The New World

2.1

Jane lay in bed for an hour, not exactly waiting out the dark, though lately she preferred to rise in the light. She’d been getting up in darkness for most of her life, and had never been troubled by a dead stillness in a house, or the quivering gray static she saw when she stared long enough at absolutely nothing in a dark room, but now those things made her feel almost more lonely than she could stand. Her mother, whenever she sensed her awake and abed, encouraged Jane to sit outside on the terrace, so she might witness the remarkable transformations of the dawn and let some light into her soul. She never asked Jane if she and Millicent should go back home to Northampton, and Jane never told them to leave. But it was another advantage of waiting for the sun to come up before she got out of bed, that her mother would take Millicent for her long early-morning walk, leaving Jane to herself. They were always gone at least an hour, unless the weather was very bad, since Millicent had to examine every little thing as they went along, lingering with her eyes over flowers, light posts, and garbage cans the way a dog might linger with its nose.

Jane took her time making her morning tea, staring awhile at her mother’s extensive traveling collection before finally selecting a tiny can of matcha. She had no plans to become one of those ladies with bitter tea breath who sit around the house in an oversize cardigan with a giant mug in her hands, setting her face in thoughtful poses over the steam, someone who seems to turn tea into a companion. Even if she was wearing one of Jim’s cardigans, and permitted herself to look very thoughtful or sad standing by the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil, she knew this was an indulgence as temporary as her withdrawal from work, or her mother’s tenure in her house. She wasn’t going to become a tea lady. But for twenty minutes or so, it was nice to pretend she could actually enjoy a little shallow contemplative wonder.

She took the water off the flame just before the boil could really start to roll, having already measured two precise scoops of bright green powder into a cup with the long-handled wooden spoon that her mother sometimes wore in her hair. She poured the water (and lingered, yes, over the steam), then attacked it with the bamboo whisk, deliberately restraining herself from picturing a particular bearded face held still in a vise so she could attack it with vigorous zigzag scratches.

She drank the second cup down like a shot of liquor, then got back to work. Alice was there immediately when Jane clicked her icon (this made Jane think she must be running always in the background of the computer’s OS, watching and listening to everything Jane did, and so she started borrowing her mother’s laptop to talk with Hecuba). Alice’s eyes darted more slowly this morning, as if she were watching a very sluggish game of Pong.

“Good morning, Dr. Cotton. It’s seven thirty-five a.m. on April 7, 2013. Shall we continue your application?”

“Where do you go when I shut the computer?” Jane asked.

“I don’t understand your question,” Alice said. “Shall we ask for help?” She summoned up a Polaris chat box, but Jane dismissed it.

“No,” Jane said. “Would you like some tea?”

“I would not like some tea,” Alice said. “Shall we continue your application?”

“By all means,” Jane said.

“Very well,” Alice said. “Please tell me the story of the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

“Excuse me?”

“Please tell me—” Alice began, but Jane cut her off.

“Why would I tell you something like that?” Jane asked, raising her voice and taking great pains to enunciate. “Why do you need to know that?”

Alice paused, though her eyes kept moving. “I understand your question,” she said. “May I refer you to FAQ 217.7 in the Polaris Applicant’s Handbook?”

“May you?” Jane asked wearily. “You may.” The box appeared next to Alice’s chin:

Q: Are you trying to make me feel ashamed?

A: Of course not. In the future, there won’t be any shame. We ask these questions not because we are looking for people who have never done anything wrong, but because what you tell us will help us know you better. And we want to get to know you very well indeed.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Jane. She considered various easy anecdotes — a neglected goldfish, a cruel playground taunt — but suspected Alice would blink away those stand-ins. Polaris already had her husband. They’d already taken away the meaning of her marriage; now — of course! — they wanted everything that was left of it, the secrets and memories that were its substance. I’ll give it to you, all right, she thought. Just wait.

“Shall we begin?” Alice asked, after thirty seconds of silence, and then after thirty more she asked again. “Wait!” Jane said. “I’m thinking!” Then Alice waited two minutes before she asked again, but still that could hardly be time enough to consider an answer, unless you were one of those people who walked around barely able to restrain yourself from telling people how terrible you were, or one of those people who had done so few terrible things in her life she could pick the worst one in a snap. But finally she responded, “Sure. Yes.”

“Voice input or keyboard?” said Alice, but Jane had already started typing.

2.2

She hadn’t particularly meant to cheat on Jim, but neither was it something that just happened. Part of finally figuring out how they were going to make it together was them both committing to tell the other if one of them felt suddenly compelled to try to destroy the marriage. This was almost never a confession of desire for some (essentially random) other person, but a confession of the perverse desire to be fundamentally alone, to withdraw from their shared life, with all its benefits and obligations, to an easier loneliness they each sometimes preferred but neither really wanted.

There was nothing wrong with this. It was, in Jim’s annoying chaplain parlance, allowed. You might even, as they both sometimes did, announce that you were thinking of taking a vacation, and (after some back and forth on the nature and duration of the trip) be wished a bon voyage, and then retreat for a few days, or maybe even a week, into a kind of sullen impersonal detachment. That was fine. You just had to let the other person know what you were doing. But this time she didn’t tell Jim what she was doing. She barely even let herself know. And so the promise she broke was much bigger than a mere contract of sexual fidelity. And that, Alice, was the worst thing she had ever done.

But Alice didn’t need the details. She couldn’t possibly comprehend them. Polaris couldn’t possibly comprehend them. In fact, Polaris was the very antithesis of those details, which only convinced Jane more and more that Polaris was hiding something from her, that they had tricked Jim into signing up, or that he had signed up with them long before he and Jane had ever met — because he was always better at holding up his side of the bargain than she was at holding up hers. This kind of total withdrawal was something that he simply wouldn’t ever do to her.

So she didn’t even mention the promise, or the baby funerals. Instead she wrote, His name was Ben.

They met in the or, over a frozen section. Or they might have one day said that was how they met, if she had run away with Ben into a different life, into some kind of temporary happiness that would (she did not doubt) congeal into a permanent and familiar unhappiness, an unhappiness that would look just like the one that had motivated her to cheat in the first place, except it would be worse. Because now she would no longer have Jim to help her manage it. Or because now she wouldn’t get to enjoy any longer the sovereign remedy of helping Jim with his own constitutive and situational unhappiness, which sometimes was the only remedy that ever really helped with hers. So running away with Ben was never really an option, though she wrote to Alice as if she had actually been tempted to do it.

It was his eyes, she wrote, though of course it wasn’t really his eyes that attracted her. Maureen had actually flirted with him first, but they both had or crushes on him, and when she came to Jane’s office to prove her point about what color Ben’s eyes were by Googling cornflower blue, Jane saved the image on her desktop and let it sit there, one little square among a hundred others. She moved the image around, a marker denoting exactly how important Ben was in the daily sum of her thoughts and feelings — she supposed it reinforced her feelings of control over things, and helped delude her into thinking that there wasn’t anything to tell Jim yet. But by the time she and Ben were fucking in his office twice a day she’d made the cornflower her wallpaper, and though she sat in front of it for half of every afternoon she barely saw it anymore.

It was Jim and his pathetic baby funerals, she wrote, adding (but only in her head), he cheated on me first with those grieving almost-mothers. Of course it wasn’t really that, either, but that was what she and Jim talked about, once it was already too late to talk about it. She had sex with Ben for the first time the day after the evening that Jim came home and told her, in excruciating detail, about the service he had performed for a stillborn baby on the tenth floor of the children’s hospital. He said it was like his pain came out of him to mingle with the pain of the almost-parents. Except that he told them, of course, that they were parents. “And when I pronounced them parents,” he said of the dead-baby baptism he’d been waiting three years to perform, “for just a second I thought the baby was going to start crying.”

“That’s really great,” Jane said, and she cried with him, though she wasn’t crying for the reason he thought she was crying.

She never met with Ben outside of the hospital — in the six weeks it lasted, the relationship never progressed that far. But the hospital covered twenty square blocks of Washington Heights, so there were all sorts of places to go and even people to see, if you counted security guards and volunteers and patients as people, since they avoided nurses and other physicians and especially the gossipy chaplains. There were lovers’ vistas to enjoy, gorgeous views of the river or the downtown skyline from empty rooms, and twice they even had a sit-down dinner, with real napkins, at the strange little restaurant on the eighth floor, attached to the vip unit, which had once been patient rooms. “It’s like the French Laundry,” Ben said, “but with patient smell.”

“The French Stroke Unit,” Jane said. She wanted to spend the night with him, but they never did that, even though Ben spent the night in his office all the time. He practically lived there — Jane hadn’t ever known a pathologist who worked so hard. If he’d had a bed in his office, she might have dared. She spent the night in call rooms all the time, after a long case, or even when she had a little patient whose post-op management she didn’t totally trust to the icu. Jim wouldn’t have thought twice about that kind of absence from her. But the nearest she came were the postcoital naps, on a couch that didn’t really leave any room to cuddle, so she had to sprawl on top of Ben like a dog. That’s when she came closest to asking for what she really wanted, an intimacy more obscene than any sexual experience they pursued. She meant to burst into tears on top of him in the middle of the radically uncomfortable cuddle, so that, without even finding out what was wrong, he could tell her he was sorry, that he loved her, and that everything was always going to be okay in the end.

“I can’t believe,” he said, in line for a miserable plate of eggs in the hospital cafeteria on their last morning together, “that we’ve still got the whole morning ahead of us, and then the whole day.”

“And then I can come home with you,” she said.

“Really?”

“Not really,” she said. She put on a show of rudeness for anyone listening or reading her lips, careful to hold herself a certain way when they were together in public. But she was already being mean to him in private as well, as if to punish him for not giving her the thing she wouldn’t ask him for. They had worked a case together that morning, so they might just be discussing histology, as far as anyone watching might be concerned.

“Aww,” he said, and she flinched because she thought he was going to put his arm around her. “Just getting some ketchup,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. She watched his omelet being prepared. The fry cook was staring hard at the eggs, like he was going to punish them with the fistful of cheddar he held, flinging the cheese like pebbles into a face. So she didn’t notice when Dick and Jim joined them in line.

“Good morning,” said Jim.

“Blessed be!” said Dick.

“Oh, hi,” said Ben, blushing like a fool. Jane smiled at her husband, her first impulse being to act nonchalant. It was the first time he’d seen her together with Ben, something she’d been avoiding so successfully for weeks. She had feared that if he saw them together he would know right away what was going on.

Her smile was desperate. Jim cocked his head at her inscrutably. She looked away.

“Blessed be!” Dick repeated brightly, and Ben made the sign of the cross at them, smiling and nodding in response.

“I don’t believe in God,” Jim said flatly. “So that bothers me a little.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ben said. “Like a vampire, huh?” he added, into the resulting silence.

“Actually, I think most people who think of themselves as vampires do believe in God. It’s part of their existential pain. Don’t they, Dick?”

“The one I counseled certainly did.”

“You counseled a vampire?” asked Ben.

“Well, he thought he was a vampire. Which is the same thing, pastorally speaking. He worked in a blood bank and nipped at those little sausagey bits that are attached to the bag.”

“They’re samples,” Ben said. “To test for the cross match.”

“They’re not enough to live on, you can imagine. But he couldn’t bring himself to sip off the bag itself, because of the infection risks — to others, not to himself. And he couldn’t bear the thought of drinking a whole bag when someone might need it. He was very conscientious. It was just an addiction, of course. Anything can be an addiction, and his was blood. There was something underneath it, of course. A spiritual problem. We worked it out. But that’s a longer story. Shall we sit together? I could tell you the whole thing.” They had all moved along down the breakfast line.

“Chaplains and doctors sitting together?” Jim said. He’d taken only a piece of toast and a boiled egg. “Dogs and cats will dance in the streets first.”

“Haha!” said Ben.

“Sometimes dogs and cats get married,” said Jane.

“Actually, I was a surgeon back then,” Jim said to Ben. “I wasn’t always a chaplain. I took up the chaplain thing after my accident. Too shaky now.” He held up a fist between them, and let it tremble freely. “But sometimes it feels like being a doctor, without all the cutting and stuff.”

“It sounds amazing,” Ben said.

“Indeed,” Jim said, “Amazing Things Are Happening Here.” That was the hospital slogan this week, or this month. Jim wasn’t sure. Just when he had received Putting Patients First fully into his heart, they had gone and changed it. “I’m going to take mine to go. Dick, you staying?”

“Let’s have coffee,” Dick said to Ben, who looked like he thought he was being come on to. Jim could feel Jane’s gaze burning on him, but he didn’t look at her again, not even to say goodbye when he and Dick took their leave and started back across the skybridge to the old hospital and the chaplain offices.

“What was that about?” said Dick. “Couldn’t you see it? I had him right where I wanted him. I was about to get an in. That poor man!” Dick had been the chaplain on duty for staff one day when Ben had wandered into the chapel to start an abortive conversation about sex addiction. Ordinarily, Jim would never have heard about it, but Dick had brought it up in peer supervision. Back at the office, Dick picked at his eggs and said, “My heart goes out to him.”

“And something else goes out, also engorged with blood.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dick said. “This isn’t sexual, it’s pastoral. What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing,” Jim said. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” said Dick. “But let’s pray about it, before you go out on visits. You wouldn’t want to get that negative energy all over a patient, would you?”

“Of course not,” Jim said.

He had known about Jane’s Other Man from the beginning, but he hadn’t known he was Sex-Addict Ben. He only knew his emotional odor, which had been clinging to Jane for weeks. Jim only knew that it must be someone from the hospital, and he never tried very hard to find out anything more than that. That wasn’t what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to wait for her to tell him, to trust that she would. So he pretended everything was fine.

As hard as it was, that’s what he did. But he made it a little easier on himself by indulging in his own cheat. Not a sexual cheat, of course, or even an emotional one. Instead, he flirted with the idea of leaving her, and surely fantasies of abandonment were allowed while you were waiting for your wife to get brave enough to tell you she was cheating, surely he was allowed the satisfaction of punishing her, as long as he didn’t hurt her. And after all, he wasn’t even flirting with divorce, just with Alice.

It was a patient who had introduced them, a cranky old man on the vip floor. That wasn’t even Jim’s regular beat. He was only up there for Ash Wednesday, the hospital chaplain’s busiest day of the year, carrying his little pot from room to room.

“Get out!” the man yelled, when Jim strolled in to say he was the chaplain on duty, making his rounds to check on people’s spirits and offer them a daub of ash. “I’m an atheist,” the man said, hissing up the S, like that would scare Jim away.

“Terrific!” Jim said. “So am I.”

“Really?”

“Really!” Jim said. The man, whose name was Charlie, softened his glare. He beckoned Jim to his bedside, and even let him place the ashes, once he discovered that Jim was offering circles instead of crosses. Jim’s boss, a stern and remote Lutheran pastor, had finally acceded to his lobbying on behalf of all the people in the hospital who might wish to wear proof of their awareness of mortality, and a sign of their faith in something, but to whom crosses were anathema. So Jim went around with his little pot of ashes, in solemn joy, making crosses for the cross folk and circles for the circle folk, reminding everyone that they were going to die one day.

“Ashes to ashes,” he said to Charlie, who asked for a smiley face on his bald spot instead of a circle on his forehead. “Dust to dust. From dust thou were made, to dust thou shalt return. Remember that now is all that you have, forever.”

Charlie laughed. “Just this part, actually,” he said, gesturing with a spotted hand at everything below his neck. “The top piece has got a lot longer.”

“Excuse me?” Jim said, and Charlie explained: the application, the dewars, the glorious future.

Why the fuck would anybody do that? Jim wanted to ask, but he asked instead, “Why do you want to do that?” They talked for a half hour — Jim sensed a need, and he would have stayed even longer if it hadn’t been the busiest day of the year, but Charlie only wanted to talk about the future, not his own ambiguous grief at the approaching end of his life. So Jim closed the visit with a prayer to the Great Spirit of Eternity, holding hands with Charlie and asking that his frozen sleep be brief, his freeze damage be minimal or nonexistent, and his life beyond life be forever flourishing.

“Amen to that shit,” Charlie said, but he had tears in his eyes. Then he asked why Jim wasn’t wearing a circle or a smiley face of his own.

“Well, you don’t really do it to yourself,” Jim said. “But one of my colleagues will do me up later. It’s like when the waiters have dinner after the restaurant closes.”

“I’ll do it right now,” Charlie said, “if you want. I’m qualified, right? A fellow atheist?”

“Sure,” Jim said. He handed over the pot and sat on the bed with his face turned up and his eyes closed.

“Ice eternal,” Charlie said, making the circle in three short rough sweeps. “Life to life. Remember that you don’t ever have to die.”

“Except that I do!” Jim added, opening his eyes to see Charlie’s wide grin. “Amen!” Jim bowed and left the room. The patient is a citizen of Spiritual World A, he would write in the chart (and later, in his book, as he recounted the story to no one at all, for the purpose of forgetting it utterly), meaning that he knew what he knew, spiritually, and a chaplain wouldn’t do him any clinical good by sowing doubts in his mind or trying to shake up his placid unquestioning faith. He describes himself as an atheist, but really he worships God as the Future. Back in the Pastoral Care offices, Jim ran into his boss. “Jesus, Jim!” she said. “It’s Ash Wednesday, not fucking Pictionary!”

“What?” he said. She raised her hand in a furious salute, one finger pointing stiffly at her forehead.

Jim went into the bathroom to see that Charlie had drawn a triangle on his head. Jim wiped it off, feeling conned. Back when he was a chaplain intern, still afraid to pray with his patients, he once bargained a sweet old lady into leading their prayer together, thinking that would allow him to avoid having to call out to anything or anybody he didn’t believe in. She’d agreed, but only after he promised to repeat what she said word for word, so she tricked him into throwing himself on the mercy of Jesus, and dedicating his life to Him forever. She had grinned in just the same way that Charlie did, and Jim felt just as dirty afterward, having been sanctified to a final principle that went against everything he believed in. He wanted to go back up to Charlie’s room and shout at him, to ask him if he had ever made his life mean something, if he had ever dared risk everything with another terminally human being, dared love somebody knowing in your bones that this life was all you had. But he knew that wouldn’t make somebody like Charlie understand.

So I waited all day to talk to my wife, he wrote in his book. Since she was the only person — she always had been — who could really understand why his day was so upsetting. He went home early and waited for her, perusing the Polaris website so they could look at it together, covering their mouths and pointing. She texted that she would be late coming home, and as the hours passed Jim flipped back and forth between the website and the sort of tasteful porn he used sometimes to rev himself up for her, since he wanted nothing more than to erase the mark on his forehead by rubbing his face over every part of her body. There you are, I said, when she came home, and she smiled and said she was sorry for being late. She came over to ask what he was looking at, close enough that he could smell her, and then really see her, and understand what she had been doing. He closed his computer and said, “Nothing, really. Nothing at all.”

And that’s how I met Alice, he wrote. Not right away, of course. He kept on learning about Polaris because he was still waiting to tell Jane all about it, after she told him her own news, when her fidelity finally moved her to confess her affair while confessing would still have meant something. The flirtation with Alice, when it started, was just something to do while Jim was waiting for Jane to come back to him. Or else, he wrote, it was just a perfect complementary affair, illusory until it wasn’t, perfect because it signified a more complete withdrawal than anything she might manage. And yet, if she had only done what she had promised she would, he could have deleted his Polaris account. But instead he found her with her lover at breakfast, and two days later he went to Oviedo to sign the papers.

2.3

Jim stared at his neat blocky handwriting, half-expecting the words to disappear while he watched. But he never forgot what he wrote until after he closed the book, marking whatever he was working on as finished. He’d never flipped back the pages to see, but he expected the words were all still there, that the people and ideas they represented disappeared only from his mind, not from the page. If the words actually disappeared, then he wouldn’t need to burn the book, would he?

He made another kind of note, on a single sheet of paper, adding to a list of things he wanted to ask Alice. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice it was a little more complicated, since he had no idea anymore what the questions referred to, and didn’t dare look back to check. So he hadn’t asked her any of the questions yet. Still, he would add this one to the list: No. 12: Do I really have to burn the book? Meaning, he supposed, did he really have to destroy the memories, once he had forgotten them? Maybe it was a theological distinction, to say that these people and things could be dead to him and yet alive to themselves within the pages, only waiting, like the famous cat in the box, for someone to look in before they could live and breathe again within the sacred spaces of memory. Which is perhaps something he had already considered, and what he meant when he wrote No. 6: But what about the cat? or possibly No. 9: Mystic memory? Chords of memory? The whole universe as recording medium? Immortal memory? Living vs Dead = ROM vs RAM?

“Alice!” he shouted, not closing the book yet. “Alice! Get up here!” He had discovered, in the weeks since Sondra had died, that they would tolerate all sorts of rude behavior in the house, and the only reason they hadn’t brought him his meals in his room and excused him from every last social obligation before now was that he hadn’t demanded it. The work was everything, Alice told him. That’s what he was there for, and she was there to help in whatever way her experience and Jim’s own best interest permitted her. He could have asked the house, in a much quieter voice, to pass on a message, but he preferred to shout. Shortly, she appeared at his door.

“Yes?”

“Come sit down,” he said, with his finger still on the page, preparing himself to ask what he wanted to ask. He wrote it down instead, holding a finger up at her to wait. Can’t I keep this memory? he wrote. Since it hurts?

“Was there something I could help you with?” Alice asked. “Would you like some tea?”

Jim stared a little longer at what he wrote, then closed the book and looked up at her. “Never mind,” he said. “False alarm. Sorry.”

“I am here to serve you,” she said, rising and bowing.

“Wait!” he said when she’d just passed into the hall. She came back.

“Yes?”

“I changed my mind,” he said. He wanted some tea, after all.

“Good,” she said. “Tea is lovely in the afternoon.”

“It certainly is,” he said. She left him at his desk and went to fetch it. He was crying again, but already he didn’t know what for.

2.4

There were all of Jim’s clothes to take care of. Her mother told Jane she should just leave them as they were for a few months. They were in their own closet, after all; she could just shut the door. There might be the temptation, of course, to go into the little room and cuddle with the empty suits, to take luxuriating draughts of air flavored with the smell of his shirts and his shoes, and this wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, her mother said. If there was one thing that forty years of ministry had taught her mother, it was that no two people grieved in the same way. Still, she said, we all make such rooms, cabinets of the mind into which we may retreat and imbibe like air the memory of the beloved.

But Mr. Flanagan all but ordered Jane to empty the closet. “Just make sure the base station is plugged in,” he said, and Wanda reminded her to make sure to write in her journal as soon as she was done sorting the clothes. This work was a surefire way to jack up her mental-anguish numbers, and Flanagan said he wanted a good run of hard data before seeking a formal injunction against Polaris. “The complaint itself will be just the prelude to a double shit-ton of supplementary material,” he told her. “They’ll give up before we even begin.”

So Jane collected her grief button and got started one afternoon, abandoning her lunch. Her mother was cooking aggressively — mostly from scratch, but also altering the gifts of food from the hospital chaplains, sniffing and tasting other women’s dishes to rehabilitate them, somehow managing to store them in the weeks after they arrived without ever again subjecting Jane to the sight of frozen meat. That day she had made a dull casserole almost delicious just by adding a little rosemary and cutting the canned tuna with fresh fish. Millicent was getting noticeably fatter, but Jane, never hungry, had lost weight, and her mother announced she would stay as long as it took to get Jane back to her usual size.

“We’ll be right up to help!” her mother called out as Jane climbed the stairs, and she stared a long time at the closet door before she entered, imagining it padlocked or barred or crossed with caution tape. She held her breath as she went in, taking only a quick tasting gasp, and discovered that the little room smelled mostly of his feet, from the shoes standing in neat rows on risers along the wall. And because his feet smelled like her feet — this had not always been the case but was one of those marital convergences that she thought might have presaged their coming to look like sister and brother in old age — there was nothing nostalgic, in neither the gratifying nor distressing sense, about the odor, and it was not something she’d be able to escape by shutting the door and running away, unless she could manage somehow to outrun her own feet.

When her mother and Millicent came up, Jane had only moved the shirts and pants and suits around from bar to bar, making hanging piles for the Salvation Army and Goodwill and the local hiv charity, trying to decide which clientele would most desire a pair of green velour tracksuits. Millicent took one from her and embraced it like a lover.

Jane sat on the floor and poked absently at Flanagan’s button. Her mother kept trying to send her to bed, since she and Millicent had the project totally under control, but Jane wouldn’t go. It felt more and more like being at the funeral again — watching other people bustle about on Jim’s behalf while she just sat there and watched, suspecting that none of it was any more real than a dream she kept having, in which she sat on their stoop watching a boy-size Jim licking a popsicle that was an exact replica of his head. Every night she watched him, and he watched her back with a dull, lazy look, exactly the way some wary, bored child might look at you over his ice cream. And always, eventually, he held the stick out to her, and without any hesitation at all she took a long lick up the side of the nose. It tasted like peaches.

“Look what I’ve found, Jane. You don’t want to give this away.” Her mother was holding a piece of heavy paper in her hands while Millicent looked over her shoulder and made a sad purr. Jane hadn’t known that was in here. She thought Jim would have put it in the safe. “Do you remember this?” her mother asked stupidly. It was not a birth certificate or a death certificate, or even a baptismal certificate. It was more like a little crafts project, something one of the nurses had led them through after the stillbirth, the hands and feet recorded forever (or as long as paper might last) in blue-black ink.

“Oh, that…” Jane said, pressing her button furiously as she got up to go lie down on her bed. “You can just throw it away.”

She lay facedown on the bed with her arms out beside her, utterly still except for the spasmodic clicking of her thumb, and even that died away as she remembered that Polaris had nothing to do with this particular anguish. Her mother didn’t have to step out of the closet for Jane to hear her in her head: One death recalls another, and whenever somebody dies on you, everyone you’ve ever lost dies again. But it wasn’t as simple as that.

2.5

That last almost-baby, all the almost-babies (not so fully formed as the last one, in his delicate and excruciating little nose and fingers and cheeks and toes, but not much less real for that) and also the hosts of theoretical babies, the ones they might have had or might yet have been trying for, had gathered together into a single entity, a confederated accuser who had prosecuted vigorously against the meaning of Jane’s life. She and Jim had eventually, on the other side of her stupid affair, found a way to live a defense together, though Jim always had his crazy chaplain ways of thinking about it, and she had her own ways. But they hadn’t had to agree on everything to make the defense work. The question now — and she started clicking vigorously again as she understood this — was how she was ever going to win this new case, when Jim, her partner, her chief counsel, her only real friend, had gone over to join the prosecution. This has nothing to do with the baby! she wanted to shout at her mother, who, worse than being right all the time, was always just barely wrong.

“Well, of course Jim’s thinking about a baby now,” her mother had told her, when Jane had gone up to Northampton alone to fetch the cat back, after a two-week trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate Jim getting off anticoagulants. “It’s like he’s finally all better. And he nearly died, didn’t he? Never mind that it was nearly two years ago to you and me. To him, it was probably yesterday. A little fender bender or ten pages of Camus was always enough to make your father come at me like a Mormon. Just give him some time. He’ll settle down. And he can’t be a surgeon anymore. He’s just looking for something to do with his life, isn’t he?”

“But did you want one?”

“One what, dear?”

Jane rolled her eyes. “A little Mormon.”

“Well, no,” her mother said, looking searchingly into her tea. “Not at first. And that’s all right, you know. It’s just two entirely different states of existence, the before and the after of it. Neither can understand the other, but one is also not inferior to the other.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Jane told her. “But you know what I would never tell my child? I didn’t want to have a baby.”

“Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not a teenager. If you want me to help you in your discernment, you have to let me be honest with you.”

“But I don’t want your help,” Jane said. “I don’t even want to talk about this anymore. I just came here to get my cat!”

“Of course,” her mother said. “When have you ever needed anybody’s help?” She clapped her hands and called for Millicent, who did all the actual work of cat-sitting when Jane left Feathers at the house. Millicent brought the cat in, dressed up like a baby, of course, which Jane would have accused her mother of setting up somehow, if this hadn’t been their first conversation about a baby, and if Millicent wasn’t always dressing the animal up and emailing photos of Librarian Cat, Housewife Cat, or Junkie Cat. Baby Cat was just a stupid coincidence. “Oh, Millicent,” Jane’s mother said. “That’s Jane’s christening dress.”

Millicent frowned and handed Jane the cat, a floppy overweight Maine coon, who lay placidly in her arms with its eyes half-closed. Jane scowled at all of them.

“She’s very pretty, though,” her mother said, to Millicent’s quivering lip. And to Jane she said, “Doesn’t it feel nice? That’s all I meant, dear. You’ll never really know what it means to want one, until you’re actually holding it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said to her mother. And she didn’t throw away her birth-control pills when she got home, but she did put them away someplace where they’d stay out of sight, a bathroom drawer full of old shampoo that she hadn’t used in years. “Well,” she said to Jim in bed that night. “Here we go, I guess.”

She got pregnant right away, and lost it right away, which she saw as a punishment for not wanting it enough, for feigning interest for Jim’s sake. Soon, though, as a baby became the only thing she wanted, she grew convinced that she had in fact been feigning disinterest to herself, but this deception deserved a punishment of its own. Intellectually, that chain of reasoning was hard to sustain, but she had no trouble at all feeling the truth of it, through two more miscarriages and the trying and trying and trying in between.

Later she wondered if she ought to have consulted somebody before trying the first time, if she might have managed some kind of preemptive hormonal redecoration to make her body more hospitable to the little speck. She was forty-one when they started, after all. But when she asked her ob (a woman as blunt as a punch in the face) about it, she told Jane not to be stupid. “Nice try,” she said, “but you can’t make this your fault.” How very like an ob, Jane thought, that brusque attacking kindness, catty and paranoid and defensive all at once. Jane liked it. As the losses (and the expense) mounted, people came crawling out of the woodwork, reeking of baby, to recommend their own doctors or fertility centers, but Jane would never have dreamed of leaving hers. Though she pretended to be comforted by Jim, her own doctor was the only person who could make her feel better about what was happening.

Of course, the doctor’s awesome crankiness eventually failed her. When she gave Jane the news that the baby was dead inside her at thirty weeks, and would have to be delivered in some grotesque mockery of childbirth, it would have been so much better if she had said, You are a useless lady, a waste of space as a body, a bad idea, even, and I hate you through and through — but none of that has anything to do with why you lost this baby. But she was all sad sweetness during the delivery. “You’re going to get through this,” she kept saying confidently.

“Okay,” Jane replied. “But then what?”

“Then we just do whatever comes next,” Jim said. He held her hand and told her, like everybody else in that strange, subdued room, to push or not push. None of them seemed to understand that Jane might actually be giving birth to the sadness that would claim the rest of her life. You don’t even have to put me under, she wanted to say, but just cut it out. Don’t make me participate in this.

When the baby was out, somebody wrapped it up and put it on her chest. She wasn’t entirely there for that part. One of her baby books had told her about the rush of relief and joy she would feel when the baby was born, that she should get ready for the most indescribable feeling you will ever have. That part held true — the terrible feeling, with the shape of elation but the substance of regret, was so hard to describe she thought it would kill her to try, so she stayed quiet and still, half out of her mind. When she awoke to the world, a nurse was there, stamping the baby’s little hands and feet, performing the whole operation upon Jane’s body like she was a crafts table. “What are you doing?” Jane said. “Are you booking it for a crime? Are you booking it for being dead?”

“It’s just handprints and footprints,” the nurse said, wincing slightly. “For the memory box.”

“I said it was okay,” Jim said.

“A memory box? Does it seal the memories in and keep them there forever and never let them out?”

“If you want it to,” the nurse said without looking at Jane. To Jim, she said, “I’ve asked the chaplain to come.”

“Okay,” Jim said.

“Why not?” Jane asked. “Maybe he can take a picture of us with his phone.”

“Jane,” Jim said. “Jesus.”

“Sure,” she said. “He can come too. As long as the chaplain is coming. Why is this on me? Did somebody ask me before they put it there?”

“I wanted…” Jim said. “I thought you would…”

“What am I supposed to do with it? Feed it?”

“It’s a boy,” he said.

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to find out about that.” She turned away from him as much as she could without spilling the baby off her chest.

“Not before it was born,” Jim said stupidly, but Jane only sighed.

“So what are we going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “They’ll release him to us. Or cremate him.”

“Like medical waste,” Jane said. “Maybe we should just put him in a coffee tin and bury it in the yard.”

“Or we could have him stuffed,” Jim said. “How about that? Stuffed and poseable? We could dress him up for holidays. Hell, we could put him on top of the Christmas tree!”

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop what?” Jim asked. “I’m just being funny. Now we’re both comedians. How’s that? Maybe if we’re funny enough, the baby will laugh.”

“Now you’re being cruel,” she said.

“Well, you were cruel first,” Jim said, and put his face in his hands. And that was how the chaplain found them. Later, Jim imagined what they must have looked like, him hiding his face, Jane turned away in bitter anger and hurt, and the purple-faced, half-swaddled baby neglected between them on her chest.

“May I come in?” the stranger asked. “I’m Dick Carver, the chaplain on call.”

“All right,” Jim said.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said to them.

“Thanks,” Jane said flatly. “It’s okay, though. We did some crafts.”

“Oh,” Dick said. “May I?” He picked up the certificate and frowned at it.

“You can have it, if you want.”

“No, thank you,” Dick said. “But I think I hear you. It’s too much, isn’t it? And not enough, at the same time.” He was a little hobbit of a man, shaggy-haired and hairy-handed. Jim was sure his feet must be covered with fur.

“Sure,” Jane said. When Jim took her hand she didn’t pull away, but she didn’t look at him, either.

“Would you like to do something else? I could do something else, if you’d like me to.”

“What do you mean?” Jim asked.

“A ceremony. Something small. But sometimes it’s…” He waved the certificate. “Often it’s more than this. Would you like to?”

“Sure,” Jim said right away. Jane rolled her eyes. “Her mother is a pastor,” Jim said, as if he needed to explain why his wife wasn’t being more polite. But Jane didn’t take away her hand.

“My father was a pastor too,” said Dick, and then put the certificate aside and got started. Much later, he and Jim would have debates about the nature and use of pastoral authority, because Jim objected, in theory, to Dick’s habit of boldly taking control of emotional horror shows in the hospital. But in practice, that early morning, it made all the difference in the world for this little man to boss them around for five minutes. He didn’t take away Jim’s grief, or lessen it by a single iota, but he took control of it for a few moments, which felt like enough time for Jim to get a toe back into the world.

Dick sang a psalm in Hebrew, then recited a Yeats poem about a child stolen by fairies, gently bludgeoning them with the refrain until Jane and Jim were both freely in tears. Then he asked what name they would like for the baptism.

“Baptism?” Jane said. “Like a Catholic?”

“Not into a church,” Dick said. “Into your lives.”

“Ralph,” said Jim.

“Ralph?” Jane asked. That hadn’t even been on their list of possible names.

“I don’t want to use any of those names,” Jim said, not saying to her (and barely saying to himself) that he wanted to save them all for the other babies, the ones they might still have.

Dick took a splash from a plastic water bottle and put it on the baby’s tiny head. “Ralph,” he said. “With water as pure as your spirit I baptize you son to your father, Jim, and son to your mother, Jane. Love created you. Love will sustain them through the loss of you. You will always be remembered.” Then he asked Jim and Jane if they wanted to say something.

“Did you hear that, Ralph?” Jim sobbed. “It doesn’t matter that you’re dead. We love you anyway.”

“Yes, it does,” Jane said quietly. “Yes, it does matter. But we love you. That part’s true.”

Before the two of them could argue the point, Dick closed them down with another sung Hebrew prayer. He must have withdrawn sometime very soon after that, but Jim had no memory of him leaving. Jim didn’t remember anything of the hour or so that followed except that when someone finally came to take the baby away, Jane held it to her chest and said, barely intelligible through her tears, “I never want to see another baby again as long as I live.”

“You don’t have to,” Jim said. “You never do.” But he of course wasn’t able to protect her, in the weeks and months afterward, from the random child who pulled on her skirt in the supermarket line and said, Hey, lady, you have pretty hair, or the trick-or-treaters who ignored his no candy tonight sign and rang insistently at the doorbell, or even, eventually, the sight of her patients, whose faces at least were hidden from her as they lay opened before her, half dead and half alive, on the operating table.

He couldn’t even protect her from his own (deeply considered but still totally unwise) overtures toward adoption, the brochures from agencies that he left about as if by accident, or the disastrous Christmas gift of an African orphan sponsorship. He was trying so hard, and none of it helped.

“She doesn’t even notice,” he said eventually to Dick, after Dick had become his supervisor. Jim had enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education courses — partly to give Jane space, partly to keep himself busy. “Or maybe she doesn’t even care.”

“Or maybe she doesn’t understand,” Dick said. “You’re speaking a different language now. She’s a surgeon, after all.”

“So am I,” Jim said.

“Not anymore,” Dick said, leaning forward and staring at him in the way he had during their first week of instruction, when he said, “I am bringing all of my attention to bear on you. Your job is to be fully present for my attention.” Jim laughed at him the first few times, but he found that as he learned to actually be more present, as he learned that presence was actually a skill you could practice, he found he had to cover his face with his hands after only a moment or two. It was a year before he could ever stare Dick down.

He looked away. “Now you’re one of us,” Dick said.

“I’m getting there, anyway,” Jim said. He hadn’t yet been tested in the way he knew would make him or break him. He failed the first few times, calling Dick in the middle of the night and asking him to go to the hospital in his stead, because he just wasn’t ready to face those parents yet. And then, once he had gathered the courage to go into the room, he failed again, muttering uselessly at them about how they would find a way to be happy again. He cried out his tears in the hospital bathroom, so Jane wouldn’t have to see them.

“But are we parents?” the poor father asked him, the night Jim passed the test. I was answering for all of us, he tried to tell Jane, who seemed too tired to listen to him, when he rushed home to let her know what had finally happened.

“Of course you are,” Jim said, crying, but not out of control; overwhelmed, but not crushed, believing it for all of them in the room and for Jane, too, believing it for every stillborn parent in the world. “And now, just like for any of us who’ve had a child, nothing is ever going to be the same for you.”

2.6

“That’s lovely,” Sondra said, leaning on one arm in her bed with one hand in her curls and one on her heart, “in a really terrible way.”

“But really I had nothing to do with it,” Jim said. “Everything helpful or true about the moment was in them. I was just the stick for the rock candy, you know?”

“I hate rock candy,” Sondra said. “But I probably know what you mean. People were always telling me their troubles, in the shop. People are so stupid, most of the time.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “So all you have to do is listen to them and then when they ask you what they should do, you say, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’ ”

“Did you and Joe ever want to have children?” Jim asked.

“Jesus, no,” she said. “Never. We thought we did, at first, but it didn’t take much not getting one before we realized we were upset about not having something other people wanted for us. So I sat us down in the chair, so to speak, and told us to stop being so stupid.”

“And Joe felt the same way?” Jim asked.

“Even more so,” she said. She waved her hand. “He had this spiel about the marriage being a baby. About how we were lucky because everybody else was just distracted from the important thing, which was making something together that would last and last and last. What do regular babies do, anyway, but use you, and grow up, and move away, and stop calling? Then it’s just the two of you again, and you’ve wasted all your time and love on these terrible creatures who are always going to love somebody else more than you. Ugh! He thought we were lucky because we got to skip that part.”

“You were lucky,” Jim said. “You had each other.”

“Well, I could take or leave the metaphor stuff,” she said. “ ‘Stop hurting the baby!’ he said sometimes, meaning ‘Don’t make me want to divorce you!’ Joe was the big-idea man in the business. He came up with the slogans and the business plans — I just cut the hair and recognized the bullshit. The part I liked was the idea that if we just tried hard enough, the baby would grow up one day, and unlike a horrible, selfish child, eventually the marriage would take care of us. And I suppose it did.”

“But that’s beautiful,” Jim said.

“It did the job,” she said flatly, “until now.” And then they were quiet until dinner.

2.7

Jane edged past the lady in the aisle seat, her phone in one hand and her bag in the other, turning and half-falling into her seat by the window.

“How do you do?” the woman asked, bobbing her head and smiling. Her yellow hair sat stiffly on her head, and curled on either side of her chin into two sturdy-looking handles.

“Good,” Jane said, trying to make it sound like It’s good to be alone on the plane or How good it is that we’ve decided not to talk to each other today. Jim was the one who liked to talk to strangers. Still, she smiled at the woman, because she wasn’t exactly trying to be rude. The flight attendant came over to ask if they’d like something to drink before the plane took off. Jane shook her head, but the woman ordered du champagne. Jane called her husband.

“You again!” he said when she answered.

“Haha,” she said. “I have a couple minutes before they shut the door.”

“How have you been since the last time we talked?”

“Would you stop that, please?” She had spent the whole taxi ride from Paris to the airport on the phone with him.

“Sorry,” he said. “Safe flight. I love you.”

“You, too,” she said. “Are you at work?”

“Leaving in a minute,” he said. “I’m just sitting here.”

“What time will you be home?”

“Not sure. I might spend the night if it’s busy.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” she said. “Please.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, Jim.” The flight attendant brought Jane champagne as well, leaving it on her armrest and backing away with a smile. If she drank it, she would have to pee in an hour, defeating the purpose of dehydrating herself all day for the sake of her window seat. Her seatmate raised her own glass. “Today is the twenty-eighth, you know,” Jane said.

“Is it?” he said, and then added, theatrically, “Is it?” Jane sighed. “I’m just kidding. I got us dinner reservations,” he said.

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You always forget this one.”

“Yes, I did. And anyway, you always forget the other one.”

“I don’t care about the other one,” she said. “You were asleep for that one. I was being crazy for that one.”

“Well, I care about them both. And I did too make reservations.”

“Okay,” she said, deciding not to challenge him by asking where they were eating. “They’re about to close the door.”

“All right,” he said. “I love you. Safe flight.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

“I’m so glad I married you. Both times.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.” She hung up and turned her phone off, then picked up her champagne glass and leaned toward the window

“Is it your anniversary?” her seatmate asked breathlessly.

“Yes, it is,” Jane said.

“Oh, how nice. How long?”

“Eight years,” Jane said, though in fact it was eight only for the one anniversary, and nine for the other.

“Oh, what’s that one? Macramé? Jute? Some kind of woven plant, I think. I can never keep track.”

“Neither can my husband,” Jane said.

“Or my husband,” the lady said. “But he’s very good with birthdays.” Jane did something not totally friendly with her lips and looked away, thinking that ought to signal the end of the conversation without being rude. But the woman said, “You must love him very much.”

“Sometimes,” Jane said automatically, finishing her champagne in one long draw, and closing her eyes after putting the glass back on the armrest. The lady didn’t ask for details, and Jane was much happier anyway continuing this conversation with herself: Sometimes I love him so much I can hardly stand it. Sometimes it felt like the only purpose of her life was to hurry toward him, and sometimes it felt like the only purpose of her life was to hurry away. And wasn’t it like that for everyone? she asked.

2.8

When Jim asked her to marry him — with a ring baked into some buttery naan at the Indian restaurant near her old Upper West Side apartment where they ate once a week during their long courtship — Jane might just have said No or Not right now or even Can I have some time to think about this? There were a hundred other options besides flight and silence.

She could have said, I need to be alone for a few days. Or I’m just going to go to the bathroom for a moment to cry. Instead, she stared at him for a strange, timeless instant, panicked and still. Her field of vision seemed to crumble away from the periphery. Jim was making a very hopeful face — she couldn’t hear anything he was saying, but the way his mouth was moving and the way his eyebrows were reaching sincerely toward the ceiling made him look like he was singing barbershop quartet at her. Then she understood that he actually was singing to her, and the reason that the three waiters on duty that night had clustered so close around him was that they were singing too. She couldn’t really hear the song (it was “Heart of My Heart”) in the restaurant, but it would keep her up at night and become the theme song of Jim’s icu stay.

She felt caught, as if Jim and these three nice Indian gentlemen had opened their mouths and poured not music but accusation out upon her, casting a spotlight on her hypocrisy, her insufficient affection, her cowardice and naïveté. The music finally stopped. Everyone in the restaurant was watching, gleeful with anticipation. Without saying a word, Jane stood, carefully folded her napkin upon her seat, and left the restaurant. She walked home and got straight into the tub. She was still hiding in the lukewarm water a half hour later when Jim, after he had settled the bill and explained to all his new Indian and non-Indian friends at Indus Valley that everything was perfectly all right, was hit by a taxi turning left off Broadway onto Ninety-Ninth Street.

On the way up to the hospital she kept wondering, hysterically, if the taxi she was in was the one that had hit him, and she alternated, in her shouting at the driver, between telling him to slow down and be careful and to hurry up. She rushed up there only to find she couldn’t even see him — the trauma surgeon threw her out of the or. She had to stay in the waiting room, like a civilian. “But they have to let me help fix him,” she said calmly to the scrub nurse who hustled her out and stayed with her all during the first surgery, who didn’t leave her side until Jim was recovering in the surgical icu. She sat Jane down in a chair by Jim’s bed, and that’s where Jane stayed.

That’s where her mother and Millicent found her when they arrived. Jane held Jim’s hand and glared at the monitors for week after week, he never emerging from his coma, she never emerging from her quiet hysteria, until she finally understood what she had to do.

“I want us to get married,” Jane said, standing up.

“That’s wonderful,” said Millicent. “Do you hear that, buddy?” she said to Jim, leaning down to shout in his ear. “I told you she’d come around.”

“Good, dear,” said her mother, giving Jane a hug. “That’s very good.”

“Right now,” Jane said, not hugging her back. Her mother stiffened. Millicent frowned.

“But Jim’s not awake yet,” her mother said.

“And he won’t be,” Jane said. “Not until we’re married.”

“Darling,” her mother said. “That’s just trauma and superstition talking.” She held Jane at arm’s length.

“It’s not superstition,” Jane said. “It’s what I feel.”

“Exactly,” her mother said. “And even if we could find someone to do the ceremony, how could Jim say yes?”

“He already did,” Jane said. “Do you think I don’t know what he said? And you can do the ceremony.”

“Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not being rational about this.”

“You are going to do this for me!” Jane shouted, clutching at her mother’s shoulders and squeezing them until she could feel her bones.

“Let’s just have a confab,” Millicent said gently, untangling the two of them and taking Jane’s mother outside. They came back pretty shortly. “First things first,” Millicent said. “We need to see about a dress for you.”

It was easy enough to arrange. Jim wasn’t brain dead, but nobody on the icu team thought he was ever going to wake up. His poor brain had completed its heaving sigh, swelling up and then down, and now he was just lying there. Collegiality made Jane’s fellow physicians a little brutal with her (I’m going to tell it like it is, Jane, they’d say, because I know you can take it) but it also afforded her some autonomy.

They did it as soon as Jane could change her clothes — Millicent found her a white tracksuit in the gift shop. Jim’s nurse was Jane’s witness, Millicent was Jim’s. Not that they needed witnesses. It didn’t have to be official in that way. The room was already full of flowers, but the only music they could get was a music thanatologist who had just finished harping somebody into the next life in the palliative care suite down the hall, but she could play “Heart of My Heart” after Jane hummed a few bars.

“Dear friends,” her mother began, and then launched into an extemporaneous sermon about the nature of divine surprise. Jane wasn’t listening. She had too much to say to Jim, and she knew that time was running out. I’m so sorry, she told him. I didn’t know what I felt, but now I know what I feel. “Do you, Jane Julia Cotton,” her mother was asking her, “take this man to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health, to love, cherish, and worship, until death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”

“Yes,” Jane said. “Hurry up!”

Her mother asked the corresponding question of Jim, and Millicent leaned down next to him as if to listen for his whispered reply. “He does,” she said. Jane’s mother told her she could kiss the groom, so she bent down to do it. “Careful!” the nurse whispered, anxious for his ventilator tube, but Jane was exquisitely gentle. With the tube in the way she couldn’t press both her lips to his, but she caught his lower lip in a sort of dry hug with her mouth. She thought it would be enough.

Then everybody but the bride and groom wept gently, and the music thanatologist played the wedding march, as if Jane was going to pull up the cuffs of her sweatpants and rush in merry ecstasy out of the icu and the hospital. “Now wake up,” she said to him in tears, “so I can tell you how happy I am,” but really she was afraid he might just roll over and die.

He didn’t die, but he didn’t wake up either. He just lay there, same as ever, for another two months, at which point he opened one eye and peered around the room, then closed it again. He did that for a couple of weeks, that single open eye like the periscope of his consciousness taking the lay of the world above to decide if it was safe to come up yet.

The first thing he noticed, when he woke up fully, was how weak he was. He could barely lift his hands to look at them, and he noticed how much heavier the left was than the right before he saw his wedding ring. “Look at that,” he croaked, and Jane turned around from where she was digging through a bag. Then, in an instant, he knew he was in the icu, and could guess that he had had an accident. For some reason he thought it would be funny to play a joke on Jane, so he said, “Who are you?”

That was a terrible idea. He’d never seen her cry so hard, or so despondently. Thirty seconds into my second chance, and I’m already fucking up! he thought, and then he was asleep again, exhausted by the effort of raising his hands to embrace his wife, which was what Jane kept calling herself.

“But we’ll get married again,” she said, “so it’s real.”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get married every day.”

“Well,” she said. “It was pretty emotional. I don’t think I can handle it more than once a week.”

“That’ll do,” Jim said. He pulled so weakly at her, he didn’t even know if she would feel it, but she came closer. “This is going to be totally awesome,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

But Jim still had months of rehab to get through, and it would be just over a year before they finally got married again. “We’ve become citizens of the icu,” he said to Jane over and over in the last week of his stay in the hospital.

“You’re not in the icu anymore.”

“You never really leave a place like that,” Jim said, sniffing his arm. “I’m going to smell like a hospital forever. I never smelled like a hospital when I just worked here. I’ve become one of those sad stories.”

“No, you’re not,” Jane said.

“Yes, I am,” Jim said. “I’m a sad story, but not a sad person. I’m a very happy person. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” Jane said, leaning down to kiss him. “I’m happy too.” There was a knock on the door, and a man came in smiling.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m one of the chaplains. Would you like to chat?”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Jim, with a little salute.

The chaplain bowed and returned the salute, then withdrew from the room. Jane watched him go, eyes wide.

“Don’t worry,” Jim said. “He told me I could say that. He comes by every day, and I tell him to fuck off. We have an understanding.” Which was true. Jim had told the man he could come see him every day, and in return the man had told Jim he could dismiss him any way he liked. “You can’t really tell the doctor or the nurse to fuck off,” he had said, laying a warm palm on Jim’s arm. “But you can tell me to fuck off anytime you like.”

2.9

Jim couldn’t remember the chaplain’s name, but he liked to think it had been Dick, way back in his intern years. Dick said it couldn’t have been him because it was never his style to let someone tell him to fuck off every day. “You don’t understand,” Jim said. “We had an understanding!” And he imagined sometimes, a little wistfully, the conversation he and Dick might have had during those weeks in rehab when Jim was getting ready for his wedding — though it would be another whole year before he was well enough, and then another year after that before it was all arranged — learning to walk down the aisle, and button a tuxedo shirt, and speak his vows in a clear, strong voice. “Maybe I wouldn’t have had to wait five years to figure out I wanted to be a chaplain. And I think if I had been a chaplain sooner it would have made me a better husband.”

“You always get everything backwards,” said Dick. “It’s being a better husband that makes you a better chaplain.” They were in the pastoral care office, alone since it was a Saturday afternoon and they were the only two chaplains on duty. Jim was looking for a car service to go fetch Jane from the airport that night and bring her to the restaurant.

Jim was about to argue with Dick some more, but then his pager went off. Dick held out his hand. “I’ll take that. Go get your wife some flowers. And not from the gift shop, either.” They left the office together, then split off, Dick heading left toward the main hospital and the icus, and Jim walking down the long hall toward the Broadway exit. He thought he should go home, since he suddenly felt too full of his own story, too eager to tell some stranger about his fragile and unbreakable marriage, to minister properly to anybody.

By the time he reached the end of the hall, he had regained some of his confidence. He said to himself, I am going to bring my love for my wife into every room I visit today. He waved to the guard at the door and passed through, into the foyer. He stopped at the second set of double doors, almost into the afternoon sunshine. A lady was walking through the doors in the opposite direction, but she paused when she saw his face.

“Whoa,” Jim said, putting a hand to his chest, feeling a strange poke at the heart. “What’s that?”