete and Bit look on, bewildered. They share a glance, shut out of the delight in the air; for a breath, envious of the inarticulate.

In the full blow of April, Arcadia seems even emptier of people. The strong wind rises against the trees so they bend like girls washing their hair; it rattles the Arcadia House windows. Wandering through the upstairs rooms one day, Bit finds a raccoon in Leif’s vast bathtub, spinning a bar of soap around and around in its humanoid hands.

If he listens closely, over the wind against the screens and a distant plane above, he can almost hear the Arcadia he knew, the strum of Handy’s guitar somewhere in the thickness of the house, the women in the Eatery kitchen, laughing as they cook. His own young voice, urgent and high. Although he almost hurts his ears, straining, he can’t understand what the once-upon-a-time Bit is saying to the current version of himself or to the one who will stand here in the future, a man changed as the house is changed, worn a little more by time and loss, gradually dragged down by gravity. If he is so lucky. If they are all so lucky. The schools on the West Coast have been closed; the airports are bare. Dogs trot down the middle of L.A.’s freeways. In Summerton, the mail carriers wear gloves and masks, and in all the stores, there are great tippy stacks of wind-up radios and soup and bottled water. But in Arcadia, with their well and garden and basement full of food, they are an island. They could wait as the disease washed again and again over the world and emerge when it was safe again.

What relief there would be in starting anew; what hope there would be in doing better. The old story, Noah’s, the first step into the world scrubbed clean.

The raccoon is watching him, holding out his uncanny black hand, the sliver of soap catching the light from the window. Bit reaches slowly and takes it. Though the creature surrenders the soap, it curls its black lips and reveals its teeth, and Bit can’t tell whether it is smiling or showing its fear.

Ellis steps through the ferns and onto the rock beside Bit. A Saturday and Grete is Hannah-sitting. After the examination — Hannah losing function and weight in shocking numbers — Ellis looked scared. In the hallway Bit said: Tell me on our hike.

A date? Perhaps. They had arranged it on her last visit. He wanted to show her the waterfall, the spring-fat waters coming down, a white sheet fading into the wind. But they are here and it is only a strip of ribbon. He looks at the ghost of the waterfall and feels ill.

It’s beautiful, Ellis says.

No it’s not, Bit snaps at her. She frowns back at him, and he says, Sorry. It’s just less than it should be. When I was a kid, it roared. We could hear it a mile away. He laughs in embarrassment at his swoop of sadness and says, Everyone in my house seems to have inappropriate emotional reactions these days.

Ellis presses his arm. Understandable. Grete’s fourteen. You’re bearing the weight of your mother’s sickness. And Hannah’s bulbar paralysis is causing her to react wildly.

Oh, says Bit. I just thought my mother was happier.

Ellis sits and pulls out the sandwiches she’d brought. Chicken or egg, she says.

I’m so sorry, Bit says, dismayed. I’ve been vegan my whole life.

Ellis gives a beautiful guffaw that echoes against the cliff. I meant, she says, who knows what came first. Hannah truly could be happier. She has her two loves near her; she’s on massive antidepressants. It’s spring, and you make sure she sits in the sun for hours every day. And maybe all that crazy laughter in itself is making her happier, sparking some kind of neural pathway in her brain. Whatever the case, treat it as a gift.

A gift, Bit says, sitting. A gift would be lunch. What are the sandwiches?

Peanut butter and jelly, she says. I can’t cook.

My favorite, he says and cuts an apple for them to share.

Ellis stretches her bare feet into the little pool. She smiles at him, chewing. Listen, she says. This is probably not what you want to hear. But do know it’ll get worse before it gets better.

Your cooking? Bit says.

Ellis doesn’t smile. Her eyes, in the sun, are the deep blue of dusk. She rests her side against his, and he can feel her waiting for him to either lean in or shift away. I know it will, he says, leaning in.

In the kitchen window, there appears a lady in a bedazzled purple mask. In the kitchen, Hannah says, Shit, and wheels into her room. The lady goes to the back of her car and heaves at something in the trunk. When Bit comes into the bright dust to help, she gives a squeal. Oh, thanks, she calls out. I’m helpless!

She’s one of the Library Ladies; such creatures everywhere have blue marshmallows for hair. Bit carries the box into the house, and she fills a glass with water and drinks it down. In the pink circle where the mask had been, the moist skin of her cheeks has collected dust; the wrinkles fanning from her lips are making their own mud. I’ll just leave it off, she declares. You are hermits out here, no way you got the SARI. Your mom around?

She’s taking a nap, Bit says.

We passed a hat, the lady says, patting at herself with a tissue. All around town. Your mom’s beloved, you know. And we bought her a computer.

Oh, Bit says, at a loss. Gently, he says, But she already has a computer.

The lady says, Not like this one, she doesn’t. Then she cocks her head to the side and says: Are you well? You don’t look well. Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Who’s taking care of you? Do you have a girlfriend? I know a lovely young woman. Pretty hair. What do you call it? Auburn. Are you sure? Take her number. And Bit is left holding a scrap of paper, which he tosses as soon as the lady is gone.

For an hour or so, Bit gazes at the booklet. Such fine calibrations; such delicate technology! This computer can track the weightless touch of a glance on a holographic keyboard. The booklet says that those who are proficient can do more than twenty words a minute. Bit thinks of what Ellis said on the hike back from the waterfall: Hannah could have a month, maybe more. He does the math. If she were to start now and not stop, she could write another of the short popular histories she’d written when she was a professor. Or one long essay. It is no time at all.

Bit struggles with the setup until Grete comes home from the morning practice. Grete, child of the Digital Age, struggles until lunch. They are eating their salads, gazing at the screen and nest of wires, when Glory says from the door, I see you need help.

Grete snorts. Glory’s woolen dress emits a damp heat, and she has a straw of hay in her bonnet. They hadn’t heard her horse on the path; the maples are swarmed with raucous magpies.

Oh, Bit says. It’s. Well. A computer, Glory.

Glory says, I know. I was in IT for five years.

Grete whispers, Is this a joke?

No, Glory says, bending down and fiddling.

They finish their food but stay, fascinated by Glory’s rough hands among the wires. Why’d you leave the world, Glory? Bit says. Why did you come back?

She stands and shrugs. It is lonely, she says. Five years, I was lonely. Then I realized that I was not happy, and would do anything to be taken in and loved. It seems a give-and-take, you know? Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

Why can’t you have both? says Grete, frowning. I think you could have both.

You want both, Glory says, you are destined to fail. She looks at Bit. I remember when your people were here, it was the big debate among my family. What to do? We watched with horror! Naked people, drugs, loud music! You were like babies, you could do nothing. You didn’t know how to plow a field. But we couldn’t let you starve. Eventually, we had a meeting and agreed to help enough to feed you, but let you disintegrate on your own. And when you did, there were some of us who felt very smart. Too much freedom, it rots things in communities, quick. That was the problem with your Arcadia.

Bit thinks of the poverty of the last years of his childhood, the kidlets with scrawny limbs and terrible teeth, the drugs, the cash going to relief efforts, to the Midwifery School, to the Trippies and Runaways. He thinks of easygoing Handy, and his pride that started the rift.

Well, says Bit slowly. I guess that’s as good an interpretation as any.

Yeah, but it’s not like you Amish are perfect, Grete says. You’re human, too. I mean, even you guys get sick. What happens if you get SARI? I bet your community would suffer.

There are always diseases, Glory says. You’re too young to remember measles, chicken pox, polio. Spanish influenza killed millions in 1918, and nobody ever hears about it. We have survived other things.

Glory nods toward the cookies she brought. Now. Eat your dessert, she says. Allow me to concentrate, thank you. In fifteen minutes, Glory has the computer running. She settles Hannah before it. They wait as Hannah figures out the mechanism that makes it work.

Bit finds himself holding his breath, urging the computer inside his head, making deals. If you let my mother speak, he thinks, I will repudiate my repudiation of technology.

A smooth, light voice rises and startles them, a voice unlike Hannah’s. Only after it has passed does Bit understand what it said into the dimness of the house: Glory be.

They hear from Cheryl and Diana, who come, sobbing. Muffin and her family are missing in Madagascar, and all the news they can get are pictures of bodies lining the street. As they are leaving, the ladies remember another sorrow and tell how Pooh’s two-year-old granddaughter in Seattle has died in the night, and the family is in lockdown and can’t travel to mourn together. The news touches the bone.

Ellis has watched silently, great-eyed, from a chair in the corner through their visit. When he passes her in the hall, she stops him, and takes his head, and gently leans it against her shoulder. He stays there until Grete comes from her bedroom, sees them, and shuts her door again.

In these quiet days, the house is full of slanted light and music from the ancient turntable. Hannah only ever wants Bach. Bit spoons a dollop of chocolate pie into his mother’s mouth. It is hard for her to swallow, impossible for her to chew. To keep her from losing too much weight, they spend most of their days making her eat.

Hannah glances over at her new computer and eyes out some words. Benefit one to sickness, the sultry computer voice says. I can taste as vividly as when I was a child.

What’s benefit two? Bit says.

He sees Hannah’s eyes return to the keyboard. Benefit two. ., the voice says, and there’s a long pause. He goes to the sink to do the dishes, and when he returns, he peers at the screen, thinking that perhaps Hannah forgot to make the voice speak. But there is only Benefit two. . trailing into nothing.

At last, he gets her joke.

Ellis comes every other day, mostly in the evenings after she’s showered and had dinner and waited for illness to sneak upon her. Bit and she sit together for hours over tea in the kitchen, eating Glory’s pies, while Luisa and Hannah murmur in Hannah’s room and Grete sleeps the sleep of the young. Ellis tells him, piece by piece, about herself. The good little girl, beloved only child of older parents, piano-playing, churchgoing. Summerton was larger then. There was a Farm and Home store, a Newberry’s, a Kmart, a smattering of hippie boutiques from defectors of Arcadia. She went straight to college at seventeen, to medical school at twenty-one. She wanted to fix people. She saw how her mother came back from the rheumatologist’s glowing, her hands having been gently held for an hour, the power of touch. But her parents both died when she was in residency. She was very alone. She was engaged three times (she blushes). She called it off every time, a few months before the wedding. They were nice guys, she says. She didn’t love them.

Bit folds her small brown hand into his. Her nostrils go red and her eyelids do too and there’s something of the bunny about her as she wipes her cheeks on her shoulders. I’m not sure, she whispers, I’m capable of loving anybody.

Ellis, Bit says. Oh, honey, of course you are.

He lifts her knuckles to his mouth and kisses them, tasting the bitter almond of her skin. She stands suddenly, and says a hurried goodbye, and drives off, and all the next day Bit is afraid he’s scared her away. But she comes again at nine that night, and when she enters the house, the cool air in her clothes, she kisses him gravely on both cheeks, next to his lips, and leans her head against his chest and keeps it there for a long moment, just resting.

Then she says, I have a surprise, and goes out to her car, and a huge yellow Lab comes bounding out, a streak of sunlight in the night-darkened house. He rests his muzzle in Hannah’s lap and Luisa chases him from the kitchen with a broom and he wrestles with Grete until they both pant. Can Otto stay here? says Grete, grabbing the leonine head and shaking it until the dog nips gently at her wrist. Ellis grins at Bit. Not just yet, she says. Maybe soon.

Possibility, so strange in this house of sickness, washes over him. Soon, he agrees.

When Ellis drives away, a door seems to close behind her. In Mexico City, the morgues are full and the dead are stacked in the warehouse of a toy company. On Grete’s e-reader, the images rise: babies in their canvas shrouds, stacked under drifts of dolls with unblinking eyes. The image haunts Bit at night and makes him sit at the window to watch the comforting dark until his vision goes blurry with sleep.

Bit can hardly catch his daughter alone. She comes in at ten. He lifts himself, his body a heavy sack, and meets Grete at the kitchen sink.

Hey, Dad, she whispers. They can hear Hannah in her room, barking No! at Luisa, the last word she can say. Luisa always responds in her soft, kind voice. Grete’s track sweatshirt smells of the woodsmoke of some bonfire. On her breath, there is whiskey.

Oh, Grete, Bit says.

Don’t worry, she says.

I do, he says. The quarantine. Plus you’re fourteen. And you have the genes. I mean, your mother started a little younger than you—

Dad, she interrupts him. In the dim kitchen, she laughs. Listen.

Whippet-thin, she leans on the sink. She talks about running. About how she pushes until the pain builds so high in her limbs that it breaks into bliss, how she is a raw nerve here, at home, but when she runs she’s let loose from anxiety, how it threads itself all the way through her bones until she feels relief kindle in her, a kind of happiness.

I would do nothing to threaten that feeling, she says. Nothing.

He must seem dubious because she looks at him for a moment, holding something in. You’re a lot like Grumpy, you know, she says. You always have to take care of everyone else, and don’t let anyone take care of you. It’s kind of aggressive.

Aggressive? he says, startled. Me?

All I’m saying is, if you won’t let me take care of you, at least take care of yourself. She turns away and closes herself in her room.

In the morning, Bit hears her stir and rolls out of his bed in his running clothes. It is the kind of dawn that seems to seep out of the trees’ vibrant green. Grete comes onto the porch where he’s stretching and says a small Oh!

How far are we going? he says.

Until you drop, old man, she says and vanishes with impossible lightness into the waking forest. It is all he can do to follow on the path where she’s gone, the underbrush still shaking with her passage, each of his steps becoming its own reward, the day its own glory, his lungs’ bursting a good pain and his daughter falling back, at last, in kindness to him.

Hannah makes a wordless bray when Grete goes out the door. Grete waits, impatient, for the computer voice to flute out: You, my darling, are not wearing underwear.

Grete flushes and mutters, Grannah, Jesus. I forgot to do my laundry, not that it’s any of your business.

Hannah snorts, and the voice says, I can see your business. Hussy.

May Day, and he looks for nymphs dancing ribbons around poles but finds only the same sear that once afflicted August in his youth. The radio is an insect abuzz in the house, reporting heat-related deaths in the cities, five hundred thousand dead of SARI, general quarantine, hospital only for traumatic cases, airlines shut down. He flicks the box quiet before the personal stories begin. He can only bear tragedy if it’s abstract.

Glory comes in the mornings and fills the air with the warmth of baking pies. They cover most of Hannah’s newest smells: the ointments for her sores, the sickly whiff of her breath, the house-filling stink when she can manage to void her bowels.

Luisa lives with them on a cot in Hannah’s room; it is safer for her here, in exile. The hospital is in crisis mode, but everyone is afraid of SARI and nobody but the sickest come in, so the doctors and nurses spend their days playing cards and watching television until the director announces voluntary suspensions of noncritical staff. Ellis chooses this option and comes every morning; she naps beside Bit, atop the covers, when it’s Grete’s turn to watch Hannah. Grete’s school is closed. Yoko and Grete talk on the e-reader a hundred times a day. At night, the family eats the vegetables Hannah once canned, tasting the sun of other summers in them.

Sometimes Hannah seems so distant; he thinks she’s trying to pray. It makes sense, in the light of her decline. Bit also tries to pray when he is unable to sleep, but he keeps his eyes open, because when they are closed he sees God in the form of Handy, who is most definitely not God. He turns toward the window, the cold coin of the moon, and tells it stories about his day, to pull the shapeless mass of his time into some saving form.

At last, Bit comes to Hannah when her face is peaceful, and he asks her what she is doing. The voice says, Practicing.

What? he says, and her proxy voice swims out beautiful and smooth: Make tofu. Baste. Play Chopin. Launder. Shell peas. Curry horse. Bake scones. Fuck. Knead bread. Swim.

He sits in the rocking chair beside her. The women’s noises fill the house at his back. He will make raspberry jam in his head, he decides; he hasn’t done any preserving since he was a boy. He closes his eyes. At first he forgets steps, has to backtrack to squeeze the lemons, clean the berries, measure out the sugar, pluck the glass jars from the boiling water. But when he relaxes, things go vibrant. He feels the furry warmth of fresh raspberries in his fingers, and the smell rises up, sweet and tingling, made even brighter by memory.

The sun and wind pour into the sheets on the line. There are bodies in the billowing, forms created and lost in a breath. He takes photo after photo with his ruined film, to hold them there.

This is what, long ago, made him fall in love with photography: the paying of attention, the capturing of time. He’d forgotten exactly this.

He walks in, arms full of laundry, to find Grete shouting for him. He drops the clothing onto the kitchen counter, and socks roll across the tiles. He finds his daughter standing in the bathtub, Hannah leaning against the sink, her face gray, choking.

She knocks me back, Grete says. I try to help, she knocks me away.

Bit is also pummeled by Hannah’s sharp elbows but leans in. Her mucus is too heavy for her, impossible to swallow. Bit takes a washcloth, seizes Hannah’s head, and scrapes off the back of her tongue. She gasps: the color slowly flows back into her face. Tears roll down her cheeks and drip off. Bit cradles her head in his arms. When she is calm again, he wheels her into the kitchen to her computer. Into the heat of the afternoon, the voice at last comes: My body, she wisecracks, wants to kill me.

During the rainstorm, the wind in the trees sounds like panting. Bit remembers what Titus used to call his own spells of sadness: the old black dog. How appropriate: fanged and servile, neither wild nor human, but an odd by-product of civilization, hungry and slinking near. He can almost see the dog out in the wild rattling rainstorm, skulking in the blacker shadows among the trees. He can almost feel the softness of its pelt under his hand.

Grete has filled six of Hannah’s skin-thin teacups with water and daisies. They shine in the dawn. These days, they use the antique lace tablecloth and the silver service at every meal. It comforts Hannah to handle things her own mother and grandmother touched.

While Luisa changes the bedsheets, Bit and Hannah are alone.

Hannah peers urgently at the computer. When the voice comes on, it says with gentle calm, My little Bit. Will you forgive me?

Bit’s silence, born of surprise, stretches. Forgive what, exactly? Which of her many failures is she speaking of?

He stares at the claw of her hand until he somehow knows she means Arcadia, their common wound, how she had pushed toward perfection but, tiring, turned away. It is true that most of the children of Arcadia rebelled. Dylan went neocon, Cole became punk, Jincy searched for suburbia, Leif turned antiseptic and inward. It’s the ancient story: the deliberate rejection of what gave birth to the youth and created the man. In the quiet of the house, Luisa’s shoes squeak around the bed, the mockingbird begins a rill.

Bit feels it start to swell in him. The love, which he had turned from, breathes, blinks, swallows. A creature, stirred back to life. He can’t be separate. It is impossible. He is part of the whole.

He looks at his brittle mother and says, There is nothing to forgive.

Within the rebellious clay of her flesh, Hannah kindles, becomes so unbearably brilliant that it hurts Bit to look at her. Still, he keeps his eyes on her. He looks.

Hannah had once been vaster than Arcadia itself, her body so big it enveloped him, the warmth of her, the bread of her, so great that the sun had risen and set in her. Dwindling, she is a burlap sack and bundle of sticks; she is frayed muscles, weeping sores.

He carries her into the Pond. She dabbles her hands and legs, pretending to swim. They hear Grete’s fast footsteps as she runs up. She wades in, still in her clothes, the jeans and boat shoes, the pretty top. She goes underwater and comes up next to them, her hair plastered and eyeliner streaming in black slips down her cheeks. She says, Let me, and carries Hannah away through the water toward Helle’s rock. When she turns around, she is singing the song that Bit used to sing to her, the summers they spent up in Arcadia, when she was little and frightened of the thick water of the Pond. . swimming all day, In the ocean so wide, Now it’s time to rest, And float with the tide, Hey ho, little fish don’t cry, she sings.

Luisa is calm but pushes through the countryside at such speeds that Bit is afraid of the trees rushing by in the darkness. Bit holds his choking mother. They are in the ER. In a moment, the doctor in his green scrubs brandishes a scalpel and Hannah has a hole in her throat. Cotton descends upon Bit’s mind. For a long, good time, there is blankness.

They wheel Hannah out again. There is a ventilator attached to her. She is weeping. I didn’t want this, she will say at home, clawing at the tubes; but it’s clear, even now, what she means. Luisa says something: refused to talk about advance directives. Hannah. Bit finds himself in the car, going home.

He can administer enemas, hold his mother one-armed over the toilet, wipe her bottom. He can brush the shine into her long whitening hair and file her toenails and rub the muscles that cramp until she gasps with relief. He can spend all his patience from dawn to dusk spooning soup into her mouth which she chokes on more often than not. Even in the hospital, when they asked her about a feeding tube, she had been so agitated they understood her No. He can watch her waste away. To make peace with the problems of her flesh is not hard for him. But something deep in him resists the raw wound in her throat, the way it smells of death.

He watches his hand clean it, anyway. He has locked himself away so that his days are lived by a shred of himself. The rest of him waits somewhere on the outskirts, watching for the end.

But Hannah studies the part of Bit that remains. She is expanding while he is retracting. She is a cup. She overbrims with love.

Hannah cannot swallow her food. She chokes and lets it dribble from her mouth. Bit remembers a story, somewhere, of a woman bricked into a wall. This is his mother, interred alive.

Ellis kneels at Hannah’s side. She isn’t sleeping, either: she is pale, her face drawn in the sun. Bit hears among the murmurs, starvation. . feeding tube.

No, the computer voice says cheerily. I am glad to have had these months. It was right. But I am almost done. Let me starve.

Ellis lays her brown cheek on Hannah’s hand. You’re right. It’s a gentler way to go, Hannah, she murmurs. We’ll give you opioids and keep you comfortable. As long as you’re still happy with this decision.

Hannah’s eyes dart at Bit. The computer sings out, I am happy, now, to go.

The women tighten, a knot, around Bit’s small family. Luisa and Grete, always; Glory every afternoon. This morning, thumbing their noses at the quarantine, Cheryl and Diana, the Library Ladies. Grete is gone for hours on her runs. When Ellis arrived the night before, she held her soft cheek on his, and he could feel the pulse of her, the promise. Such terrible timing, to find what he had been hoping for, now. She had put her things in his closet, and slipped into his sheets, her body cool as a salve. When he rose to get a glass of water, he’d heard Grete in her room whispering into Otto’s patient ruff.

Before lunch, Astrid, alerted by Grete, sweeps in. Bit doesn’t see her at first, but he feels the house fill with her cold blue flame. Then she is cupping his cheeks in her callused hands. She kisses him on the forehead, and he wears the kiss for the rest of the day like a badge.

Cooking, tending, cleaning: omnipresent like flies, the hands of women.

When it is overmuch, he goes to the Pond and submerges himself in the too-warm water. The weeds grab and slide against him. A hawk watches him from a branch, a blue jay in its talons. When Bit proves innocuous, the hawk bends its head to the bird and down confettis onto the surface of the water. Small blue feathers stick to Bit’s skin when he climbs out.

On his walk back, he sees a man sitting on Scott and Lisa’s porch. Even from a distance, Bit can see the man is Amish: full-clothed in the heat, suspenders black against a white shirt. Bit approaches warily. The man stands and nods, and his beard wags. He’s fair-haired with rosy cheeks and shoulders so square they could be hewn from oak. Bit had seen him on Glory’s arm at Abe’s service; her husband. When Bit nears, the man’s eyes begin to twinkle. He makes a little pinching motion with his fingers and brings it to his lips. If Bit didn’t know better, he would say that it was the universal sign of a toke.

I’m sorry? he says.

Amos, the man says, pointing at his chest. He makes the sign again, then a motion that could only mean waterfall. And it returns to Bit like a slap, the day at the end of Arcadia, Ike and Cole and he in the waterfall, the two Amish boys stepping out of the twilit woods, the crouching around the campfire, the joint. This must be one of those boys.

Bit gapes in astonishment. The man looks around and winks. Then he makes the toke sign again. One minute, Bit says. He walks through the back door and rummages in Abe’s office until he finds the tennis ball he knows would be there.

When he comes out again, the man is looking squirrelly, but he beams when Bit presses on the side of the ball and the invisible cut in it mouths open and a little bag of weed falls out. Bit rolls one, and they smoke. It feels so good to stand with another man in compassionate silence. Amos goes heavy-lidded and says, Glory. They walk back together toward the Green house. When Glory comes out, tucking her loose hair under her bonnet, Bit and Amos are petting the horse, chuckling at nothing.

She sniffs and frowns at Bit with her bunched-berry features. She says, What have you done with my husband?

Bit only says, thoughtfully, I would like to eat the world; and his new friend Amos chuckles alongside him.

In the dusk, Grete arrives home, scratched and sunburnt, her arms speckled with bites. The house is packed. Ellis is giving Hannah a manicure; she grins up at Bit, and he blows her a kiss from the door. Grete leans toward Bit and mutters, Why are there old ladies all over the place?

He puts another biscuit in his mouth to keep from answering.

Hannah hears Grete, though, and the computer voice rises sweetly, saying: It’s an infestation.

Wasting Hannah, faster and faster. Her belly, distended. Her face shrinking to settle among its bones, her flesh mottled. Bit tries to not shudder upon seeing her. Grete can’t be in the room without closing her eyes to her grandmother.

So strange, however: with her body leaving, her soul is rising to the surface. There is fire there, he sees. An ecstasy. He hurts with recognition: where has he seen this before? The answer comes to him in the night. In his knowledge-drunk youth in the college library, the lonely section of art books, the giving spread of them, the lustful dizzied colors. The faces of the saints. Girls: Catherine of Siena, Saint Veronica, Columba of Rieti. Anorexia mirabilis, the body emptying of corporeal want and filling with the wine of God.

Bit buries his face among his father’s sweaters, yearning for Abe to emerge, to make it all better, to take over.

He comes out of the closet. Luisa moves about in the kitchen. Hannah’s room is black and he and Hannah are there alone. Through the thick air, the smooth voice says softly, Don’t be afraid, Bit. I’m not afraid.

He fills an entire roll watching the afternoon light slant across his mother’s wasted face, watching her hands curled like snails on the dough of her belly.

He will develop these later in the pitch-black silence of a color darkroom; in the light, he will hold his mother in his hands again, fractured and grainy, her ruined body perfected by the ruined film.

Astrid sits behind Hannah, smoothing her hair. They used to be sisterly; now, the gulf is vast. Astrid flesh, Hannah bone. They remove the ventilator. Hannah’s eyelids are the purple of a bruise. She doesn’t wake. Her body is clenching back to its original form. She is a wisp, she would be gone in a slight wind.

Insomniac, he comes into the living room and finds Ellis in the recliner. She wakes to him watching her. She begins to say something, but he puts his hand over her mouth and holds it there, feeling the warm movement of her lips, her big teeth, her breath. She stands, and makes him dizzy with her perfume. He leads her out, into the night, over the ground that cracks with branches. The door of Midge’s house, dug into the hillside, opens under his palm. A fury fills him, and he leads her into the farthest bedroom, the windowless one, the pure blankness of earth there. He presses her against the cold concrete wall; she gasps; he pulls her skirt roughly over her hips and finds the welcome of her. They slip to a low bed. The darkness in him comes alive, angry. When he is done, he lifts himself so he is light on her bones and her shallow breath can deepen. He feels the clammy sheets on his legs, her mouth sliding gently on his wet cheeks, the fist clenched in his chest loosening.

Despite the shame, it is good, this thing; in a world gone to shit, this between people should be preserved.

I’m sorry, he says.

Don’t, she says. I’m not.

I’m an ass, he says. Her hands on his neck, shoulders, back. His ear is against the concrete. Ellis says, kindly, It’s all right.

He says nothing, and she says at last, Listen. I love Hannah. But you know I’m not here right now because of her. Her eyelashes are damp on his cheekbone. It had to happen sometime.

He groans. I’ll make it up to you, he says. His lips on the delicate, bitter folds of her ear. Her smile tightening along his jawbone. You will, she murmurs, her voice somewhere inside his skull.

It is the quiet hour. He can hear the tinkle of a wind chime forgotten up at Arcadia House.

Astrid looks at the clock. Luisa will be here soon, she says.

Bit holds his mother’s frond of a hand.

Astrid moves to the table where the morphine sits. I’m giving her a large dose, she says. Enough to knock her out. She bends over Hannah, a willow.

She finishes and puts a palm on Bit’s cheek. I’m not going to write this down, she says. The silence swells between them. You have to say you understand, she says.

I understand, he says. The words come from far away, years ago, the sun.

Astrid leaves. Luisa comes in. She flips through the log in the light of the pallid moon. Hm. Unlike Astrid to forget morphine, she says, but she is careful not to look at Bit.

He says nothing. He watches Luisa prepare the drug, find the catheter. He watches the slow slide in.

It doesn’t take long. Asleep, Hannah folds further into herself.

There is a lightening, as if a weight has been removed from her chest.

And his mother is gone.

It is hot and windless and bright; the last flare of sunset, Hannah’s time of day.

Many said their goodbyes to Hannah at Abe’s services. This gathering is smaller. The stalwarts are here, the women. The Amish are here, mixed in. Ellis holds Bit’s hand. Grete is pale and composed in the green dress Hannah had made her promise to wear. It brings out your eyes, Hannah had said. It makes Grete look like Hannah.

Astrid stands in the Pond, and the water draws slow dark swoops up the fabric of her white dress. She bends to a leaf, where she places a lit candle and pushes it off. The candle moves toward the center of the Pond in a length of ripples, then stops. Astrid sings, her voice cracked. Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changes not, abide with me.

There is no wind. Grete wades out alone, tipping the basket. When Hannah’s remains go into the Pond, they fall straight down. When the heavy pieces of her break the surface, the water heals itself. The rest of the ashes are lighter and float; they bloom in a slow flush across the surface.

Back inside the empty house, the black dog arrives. Bit opens his arms to it, tooth and claw. Outside, there are voices, people drinking juice and eating cake in the Sugarbush.

One week, Bit tells Grete. Give me one week. Then come get me.

Grete holds her sharp elbows and nods. She watches him go into his room.

All is still here, the walls full of comforting dimness. The bed is like two cupped hands, welcoming him in.

There is a landscape inside his head. Delicate hills, threading rivers of blood.

Unpeopled, this place would be nothing. Bit’s people come at will. Abe, striding along, his toolbelt jingling. Grete, a fleet flash in the woods. Verda gathering from the shadows at the edge of the trees, the white dog her dapple. Titus, who reaches for Bit and swings him into the sky. Hannah, her hand stretching toward something, young, golden, round.

Everything he needs is here.

If he cannot be infinite — his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow — this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night.

Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.

Grete climbs behind him, holding him with her thin length. But she is made of flight and burrow, Helle and Hannah both, and leaves him to run when twilight falls.

Luisa comes in and, weeping, kisses him goodbye.

Jincy comes in, bringing the twins. They sleep against him, and Jincy sleeps in the chair, her face lined in the moonlight, mouth open, black as a cave.

Dylan comes in; Cole comes in; Bit’s department chair comes in.

Ellis comes in, the hardcover book splayed in her hands like a bird poised for flight. She stays and stays. She whispers in his ear.

The night comes in, Grete comes in, Astrid comes in.

Glory comes in with muffins, saying something over him in her guttural language, a prayer, perhaps.

In the window, the moon comes in.

On her e-reader, Grete holds Yoko, who was at last allowed to go home to Japan; the girl plays her violin but so poorly Grete snorts and turns her off.

Astrid comes in with avocados and mushroom soup.

Ellis comes in, puts his head on her lap, brushes his temples with her cool hands, murmurs.

Grete comes in; Grete comes in; Grete comes in. With a new song and a sunwarmed tomato, with applesauce and ice water, with a scrimshaw, brittle and yellow, Hannah’s face endlessly carved in the bone. Grete, like water, like the world, will always let herself in.

The first thing is the tea. The stun of rosehip lets the ghosts enter, the cookies flavored with anise, the sighing cushion of the white dog, the close smoky cottage of his own story.

Next, the stars brief in a window between the maple branches. From under a rocking chair, a mouse. It prays into its pink hands, watching Bit, it smoothes its fat haunches like a housewife in a new dress. Bit laughs and the noise scares them both, and the mouse skitters off. Bit is lonely when it is gone.

Soon the page of a book can stay cohesive in the eyes; one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers.

They are in the room when he wakes again.

It’s been a week, Dad, Grete says, her voice tight with urgency.

Time to get up, says Ellis from the chair. She is rumpled; Otto sleeps under her feet.

Astrid, in the doorway, her own column of light.

Dad, says Grete. Please.

It is an effort like digging himself out from a mound of dirt. But he sits.

It is a cool morning. The spring has ended, Bit sees. Grete leaves her e-reader out for him to use, and he finds that the disease has tiptoed backward. Quarantine is over: three quarters of a million dead, only thirty thousand in the United States. Most deaths have been contained in a few areas, the city mostly. The president praises technology, the ability to track the disease and make decisions; he comes onto the e-reader, blue thumbprints under his eyes, and says, Without technology, the pandemic would have been a disaster of proportions never before seen on this planet. We must be grateful. Bit is.

Grete is rosy with health and tan from the sun. Home, she says, a flash of yearning in her face. He sees how the brownstone they bought ten years ago is to Grete what Arcadia is to him. Soon, they will leave the furniture where it sits in the Green house, the clothes neat in their closets. They will seal the windows against drafts and close the curtains. They will secure doors that have locks as afterthoughts: Titus’s, Midge’s, Scott and Lisa’s, the Green house, quieted of its solar clicks. They will load the car. Ellis is coming for a week to help them resettle. There is little of Helle’s in the brownstone: a chair, the same kitchen table, the same bed. He imagines thin brown Ellis filling those places, and is surprised to feel no pain.

He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.

The night before they go, he stays awake, watching the subtle seep and draw of the moon. In the dark, he scans Abe and Hannah’s bookshelves until he finds what he’s been looking for. The book is smaller than he remembered, the edges flaking like pastry dough under his fingers. But the color plates surprise him: they are so startling, so excessively beautiful. He hadn’t remembered such beauty.

For hours in the sleeping house, he reads the old stories until they blend together. Then he puts down the book. When he turns out the light, the moon seizes its brightness again in the window. The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now. They are sturdy wooden boxes, their worth less in what they are than in what they can be made to hold. What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire, the milk churned, the chickens sleeping, the babies lulled by rocking, the listeners’ own bones allowed to rest, at last, in their chairs. The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set off fear: a nail dropped in the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods, the newest baby in the tired womb. His heart, in the night-struck house of his parents, responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.

Bit moves through the house, turning out the lights that Grete thoughtlessly left burning. And like that he lets the darkness in to take its place, where it belongs.

The early June woods simmer. When Bit and Grete lace up their boots, Ellis starts to put hers on, too, but something in Bit’s face makes her sit back down on the porch steps with a book instead. Take Otto, she says. He’ll dream of this walk when he’s a city dog. Bit stays to look at the way the sun off the page shines on her face. I’ll be here when you get back, she laughs into her book. Don’t worry. In gratitude, he doubles back to kiss her on the soft part in her hair. By midmorning the birds grow heavy and watch the world with their beaks cracked, panting from the coolest clefts of the branches. Under such cheery light it is impossible to see the forest as he had so long ago when he was a lost child, grasping and bitter and ready to gobble him, the twigs turned fingernails, the roots sinuously rising from the ground to pull him in.

Grete tells him long, fantastical tales of the kids at the school. She had finished the year with a kind of shuddery relief: now she turns others grotesque to strip them of their terror. The girls are blades in female form; the boys lurch through the halls as rustic as bears. The teachers are gobbling amoebas, greedy for what they can’t understand. Otto races back, his underbelly caked with mud, and squeezes his body between their legs, and races off again.

They come to the place Bit has avoided all these years and climb a storm-felled oak to find the path. Here is the island of trees between two snakes that once were knee-deep streams. Here is the house. The old walls are still standing. The roof has fallen in: a tree grows from the heart of Verda’s cottage as if it were a vast stone planter. One window is breathtakingly intact. The cherries by the doorstep have spawned an orchard, and last year’s pits gravel the ground. When Bit pushes open the door, it swings easily, true in its frame. Inside, the house is forest. The floor is dirt and skittering leaves; the beams have returned to mossy logs. They sit and unpack their lunch, the dog panting at their feet, and he tells his daughter of Verda.

Hm, is all she says.

He watches her, amazed. I’m not lying, he says.

I didn’t say you were, she says. Just, how fantastic it seems. I mean, she was precisely the opposite of everything you were. A witch, magical. Old, self-sufficient, with a pet. You were tiny, overwhelmed with community, longing for a woman to take you in. It’s interesting. She shrugs.

You think Verda was an imaginary friend, Bit says, laughing with dismay.

This place looks like it’s been abandoned for centuries, Dad. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. You found what you needed when you needed it, she says, and squeezes his knee.

She has more of a shell than he ever will. Already, she watches life from a good distance. This is a gift he has given her.

Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.

He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.