Turn of Mind

PRAISE FOR ALICE LAPLANTE AND TURN OF MIND

‘Wonderful. This harrowing exploration of the slow disintegration of the mind is deeply touching and utterly heartbreaking, while also being a compelling page-turner. I loved it.’

S. J. WATSON

‘Really terrific—ambitious, clever and human.’

NICCI FRENCH

‘An electrifying book, impossible to put down…a tour de force that can’t be a first novel—and yet it is. I’ll read whatever LaPlante writes next, and the sooner the better.’

ANN PACKER

‘[A] startling portrait of a fiercely intelligent woman struggling mightily to hold on to her sense of self…fascinating on so many levels, from its poignant and inventive depiction of a harrowing illness to its knowing portrayal of the dark complexities of friendship and marriage.’

Booklist

‘LaPlante’s characters are completely convincing, the plotting masterful.’

DONNA LEON

‘Alice LaPlante’s brilliantly original novel took me not simply into the life of a woman falling apart, but directly into her crumbling brain as she tries desperately to keep her sense of her own identity from slipping away. She held me there for three hundred riveting pages—and for weeks after i’d turned the last one.’

JOYCE MAYNARD

‘A haunting story masterfully told.’

Kirkus

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer who teaches at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and held a Jones Lectureship. Raised in Chicago, she now lives with her family in Northern California. Turn of Mind is her first novel.

ALICE LAPLANTE

TURN

of

MIND

TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company

Swann House

22 William Street

Melbourne Victoria 3000

Australia

Copyright © Alice LaPlante 2011

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in 2011 by The Text Publishing Company

Cover design by Susan Miller

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Author: LaPlante, Alice.

Title: Turn of mind / Alice LaPlante.

ISBN: 9781921758423 (pbk.)

Dewey Number: A823.4

Primary print ISBN: 9781921758423

Ebook ISBN: 9781921834608

For Alice Gervase O’Neill LaPlante

TURN

of

MIND

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

Something has happened. You can always tell. You come to and find wreckage: a smashed lamp, a devastated human face that shivers on the verge of being recognizable. Occasionally someone in uniform: a paramedic, a nurse. A hand extended with a pill. Or poised to insert a needle.

This time, I am in a room, sitting on a cold metal folding chair. The room is not familiar, but I am used to that. I look for clues. An office-like setting, long and crowded with desks and computers, messy with papers. No windows.

I can barely make out the pale green of the walls, so many posters, clippings, and bulletins tacked up. Fluorescent lighting casting a pall. Men and women talking; to one another, not to me. Some wearing baggy suits, some in jeans. And more uniforms. My guess is that a smile would be inappropriate. Fear might not be.

I can still read, I’m not that far gone, not yet. No books anymore, but newspaper articles. Magazine pieces, if they’re short enough. I have a system. I take a sheet of lined paper. I write down notes, just like in medical school.

When I get confused, I read my notes. I refer back to them. I can take two hours to get through a single Tribune article, half a day to get through The New York Times. Now, as I sit at the table, I pick up a paper someone discarded, a pencil. I write in the margins as I read. These are Band-Aid solutions. The violent flare-ups continue. They have reaped what they sowed and should repent.

Afterward, I look at these notes but am left with nothing but a sense of unease, of uncontrol. A heavy man in blue is hovering, his hand inches away from my upper arm. Ready to grab. Restrain.

Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?

I want to go home. I want to go home. Am I in Philadelphia. There was the house on Walnut Lane. We played kickball in the streets.

No, this is Chicago. Ward Forty-three, Precinct Twenty-one. We have called your son and daughter. You can decide at any time from this moment on to terminate the interview and exercise these rights.

I wish to terminate. Yes.

A large sign is taped to the kitchen wall. The words, written in thick black marker in a tremulous hand, slope off the poster board: My name is Dr. Jennifer White. I am sixty-four years old. I have dementia. My son, Mark, is twenty-nine. My daughter, Fiona, twenty-four. A caregiver, Magdalena, lives with me.

It is all clear. So who are all these other people in my house? People, strangers, everywhere. A blond woman I don’t recognize in my kitchen drinking tea. A glimpse of movement from the den. Then I turn the corner into the living room and find yet another face. I ask, So who are you? Who are all the others? Do you know her? I point to the kitchen, and they laugh.

I am her, they say. I was there, now I’m here. I am the only one in the house other than you. They ask if I want tea. They ask if I want to go for a walk. Am I a baby? I say. I am tired of the questions. You know me, don’t you? Don’t you remember? Magdalena. Your friend.

The notebook is a way of communicating with myself, and with others. Of filling in the blank periods. When all is in a fog, when someone refers to an event or conversation that I can’t recall, I leaf through the pages. Sometimes it comforts me to read what’s there. Sometimes not. It is my Bible of consciousness. It lives on the kitchen table: large and square, with an embossed leather cover and heavy creamy paper. Each entry has a date on it. A nice lady sits me down in front of it.

She writes, January 20, 2009. Jennifer’s notes. She hands the pen to me. She says, Write what happened today. Write about your childhood. Write whatever you remember.

I remember my first wrist arthrodesis. The pressure of scalpel against skin, the slight give when it finally sliced through. The resilience of muscle. My surgical scissors scraping bone. And afterward, peeling off bloody gloves finger by finger.

Black. Everyone is wearing black. They’re walking in twos and threes down the street toward St. Vincent’s, bundled in coats and scarves that cover their heads and lower faces against what is apparently bitter wind.

I am inside my warm house, my face to the frosted window, Magdalena hovering. I can just see the twelve-foot carved wooden doors. They are wide open, and people are entering. A hearse is standing in front, other cars lined up behind it, their lights on.

It’s Amanda, Magdalena tells me. Amanda’s funeral. Who is Amanda? I ask. Magdalena hesitates, then says, Your best friend. Your daughter’s godmother.

I try. I fail. I shake my head. Magdalena gets my notebook. She turns back the pages. She points to a newspaper clipping:Elderly Chicago Woman Found Dead, Mutilated

CHICAGO TRIBUNE—February 23, 2009CHICAGO, IL—The mutilated body of a seventy-five-year-old Chicago woman was discovered yesterday in a house in the 2100 block of Sheffield Avenue.Amanda O’Toole was found dead in her home after a neighbor noticed she had failed to take in her newspapers for almost a week, according to sources close to the investigation. Four fingers on her right hand had been severed. The exact time of death is unknown, but cause of death is attributed to head trauma, sources say.Nothing was reported missing from her house.No one has been charged, but police briefly took into custody and then released a person of interest in the case.

I try. But I cannot conjure up anything. Magdalena leaves. She comes back with a photograph.

Two women, one taller by at least two inches, with long straight white hair pulled back in a tight chignon. The other one, younger, has shorter wavy gray locks that cluster around chiseled, more feminine features. That one a beauty perhaps, once upon a time.

This is you, Magdalena says, pointing to the younger woman. And this here, this is Amanda. I study the photograph.

The taller woman has a compelling face. Not what you’d call pretty. Nor what you would call nice. Too sharp around the nostrils, lines of perhaps contempt etched into the jowls. The two women stand close together, not touching, but there is an affinity there.

Try to remember, Magdalena urges me. It could be important. Her hand lies heavily on my shoulder. She wants something from me. What? But I am suddenly tired. My hands shake. Perspiration trickles down between my breasts.

I want to go to my room, I say. I swat at Magdalena’s hand. Leave me be.

Amanda? Dead? I cannot believe it. My dear, dear friend. Second mother to my children. My ally in the neighborhood. My sister.

If not for Amanda, I would have been alone. I was different. Always apart. The cheese stands alone.

Not that anyone knew. They were fooled by surfaces, so easy to dupe. No one understood weaknesses like Amanda. She saw me, saved me from my secret solitude. And where was I when she needed me? Here. Three doors down. Wallowing in my woes. While she suffered. While some monster brandished a knife, pushed in for the kill.

O the pain! So much pain. I will stop swallowing my pills. I will take my scalpel to my brain and eviscerate her image. And I will beg for exactly that thing I’ve been battling all these long months: sweet oblivion.

The nice lady writes in my notebook. She signs her name: Magdalena. Today, Friday, March 11, was another bad day. You kicked the step and broke your toe. At the emergency room you escaped into the parking lot. An orderly brought you back. You spat on him.

The shame.

This half state. Life in the shadows. As the neurofibrillary tangles proliferate, as the neuritic plaques harden, as synapses cease to fire and my mind rots out, I remain aware. An unanesthetized patient.

Every death of every cell pricks me where I am most tender. And people I don’t know patronize me. They hug me. They attempt to hold my hand. They call me prepubescent nicknames: Jen. Jenny. I bitterly accept the fact that I am famous, beloved even, among strangers. A celebrity!

A legend in my own mind.

My notebook lately has been full of warnings. Mark very angry today. He hung up on me. Magdalena says do not speak to anyone who calls. Do not answer the door when she’s doing laundry or in the bathroom.

Then, in a different handwriting, Mom, you are not safe with Mark. Give the medical power of attorney to me, Fiona. It is best to have medical and financial powers of attorney in the same hands anyway. Some things are crossed out, no, obliterated, with a thick black pen. By whom?

My notebook again:

Mark called, says my money will not save me. I must listen to him. That there are other actions we must take to protect me.

Then: Mom, I sold $50,000 worth of IBM stock for the lawyer’s retainer. She comes highly recommended for cases where mental competency is an issue. They have no evidence, only theories. Dr. Tsien has put you on 150 mg of Seroquel to curb the episodes. I will come again tomorrow, Saturday. Your daughter, Fiona.

I belong to an Alzheimer’s support group. People come and they go.

This morning Magdalena says it is an okay day, we can try to attend. The group meets in a Methodist church on Clark, squat and gray with clapboard walls and garish primary-colored stained-glass windows.

We gather in the Fellowship Lounge, a large room with windows that don’t open and speckled linoleum floors bearing the scuff marks of the metal folding chairs. A motley crew, perhaps half a dozen of us, our minds in varying states of undress. Magdalena waits outside the door of the room with the other caregivers. They line up on benches in the dark hallway, knitting and speaking softly among themselves, but attentive, prepared to leap up and take their charges away at the first hint of trouble.

Our leader is a young man with a social-worker degree. He has a kind and ineffectual face, and likes to start with introductions and a joke. My-name-is-I-forgot-and-I-am-an-I-don’t-know-what. He refers to what we do as the Two Circular Steps. Step One is admitting you have a problem. Step Two is forgetting you have the problem.

It gets a laugh every time, from some because they remember the joke from the last meeting, but from most because it’s new to them, no matter how many times they’ve heard it.

Today is a good day for me. I remember it. I would even add a third step: Step Three is remembering that you forget. Step Three is the hardest of all.

Today we discuss attitude. This is what the leader calls it. You’ve all received this extraordinarily distressing diagnosis, he says. You are all intelligent, educated people. You know you are running out of time. What you do with it is up to you. Be positive! Having Alzheimer’s can be like going to a party where you don’t happen to know anyone. Think of it! Every meal can be the best meal of your life! Every movie the most enthralling you’ve ever seen! Have a sense of humor, he says. You are a visitor from another planet, and you are observing the local customs.

But what about the rest of us, for whom the walls are closing in? Whom change has always terrified? At thirteen I stopped eating for a week because my mother bought new sheets for my bed. For us, life is now terribly dangerous. Hazards lie around every corner. So you nod to all the strangers who force themselves upon you. You laugh when others laugh, look serious when they do. When people ask do you remember you nod some more. Or frown at first, then let your face light up in recognition.

All this is necessary for survival. I am a visitor from another planet, and the natives are not friendly.

I open my mail myself. Then it disappears. Whisked away. Today, pleas for help to save the whales, save the pandas, free Tibet.

My bank statement shows that I have $3,567.89 in a Bank of America checking account. There is another statement from a stockbroker, Michael Brownstein. My name is on the top. My assets have declined 19 percent in the last six months. They apparently now total $2.56 million. He includes a note: It is not as bad as it could have been due to your conservative investment choices and a broad portfolio diversification strategy.

Is $2.56 million a lot of money? Is it enough? I stare at the letters on the page until they blur. AAPL, IBM, CVR, ASF, SFR. The secret language of money.

James is sly. James has secrets. Some I am privy to, more I am not. Where is he today? The children are at school. The house is empty except for a woman who seems to be a sort of housekeeper. She is straightening the books in the den, humming a tune I don’t recognize. Did James hire her? Likely. Someone must be keeping things in order, for the house looks well tended, and I have always been hostile to housework, and James, although a compulsive tidier, is too busy. Always out and about. On undercover missions. Like now. Amanda doesn’t approve. Marriages should be transparent, she says. They must withstand the glare of full sunlight. But James is a shadowy man. He needs cover, flourishes in the dark. James himself explained it long ago, concocted the perfect metaphor. Or rather, he plucked it from nature. And although I am suspicious of too-neat categorizations, this one rang true. It was a hot humid day in summer, at James’s boyhood home in North Carolina. Before we were married. We’d gone for an after-dinner walk in the waning light and just two hundred yards away from his parents’ back porch found ourselves deep in a primeval forest, dark with trees that dripped white moss, our footsteps muffled by the dead leaves that blanketed the ground. Pockets of ferns unfurled through the debris and the occasional mushroom gleamed. James gestured. Poisonous, he said. As he spoke, a bird called. Otherwise, silence. If there was a path, I couldn’t see it, but James steadily moved ahead and magically a way forward appeared in front of us. We’d gone perhaps a quarter of a mile, the light diminishing minute by minute, when James stopped. He pointed. At the foot of a tree, amid a mass of yellow green moss, something glowed a ghostly white. A flower, a single flower on a long white stalk. James let out a breath. We’re lucky, he said. Sometimes you can search for days and not find one.

And what is it? I asked. The flower emitted its own light, so strong that several small insects were circling around it, as if attracted by the glare.

A ghost plant, James said. Monotropa uniflora. He stooped down and cupped the flower in his hand, being careful not to disengage it from its stalk. It’s one of the few plants that doesn’t need light. It actually grows in the dark.

How is that possible? I asked.

It’s a parasite—it doesn’t photosynthesize but feeds off the fungus and the trees around it, lets others do the hard work. I’ve always felt a kinship to it. Admiration, even. Because it’s not easy—that’s why they don’t propagate widely. The plant has to find the right host, and conditions must be exactly right for it to flourish. But when it does flourish, it is truly spectacular. He let go of the flower and stood up.

Yes, I can see that, I said.

Can you? James asked. Can you really?

Yes, I repeated, and the word hung in the heavy moist air between us, like a promise. A vow.

Shortly after this trip, we quietly got married at the Evanston courthouse. We didn’t invite anyone, it would have felt like an intrusion. The clerk was a witness, and it was over in five minutes. On the whole, a good decision. But on days like today, when I feel James’s absence like a wound, I long to be back in those woods, which somehow remain as fresh and strong in my mind as the day we were there. I could reach out and pluck that flower, present it to James when he comes back. A dark trophy.

I am in the office of a Carl Tsien. A doctor. My doctor, it seems. A slight, balding man. Pale, in the way that only someone who spends his time indoors under artificial light can be. A benevolent face. We apparently know each other well.

He speaks about former students. He uses the word our. Our students. He says I should be proud. That I have left the university and the hospital an invaluable legacy. I shake my head. I am too tired to pretend, having had a bad night. A pacing night. Back and forth, back and forth, from bathroom to bedroom to bathroom and back again. Counting footsteps, beating a steady rhythm against the tile, the hardwood flooring. Pacing until the soles of my feet ached.

But this office tickles my memory. Although I don’t know this doctor, somehow I am intimate with his possessions. A model of a human skull on his desk. Someone has painted lipstick on its bony maxilla to approximate lips, and a crude label underneath it reads simply, mad carlotta. I know that skull. I know that handwriting. He sees me looking. Your jokes were always a little obscure, he says.

On the wall above the desk, a vintage skiing poster proclaims Chamonix in bright red letters. Des conditions de neige excellentes, des terrasses ensoleillées, des hors-pistes mythiques. A man and a woman, dressed in the voluminous clothing of the early 1900s, poised on skis in midair above a steep white hill dotted with pine trees. A fanciful drawing, not a photograph, although there are photographs, too, hanging to the right and left of the poster. Black-and-white. To the right, one of a young girl, not clean, squatting in front of a dilapidated shack. To the left, one of a barren field with the sun just visible above the flat horizon and a woman, naked, lying on her belly with her hands propping up her chin. She looks directly into the camera. I feel distaste and turn away.

The doctor laughs and pats me on the arm. You never did approve of my artistic vision, he says. You called it precious. Ansel Adams meets the Discovery Channel. I shrug. I let his hand linger on my arm as he guides me to a chair.

I am going to ask you some questions, he says. Just answer to the best of your ability.

I don’t even bother to respond.

What day is it?

Going-to-the-doctor day.

Clever reply. What month is it?

Winter.

Can you be more specific?

March?

Close. Late February.

What is this?

A pencil.

What is this?

A watch.

What is your name?

Don’t insult me.

What are your children’s names?

Fiona and Mark.

What was your husband’s name?

James.

Where is your husband?

He is dead. Heart attack.

What do you remember about that?

He was driving and lost control of his car.

Did he die of the heart attack or the car accident?

Clinically it was impossible to tell. He may have died of cardiomyopathy caused by a leaky mitral valve or from head trauma. It was a close call. The coroner went with cardiac arrest. I would have gone the other way, myself.

You must have been devastated.

No, my thought was, that’s James: a perpetual battle between his head and his heart to the end.

You’re making light of it. But I remember that time. What you went through.

Don’t patronize me. I had to laugh. His heart succumbed first. His heart! I did laugh, actually. I laughed as I identified the remains. Such a cold, bright place. The morgue. I hadn’t been in one since medical school, I always hated them. The harsh light. The bitter cold. The light and the cold and also the sounds—rubber-soled shoes squeaking like hungry rats against tile floors. That’s what I remember: James bathed in unforgiving light while vermin scuttled.

Now you’re the one patronizing me. As if I couldn’t see past that.

The doctor writes something in a chart. He allows himself to smile at me.

You scored a nineteen, he says. You’re doing well today. I don’t see any agitation and Magdalena says the aggression has subsided. We’ll continue the same drug therapy.

He gives me a look. Do you have a problem with that?

I shake my head. Okay, then. We’ll do everything we can to keep you in your home. I know that’s what you want.

He pauses. I must tell you, Mark has been urging me to make a statement that he can use to declare you mentally incompetent to make medical decisions, he says. I have refused. The doctor leans forward. I would recommend that you not let yourself be examined by another doctor. Not without a court order.

He takes a piece of paper out of his file. See—I have written it all down for you. Everything I just said. I will give it to Magdalena and tell her to keep it safe. I have made two copies. Magdalena will give one to your lawyer. You can trust Magdalena, I believe. I believe she is trustworthy.

He waits for my answer, but I am fixated on the photo of the naked woman. There is doubt and suspicion in her eyes. She is looking at the camera. Behind it. She is looking straight at me.

I can’t find the car keys, so I decide to walk to the drugstore. I will buy toothpaste, some dental floss, shampoo for dry hair. Perhaps some toilet paper, the premium kind.

Normal things. I’m inclined to pretend to be normal today. Then I will go to the supermarket and pick out the plumpest roast chicken for dinner. A loaf of fresh bread. James will like that. Small comforts—we share our love of these.

But I must go quickly. Quietly. They will try to stop me. They always do.

But no purse. Where is it. I always keep it beside the door. No matter, there will be someone nice there. I will say, I am Dr. Jennifer White and I forgot my purse and they will say oh of course here is some money and I will nod my head just so and thank them.

I stride down the street, past ivy-covered brownstones with their waist-high wrought-iron fences enclosing small neat geometrically laid-out front gardens.

Dr. White? Is that you?

A dark-skinned man in a blue uniform, driving a white truck with an eagle on it. He rolls down his window, slows to a crawl to keep pace.

Yes? I keep walking.

Not the nicest day to be out and about. Nasty.

Just a walk, I say. I make a point of not looking at him. If you don’t look, they may leave you alone. If you don’t look, sometimes they let it go.

How about a ride? Look at you, completely soaked. No coat. And my goodness. No shoes. Come on. Get in.

No. I like the weather. I like the feel of my bare feet against concrete. Cold. Waking me out of my somnolent state.

You know, that nice lady you live with won’t like this.

So what.

Come quietly now. He speaks soothingly while pulling the truck over to the curb. He holds out both hands, palms up, and beckons with them. Gently.

I’m not a rabid dog.

No, you’re not. Indeed you aren’t. But I can’t stand by and do nothing. You know I can’t, Dr. White.

I brush my icy hair out of my face and keep going, but he idles his truck alongside. He takes out his phone. If he punches seven numbers, it’s okay. If he punches three numbers, it’s bad. I know that. I stop and wait. Onetwothree. He stops. He brings the phone to his ear.

Wait, I say. No. I run around the front of the truck. I yank the door open and clamber in beside him. Anything to stop the phone. Stop what will happen. Bad things will happen. Put the phone down, I say. Put the phone down. He hesitates. I hear a voice on the other end. He looks at the phone and flips it shut. He gives me what is supposed to be a reassuring smile. I am not fooled.

Okay! Let’s get you home before you catch your death.

He waits at the curb until I reach the front door. It is wide open, and wind and sleet are gusting through into the hallway. The thick damask curtains on the front windows are drenched. I step on a sodden carpet—a dark Tabriz runner we bought in Baghdad thirty years ago, now considered museum-quality. James had it appraised last year, will be furious. Magdalena’s shoes are gone. A lukewarm cup of tea sits on the table, half drunk.

I am suddenly very tired. I sit down in front of the tea, push it away, but not before getting a waft of chamomile. So many old wives’ tales about chamomile have proven true. A cure for digestive problems, fever, menstrual cramps, stomachaches, skin infections, and anxiety. And, of course, insomnia.

A fix for whatever ails you! Magdalena had exclaimed when I told her that. Not really, I said. Not everything.

We are listening to St. Matthew’s Passion. It is 1988. Solti is at the podium in Orchestra Hall, and the audience is held captive until the cadences resolve. The diminished seventh chords and the disturbing modulations. The suspense barely tolerable. I can feel the warmth of James’s fingers intertwined with mine, his breath warm against my cheek.

Then suddenly it is a cold winter day. I am alone in my kitchen. I fold my arms on the table and lean my forehead against them. Did I take my pills this morning? How many did I take? How many would it take?

I am almost to the point. I have almost reached that point. And hear an echo of Bach: Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen. It is I who should suffer and be bound for hell.

But not yet. No. Not quite yet. I sit and wait.

A man has walked into my house without knocking. He says he is my son. Magdalena backs him up, so I acquiesce. But I don’t like this man’s face. I am not ruling out the possibility that they are telling me the truth—but I will play it safe. Not commit.

What I do see: a stranger, a very beautiful stranger. Dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, a dark aura, if I may be so fanciful. He tells me he is unmarried, twenty-nine years old, a lawyer. Like your father! I say, cunningly. His darkness comes alive, he glowers—there is no other word for it.

Not at all, he says. Not in the slightest. I cannot hope to fill those mighty McLennan shoes. Give counsel to the mighty and count the golden coin of the realm. And he gives a mock half bow to the portrait of the lean, dark man that hangs in the living room. Why didn’t you give me your name, Mom? The shoes would have been just as large but of a different shape altogether.

Enough! I say sharply—for I remember my son now. He is seven years old. He has just run into the room, his hands clutching at his thighs, a glorious look on his face. Water spattering everywhere. I discover his front pockets are full of his sister’s goldfish. They are still wiggling. He is astonished at my anger.

We save some of them, but most are limp cold bodies to be flushed down the toilet. His rapture is not dimmed, he stares fascinated as the last of the red gold tails gets sucked out of sight. Even when his sister discovers her loss he is unrepentant. No. More than that. Proud. Perpetrator of a dozen tiny slaughters on an otherwise quiet Tuesday afternoon.

This-man-who-they-say-is-my-son settles himself in the blue armchair near the window in the living room. He loosens his tie, stretches out his legs, makes himself at home.

Magdalena tells me you’ve been well, he says.

Very, I say, stiffly. As well as a person in my condition can be.

Tell me about that, he says.

About what? I ask.

About how aware you are of what’s happening to you.

Everyone asks that, I say. They are astonished that I can be so aware, so very . . .

Clinical, he says.

Yes.

You always were, he says. He has a wry smile, not unappealing. When I broke my arm, you were more interested in my bone density than in getting me to the hospital.

I remember someone breaking his arm, I say. Mark. It was Mark. Mark fell out of the maple tree in front of the Janeckis’.

I’m Mark.

You? Mark?

Yes. Your son.

I have a son?

Yes. Mark. Me.

I have a son! I am struck dumb. I have a son! I am filled with ecstasy. Joy!

Mom, please, don’t . . .

But I am overwhelmed. All these years! I had a son and never knew it!

The man is now kneeling at my feet, holding me.

It’s okay, Mom. I’m here.

I hold on to him tightly. A fine young man and, wondrous of all, conceived by me. There is something not quite right about his face, a flaw in his beauty. But to my eyes, this makes him even more beloved.

Mom, he says after a moment. His arms around me loosen, he pulls back.

I miss the warmth immediately but reluctantly let go and sit back in my chair.

Mom, I had something really important to say. It’s about Fiona. He is standing now, and his face is back to the dark, watchful look he wore when he entered. I know that look.

What about her? I ask. My tone is not welcoming.

Mom, I know you don’t want to hear this, but she’s gone off again. You know how she gets.

I do know, but I don’t answer. I have never encouraged this telling of tales.

This time it’s bad. Really bad. She won’t talk to me. You used to be able to talk her down. Dad, sometimes. But she listened to you. Do you think you could speak to her? He pauses. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Where have you been, you bastard? I ask.

What?

After all these years, you come here and say these things?

Shhh, Mom. It’s okay. I’m right here. I never left.

What do you mean? I’ve been alone. All alone in this house. Eating dinner alone, going to bed alone. So alone.

That’s just not true, Mom. Until just last year there was Dad. And what about Magdalena?

Who?

Magdalena. Your friend. The woman who lives with you.

Oh. Her. She’s not my friend. She gets paid. I pay her.

That doesn’t mean she’s not your friend.

Yes, it certainly does. Suddenly I’m angry. Furious! You bastard! I say. You abandoned me!

The man slowly gets to his feet and sighs heavily. Magdalena! he calls.

Did you hear me? Bastard!

I heard you, Mom. He looks around, searching for something. My coat, he says. Have you seen my coat?

A woman hurries into the room. Blond. A woman of heft. Better go, she says. Quickly. Here’s your coat. Yes. Thanks for coming.

Well, I won’t pretend it’s been fun, the man says to me, and turns to go.

Get out!

The blond woman puts up her hand. She moves slowly toward me. No, Jennifer. Put that down. Please put that down. Now, really, did you have to do that?

What has happened. There has been an accident. The phone lies in the hallway amid shattered glass. Cold air sweeps past me, the curtains blow wildly. Outside, a car door slams, an engine starts. I feel alive, vindicated, ready for anything. There’s so much more where this came from. O yes, much much more.

From my notebook:

A good day. Excellent day, my brain mostly clear. I performed a Mini-Cog test on myself. Uncertain of the year, month, and day, but confident of the season. Not sure of my age, but I recognized the woman I saw in the mirror. Still a touch of auburn in the hair, deep brown eyes unfaded, the lines around the eyes and forehead, if not exactly laugh lines, at least indicating a sense of humor.

I know my name: Jennifer White. I know my address: 2153 Sheffield. And spring has arrived. The smell of warm, wet earth, the promise of renewal, of things emerging from a dormant state. I opened the windows and waved at the neighbor across the street, already turning over his raised beds, preparing for the glorious array of angel’s trumpets, blood flowers, blue butterfly bushes.

Went into the kitchen and remembered how to make the strong, bitter coffee I love: how to shake the beans into the grinder, how to sniff the rich scent as the blades slash through the hard shells, how to count the scoops of fragrant deep brown coarse particles into the coffeemaker, how to pour the fresh cold water into the receptacle.

Then Fiona stopped by. Ah, my girl delights me! With her short pixie haircut and upper right arm entwined by a red and blue rattlesnake tattoo. Usually she keeps it hidden, and only a chosen few in her current life know about it, about her wilder days.

She came to collect my financial statements, go over some numbers that I will not understand. No matter. I have my financial genius. My monetary rock. Graduated from high school at sixteen, from college at twenty, and at twenty-four, the youngest female tenure-track professor at the U of C business school. Her area of specialization is international monetary economics—she routinely gets calls from Washington, London, Frankfurt.

After James died, once I was certain of my prognosis, I signed over financial power of attorney. Her I trust. My Fiona. She places paper after paper in front of me, and I sign without reading. I ask her if there is anything I should pay special attention to, and she says no. Today was different, however. She had no papers but just sat at the table with me and held my hand in hers. My remarkable girl.

At our Alzheimer’s support group today, we talk about what we hate. Hate is a powerful emotion, our young leader says. Ask a dementia patient who she loves, and she draws a blank. Ask her who she hates, and the memories come flooding in.

Hatred. Hate. The word resonates. My stomach contracts, and bile rises in my throat. I hate. I find my hands clenched into fists. Faces turn to look at me. Some men, mostly women. A variety of races, of creeds. A United Nations of the despised, of the despicable. I cannot make out their features exactly. An anonymous mob.

It is becoming hard to breathe. What is that noise. Is it me. Who are you staring at.

Our leader is coming over. Our leader is leaving the room, he returns with a youngish woman, bleached blond hair, too much makeup. She comes straight over to me.

Dr. White, the woman says. Jennifer. We’re going home now. Shhh. No yelling. No. Please stop. Stop. You’re hurting me. No, don’t call, I can handle this. Jennifer. Come now. That’s right. We’re going home. Shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s me, look at me. At me, Magdalena. That’s right. We’re going home.

On some days, blessed clarity. Today is one of those days. I walk through the house taking joy in claiming things. My books. My piano, which James played endearingly clumsily. My Calder lithograph, purchased by James for me in London, 1976, its lines as fresh as ever. My artifacts, the seventeenth-century santos and the ex-votos, doubtless stolen from churches, which we bought from roadside peddlers in Jalisco and Monterrey: all the trappings of the devout without the burden of faith. I touch everything, rejoicing in the feel of leather, mahogany, canvas, porcelain, tin.

Magdalena is what I can only describe as sullen. She breaks a plate, curses, sweeps up the pieces, and drops them again while struggling with the lid of the trash can. Her job cannot be fun. I suspect, however, that she needs the money badly. Her car is at least a dozen years old, with dented rear fenders and a cracked windshield.

She dresses simply, in faded blue jeans and a white man’s button-down shirt that hangs over her substantial hips. She bleaches her dark hair, not very competently—you can see the roots. Thick eyeliner and mascara that make her eyes appear small.

Her age: perhaps forty, forty-five. I catch her writing in my notebook. A very good day for Jennifer. A not-so-good day for me. I ask her why, and she shrugs. Her face is haggard, and she has circles under her eyes.

Why should I explain again? she says. You’ll just forget anyhow.

I wonder if she is always this rude. I wonder many things. How long has it been raining? How did my hair get so long? Why does the phone keep ringing, yet never seems to be for me? Magdalena picks it up, and her face closes in secrecy. She whispers into the receiver as if to a secret lover.

I am in the middle of a street. Dirty snow has been pushed to either side, but still treacherous going, I have to tread carefully. There is shouting. Cars everywhere. Horns blaring. Someone grabs my arm, not gently, pulls me faster than my legs want to move, practically hoists me up a curb onto a cement island. I am suddenly surrounded by people. Strangers. From afar a voice calls, a familiar one, and the strangers part like the waters of the Red Sea. Here she comes: bright auburn hair, shivering in a short-sleeved T-shirt that exposes her rattlesnake tattoo.

Wait! I’m her daughter! Please don’t call the police!

She arrives, breathless.

Thank you, thank you. Whoever got her out of the street, thank you. She takes a deep breath. I apologize for the trouble. My mother has dementia. She is forcing out the words, and her thin frame is starting to shiver. It is bitterly cold.

As the crowd begins to disperse, she turns to me.

Mom, please don’t do that! You scared us all.

Where am I?

About two blocks from home. In the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the city.

She pauses. It was my fault, I was putting my bag up in my old bedroom. You know, I’m spending the night again, Magdalena thought it would be nice for you. We got to talking, didn’t notice that you’d wandered off. Where were you going?

To Amanda’s. It’s Friday, isn’t it?

No, actually it’s Wednesday. But I understand. You were trying to find Amanda’s house?

It’s our day.

Yes. I understand. She thinks for a moment, seems to make up her mind. I think we should go to Amanda’s, see if she’s in.

What’s your name?

Fiona. Your daughter.

Yes. Yes, that’s right. I remember now.

Let’s go. Let’s see if we can find Amanda. Look. The light is green now. She is holding my arm and urging me forward with purpose. Although I am at least three inches taller than she is, I have trouble keeping up with her stride. We move past the thrift store, past the El station, around the corner of the church, and suddenly the world tilts into place again. I pause at one house, a brownstone, with a short black iron fence around its yard. A tree stripped of leaves leans over the path to the front steps.

Yes, this is our house. But we’re going to visit Amanda.

I remember, I say. Three houses down. One, two, three.

That’s right. Here we are. Let’s just knock on the door and see if Amanda’s here. If she’s not, we’ll go home and have a cup of tea and do the crossword puzzle. I brought a new book.

Fiona knocks loudly three times. I press on the doorbell. We wait on the porch, but no one comes. No face appears behind the curtains of the living room window. Not that Amanda would ever peer like that. Despite Peter’s admonitions, she always flings open the door without looking. Always ready to face whatever life brings her.

Fiona has her back to the door. Her eyes are closed. Her body is shaking. Whether it’s from the cold or something else I can’t tell. Let’s go, Mom, she says. No one is home.

Strange, I say. Amanda has never missed one of our Fridays.

Mom, please. Her voice is urgent. She pulls me down the steps, so fast I stumble and nearly fall, and pushes me back down the sidewalk. One. Two Three. We are back in front of the brownstone.

Her hand on the gate, she pauses, looks up. Her face is full of pain, but as she gazes at the house, the pain dissipates into something else. Longing.

How I love this house, she says. I’ll be so sad to see it go.

Why should it go? I ask. Your father and I don’t intend to move. The wind whistles past and both of us are white with cold, but we stand there on the sidewalk in front of the house, not moving. The frigid temperature suits me. It suits the conversation, which strikes me as important.

Fiona’s face is pinched and there are large goosebumps on her arms, but she still doesn’t move. The house before us is solid, it is a fact. The warm red stones, the large protruding rectangular windows, the three stories capped with a flat roof emblematic of other Chicago houses of the era. I find myself yearning for it as desperately as when James and I first saw it, as if it were out of our reach. Yet it is truly ours. Mine. I bullied James into buying it, even though it was beyond our means at the time. It is my home.

Home, she says as if she could read my mind, then shakes her head as if to clear it. She takes me by the elbow, propels me up the steps, into the house, helps me off with my coat, my shoes.

I have something to show you, she says, and takes a small white square out of her pocket, unfolds it. Look at this, she says. Just look.

A photograph. Of my house. No, wait. Not precisely. This house is slightly smaller, fewer and smaller windows, only two stories high. But the same Chicago brownstone, the same small square of yard in front, and, like my house, crowded in from brownstones on either side, one in pristine condition, the other, like this one, slightly shabby. No curtains at the windows. A sold sign in front.

What is this? I ask.

My house. My new house. Can you believe it? I try to take the photograph from her to see more closely, but she has trouble relinquishing it. I have to pull to get it into my own hands. Even so, she leans toward me, as though she can’t bear to let it out of her sight.

It’s in Hyde Park. On Fifty-sixth Street. Right off campus. I can bike to my office.

It’s eerie, I say. The similarity.

Yes, I thought so too. I paid too much for it, of course. It needs tons of work. But these things don’t come on the market very often. I had to act fast.

I keep gazing at the house. It could almost be my own, that could almost be my bedroom window, that could almost be the iron gate to my backyard.

When do you move in?

Well, it’s a little complicated. Closing was delayed. Because of Amanda. She had cosigned the loan for me.

And why would that be a problem? Did she change her mind?

No. No, of course not.

Well?

Fiona is silent for a moment. Then, I just decided I didn’t want to bother her with it after all.

Why didn’t you ask me? Or your father?

Fiona twists a purple lock around her index finger. I don’t know. Just didn’t want to make you feel obliged. It turned out okay. I was able to come up with enough money.

Well, you know if you ever need help . . .

Yes, I know. You’ve always been very generous.

Mark is a different matter altogether, of course. Your father and I don’t trust his judgment in money matters.

You’re a little hard on him, you know.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

I have forgotten I am still holding the photograph until she reaches out and plucks it from my hand, folds it carefully, and puts it back in her pocket. Then pulls it out and looks at it again, as if checking that it is real, the way I used to pat her little arms and legs when she slept, amazed I had produced this perfect being.

It is my home, she says, so softly I can barely make out the words. And she smiles.

From my notebook:

I watched David Letterman last night. So, in homage:

TOP 10 SIGNS YOU HAVE ALZHEIMER’S 10. Your husband starts introducing himself as your “caregiver.”9. You find an hourly activity schedule taped up on your refrigerator that includes “walks,” “crocheting,” and “yoga.”8. Everyone starts giving you crossword puzzle books.7. Strangers are suddenly very affectionate.6. The doors are all locked from the outside.5. You ask your grandson to take you to the junior prom.4. Your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand has done.3. Girl Scouts come over and force you to decorate flower pots with them.2. You keep discovering new rooms in your house.And the No. 1 sign you have Alzheimer’s is . . . It’s somehow slipped your mind.

If I could see through this fog. Break through this heaviness of limbs and extremities. Every inhalation stabs. My hands limp in my lap. Pale and impotent, they used to wield shiny sharp things, lovely things with heft and weight that bestowed power.

People would lie down and bare their naked flesh. Invite me to dismember them. And if thy hand off end thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.

Write about yourself, Magdalena urges. If it helps, write in the third person. Tell me a story about a woman who happens to be named Jennifer White.

She is a reserved person. Some would say cold. Yet others welcomed that quality, saw it as a form of integrity. She thought either was a fair assessment. Both could be attributed to her training. Surgery requires precision, objectivity.

You don’t get emotional over a hand. A hand is a collection of facts. The eight bones of the carpus, the five bones of the metacarpus, and the fourteen phalanges. The flexor and extensor tendons that maneuver the digits. The muscles of the forearm. The opposable thumb. All intertwined. Multiple interconnections. All necessary to the balance of motion that separates humans from other species.

But Amanda. She thinks of Amanda’s metacarpus, minus four sets of phalanges. A mutilated starfish. Does she cry? No. She writes it in her notebook. Amanda died. Fingerless. But the details won’t stick.

I stop, put my pen down. I ask Magdalena, Which neighbor was suspected in Amanda’s death? but she will not answer. Perhaps because I have asked and she has answered the question many times. Perhaps because she knows I will forget my question if she ignores it.

But I rarely forget that a question has been asked. When Magdalena ignores me, unfinished business lies heavy between us, disrupts our routine, hangs over us as we drink our tea. In this case, it pollutes the very air. For something is terribly wrong.

My notebook again. Fiona’s handwriting:

Came over today to find you uncharacteristically subdued. Anger we see a lot of. Bewilderment. And a surprising degree of intelligent acceptance. But rarely this resigned passivity.

You were slumped at the table, your face flat down, your hands hanging at your sides. I crouched down and put my arm around your shoulders, but you didn’t move or say anything. Wouldn’t answer any questions or give any sign you knew I was there.

Eventually you sat up, pushed back the chair, and slowly went up the stairs to bed. I didn’t dare follow you. Didn’t dare ask any more questions for fear of what you would reveal about the dark place you were residing in.

I had never been afraid like that. I wasn’t always sure what you were thinking, but I could always ask, and sometimes you would even tell me. If the truth had the power to hurt, you made it palatable by your calm acceptance of it.

You don’t really like me very much, do you? I asked you when I was fifteen. No, you said, and you don’t like me very much either right now.

But we’ll find each other again. And we did. If I’d known that within a decade I would lose both you and Dad, would I have acted differently back then? Probably not. I probably would have gone out and gotten another tattoo.

That tattoo. You keep asking about it, Mom, so I’ll write it down here. It’s a pretty good story. I already had two tattoos. There was the one I got with Eric when I was fourteen. You didn’t know about that one. It’s very discreet—on my left buttock. A tiny Tinker Bell. Well, I was fourteen.

Then when I was sixteen, the youngest freshman in my class at Stanford, I got another one, this time on my ankle. A cannabis sativa plant. Yes, you can guess why a kid really too young to be away from home would think that was cool.

But the rattlesnake. That was my junior year. I’d done okay the first two years, better than I’d done in high school socially, actually made some friends, did the things you’d expect. Drank too much. Slept around.

But in my junior year, things fell apart. My best friend had a sort of breakdown and went home to West Virginia. He wrote a couple times, made jokes about the skinny dogs and the ugly women, and that was that. Two of my other friends started dating each other, retreated into their own private world, put up a barrier against others. It felt oddly personal.

At that point, I was living off campus in a room rented from this Silicon Valley marketing type. She wasn’t there half the time, either traveling or staying up in the city with her boyfriend. The house was up in the redwoods, high above the university.

When people came up to visit they’d sit in the hot tub and ooh and aah, but I never got used to the place. The quiet disturbed me, as did the fact that the sun went behind the hills at two in the afternoon and suddenly the day was over.

Coyotes trotted boldly through the yard, rats scratched under the floors and in the woodwork, and even the deer spooked me. They’d come right up to the house to forage, and since there were no curtains on the windows—the house was on three acres of redwoods, so there was no need—I’d woken up several times to deer faces pressed against the glass, solemnly observing me as they chewed.

So I took to spending a lot of my time down on the flats, in Palo Alto. There was one coffeehouse I liked, and I’d sit there for hours, drinking cup after cup of black coffee and studying. By then I was taking grad classes, and my professors were telling me I had a career in academia if I wanted one. Because I wanted one, badly, you could find me at that coffeehouse working pretty much every night.

I was there one Friday night as usual, hyped up on coffee and lonely as hell, and not wanting to go back up the hill to that house without curtains. I had resigned myself to doing just that, however, when a nice-looking young woman—just a little older than myself, I’d guess—came up to me. She had a question about what I was studying—was it math? Sort of, I said, and we fell into a conversation about what economics was and why it mattered.

After a while she motioned to a young man sitting at another table and said, We’re going to a party in Santa Cruz, you want to come? I thought,Well, this is strange. And, I’m not sure I like these people. There was something too eager about them. The woman’s teeth were too large for her mouth when she smiled. And then, recklessly, Why the hell not?

They told me not to bother with my car, that they’d bring me back when the party was over. That should have alerted me. But I got in the car, and the first thing that happened was they started going up the hill toward where I lived.

I said, Wait a minute, this isn’t the way to Santa Cruz, and they told me it was a back way, a really pretty one. Since I’d had enough of that kind of pretty and was beginning to think I’d done a very foolish thing, I asked them to just drop me off at my house—we were passing right by my street—and said that I’d pick up my car in the morning.

But they refused. Said, No, you’re coming with us. And I was both very angry and very frightened. I had a kind of a crazy idea that I would wait until the car slowed to go around a corner and then jump out, but when I tried to open the door I found they’d put the child-safety locks on. So I just folded into myself and waited to see what happened.

We got to this old ranch house up in the Santa Cruz mountains—where, I’m still not sure—and there was another poor soul like me who they’d picked up in Santa Clara. We were all in this room and this man came out and welcomed me and this other girl to what he called “the family.” Said we shouldn’t be alarmed. Said we could go home whenever we wanted, we just had to give them a chance. Keep an open mind.

At that point, I got up and left the room. Didn’t run, didn’t hurry, just walked right out of that house and down the long driveway and into the road. Astonishingly, no one followed me.

Later, maybe a half mile down the road, I found my hands clenched into fists. I kept walking, it was pitch-black, and I had no idea where I was, but had a vague idea of getting to the nearest house and calling the police. And then I saw headlights. I stuck out my thumb, and a truck with two sixteen-year-old kids from Ben Lomond stopped.

One of them had only that day gotten his driving license and they were both pumped up like hell on excitement. They were on their way into Santa Cruz to get drunk and tattooed to celebrate.

I said, I’m game, and I was. I figured I couldn’t get a bus back to Palo Alto until the next morning anyway.

After downing a bunch of tequila shots in a campus bar, we somehow got to a twenty-four-hour tattoo parlor on Ocean. I stumbled into a chair and said Do your worst. Give me the biggest meanest thing you have.

So he started in. It took him all night. He kept popping pills to stay awake, which should have worried me, but it didn’t. The pain was almost unbearable, but the booze helped and when I got home and saw my lovely snake it was worth every acid-laced sting.

I aced my finals that week and, my arm throbbing, took a red-eye back to Chicago. You took one look at my arm and prescribed a course of antibiotics, but you never said anything about my snake. Whether you liked it or not. Until after you got sick.

Then you began complimenting me on it. Telling me not to cover it up. Encouraging me to wear sleeveless tops. I think at this point you’re as proud of it as I am. Our joint emblem: Don’t Tread on Me.

From my notebook. My handwriting:

Two men and a woman were here today. Detectives. I must write it down, Magdalena says, I must keep my head clear. Know what I’ve said. Think straight.

The men were clumsy and heavy, perched awkwardly on my kitchen chairs. The woman was one of them: coarse, almost, but with a more alert, intelligent face. The two men deferred to her. She mostly listened, putting in a word now and then. The men took turns asking questions.

Tell us about your relationship with the deceased.

What deceased? Who died?

Amanda O’Toole. Everyone says you were very close.

Amanda? Dead? Nonsense. She was here, just this morning, full of schemes for a new neighborhood petition. Something against excessive dog barking, about imposing sanctions and fines.

Let me rephrase the question. What is your relationship with Mrs. O’Toole?

She is my friend.

But one of your neighbors—the man who was talking consulted his notebook—said you had a loud argument on February fifteen. The day after Valentine’s Day, around two PM, in her house.

Magdalena broke in. They were always fighting. They were that close. Like sisters. You know how family is.

Please, ma’am. Let Dr. White answer. What was that particular argument about?

What argument? I asked. It is a bad day, I can’t concentrate. This morning Magdalena put a red and white stick in my hand at the bathroom sink. Toothbrush, she said, but the word meant nothing. I came to later at the kitchen table with a half-eaten stick of butter in front of me. Then I had another fade-out and a fade-in. I found myself sitting in the same place, but now with a glass half full of an orange liquid on the table in front of me, a pile of multicolored pills. What is this? I asked Magdalena, pointing. The colors were wrong. The bright liquid and the small hard round bursts of blue, magenta, buttercup. Poison. I would not be fooled. Was not fooled. Flushed it all down the toilet when Magdalena was not looking.

But back to the main point:

The argument you had with Mrs. O’Toole in mid-February, the man repeated, somewhat impatiently.

Can’t you see that she doesn’t remember? asked Magdalena.

Convenient, said the other man. He looked at the first man and raised his eyebrow. Coconspirators.

She’s not a well woman, said Magdalena. You know this. You have her doctor’s statement. You are aware of the nature of this disease.

The first man started in again. What was the state of your relationship with Amanda O’Toole in February?

I imagine it was what it always was, I said. Close, but combative. Amanda was in many ways a difficult woman.

The woman spoke for the first time. So we’ve heard, she said. She allowed herself a small smile. She nodded to the first man to continue.

You had a fight with her in her house seven days before the body was discovered. About the time of the murder.

What murder?

Just answer the question. Why did you go to Amanda O’Toole’s house on February fifteen?

We were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. We had keys.

But that particular day? What were you doing? According to our witness, you didn’t knock but let yourself in the front door. This was at approximately one thirty PM. At two PM this neighbor heard loud voices. An argument.

I shook my head.

Look, clearly she doesn’t know, Magdalena said. She won’t even remember you were here ten minutes after you’re gone. Can’t you leave her alone? How many times are you going to ask these questions?

The first man started to talk, but the woman silenced him. That evening was the last time anyone saw Amanda O’Toole, she said. She visited the drugstore, bought some toothpaste, and picked up some food items from Dominick’s around six thirty PM. But she didn’t take in her paper after that day. The timeline fits. If nothing else, Dr. White was one of the last persons to see Mrs. O’Toole before she was killed.

The world shifted sideways. Darkness descended. My body turned to stone.

Killed? Amanda? I asked. But it was true. Somehow I knew that. This was not shock. This was not surprise. This was grief, continued.

After a short silence, the woman spoke. Her voice was gentler. That must be difficult. Reliving that moment over and over again.

I willed myself to breathe, to unclench my hands, to swallow. Magdalena put a hand on my shoulder.

And why are you here today? asked Magdalena. We’ve gone over this several times. Why again. Why now? You have no evidence.

There was only silence to that.

So why are you here? Magdalena asked again. No one was looking at me.

Just routine. Trying to find out if Dr. White can help us in any way.

How could she help you?

Perhaps she saw something. Heard something. Knew something about what was going on in Amanda’s life that no one else knew about. The woman turned to me suddenly.

So, was there? she asked. Anything out of the ordinary in Amanda’s life? Anyone who had a grudge? Had reason to be . . . disgruntled?

Everyone looked at me. But I was not there. I was in Amanda’s house, at her kitchen table, we were laughing wickedly over her imitation of the head of our block’s Neighborhood Watch program, her rendition of the 911 tape in which the woman reported a dangerous intruder trying to break into the church, which turned out to be a stray Labrador urinating under a bush.

It was a humble kitchen, never renovated to the standards of the neighborhood. Peter and Amanda, schoolteacher and PhD student in religious studies, bought the house prior to the area’s gentrification.

Plain pine cupboards painted a flat white. Checkered linoleum tiled floors. A twenty-year old avocado green Frigidaire. Amanda brought out a stale Bundt cake, a leftover from a PTA function, and cut us each a dry slice. I took a bite and spitted it out at the exact moment she did the same. We started laughing again. And suddenly I ached with loss.

The female detective had been watching me intently. Enough, she said. That’s all for today.

Thank you, I said, and our eyes met for a second. Then the three of them took their leave.

March 1, according to the calendar. Our anniversary. James’s and mine. I usually forget, but James, never. He doesn’t buy me extravagant gifts on schedule—those he saves for when I least expect them—but the ones he brings on these occasions are nevertheless deliciously unusual. What will it be today? I feel doglike, capable of wearing out the carpet with my pacing. Not that I’m often in this mood. No. And not that I would let him catch me. But nevertheless, there is this excitement, this anticipation, that has not dissipated. My parasite, thriving in darkness, his essence remaining mysterious throughout the mundanity of marriage. The shared bathroom, the clothes abandoned on the floor, the crumbs under the breakfast table. Still an enigma despite all this. A gift from the gods, James was. And today, as I wait for his return from parts unknown, I give thanks to them.

I pick up the first photo album, labeled 1998–2000. The woman who helps me insists. She doesn’t understand how utterly stupefying it is to be guided through the sea of unfamiliar faces and locales. All labeled in large black capital letters as though for an idiot child. For me.

To be asked, over and over, And who is this? Do you remember her? Do you recognize this place? It’s like being forced to see someone’s holiday snapshots of places you never wanted to go.

But today I will do what the leader at our support group suggests. I will examine each photo for clues. I will think of the book as a historical document, myself as an anthropologist. Uncovering facts and formulating theories. But facts first. Always.

I have my notebook beside me as I look. To record my discoveries.

The first photo that has Amanda written in the caption is dated September 1998. Amanda and Peter. A vibrant older couple. They could be in an ad for healthy aging.

The woman with longish thick white hair caught up in a ponytail. You can tell how strong and capable she is. Her wrinkles augment this authority. You wouldn’t want to be in a subservient position to her. You’d have to hold your own or be vanquished. An executive? A politician? Someone used to controlling crowds, multitudes even.

The man next to her is a different sort altogether. Although his beard is gray, his hair still has traces of black. He stands a little behind the woman and is only very slightly taller. More humor in his smile, more kindness.

You would turn to him for help, advice. To her, for decisive action. I cannot see his left hand. Hers has a wedding band on it. If they were husband and wife, there would be no doubt who would be in charge.

The photo has few other points of interest. They are standing on a porch—a rare feature for the brownstones on this street. It is summer: They are wearing T-shirts, and the honeysuckle vine climbing up the railing is in full bloom.

Behind them are folding lawn chairs, the kind woven from cheap multicolored plastic strips. A small oval plastic table immediately in front. On it, three empty tall glasses and one full one that contains a flat watery amber liquid. There is a slight blur in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo—perhaps the photographer’s hand, gesturing the couple to move together.

The sun must be behind the photographer, because his (her?) shadow shades the woman’s neck and breasts.

And suddenly I remember. No, I feel. The heat. The insistent buzz of cicadas that were everywhere that year—the seventeen-year plague, everyone said, only half kidding. They crunched underfoot, spattered across our windshields, forced us inside during the hottest months of summer.

Peter and Amanda’s house had a screened-in porch, which is what made it possible to sit outdoors that day, to relieve the claustrophobia, the sense of incarceration. We were waiting for James, who was late, as usual.

We’d drunk our beers and were debating whether to open some more when Peter suggested capturing the moment. What moment? Amanda and I had exclaimed, in such perfectly matched tones that we both laughed.

Peter, characteristically, was unruffled. This moment that will never come again, he said. This moment after which nothing will ever be the same. Amanda made a face but went inside for the camera agreeably enough.

And what is likely to be different after this moment? I teased Peter. Do you have an announcement to make? Some revelation? That made him uncomfortable.

No, of course not, he said. Nothing of the sort. He shifted in his chair, picked up his glass, and raised it to his lips again, even though it was empty.

I guess I’m grateful, he said, finally.

That’s an odd emotion to feel when it’s more than one hundred degrees at six o’clock in the evening, I said.

He refused to smile. No, grateful is the right word, he said. Grateful for every moment that the bottom doesn’t fall out. He paused, then laughed. It’s those damn cicadas, he said. They make one think about Old Testament–style wrath-of-God type things.

You know, he continued, there are remarkable parallels between events documented in an ancient Egyptian manuscript, Admonitions of Ipuwer, and the book of Exodus. Pestilence and floods, rivers turning red, and no one able to see the face of his fellow man for days on end because of locusts. Many a doctoral candidate has been grateful for these points. Although if I never read another thesis with the word locust in it, I myself will be eternally grateful. He stopped, leaned forward, suddenly intent.

And you, Jennifer, he said. What would you be grateful for?

Taken unaware, I gave him a breezy reply: Oh, the usual. Health and happiness. That the kids keep doing as well as they’re doing. That James’s and my late fifties are as productive as our early fifties and our sixties not too dull as we start to slow down.

He took it more seriously than I had intended.

Perhaps. Yes. Those are not unreasonable hopes.

Well, I’m a reasonable woman, I said. But frankly, you’re alarming me.

I don’t mean to. But I do have a decade or so on you. Enough to know that the words reasonable and hope don’t always fit well in the same sentence.

Then, a bustle and a little noise, and Amanda was back with the camera. She gestured for Peter and me to stand together. No no, I said. I’m a little spooked by what Peter has been saying. I’d rather not have this particular moment recorded with me in it. Here, let me.

And so I took the picture—my sense memory is so clear I can hear the double click-click of the predigital camera—and at that moment James arrived, bearing flowers and wine and keeping his own counsel on things of import. But I didn’t realize that at the time.

It is a day for the rending of garments. For the gnashing of teeth and the covering of mirrors. Amanda.

I rage at Magdalena. How could you withhold this information from me? I may be impaired, but I am not fragile! I accepted my diagnosis. I buried a husband. I am nothing if not resilient.

We did tell you. Many times.

No. I would have remembered this. It would have been as though my own fingers had been severed. As if my own heart sliced open.

Check your notebook. Here. Look at this entry. And this. Here is the news article of her death. Here is the obituary. Here is what you wrote when you first found out. And we’ve been to the police station twice. Visited by investigators three times. We’ve gone over this and over this. You have mourned. And mourned again. We went to church. We said the Rosary.

I? Said the Rosary?

Well, I said the Rosary. You sat there. You were calm. Not aware, but not distressed. You get like that sometimes. Calm and accepting. Almost catatonic. I like to take you to church when that happens. Magdalena isn’t looking at me when she says this.

I have a theory, that it is a good thing when you’re in that state, she says. That those are the times your soul is most open, the possibilities for healing greatest. The echoing silence, the sweet smell, the soothing filtered light. The Presence. This time was different, however. You roused yourself. You saw the people waiting their turn for confession. You got in line. You went behind the curtain. You stayed a very long time. When you came back you had tears on your face. Tears! Imagine that!

I can’t, actually. But go on.

But it’s true. I swear. You reached out, and took my Rosary. You closed your eyes. Your fingers touched the beads. Your lips moved. I asked you, What are you doing? And you answered, as clear as could be, Amanda. My penance.

That sounds implausible. I wouldn’t know how to say a Rosary. Not after all these decades.

Well, you gave a pretty good impression of knowing what you were doing!

I consider this. I am calmer now. I consider the written evidence. I accept that there was no betrayal on Magdalena’s part. Just my damaged mind. But this doesn’t lessen the agony. Amanda my friend, my ally, my most worthy adversary. What will I do without you?

I think of the time around Mark’s graduation from high school. He and James had fallen out. He had, disconcertingly, attached himself to me. Just as I was getting ready to let him go. He was then coming into his dark, dangerous looks. Always good-looking—the girls started calling when he was twelve—he had in the last year been transformed into a dangerous man, a walking risk to those around him.

That summer was memorable for that, and because Amanda was for once not teaching. We spent the long evenings together while the sun lingered on her porch. Fiona, a very mature twelve, preferred to stay at home reading, that summer it was Jane Austen and Hermann Hesse. But Mark would inevitably join Amanda and me, sometimes for a few minutes on his way to a friend’s house, sometimes for hours, and sit quietly, listening while we talked. Although he was a year from being of legal age, Amanda would pour him a beer and he’d drink it thirstily and fast, as if we might change our minds and take it away.

What did we talk about night after night in that waning light? Politics of course, the latest petitions and rallies and marches Amanda had participated in, which she was constantly pressuring me to join.

Take Back the Night. Walk for Breast Cancer. Run for Muscular Dystrophy. Books—we were both Anglophiles, both knew the works of Dickens and Trollope by heart—and travel. The many places James and I had traveled, and Amanda’s curiosity, despite her own inclination to stay at home, which I never understood. And Mark there, listening.

Something significant occurred on one of those evenings. James and I had just returned from St. Petersburg, where we had purchased an exquisite fifteenth-century icon of Theotokos of the Three Hands. It had been outrageously expensive.

I had seen it at a gallery in Galernaya Place and had fallen in love. James resisted and resisted and then, on our last morning, disappeared for half an hour and came back with a package wrapped in brown paper, which he held out to me with a mixture of amusement and anger.

I held it on my lap on the flight home, unwilling to trust it to my suitcase or the overhead bin. Now I carefully unwrapped it to show Amanda. Perhaps eight inches high, the icon showed the Blessed Mother supporting the Christ Child with her right hand. Her left hand was pressed to her breast as if trying to contain her joy.

At the bottom of the icon appeared a third hand. The severed hand of Saint John Damascene. As the legend went, it had been miraculously reattached to his arm by the Virgin. Now at her feet, a testament to her healing powers.

Amanda held the icon in silence for perhaps five minutes, intent as when she was deeply engaged in giving a lesson to a difficult student or preparing for an important school board speech. She finally spoke.

I like this, she said. I never really understood your passion for religious iconography, but this is different. This one moves me in a way I can’t explain.

Then she spoke. I want this, she said. Her voice was soft but firm. Will you give it to me?

Mark, who had been lolling on the steps, sat up straight. I could only look. There was a long silence before a car horn sounded on Fullerton, causing both Mark and me to jump. Amanda didn’t move.

Well? she said. I won’t ask if I can buy it, because I know I can’t afford it. So I think you will give it to me. Yes. I think so.

I stood up, walked over to where she was sitting on the porch swing, and took the icon from her hands. It took some effort, she was holding on so tightly.

Why now? Why this? I asked. You’ve never asked for anything before. Never.

And you’ve always been so generous to me, she said. Bringing me gifts from your travels. Lovely things. The most beautiful things I own in the world come from you. But I hope you won’t mind me saying that they meant nothing. Mean nothing. Such things never touched me. But this. This is something else.

Mark surprised both of us by clearing his throat and speaking. But Mom loves this. It’s not just a souvenir to her. He opened his mouth as if to say more, then blushed and closed it.

I understand that, Amanda said. Which is one of the reasons I want it so much. Not the only reason. But a main one.

No, I said. My voice came out stronger and louder than I had meant it to. This is mine. Anything else, you know I’d be happy to give you whatever you wanted. Money has never been an object.

No, it wouldn’t be, she said, and there was a warning in her voice. Mark was watching everything intently.

No, I said again. I rewrapped my icon and placed it back in its box. No and no and no. This time, you’ve gone too far.

I left her porch, and it was many weeks before I felt calm enough to speak to her again. Many lonely weeks. Then, she knocked on my door one Friday noon. Our standing appointment. And I got my coat and joined her. It was done. She had made a request—something I imagined was a humbling experience—and had been refused. There was nothing more to say.

Yet there was an odd coda to all this. Mark went off to Northwestern in the fall, as planned. Since his dorm was less than twenty minutes away, it was not as momentous a leave-taking as Fiona’s was to California four years later.

But it was traumatic for him. During the days before he left he was extraordinarily demanding. I need a study pillow. My roommate doesn’t have a TV, we need to buy one. And even, Bake me some cookies.

It was also a particularly busy time at work, and I gave most of these demands short shrift. Still, it was more draining than I had anticipated. It wasn’t until the morning after we’d dropped him off in Evanston, leaving him standing in front of his dorm, that I realized my icon was gone. A blank spot in its position of honor in the front hallway.

I immediately called Mark, but there was no answer. I left an urgent message on his machine, and paced from room to room, to the phone to call James, back to the front window, to the phone to try Mark again.

I didn’t for a minute think it could be anyone else. I had found Mark standing in front of it on more than one occasion, a bemused look on his face, his hand outstretched as if to caress the Madonna’s face. When the doorbell rang, I jumped. Amanda stood there, cradling the icon.

Look at what was on my doorstep yesterday morning, she said, and held it out.

I took it. My hands were shaking. I found I was unable to speak.

Yesterday morning? I managed to ask, finally. What took you so long to come around?

Amanda didn’t say anything. She merely smiled. I eventually answered myself.

Because you weren’t sure you were going to return it, I said.

Amanda seemed to be considering what to say.

I was touched by Mark’s gesture, she said.

And you coveted it. Badly. As badly as I had.

Yes, I did. And I asked you to give it to me. And you said no.

I said no. And I meant no, I said. I held out my hand. She handed over the icon.

I suppose I will pay in some way for that refusal, I said.

Yes, you will pay. Perhaps not in any way you can guess. But eventually, such things have repercussions, Amanda said.

Then she turned and left. My best friend. My adversary. An enigma at the best of times. Now gone, leaving me utterly bereft.

Jennifer you are having a bad day. Jennifer you have had a bad week. Jennifer this is the worst yet, ten days and counting. Dr. Tsien increased your galantamine. He increased the Seroquel. He increased the Zoloft.

When Mark calls, I lie, I say you are well, you are napping. Or I don’t answer the phone at all when I recognize his number on caller ID. Fiona knows, she is here every day. What a good daughter. How lucky you are. I will pray for you, I will say the Rosary. I will pray to Saint Daphne, patron saint of the mentally ill. Or to Saint Anthony, my favorite, the patron of lost things.

What has been lost? Your poor, poor mind. Your life.

Fiona and I go out to lunch. Chinese. My fortune: It doesn’t take a good memory to make good memories. You couldn’t make this shit up, says Fiona.

Amanda has always called me shameless. She means it as a compliment. Shame-less. Without shame. I used to lie to the priests when saying confession because I could never think of things I should be asking forgiveness for. People who take this to an extreme are called sociopaths, Amanda tells me. You have certain tendencies. You should watch them.

Bless me Father for I have sinned.

It has been forty-six years since my last confession.

My how time flies.

This always happens. I wake early, hoping to get some work done before the children start clamoring for their breakfast, but someone is up even earlier. That blond woman. Damn. Only this time she’s not alone. Another woman is with her, drinking coffee out of my favorite cup. Large bones. Short light brown hair, tucked behind her ears. Wearing a denim jacket on top of faded jeans, cowboy boots.

Jennifer! What have you done . . . ?

I beg your pardon? I ask, but the blond woman has already left the room. She returns immediately with a blue towel and places it around my shoulders. She puts her arm around mine, turns me around, takes me away from the kitchen.

I notice that I am oddly cold, that rivulets of water are dripping from my nightgown onto the wood floors, that I can see my wet footprints on the polished oak. The blond woman talks at me as she leads me upstairs.

What a morning to pull this stunt. What timing. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I write it down in your notebook? Didn’t we talk about it last night? I swear, sometimes I feel like I’m the one going nuts in this house.

She takes off my wet things, towels me down, dresses me in a blue skirt and a blue-and-red striped sweater, talking the whole time.

Now, behave. Just answer the questions. Keep calm. No acting up. This is just an informal visit. Very friendly. There’s no need to worry. No need to bother Fiona or that lawyer she’s got. It’s not that kind of thing, not at all. Just a few questions and off she’ll go.

The world is subdued today. Like I am behind a veil, looking out. The colors pastel and faded, my senses dulled. My vision slightly obscured by the veil. It’s not unpleasant. But it can be dangerous. You think that you are hidden from them, behind your veil, and suddenly you realize that you’ve been visible the whole time. Exposed.

It’s not that you did anything you are ashamed of. Or that you would change what you did. It’s just the thought of what you might have said or done. The breathtaking risk you’ve just taken. Now I am sitting at the kitchen table, facing the strange woman. My jaw feels wired shut. I have no energy to open it. I can barely keep my eyes open. Sleep. Sleep.

I remember turning on the shower. I remember soaping up my arms and my legs. I remember thinking that my nightdress was getting in the way. But I didn’t put it all together. Too slow. Too uncaring.

The woman is asking me questions. I’m finding it hard to pay attention.

Where were you again the week of February sixteen?

Here. I’m always here.

On February fifteen and February sixteen in particular? You were here? You didn’t leave the house?

I exert myself, reach out, and pick up my notebook. I leaf through the pages. February 13. February 14. February 18.

The blond woman interrupts.

We try to document as many of her days as possible. She likes to read over them when she’s feeling a bit down, when she’s having a bad time of it. But I guess we missed that day. Still, if anything out of the ordinary had happened, I would have made a point of writing it down. Her daughter insists upon it.

The brown-haired woman reaches out and takes the book from me. She carefully turns the pages.

I see she wandered from home several times in January.

Yes, she does that occasionally. I watch her, but sometimes she does get away.

Did that happen in mid-February?

No, not in February. Honestly, it’s a very rare occurrence.

She was seen by Helen Tighe, from Twenty-one Fifty-six, letting herself into Amanda O’Toole’s home on February fifteen. Was that one of those rare times?

We’ve been over and over that. If it happened, I didn’t know about it. She wasn’t missing for any extended length of time. Sometimes I do laundry in the basement. Make some soup. If she went over to Amanda’s, she was back before I noticed.

Doesn’t that worry you?

It does, it does. Honestly, I do my best. We’ve had locks installed on all the outside doors, but that upsets her and does more harm than good. It’s best to leave them unlocked and watch her carefully. Usually a neighbor notices. It’s that kind of street. Everyone looks out for everyone else. We always get her back. We had a bracelet made, but she won’t wear it.

What about at night?

Oh, nights are no problem. I’ve been told there are cases where you have to strap them in at night or you wouldn’t know what they’d get up to. Not her. She goes down quietly at nine and doesn’t make a peep until six in the morning. You could set a clock by her.

The brown-haired woman isn’t listening. She is frowning. She holds the book closer, places her index finger in between two of the pages, draws it back, and looks at me.

A page has been removed, she says. And not torn out. Sliced out. With a razor or something like that. She looks at me, moves her chair closer to the blond woman, and speaks more softly. She was a doctor, right? A surgeon?

That’s right.

Does she still have any of her equipment? Her scalpels?

I wouldn’t think so. Don’t those belong to the hospital? I’ve never seen anything like that around here. I would have, too. There isn’t anything about this house I don’t know. I have to keep an eye on things. Otherwise, you don’t know what she’ll do.

The blond woman pauses for a breath.

Last week, she threw all her jewelry in the trash. We only caught it by accident—her daughter found a diamond pendant lying outside in the snow next to the garbage. We dug down and found her wedding ring. Then some family keepsakes—some quite valuable, others just sentimental. We retrieved it all, and at that point we went through everything and I mean everything. Definitely no knives. Her daughter took a couple of trinkets that she wanted home with her—a special necklace that belonged to her mother and her father’s college ring—then locked everything away in the safe-deposit box.

I make a noise. It’s not until both women look at me that I understand it is laughter.

I stand up. I go into the living room. I go to the piano. To the bench. I open it up. It’s full of what looks like junk. It is James’s and my don’t-but-can’t place. As in I don’t-know-what-to-do-with-it-but-can’t-throw-it-away-yet. Receipts for purchases we might want to return someday. Knobs that fell off things. Unmatched socks.

I dig down. Past old prescription reading glasses, batteries that may or may not have charges, New Yorker magazines. Until I hit bottom. And pull it out, loosely wrapped in a linen napkin.

My special scalpel handle. Shiny. Alluring. Begging to be used. My name engraved on it, along with the date I finished my surgical residency. What do they say about me at the hospital? Get a second opinion. She’s the best there is, but she’s a hammer looking for a nail. She’ll operate on a torn cuticle if you let her.

Some plastic packages fall out of the napkin. Each one holding a glinting sharp blade, ready to be inserted into my scalpel handle. Ready to slice. Both women are standing nearby, watching me closely. The blond one closes her eyes. The brown-haired one reaches out her hand. I’ll have to take those, ma’am, she says. And I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.

We are in a car. I am sitting in the back, behind a driver with short brown hair. I cannot tell if it is a man or a woman. The hands on the wheel are strong, coarse even. Androgynous.

Magdalena is next to me. She is on her phone. Speaking urgently to one person, then hanging up, dialing another. It is cold. Snow is in the air. Yet the trees are budding. I roll down the window to feel the wind in my face. A typical Chicago spring.

I like being able to use that word, typical. Usually is another good one. And most of the time. Anything that’s relative. Any way of comparing future events to past occurrences.

We are in a room. Empty except for a table and one chair—the chair I am sitting in. There is no one in the room I know. Four men. No Magdalena. I am read something from a piece of paper. I am asked if I understand. With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?

I am firm. No. I want my lawyer. There is a large mirror taking up an entire wall. Otherwise, a barren, forsaken place. A place to keep one’s counsel.

Your lawyer is coming.

Then I will wait.

My scalpel handle and the blades on the table in a plastic baggie. The men talk quietly among themselves, but no one can keep their eyes off the items and me.

I amuse myself by thinking how, in the movies, this room would be filled with cigarette smoke. Unshaved haggard men drinking cold weak coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Yet these men are close shaven, well dressed, dapper even. Two are drinking foamy drinks out of paper cups. One is holding an energy drink, the other a plastic water bottle. No one offers me anything.

A bustle at the door, and in sweep three women. Three tall striking women. Amazons! My daughter or perhaps my niece; the nice woman who helps me; and another one I may have seen before.

This last one, the one I am most uncertain about, holds out her hand, grips mine hard, and smiles. Nice to see you again, she says. Although I wish it were under better circumstances. She searches my face, smiles again, and says, Joan Connor. Your lawyer. To whom you are paying very big bucks indeed.

My daughter/niece comes straight over and puts her arm around my shoulders. It’s okay, Mom, she says. They can’t do anything to you. This is America. They still have to have some kind of proof.

The third woman, the blond one, just stands in the back, near the door. She is sweating profusely. Her color is curiously high. I reach into my jacket pocket for my stethoscope. Then I remember.

I am retired. I have Alzheimer’s. I am in a police station because of my blades. My mind won’t take me beyond these facts. My diseased mind. Yet I have never felt more alert. I am ready for anything. I smile at my daughter/niece, who does not smile back.

The lawyer turns to the men. Whereas before they had been standing casually apart from one another, now they are in a line, their shoulders nearly touching, their beverages on the table, forgotten. Men on guard. Against the enemy.

Are you charging Dr. White?

We just have a few questions. She refused to talk without you.

As is her right.

As we explained to her. Can we proceed now?

My lawyer nods. Please, a few more chairs.

The men break rank, two leave the room and come back with four more folding metal chairs, another one returns with two cups of water. He silently offers one to me, one to the young woman.

The lawyer sits down to my right, my daughter/niece to my left. She keeps her arm around my shoulders. The blond woman remains standing near the door, waves off a man when he gestures to an empty chair.

Where were you on February sixteen and seventeen?

I don’t remember.

My lawyer interrupts.

She has been asked this time and time again. She has answered to the best of her ability. As you are aware, Dr. White has dementia. She will not be able to answer many of your questions.

Understood. When was the last time you used your scalpel?

I don’t know. Some time ago.

You were an orthopedic surgeon, right?

That is correct. One of the best.

The man allows himself a smile.

And you specialized in hands?

Hand surgery, yes.

What do you make of these? He handed me some photographs. I study them.

An adult hand. Female. Medium-sized. The thumb is the only remaining digit. The others disarticulated at the joints between the metacarpal and proximal phalanges.

How would you characterize the cuts?

Clean. But not cauterized. Judging from the amount of coagulated blood, not performed according to protocol. But by all appearances, expertly executed.

What kind of knife would you say has been used?

Impossible to tell from these photos. I, personally, would use a size ten blade for an amputation, but it does not appear that these cuts were made for therapeutic reasons.

Is there a size ten blade in here? He indicates the baggie.

Of course.

Why ‘of course’?

Because it’s the most appropriate blade for many of the most common surgical procedures. You would always have one handy.

You know who these photos are of, don’t you? Whose hand this is?

I look at my lawyer. I shake my head.

Amanda O’Toole.

Amanda?

That’s right.

My Amanda?

That’s right.

I am left without words. I look at the young woman who has her arm around my shoulders. She nods.

Who would have done such a thing?

That’s what we’re trying to find out.

Where is she? I must see her. Do you have the digits? Replantation might be possible with cuts this clean.

I’m afraid that isn’t likely.

The room contracts. Somehow I know what he is going to say. Those photos. This station. A lawyer. My scalpel handle. The blades. Amanda. I close my eyes.

My daughter/niece breaks in. How many times are you going to do this to her? How cruel can you be?

We have no choice. When Detective Luton found the scalpel we had no choice.

You mean, when my mother handed over the scalpel. Would she have done that if guilty?

Perhaps. If she didn’t remember what she’d done. He turns to me.

Did you kill Amanda O’Toole?

I don’t answer. I am focused on my own hands. Whole and unbloodied.

Dr. White, pay attention: Did you kill Amanda O’Toole and then afterward cut off four of her fingers?

I don’t remember, I tell him. But there are images that nag.

The man is watching me closely. I meet his eyes and shake my head.

No. No. Of course not.

Are you certain? For a moment there . . .

My client has answered. Do not badger her. She is not a well woman.

One of the other men, smallish and blond, the one who had been sipping the energy drink, interrupts.

Strange how she knows some things and not others.

That is the nature of the disease, says the woman sitting next to me. She fades in and out.

I’m just saying. I could have sworn just then she remembered something.

He turns to me.

Anything. Anything at all pop into your head?

I shake my head. I look straight ahead, not at him. I place my perspiring hands on my lap, under the table.

My lawyer rises. Will you be charging my client?

The first man hesitates, then shakes his head. We need to run some tests.

I don’t like the way that the woman next to me and the lawyer look at each other. We get up to leave, one of the men hands me my coat. I look for the other woman, the blond one, but she is already gone.

From my notebook. In an odd, backward-slanting handwriting, it is dated January 8 with the name Amanda O’Toole.

I stopped by today to say hello. Jennifer, you seemed to be doing well. You knew me. You remembered my knee surgery from last fall and the fact that this coming spring I plan to plant heirloom tomatoes in pots on the back patio where it catches the sun. You don’t look particularly well. You’ve lost weight and your eyes are ringed with red. I hate losing you like this, old friend.

But today was a day for being content. We sat in the front room and talked, mostly about our men. Peter and James and Mark. You didn’t remember that both Peter and James are gone, one to California, the other to a place that is either much better or much worse than here.

Peter loves California. He e-mails me frequently, you know. He asks about you. After forty years of marriage you don’t just sever all ties. Peter and his vision quest. To live in a trailer in the Mojave Desert with a new age graduate student. People ask how I can bear that—the abandonment, as they see it.

Isn’t the house empty? they ask. Well, it always was, I say, the two of us in that great big cavern. Maybe when you sell this place and move, I’ll move too. There’s not much else keeping me on this street.

You spoke of your worries about Mark. About how he takes too much after James in all the bad ways, with none of his—James’s—strengths.

I can’t agree with you there. Mark has a vulnerable side that may save him. He’s aware of it, too. James would never have acknowledged any weakness. Utterly confident of himself until the end. It can be reassuring to be around someone like that, to have a partner who has such an absolute belief in his own place in the world.

But such confidence has its risks. If you make the mistake of following them when they take that inevitable misstep, then you’re at hazard, too. Then you’re both sunk. A little healthy skepticism is good, even essential, for a marriage. A certain amount of pushing back. You never did enough of that.

Listen to me, my marriage evaporated after four decades without leaving a trace. Should the death of a marriage be odorless, tasteless? No. There should be some residue, there was something wrong with Peter and me that ours didn’t have any. That it was so easy, that it ended so quietly.

At least when James died you felt something. It manifested itself in some strange ways, but you felt it very deeply. I know you don’t remember that time, but you threw yourself into gardening, oddly enough. You of the black thumbs. Or rather, you started digging holes in your backyard.

And after you’d dug a couple dozen holes, you inserted rose saplings into them that you got from that nursery on Halsted. The first time you’d ever set foot in such a place. Then you abandoned them. They died, of course. Your yard was filled with little mounds of fresh earth with dead plant sprigs lying limply on top of them. The work of a demented gopher.

Do you remember anything at all about those days? You were starting to exhibit some of the signs. You had told me about your fears, of course. You hadn’t told James. Did you ever tell the kids? Somehow I doubt it. You just hired a caregiver and let them figure it out for themselves.

Magdalena tells me the episodes of aggression are getting worse. I haven’t seen one yet. Magdalena says I seem to have a calming influence on you. I know better than to think I’ve got some secret power. I’ve read enough about this disease to know that you can’t predict the future by the past. It’s like they say about parenting: Just when you think you’ve mastered it, everything changes.

That’s why teachers hate switching from one grade to another, why I taught seventh grade for forty-three years. Try to apply all your best ideas and curricula even one year later in a child’s life and it simply won’t work.

You talked cogently about Fiona today. No fog there. And about her we are in complete agreement. She is doing well. We’re both so proud of her. I was as worried during her adolescence as any parent would be. Her late teens and early twenties were so difficult, so painful to watch.

As you know, I took my godmother duties seriously! I wasn’t worried about drugs or sex, although I’m sure she dabbled in both. Perfectly normal. No, I was more worried about her rescue fantasies. Always bailing Mark out. Then that unspeakable boy. Thank God she got rid of him before she reached her twenties. Otherwise she might well have married him.

It wouldn’t have lasted, of course. But it would have left a stain, knowing Fiona. Damaged her. She would have felt it deeply. More deeply than I did after forty years.

Enough of this! I’ve gone on. Be well, my dear friend. I’ll stop by again soon.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the children. They used to be so close. Mark being so much older than Fiona, you’d think he would have gotten bored, would have pushed her away. He never did, not then. But they’ve fallen out. Mark does that with people. Sours on them, picks fights, renounces them. Then, after six months or a year, comes humbly back, begging pardon.

Early on, she was too young to be of interest to his friends, and I’d see her mooning after one or the other of them without worrying too much. Too thin, gawky, too damn smart to interest the football stars and basketball heroes that were Mark’s cronies back then. But there was one—Fiona would have been, what, fourteen? Not cute anymore, and her features hadn’t rearranged themselves into the pleasing openness of her adult years. She was a closed, secretive creature in adolescence.

Yet this boy—this young man—Mark’s freshman-year roommate from Northwestern, saw possibilities. I had always been alert for predators, but Eric slipped below my radar. Too sallow, too diffident, without any of the charm or resentment I associated back then with successful seducers.

What happened between them I don’t know. Fiona wouldn’t tell me. Was her heart broken? Did she catch a venereal disease? Did she have an abortion? Any of those were likely, but I think it was probably something less melodramatic. I thought at the time she was merely helping him through a statistics course. Amanda thought something similar. She thought Fiona had taken pity on him for his social clumsiness. It didn’t occur to either of us that Fiona needed anything from Eric. It just wasn’t what one thought about Fiona.

I ended it one night, after I caught them together sitting on the front steps. I wasn’t spying, hadn’t even thought about them, just opened the door and there they were. He had a petulant look on his face, the kind of don’t-you-love-me face that young men like to pull. Not one I would have thought Fiona would be susceptible to. Then I saw her expression. Not love. No. Something worse. A kind of despairing responsibility. A tortured acceptance of a heavy burden.

It took every ounce of my strength not to kick that young man in his bony buttocks. I can still picture his aggrieved shoulders as he leaned toward Fiona, willing her to give him some of her strength. And she looked back at me, saw that I saw, and the weight seemed to evaporate from her body as I shook my head. No.

Later that night she accused me, in tears, of ruining her life. And so we played out that particular mother-daughter scene with a gusto that fooled both James and Mark. But we knew what was going on. A timely rescue, met with gratitude.

I find a letter next to my morning pills and juice. My name on it, no address. No stamp. Two pages of unlined notepaper, tiny cramped writing. I read it through once, then again.Mom:I’m sorry my last visit didn’t end so well. I never even got to the real reason I came over. But, in fact, the episode just proves the point I wanted to make. It’s really time to sell the house and move into assisted living.What’s more, it’s time for me to exercise the medical power of attorney. I know you don’t want this. You value your independence. With Magdalena’s help, 65 percent of the time you do well. But the other 35 percent of the time!The ongoing investigation into Amanda’s death is a real worry. The fact that it’s even a question that you might have been involved—not that I believe that, of course—is reason enough to make this move.Do I believe that you are a danger to others? No. Do I believe you are a danger to yourself ? Yes, I do. I suspect I don’t hear everything. I suspect that Magdalena and Fiona keep things from me.You gave me this power. I didn’t ask for it. But, having been given it, I intend to fulfill my duties. You could take it away, of course. You could do what Fiona is trying to convince you to do (yes, I read through your notebook last time I was there) and strip me of this power. But I think you know it would be a mistake.About Fiona. I worry about her. Almost as much as I worry about you. As I said when I saw you, you know how she gets. How she does really well for long periods of time, but then things can go south—very very quickly. Remember that time at Stanford? When Dad had to go get her so she could decompress in a safe place?Anyway, I know Fiona tells you otherwise, but I truly have your best interests at heart. The police have had you in for questioning multiple times. I know that if they had anything at all on you they wouldn’t hesitate to try you as a competent adult.I worry about you a lot. I know I don’t always express it in the most diplomatic way. As we’ve discussed many times, I’m not Dad. I’m not the silver-tongued corporate finance lawyer, just a grunt. But I do care.Legally, as you once knew (and maybe still do when your mind is clear), incapacity has to be established for each separate task. You may no longer be competent to dress yourself, but you may be competent to make a decision about where you want to live. I accept that.The fact that you decided to give Fiona financial control was on one hand a wise one. You recognized that you could no longer act in your own best interest financially. You have substantial assets, and you should not risk them. That was the right thing to do—almost.This is a long-winded way of saying that I would like to declare you mentally incompetent to get some legal protection for you. Just in case.And an equally long-winded way of saying that I’m not sure that Fiona is the best person to control your money. She’s certainly capable. But is she trustworthy? I would feel more comfortable if I were also getting copies of your account statements. Can we perhaps arrange this?Try to read this letter knowing of my concern for your well-being. Mental competency is a label. It doesn’t have anything to do with your actual abilities. You won’t suddenly deteriorate because some court of law has ruled. You’ll still be the same person. But you may possibly avoid a lot of trouble and expense by making this move now rather than waiting until you are pulled in again by the police or even charged.I’ll come by tomorrow and try again. Believe me, I truly wish to be of service.Your loving son, Mark

Today my mother died. I am not crying, it was her time. So it goes. So it always goes.

Oh Mary! My father would say when my mother did something outrageous—danced the cancan on top of a chair at a formal dinner party, stoned a pigeon to death in front of horrified passersby. Oh Mary! Their love duet.

Such a lovely man, my father. He had a quiet mind, as Thoreau would say. How did he end up with my mother? She flirted with homosexual priests, told audacious lies, uncorked the whiskey at four o’clock every day. And now, finally, gone.

My flight to Philadelphia is delayed, and so when I arrive at the hospice the bed is already empty—someone failed to pass on the news that I was coming. I sit on the stripped bed. Does it matter? No. I don’t know if she would have known me in any case.

She wandered at the end. A devout Catholic always, in the last months of her life she forsook Christ and the Blessed Mother for the virgin martyrs. Theresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Lucy were her constant companions. She would giggle, swat at the air with a Kleenex, offer them bits of food. A hungry, witty lot, to judge from the constant feeding they required and my mother’s constant laughing at their repartee.

She retained her mischievousness. She never lost that. Once, she secreted a ketchup package from her lunch tray and dotted it on her wrists at the lunocapitate joints, on her ankles at the talonaviculars. Bitter, vinegary stigmata. The nurse’s assistant screamed, to my mother’s obvious delight. She gave a high five to an invisible coconspirator.

Ultimately what did her in was a fall. An innocuous one. Her knees buckled as she hobbled from her bed to the toilet. She collapsed onto the floor, was helped up, and that was the end of her.

That evening, she was running a high fever. Throughout the night she remained deep in conversation with her saints. It was a different kind of delirium than usual: She was saying her good-byes. She kissed the virgins good-bye, gave them long, loving embraces. She waved goodbye to the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies. She waved to the hospice visitors passing by in the hall. She asked for, and received, a large glass of Scotch whiskey. She was given her last rites. Good-bye, good-bye.

My father wasn’t mentioned. I wasn’t either.

She was a lover of practical jokes until the end. When the orderlies came to remove her body, one noticed an oddly shaped lump between her breasts. Gingerly fishing his hand down the front of her hospital gown, he gave a shriek, jumped back, and shook his hand. Something bite you? his coworker said, grinning. Yes, indeed: my mother’s false teeth. A beautiful woman when younger, she had never stopped believing in her allure. So one of her last acts was to spring a trap where she apparently still believed someone would want to go.

The nurse told me all this, and I smiled. I wonder what will remain in my mind, at the end. What basic truths will I return to? What tricks will I play and on whom?

Jennifer.

Someone is shaking me. The nurse.

Jennifer, it’s time for your pills.

No. I must call the funeral home. Make arrangements for the cremation. Because I cannot bear the thought of a funeral. Ashes to ashes, that is all that is required. The plot is paid for. My father is already there. Beloved husband and father. All that is necessary is to finish carving the double headstone. I can arrange for that tomorrow and be on an evening plane. Back to my surgery, to James and the children.

Jennifer, you are in Chicago. You are home.

No. I am in Philadelphia. At Mercy Hospice. With the body of my mother.

No, Jennifer, your mother died a long time ago. Years and years.

No, not possible.

Yes. Now take your pills. Here’s your water. Good. Now. How about a walk? She holds out her hand. I take it. I study it. When I cannot sleep, when I am confused, I label things. I try to remember what matters. And I use their right names. Names are precious things.

I run my fingers across the hand I am holding. This is the hamate. This is the pisiform. The triquetrum, the lunate, the scaphoid, the capitate, trapezoid, trapezium. The metacarpal bones, the proximal phalanges, the distal phalanges. The sesamoids.

You have a gentle touch. You were a good doctor, I suspect.

Perhaps. But not necessarily a good daughter. When did you say it happened?

More than twenty years ago. You’ve told me the stories.

Did I mourn?

I don’t know. I wasn’t around then. Perhaps. You’re not one to display much.

I continue holding her hand, stroking the fingers with my own. The things that matter. The truths we hold on to until the end. These are things that make life as we know it possible, I used to say in my lectures, pointing to each phalange in turn. Treat them with the utmost reverence. Without them, we are nothing. Without them, we are hardly human.

The beautiful one would leave by the back door as James came in the front. Duplicity. Making rounds with him and needing to be stern. He was so young. Reprimanding him for poorly executed sutures. But we saw the patient’s symptoms and functions improve after I reconstructed the traumatized joint, he argued once, almost whining. Not attractive in that context. No.

The sullenness of the inexperienced, sulk of the injured. Why do you treat me this way? he would ask.

Because I cannot show favoritism.

Because people would notice?

Because it compromises my reputation and the reputation of this hospital.

If I’m so substandard, why put up with me?

Because you are not substandard. Because you are beautiful.

It did not last long. How could it? And people talked. But I would not have given up a millisecond of it. Still, the loss. To lose and to grieve and to be unable to confide that grief. It is a lonely place to reside.

I stretch out my arm and feel nothing but bedclothes. The clock tells me it is 1:13 am, and James is still not home. The fact that I know where he is does not alleviate worry. It’s a dangerous world, and the hours between 1 am and 3 am are the most dangerous ones.

Not just outside, in the city streets, but here, inside. Sometimes I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and relieve myself or to check the windows and doors, and I hear breathing. Rough and rasping. When there shouldn’t be anyone else in the house. Not the children, they are long gone. Not James, he has not come in from his wanderings.

I seek the source of the noise, and it comes from one of the spare bedrooms. The door is open. I see a shape in the bed, large and bulky. Man or woman? Human or homunculus? At this hour, in these confused half-awake times, anything is possible.

I breathe deeply to control the terror, close the door, and back away. I make it to the steps, run downstairs, nearly falling in my haste. I look for a safe place. The only room with a door is the bathroom. I lock myself in, sit down on the toilet, and try to calm myself. To have someone to clutch, to have my hand patted and be told, It’s just a dream. Or just a movie. For I cannot tell the difference anymore. But no one is here.

Magdalena is out and about, leaving me alone in this house with an unknown thing. I wish suddenly for a dog, a bird, a fish, anything with a heartbeat. I adore cats, but we never got one, because I hated the thought of keeping one trapped indoors when its instinct would be to roam. The risks of letting one out in Chicago were too great.

Did it bother me that first time James didn’t come home? The night of his original sin? Briefly. And then I found out the facts, and all the pain disappeared, replaced by anger.

Not anger toward him, or at least nothing more than a slight flare-up that quickly burned itself out. No, anger directed inward. I never took myself for a dupe. I valued myself so highly that I assumed others did, too, especially those closest to me. James. The children, even during the horrors of the teenage years. Amanda, of course. I told no one but Amanda about James, and she disappointed me with the banality of her response.

There’s nothing worse than betrayal, she had said. And, When trust is gone, so is respect.

Actually, I told her, there are a lot of things worse than betrayal. And respect always precedes trust to the door.

What’s worse than betrayal?

Losing your sight. Losing the use of your arms. Just about any physical affliction or deformity.

Illness.

Yes.

If you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything. She made a face as she recited the platitude.

Pretty much.

Well, if that isn’t a self-serving attitude for a physician to have, I don’t know what is. No wonder they call you the hammer.

There are a lot of bona fide nails out there.

How far would you take this theory?

What theory?

That physical suffering trumps psychological, emotional, or spiritual pain?

Well, clearly they are all interrelated! I’d take it to the point that I always have, as a physician: When patients come to me, I do everything in my power to heal them or, if that isn’t possible, to minimize the impact on their ability to live their lives. Clearly, a physical trauma can have severe emotional and psychological effects that must be considered when making a prognosis.

And spiritual effects?

That one puzzles me. How can losing the use of a hand lead to a spiritual crisis? Medieval doctors, of course, believed that things worked the other way around: Spiritual flaws lead to physical illnesses. Lechery led to leprosy, for example. But other than that . . . ?

It can cause someone to doubt their God. Their sense of how the universe works. Their sense of right and wrong. But let me reverse the question. What would cause a spiritual crisis for you? What would shake your belief in your universe?

Well, clearly James having a fling is not going to do it! I know most people wouldn’t understand it, but our bond goes deeper than that. It will end. We will survive.

Clearly. Then what?

I thought about it. Some moments passed during which Amanda had time to pour herself another cup of coff ee.

I guess, I said, the thing that scares me most is corruption.

And you define corruption as . . . ?

The act or process of tainting or contaminating something. To cause something that has integrity to become rotten.

So when James cheats on you, that’s not corrupting your marriage?

You can’t corrupt something like what James and I have. Although I am quite aware you question the integrity of our relationship.

I was speaking slowly because I was in the process of working something out.

Yes, indeed I do.

It is a tragedy when something decent and good becomes tainted, I continued. That’s what is so horrifying about the Catholic Church protecting their priests. And corruption of the young is truly evil.

And that’s why it’s not horrifying about James. Because neither of you is an innocent.

Most definitely not.

And what should be the punishment for corruption?

She was playing with me, and I knew it. A dangerous game.

As I said, pure corruption is pure evil. Something to be eradicated.

Do you mean it deserves death?

Yes, when it manifests itself in its purest form.

Yet you’re against the death penalty. You’ve marched with me. Held candlelight vigils.

Our courts aren’t the way to adjudicate good and evil.

What is?

Aren’t we getting pretty far from the point? We started out talking about betrayal and trust. And now you’re laughing at me.

Never.

Always.

You’re right. Always.

The memory fades out, like the end of a movie. I can no longer hear Amanda’s voice, but I can see certain words as though they had been written in the air. Respect. Innocence. Death. Clearer than my current reality. I sit in the dark and try not to listen to the house breathe.

James was very angry last night. Someone had been in his sock drawer, taking all his clean pairs, he said. Someone had stolen his favorite comb. Someone had been using his razor. He sounded like Papa Bear. Who’s been eating my porridge? We both knew who, of course. Fiona is thirteen and in a danger zone.

Need. I hate the word. I hate the very idea. Certain needs are unavoidable. I need oxygen. I need nutrients. I need to exercise this vessel, my body. I can accept all these things. But my hunger for companionship, that’s something else altogether. The camaraderie of the OR, of the locker room, of sharing coffee with Amanda at her or my kitchen table.

Since I cannot go out to get this companionship, it is brought to me. I don’t see money exchange hands anymore. That’s done behind my back, a sleight of hands, since I signed my financial power of attorney over to Fiona. We pretend now. We pretend that Magdalena is my friend. That she is here voluntarily, that I invited her into my home.

So here we live, such an odd couple. The woman without a past. And the woman desperately trying to hold on to hers. Magdalena would like a clean slate, while I am mourning the involuntary wiping of mine. Each with needs the other can’t fulfill.

How mortifying to be pregnant at forty. How mortifying not to suspect until a naive coworker congratulates you on your changing shape. But you haven’t had a regular period in your life. It took six years to conceive Mark. You’d given up. Almost agreed to get the dog for James. Never used birth control again. And now this.

How will James react? Will he guess? How will you react when the shock has worn off ? You’re still staring at the white stick with the pink plus sign on the end of it. You’ve just peed onto a stick and changed your life forever.

We are sitting in the living room, Mark, Fiona, and I. I vaguely recall some recent trouble between Mark and Fiona, some estrangement that had distressed Fiona considerably. Mark, as far as I could tell, had been unaffected. But there appears to have been some kind of reconciliation. Mark is lolling on the long leather-cushioned Stickley couch, and Fiona is sitting on the rocker smiling at him, remnants of little-sister adoration shining from her face.

They really thought they had you this time, Mark says. But all the tests they ran were inconclusive. He is fiddling with his watch strap. He does not seem overly concerned. I catch a quick worried frown flash across Fiona’s face.

What are you talking about? I ask. I am irritable. It is not a day when I feel especially maternal. I have paperwork to complete, and I am more tired than I like to admit. A cup of coffee and a retreat to my office is what I really want, not making small talk with these young people, however closely we are related.

Never mind, Fiona says quickly, and so I don’t. Instead I look at my watch. I notice that Fiona notices, and the frown briefly reappears, but that Mark is now staring at my Calder, hanging in its usual place above the piano.

Where is your father? I ask. He’ll be sorry he missed you. I begin to rise, it is my way of ending the session, which feels strangely like they are deliberately wasting my time, as if it’s a ruse to keep me in the room and away from my real work.

I doubt he’ll be back before we have to go, says Mark, who doesn’t budge from the couch. I don’t miss the look Fiona gives him. Something is up, they are withholding information, but I am too annoyed to pursue it.

Where’s Magdalena? Fiona asks abruptly. There’s something we have to discuss with both of you. She begins to get out of her chair, but just then Magdalena bustles. Her eyes are slightly red.

I’m sorry, I was on the phone, she says, adding, Family stuff.

Fiona has settled herself back in her chair and gives the ground a little push with her right foot to set it in motion. Small and slight as she is, she resembles a child as she rocks back and forth.

We wanted to get on the same page about something, she begins, and looks over at Mark. He has turned his attention back to the Calder, so she continues.

The press has been bugging both Mark and me. There was a leak. They know Mom was taken in for questioning and released. That’s about as much as they seem to know, but I’m—and here she gives Mark another quick glance— we’re eager to avoid any undue publicity.

Magdalena jumps in. I would never say anything. You know that. I just hang up on them. Or if someone appears at the door I don’t recognize, I don’t even open it.

Mark speaks up. Yes, but they somehow got hold of Mom last week—she’d wandered out into the front yard.

What exactly do you mean—got hold of me? I ask, icily. And under what circumstances would I wander out into my own front yard? You make me sound like a two-year-old.

I see Mark smile at this, but it isn’t a smile for me. Just some private joke.

Magdalena is looking uncertain and slightly frightened. No one told me, she says.

I got a call from the reporter. Fiona did, too. Apparently Mom was in fine form that day—got it in her head that the reporter was trying to dig up dirt on Amanda and her teaching methods—remember how Amanda was always battling the PTA? Confused the hell out of the guy. It seems they talked at cross-purposes for a moment or two, then Mom dismissed him. He doesn’t quite understand what is going on.

If he’s any good he can find out about Mom’s condition from the hospital or clinic, Fiona says. And of course there’s the leak on the police end. But let’s not make it easy for him or anyone else.

My condition? I ask. I am standing now. I’ll tell you what my condition is—I’m furious.

I’m astonished that no one bothers to look at me. Excuse me, I say, clipping the words short, and deliberately lowering my voice. This invariably gets the attention of the OR. But it doesn’t work this time.

No more negligence, Mark is saying, looking at Magdalena. Do you understand? Three strikes and you’re out. We’ve started counting.

Magdalena’s breath is uneven. Yes, she says. Understood.

Even Fiona, usually so attentive toward me and gentle toward others, has hardened her features. This is now your number one priority, she tells Magdalena. Protecting the family. Nothing else matters.

We’re looking at apples. Piles and piles of apples, all different varieties, colors, sizes. Next to them, mounds of green pears, purple pears. Then oranges. Who stacks them so neatly? Who keeps them in order?

I take one of the apples, a red one, and bite it. A bitter aftertaste. I spit it out and pick up another. Try that one. A little girl is watching me. Mom, that lady is wasting food. Shhh, her mother says, but the girl persists. And why is she taking off her dress?

Jennifer! I turn around. A large blond woman is running at me. Startled, I bump against the apples, and they start tumbling down off the stand, rolling by the dozens onto my feet, onto the floor, scattering in all directions.

Put your clothes back on! But why should I? Jennifer, no, not anymore. Please leave on your underpants. Oh God, they’ll call the police again. A large man hurries over. Ma’am? he asks. The blond woman cuts him off. She has dementia. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Here. Here’s a letter from her doctor.

The blond woman is pulling a crumpled envelope from her purse. She opens it hurriedly, thrusts a piece of paper at the man. He reads it, frowning. Okay, but get her dressed and get her out of here. What were you thinking, anyway, bringing her here when this might happen?

Usually she’s very good. It’s just on occasion . . .

Often enough that you have to carry a letter around with you!

Yes, but . . .

Just get her out.

The blond woman is pushing something over my head and down over my hips and then picking up something smaller and balling it up and putting it in her pocket. We leave the store with the cries of children rising over us. But Mommy! Mommy? Mommy, look.

My notebook: Fiona’s handwriting.

Mom, we had a discussion today. It’s one I’ve been wanting to have for years, but the time was never right. I was always afraid. But now things are so different. Even if you get mad, it doesn’t last. Revelations these days are worth shit. We quickly go back to our safe, comfortable roles. It wasn’t always this safe, of course. So it’s still a little scary to initiate a talk.

We started out talking about me at fourteen. Remember? Cantankerous, rebellious, rude. Acting everything that was age-appropriate, in fact. I ran away twice, if you recall. The first time was a fit of pure rage. One minute I was screaming at our nanny at the time—what was her name? Sophia? Daphne?—and I don’t remember anything else until I was at Union Station, trying to buy a ticket for New York. That’s when the cops picked me up. I barely look my age now. I can only imagine what I looked like at fourteen: skinny and knock-kneed with my hair cut like a boy’s and greased to stand up straight. The first of my many piercings in my ears and cheeks. Dressed in all black, of course.

What I would have done in New York is anyone’s guess. I must have had some of my wits about me, because I’d gone through Sophia’s or Daphne or Helga’s wallet and stolen what I thought was a credit card but was really a AAA membership card you’d given her in case her car broke down. Very naive I was. The cops brought me back right after you got home from work. You hadn’t even taken off your coat. And you just coolly accepted the facts the cops told you, didn’t punish me, didn’t bring up the subject ever again, just told me to wash my hands for dinner. I was furious, as you can imagine.

The second time was different. I’d just broken up with Colin. Because of you. I was in a panic. I’d been shown the abyss and wasn’t sure if I had leaped in or been pulled back from the precipice. It was an almost purely physical sensation, because I certainly wasn’t thinking: my heart was racing, I had trouble breathing, and I was even breaking out in odd rashes all over my body. To all of this you seemed oblivious. Just leaving in the morning and coming back at night. Mark was away at college already. Dad was . . . well, who knows where. And I thought I was dying. Everything was getting out of control and I was afraid. So I left again. But I was smarter this time. I packed a bag and went over to Amanda’s, requesting asylum. She was delighted. She had always taken her role of godmother very seriously and had always encouraged me to come to her— especially if I was having trouble with you. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that she reveled in such complaints. I always adored her. I saw her hardness, the way she treated others, the face she showed the world. But I could always overcome those defenses. I took advantage of her, of course. Shamelessly. And that time was no different. I laid my grievances about you at her feet and watched her mind begin to work.

As I told you today, I think now that she’d planned this for years. She’d just been waiting for the right time. She had been watching me and calculating and hoping. Observing me change from an intense but loving child into a total freak with mother issues. Waiting for her chance. She thought she had it that time. We were sitting at her dining room table, and she had this funny look on her face. Funny for Amanda, who is usually so resolute. But I could see her trepidation when she asked me. To move in with her and Peter. To spend the rest of my teen years with them. To leave you, Mark, and Dad behind, although I’d see you, of course. She would be my foster mother. It shocked me out of my teenage angst. And attracted me. Revenge, ready-made. I asked for some time to think it over. She agreed, naturally, and told me to go home until I made up my mind. I came home that evening in a daze. You noticed something was up—I found you studying me during dinner—but didn’t say anything directly. Still, you came to my room that evening, something you rarely did. You sat on the edge of my bed and said something odd. It was as if you knew. You said, three more years. Just three more years. And you patted my arm. That’s all it took. Just one touch. Even though at that age I shrank from any physical contact, I welcomed that touch and in one instant abandoned Amanda and her well-laid plans. We never spoke about it, Amanda and I. No questions ever asked. And she never changed her attitude toward me. We continued as before, the iconoclast and the devoted godmother. Until the day she died.

And what did you say, this afternoon, when I told you all this? You smiled, and reached out and patted my arm again. Then withdrew it, sooner than I liked. For I’m no longer at a point where I don’t want to be touched. The opposite, in fact. Yet I don’t seem to be attracting much these days. I’ve spent some years in the wilderness and can’t seem to find my way out. God help me, I’d thought and didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until you said, Yes, please do.

I’m having a bad day, the kind of day when I know that believers would pray, but I just can’t allow myself to sink that low. So a single word echoes repeatedly inside my head, little pleadings to little gods. Godlets. Please. Just that one word, over and over again.

Fiona is sobbing. Her head in her hands at my kitchen table. Magdalena is standing behind, rubbing her bowed back. They can both go to hell.

I do so much! Fiona says. Day after day. Month after month. The head of the green-eyed snake tattoo is just visible from under her long-sleeved T-shirt. Her short hair is tousled from running her hands through it. We’ve been at it for some time.

Yes, you do. Indeed you do, Magdalena says. Her soothing voice does not match her expression.

And what, exactly, do you do? I ask. What have I ever asked you to do? I am inflamed, infused with the power of the injured.

I know it’s the disease speaking, but it’s still hard. So hard, Fiona says. Her voice is muffled. She has not lifted her head from her hands.

No, it’s me speaking. Stop treating me like I’m crazy. I’m forgetful, true. But just because I don’t remember where I put my car keys doesn’t make me psychotic. Don’t shake your head at me. I heard you say it. I heard you on the phone. She’s being difficult today. No, beyond difficult, psychotic. You said those words. Deny it.

Fiona just shakes her head.

The blond woman speaks up. Jennifer, the reason you can’t find your car keys is that they don’t exist anymore. Your car was sold last year. You are not allowed to drive. You are too ill.

You, too?

Yes, me, too. Everyone, too.

Everyone.

Yes, just ask. Go ahead. Go out in the street. Knock on a few doors.

Then you two have been talking about me, I say. Spreading the word.

You’re after something. You’re after my money. Fiona, you were looking through my papers. I saw that, too.

Fiona raises her head. Mom, I am your financial adviser. You gave me power of attorney. More than two years ago. When you were first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Remember that?

She gives a snort of laughter and turns to Magdalena. I’m asking a woman with dementia if she remembers. Who’s the crazy one?

That’s it, I say. Out. Now. And leave the papers. I want to check them.

Mom, you’ve never been able to ‘check’ any numbers. You’ve said so yourself. You’re hopeless with money.

Well, then. Such people can be hired. I will hire one. I will commission an audit.

Fiona lifts her head. An audit? What for?

Why does one do an audit? To make sure everything is in order. Call it a second opinion.

But you’ve always trusted me. Always.

Be a professional. Do I throw a tantrum every time a patient wants a consult? What kind of doctor would I be if I did?

This is different.

How. How? What do you have to hide?

Nothing! Mom, get a grip.

I have a grip. I have a tremendous grip. And I will not be betrayed. Get out. And stay away. From this point on, I have no daughter, I say.

I feel a burden rise as I say this. No daughter! No husband! No son! No encumbrances! I will pack my bags. I will depart for parts unknown. I will take leave from work. I am owed the vacation time. I have the willpower.

I remember the statements Fiona was perusing so intently. And I have the money. No one will know where I am going. No one can follow me. No longer a prisoner in my own house. No longer being watched and followed from room to room. Ah, glorious freedom.

Jennifer. You don’t mean any of this, Magdalena says. She has completely failed to control her face. There is no doubt of her expression. Secret triumph.

You stay out of this. Actually, you’re in it already, aren’t you? You’re a part of this conspiracy. Okay, you’re fired. Both of you, out. I have things to do.

Magdalena puts her hands on her hips. You can’t fire me.

What?

You can’t fire me. You’re not my boss.

If I’m not your boss, who is?

Magdalena gestures to Fiona. She is. Along with your son. They hired me. They signed the agency paperwork. The money comes from them.

No. It’s my money. This I know.

It’s not your name on the check every month.

A sleight of hand, that’s all. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Besides, you forget. This is my house. I decide who comes and who goes.

Fiona speaks again. Her jaw is quivering. Not for long, she says.

Excuse me?

This won’t be your house for long. Mark and I agree.

Since when are you and Mark friends?

We talk. We cooperate. When necessary. And we will not hesitate to have you declared mentally incompetent and put you into assisted living. We have ample evidence. Multiple nine-one-one calls. Emergency room visits. Eye-witness accounts. Not to mention the ongoing investigation.

So you’re all in this together.

Yes, all of us, Magdalena says. The whole world! She goes to the stove, puts the kettle on. Time for some tea, she says. Then a walk. We have some shopping to do. Help me make a list. Milk, for sure. And pasta. We’ll have pasta for dinner. I’ll make my marinara sauce if we can find fresh basil. If not, we’ll just grate some parmesan on top. That’s something else we need. Also we’re almost out of salt. See, here’s the list. Anything to add? Anything I forgot?

I take the list. I look at the markings on it. Chicken scratches. Nothing that makes sense. I nod intelligently to show I understand. Something nags at me. The kettle whistles. Tea. Milk. Sugar. What just happened? And why is Fiona wiping red eyes, refusing to look at me?

Yes, that’s right. Calm down. It’s time to calm down. We’ll have a cup of tea and we’ll talk and then we’ll go to the grocery store. She addresses Fiona. You go home now. It’ll be all right. She’s already past it. She won’t remember any of this tomorrow. Or even in an hour.

But she’s never turned on me this way. Mark, yes, but never me.

Actually that’s not true. You just haven’t been here. The stories I could tell you. The situation is deteriorating.

That’s what Dr. Tsien says. He says she’s entered the worst stage. The next one will be easier. Much sadder, but easier. It’s almost time. Our options are running out.

I listen carefully, I think this is important, but the words disappear into the ether the moment they are spoken.

I accept a cookie from a plate. I bite into its sweetness. I drink the hot wet liquid in the cup that is in front of me. And I ignore the two women who are in my kitchen, two of the multitude of half-familiar strangers who have been intruding, who take such liberties with my house, my person.

Even now, one is leaning over my chair, hand outstretched, trying to pat me on the head. Pet me. No. Stop. I am not a wild thing to be soothed by touch. I will not be soothed.

There is one picture of James that I like and only one. It is James at his most pompous, his most self-promoting, self-gratifying. He could have a crown and a leopard robe about his shoulders and he wouldn’t look more ridiculous.

I love it because it is honest. I love it because it is true. In his other photos he appears spontaneous, open, game. But that was the pose. In reality, he has too high an opinion of himself to accept most people as equals. That I see this about him doesn’t make me love him any less.

I call for Amanda. I close the door behind me, put the key in my pocket. All is quiet. I fumble, find the light switch, flip it upward, and the hallway is flooded with light. Hey there! I say, louder this time. Nothing. Perhaps she is out of town? But she would have told me. Reminded me to water her plants, take in her mail, feed Max.

That reminds me. Max! I call. Good kitty! But no jangling bell, no skittering of claws across hardwood.

Yellow tape has been strung across the entrance to the living room: police line do not cross. I walk into the kitchen, which I know as well as my own. Something is wrong. None of the noises of a living household. No electric hum from the refrigerator. I open the door. The inside is dark and rank smelling. The water pipes that give Amanda perpetual insomnia, silent. No squeaking floorboards.

Yet something is here, something that wants congress with me. I do not believe in the supernatural. I am not a fanciful woman, nor a religious one. But this I know: Revelation is near. For I am not alone.

And from the shadows she comes, barely recognizable, so brilliant is her complexion, so golden her hair. She is dressed in a plain blue suit, sheer stockings, low-heeled shoes. I have never seen her attired like this, like a seventies-style junior executive intent on ascending the organizational ladder. Corporate angel. But her face is twisted in pain, and her hands are bandaged. She holds them out to me.

I take hold of her right wrist and gently begin to unwrap the coarse cotton from her hand. Around and under and around until it is revealed: perfect, white, and soft to the touch. The unblemished hand of a good child. I compare it to my own liver-spotted ones. Those of the witch that lures the child into the forest, fattens her up to eat. The hands of a sinner.

Suddenly Amanda and I are not alone. My mother is there with her virgin martyrs. And my father, too, wearing, oddly enough, a motorcycle helmet and jacket, when he was too terrified to ever get a driver’s license. And James, of course, and Ana and Jim and Kimmy and Beth from the hospital and Janet and Edward and Shirley from the neighborhood.

Even Cindy and Beth from college and Jeannette from before that. My grandmother O’Neill. Her sister, my great aunt May. People I haven’t thought of in decades. The room is full of faces I recognize, and if I don’t love them, at least I know their names, and that is more than enough. Perhaps this is my revelation? Perhaps this is heaven? To wander among a multitude and have a name for each.

It is dark here in my house. I bump into something with a sharp edge, bruise my hip. I put out my hands and feel a wall, a door frame, a closed door. I try the knob. It will not open. I need the bathroom, badly. Where is the light. I want to go home. Home to Philadelphia. I’ve been here long enough. A prisoner.

What crime have I committed? How long have I been incarcerated? It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free. Who said that? The pressure in my bladder is too great. I squat. I pull up my nightgown, pull down my pants. Let go. Spatter my bare ankles, my feet. No matter.

The relief ! Now I can sleep. Now I can go to sleep. I lie down where I am. There is softness under me, not a bed but acceptable. I hug my body for warmth. If I lie here, still, I will be safe. If I revel in my chains I will be free.

Inside is not safe. Too dark, and the house breathes. It breathes, and strangers appear and touch you. Tug at your clothes. Force open your mouth and fill it with foul pills. Out here it is brighter, the moon and the streetlights conjoining to cast a soothing aura over the sidewalks, the gardens just awakening from the winter.

Everything is where it should be. Even the squat object made of metal and painted bright red is a beautiful sight. It has always been there, in front of the house. It will always be there. There may be things lurking in the shadows, but they come in peace. They let me sit here, unmolested, on this patch of grass.

I can look to the right and see the church at the end of the block. To the left, the Bright and Easy Laundry. And upward, the stars. Bright pinpricks, most staying in their places, but others blinking, transmitting signals as they crawl across the vast darkness.

If only I could interpret this message. I want my friend. She would understand. She is safety. She is comfort. Her features remain constant, her voice does not rise or get loud. She does not reach for the phone. She does not make me drink tea, swallow small round bitter objects. I’m walking now. I’m opening the gate. Down three houses. I count carefully. Three is the magic number, my friend says.

That gate sticks, but I get it open. The brick path is uneven, so I proceed carefully to the white stone statue of the laughing Buddha that presides over the front garden. Buddha holds the key, my friend says. And you know you are always welcome, day or night.

I take the key from under the Buddha’s rotund cheeks and let myself in. I will find my friend. She will explain everything. She knows everything. She knows it all.

It is apparently my birthday today. May 22. Magdalena did the math for me: I’m sixty-five. Fiona and Mark are taking me out to dinner at Le Titi. In the afternoon, my old assistant Sarah stopped by. Remarkable for her to remember. I wouldn’t know her birthday under the best of circumstances. Even in my prime. I wouldn’t even have asked. Sarah presented me with a gift from the hospital: a three-foot-tall statue of Saint Rita of Cascia. Eighteenth century. A beauty.

You share a birthday, Sarah said.

Technically, the day of her death and of my birth are the same, yes. But we share more than that.

That’s right—you were often called the doctor of last resort.

You’re up on your hagiography.

A natural result of working for you for more than fifteen years. Anyway, everyone felt cheated by not being able to give you a retirement party. You left so suddenly. So we all put our heads together. Here. Here’s the card.

I’m honored.

And I was. Extraordinarily touched.

We all felt the same. It was an honor working with you.

I reached out and touched the statue, traced the gilt crown, the lines of the robe from her shoulders to the floor.

Sarah pointed to the statue. Why does she have a cut in the middle of her forehead?

According to the Saint Rita legend, she asked God to let her suffer the same way he did, and a thorn fell off a crucifix that was hanging on the wall and wounded her.

What about the rose she’s carrying?

When she was dying, her cousin asked if there was anything she wanted. She requested a rose from her garden. Even though it was winter, a rose was blooming there.

I just love these old legends, don’t you?

Some are more interesting than others. I don’t find Rita’s story particularly compelling. The cruel father, the drunken husband, the disobedient sons. Trite stuff. I like the idea that there’s someone you can go to when all else has failed.

Have you ever invoked her? Just curious.

No. No. On those rare occasions when I needed help, there were others I could ask.

You’re talking about human intervention. I’m talking about something else.

You mean, a higher power?

I mean . . . your diagnosis. Sarah said this tentatively. We’ve never discussed this. Officially, no one at the hospital knows why I retired early. Unofficially is another matter, I suspect.

I won’t say I didn’t hope there was a mistake.

No praying for a miracle?

None whatsoever.

How about just plain hope?

None of that, either.

How can you go on? I don’t understand.

What is there to understand? I have a degenerative disease. There is no cure for that disease. That is the condition facing hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

You’re so clinical about it. This is your life, not some hypothetical patient.

And whatever choice do I have, my dear Sarah?

I’m sorry. I’m prying. I guess I’m just wondering. How you keep going.

At some point we die. Except under unusual circumstances, we usually get some advance warning. Some of us know sooner than others. Some of us will suffer more than others. You’re asking, how do you endure that interval between when you know you’re dying and when you actually die?

Yes, I guess so.

I suppose everyone is different. To get her through, Saint Rita wanted the impossible: a rose in midwinter.

And you?

I was stymied. No one asks me such things anymore. They ask me if I want tea. If I’m cold. If I want to listen to some Bach. Avoidance of the big questions.

My deathbed wish?

Well, not deathbed! But do you think you’ll stay as practical as time progresses? Or will you ever be tempted to ask for the impossible?

Part of my condition is that the line between those two things is increasingly blurred. I was looking through my notebook this morning, and apparently on some days I still have my parents with me. Magdalena has recorded some long talks I have with them. I don’t remember any of this, of course. But I like the idea very much.

So maybe some very impossible requests are being granted.

Perhaps. Yes. And I’ve been thinking. What you said about how one keeps going.

Yes?

A dear friend of mine just died.

Yes, I heard. I’m sorry.

And amid the grief and the anger, I found myself feeling gratitude— gratitude that it wasn’t me. So at some level I still see death as something to be put off. It’s not that I don’t think about it—and I won’t say that on bad days I don’t plan for when things are a lot worse. But I’m not ready yet.

Well, that’s a good thing! Sarah reached over and gave me a hug before gathering her things together. I waved good-bye from the front door, then closed it, and sat down to examine my present. What a delightful prize. It will get the place of honor in the living room, on the mantel, next to the icon.

Really, I feel utterly blessed today.

No, it’s not yet time. Not yet.

We’re in front of the television, which seems to be our habit in the evening. This program is easy to follow. I don’t need to try to hold anything in my head for too long. A game show, where a motley congregation of contestants possesses a seemingly unlimited knowledge of trivia.

The blond woman loves it. She says things like He’s my favorite and I can’t believe she didn’t make it to the next round. I am having trouble concentrating. I try to do what a new sign in the kitchen commands me: Live in the moment. I have to. There is no other way for me, not anymore. But a young man wearing excessive eyeliner is jumping up and down after demonstrating his superior knowledge of the mating habits of penguins. Do I really want to be in this moment? I get up to leave the room just as the phone rings. I turn back and pick it up.

Mom, it’s Fiona.

Who?

Fiona. Your daughter. Can I speak to Magdalena? The nice lady who lives with you?

I hand over the receiver, but I don’t leave the room. Conversations are being had about me. Decisions being made.

The blond woman says little but agrees to whatever the person on the phone says. Yes. Okay. Sure. Yes, we’ll be there. She hangs up.

And what was that all about? Where will we be?

I am glad to have something to hold on to. Delighted to be able to raise my voice and release this tension.

Calm down, Jennifer. It’s no big deal. The police have some more questions. They’ve asked you to come back to the station tomorrow. Fiona will be there. And your lawyer—remember her?

Why would I need to talk to the police?

About Amanda.

What’s Amanda done wrong?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The reverse. The police are trying to find out who killed her.

Lots of people would like to.

The blond woman gives a little snort of laughter. Yes. That’s what I told them. And then wished I hadn’t, because they started asking me a lot of questions.

Now a young woman with implausibly red hair is stumped over a question related to seventies pop music. The TV audience is going wild.

Why would you say that? What do you know about Amanda?

I’ve been here eight months. That’s given me plenty of chances to observe.

Like what?

She always treated you with respect. Deference, even. Even when you were at your dottiest. She never talked down. Always spoke to you as though you were her equal. Or superior. And for the most part, you rose to the occasion. No episodes around her.

That all sounds commendable. What’s there not to like?

It had its reverse side. She didn’t cut you any slack. She’d grow impatient at answering the same questions over and over, and simply stopped answering after a while. Once I heard her say, That was all long ago and far away, in a tone of voice that meant the subject was closed.

You make it sound cruel.

Well, for you a lot of things have been reopened. Old questions, old wounds, old joys and sorrows. It’s like going into the basement and finding all the old boxes of stuff you’d meant to give to Goodwill open and overflowing. Things you thought you’d put away for good. Now you have to go through everything again. And again. Like yesterday. You wanted me to run to the drugstore to get you some tampons. You said it was an emergency.

Perhaps it was.

Jennifer, you’re sixty-five years old.

Oh. Yes.

Anyway, Amanda did or said something that distressed you enormously shortly before she died.

What was that?

I don’t know. I was in the den. I heard raised voices. By the time I got to the living room, it was over. At least the shouting was. But something had happened between the two of you that was still unresolved. Amanda was half out the door. She said one thing before she left.

I will not hesitate for one moment, she said. You were extremely agitated. That evening you had one of your episodes. I had to take you into the ER. You wouldn’t take your Valium. They had to inject you with something to calm you down.

I don’t remember any of this.

I know you don’t. The next morning you wanted to go over to Amanda’s—to catch up, you said, because you hadn’t seen her in a while. I pretended to call her, hung up, and told you she wasn’t home.

And I fell for it?

You did. And it turned out that the previous afternoon was the last time we saw her. She was still alive—they were able to trace her steps around town, to a meeting, to the store. But the next day she stopped taking in her Tribunes, and about a week after that Mrs. Barnes checked on her and found the body.

Did you explain all this to the police?

Yes, many times.

Why do they want to see me, then? I won’t be able to tell them anything.

They’re still trying. Ever since they got your scalpel handle and blades. Your lawyer says they’re hoping that if they ask enough, and in enough different ways, they’ll get a different response.

Didn’t someone once say that that is the embodiment of madness? Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different effect?

Well, sometimes you do remember things. Surprise us all. Like the other day. Out of the blue, you asked me about my elbow—the one I landed on when I tripped on the sidewalk. That had happened a few days earlier, but you were very clear, remembered that you had examined me and determined nothing was broken or torn. One of the perks of working for a doctor—good thing, too, because my insurance is so lousy.

I don’t recall. Things come and go. For example, what is your name?

Magdalena. Look—it’s written right here. On this poster.

How long have you been here?

You hired me almost exactly eight months ago. Last October. Just before Halloween.

I love Halloween.

I know. It was the most fun I’d had since my kids were small. You insisted that we both dress up. Witches. The only dignified costume for crones, you said. You decorated the house spectacularly. You bought the kind of candy that kids fight over and won’t trade. And you insisted on opening the door yourself and making a fuss over the costumes. You really surprised me. The first of many surprises.

Yes, Halloween excites me. That whole time of year, autumn, I find exhilarating. A passionate season. The others are so bland. In the fall, you see opportunities for change. Real change. Possibilities present themselves. None of the renewal and redemption clichés of spring. No. Something darker and more primal and more important than that.

You paced that night until three AM. You certainly were excited. But not in a bad way. It was the first time I saw you do that. Back and forth, all night. I fell asleep in my chair in the living room. You ended up on the couch. Both of us still in our witch costumes.

I always liked dressing up. Giving out the candy. Assuming my proper guise for a night.

Yes, your costume suited you. The white pancake makeup contrasting with the dark-ringed eyes, the long gray-black wig flowing over your shoulders. The fake mole to the right of your mouth drawing attention to those high cheekbones. A peculiar sort of Sleeping Beauty, but nevertheless a beauty. You opened your eyes to find me studying you. Wicked debauchery, you whispered.

Mark’s in a good mood. It doesn’t make this mother’s heart glad. It makes it suspicious. The euphoria. The fast-talking wit. The notable appreciation of the inferior egg salad sandwich Magdalena presented as our lunch. His inability to recognize that the living room curtains are the same shade of glorious red they’ve always been. His wanting a heart-to-heart.

How are you, Mom?

How much do you want? I ask.

He doesn’t hesitate. As much as you can give me.

Is it that bad?

Worse.

You’re being direct for once. Is it because you’re high?

Possibly. I find you hard to take under any other condition.

You’ll have to ask your sister.

What?

I don’t even have a checkbook anymore. Even when I want one. Fiona takes care of everything.

But certainly you can write one check.

I don’t have even one to write. Fiona was very thorough.

But you wrote me a check six months ago.

Yes. I found an old checkbook in my bureau. And as soon as it cleared, Fiona went through all my drawers and confiscated it.

The bitch.

A chip off the old block.

You said it.

He taps his fingers on the table in an almost recognizable rhythm. Dahdah-dah day-day-dah dah-DAH-dah-dahdah.

You’re sharp today.

Yes.

Interesting how it comes and goes.

Interesting isn’t the word I’d use.

We are in the den because the cleaners are here, and they’ve chased us out of the living room and the kitchen, our usual haunts, and we can hear the approaching roar of the vacuum, the rattle of mops and pails as they work their way toward this final room.

I’m curious. Will you even remember this conversation tomorrow? Mark is standing by the television, idly clicking through James’s DVD collection of classic movies. There wasn’t a noir film that James didn’t know by heart.

I may. I may not. It all depends, I say. I watch as Mark pulls out Du rififichez les hommes, rejects it in favor of White Heat.

So I shouldn’t say anything I might regret? He flips open the plastic case, takes out the silver disk, places his finger in the center hole, and spins it around.

It depends on the source of regret. Would you regret it because it was a cruel or otherwise despicable thing to say, or because I would remember you saying it? I ask.

Probably the former. I tend not to have regrets unless there are repercussions. He smiles at this, puts down the DVD on top of the television, and takes a seat opposite me. His jitters seem to be subsiding. How about you? he asks. Any regrets? Although his tone is derisive, I get the feeling he really wants to know.

I was the opposite, I say. I never let the possibility of repercussions influence any decisions I made.

What about your medical decisions? Weren’t you concerned that decisions you made could have certain effects? Like, for instance . . . death? His dark face is exaggeratedly solemn. He is waiting to catch me out in something. I won’t let him.

Those are outcomes. Outcomes are different from repercussions.

I would have thought they were synonyms, he says.

There are nuances, I say. I am warming to the discussion. Anything is better than another endless chat about nothing over tea with Magdalena. A repercussion has the nuance of being punishing, I say. An outcome is simply a result. You do something, and you have an outcome. An output for an input.

And were you always pleased with the . . . outputs . . . of your actions?

I was not pleased with the outcomes of some of my surgeries, certainly —a small percentage, but nevertheless they existed. But I made the best decisions under the circumstances. Those were not mistakes. They were decisions that had outcomes.

Mark is silent for a moment. You’re on top of your game, certainly, he says. No one could pull a sly one on you today.

That actually makes me smile. He sounds about ten, just having been caught smoking cigarettes with Jimmy Petersen behind the Jewel.

Why? I ask. Did you hope to?

He doesn’t answer, instead changing the subject.

Did Amanda talk to you?

About what? Oh. Did you hit her up, too?

Well, I’d gotten a nice check from you. It would have been tasteless to approach you again so soon.

And what did she say?

So, she didn’t tell you? Odd. I would have thought that was the first thing she’d do.

No. She liked to keep her own counsel. So what did she say?

She laughed at me. Told me to stuff it up my nose.

That sounds like Amanda.

It was infuriating. I could have killed her. Mark fidgets in his chair. Oh. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.

Said what?

You know. He looks at me. Or maybe you don’t. Never mind.

We sit in silence for a moment. When Mark speaks again, his voice is again one of a small boy.

You haven’t asked how I’m doing, he says. How my work is, how my love life is.

I get to my feet. The cleaning crew is coming closer, they’ll be here in a few minutes and we’ll have to move. I am glad. I am annoyed with the conversation.

I assumed that if you had something to tell me, you would, I say. You’re not a child anymore. Use your words.

Mark stands up, too, and unexpectedly he is laughing. I should have known you wouldn’t fall for that, he says. But it was worth a try.

I’ve never been susceptible to emotional blackmail before, I say. And despite my diseased brain, I have no intention of becoming so now.

Well, let me use my words, as you suggest, and give you a synopsis of my current affairs, Mark says. Tall, dark, handsome twenty-nine-year-old lawyer, with a bit of a substance-abuse problem, looking for love and money in what are apparently all the wrong places. His voice is mocking, but there is a slight sag to his shoulders. I notice his clothes are hanging loosely on his frame, that his jacket cuffs reach too far down over his wrists and that his belt is cinched tight to keep his trousers around his too-slender waist.

I find myself reaching out, and almost touch his right cheek, when he flinches, pulls away.

I like you more the other way, he says. It suits you better. He gestures to the cleaners, who are at the threshold to the den, waiting for permission to enter. Thus ends another visit to dear old Mom’s, he says, adding, as he leaves the room, and to use another ironically appropriate expression, let’s forget this conversation ever took place.

From my notebook. December 15, 2008. Amanda’s name written on top of the page.

Jennifer:

Today we decided to walk to our favorite Middle Eastern take-out place on Lincoln, the one with the sublime hummus, then over to the park for a picnic. Yes, it was that warm! I made you wear your gloves and a hat, because you are still struggling with that cough. Magdalena fussed a bit, but we overruled her. You were clearly itching to get out.

You kept saying how you wished James and Peter could come along. I was unclear at first about why you thought they were missing, and it turned out you attributed their absence to that old man-excuse—work. No matter that Peter had retired more than a decade ago, and James would have retired last year if he’d lived.

Funny how at the end of life things accelerate at a pace beyond our ability to process them. I kept waking up at six to prep for class for three years after I retired. I still can’t believe I haven’t been in a classroom for a dozen years, haven’t had to face a tearful twelve-year-old or an angry parent for that long. It seems like just yesterday. How we used to mock our parents and grandparents for using that phrase. And for you it doesn’t seem like yesterday, but today. Now.

Anyway, we bought our hummus and baba ghanoush and walked slowly over to the park. We found an empty bench near the zoo. A glorious day. The park bursting with joggers, babies, and dogs.

One ambitious young father had an infant strapped to his back, a dog leash wound around his belt, and was helping his four-year-old fly a kite. You were not as conscious of your state as I’ve seen you on other occasions. You didn’t seem to grasp that you were impaired. Interesting how that self-knowledge comes and goes. But you were operating at a high-enough level for it not to be a problem that day.

Perhaps for that reason, you wanted to dwell in the past. I had an inkling—just an inkling—of how it must feel when you asked, Do I use this? and held up a plastic spoon with the plastic container of tabbouleh.

We talked about Peter and James, nothing much, did our usual complaining about their foibles. What women do when they’re bored and have nothing to say really but like the sound of their voices responding to each other. First me, then you, then me again. As satisfying as a good tennis volley.

For once I didn’t set you right. I usually won’t indulge you—it’s the thing I really argue with Fiona about—but I had to keep correcting myself when I slipped into past tense. Yes, James was a bit of a dandy. No, Peter wasn’t that hard to live with.

One moment was out of step with the rest of the lazy good feeling of the day. At some point one of the animals in the zoo let out a cry. I don’t know what it was—an elephant? A big cat? It was really more of a mournful wail, over quickly, but you got upset.

Give that child back her blanket! you yelled loudly, startling everyone around us.

You certainly startled me, and I dropped my soft drink and soaked my pants. You seemed to have forgotten your outburst as soon as it was out of your mouth. I was reminded of what Magdalena says about how you can change so suddenly. It’s not something I had ever seen before. You are either in a slightly better or slightly worse state.

I know there have been what everyone refers to as episodes. I tell Magdalena and Fiona to call me when they need help. So far they haven’t. I think there’s some sense of possessiveness, some rivalry there.

If nothing else, the day reminded me of how we gradually inure ourselves to tragedy. For it is a tragedy, my old friend, what is happening to you.

I am very selfish: I am more concerned about myself than you in this regard. You’ll get past this stage of awareness, and the disease will be its own pain-management regime. But me. These little outings remind me of how much anesthesia I’m going to need. Like the topical sedative that goes in before the big needle, everything I’ve done to prepare myself is going to be too weak to withstand the pain of separation that’s looming.

The end of my marriage is nothing compared to the end of our friendship—if that’s what you want to call it. It’s enough to want to burn the bridge and leave you on the other side. Too many good-byes lie ahead. How many times have you had to endure the death of James? How many times will I have to say good-bye to you, only to have you reappear like some newly risen Christ. Yes, better to burn the bridge and prevent it from being crossed and recrossed until my heart gives out from sheer exhaustion.

I am performing a complex brachial plexus procedure where the total plexus lesions have permeated all the nerve roots. The patient is under general anesthesia. His (her?) face is covered.

Things are not going well. I am attempting an intraplexual neurotization using the parts of the roots still attached to the spinal cord as donors for the avulsed nerves. But I miscalculate and hit the subclavian vein. Horrifying quantities of blood. I put pressure on it and call for the vascular surgeon, but it is too late.

I think about the faces of the family members in the waiting room. I also cannot help thinking, ashamedly, of the lawyers, of the internal hospital investigation that will inevitably follow. The tediousness of the paperwork that accompanies blunders large and small.

Then the room undergoes a sort of seismic shift and I am no longer in the OR. No patient anesthetized on a table. Instead I am gazing down at a bed with rumpled floral sheets. I am still perspiring, there is still an irregular drumming in my chest, but my hands are no longer encased in rubbery gloves, they no longer hold sharp implements. It’s a large bed with an oak frame. A matching dresser. An ornate red Oriental carpet. Nothing familiar.

I want the OR back, the soothing green walls, the steel instruments reflected large in the steel cabinetry. Everything placed just so. But this. This richly furnished, unsterile environment. It makes me uncomfortable. I want to wash my hands, suit up, try again. I close my eyes, but when I open them I am still in the same room.

Then I hear voices. With difficulty, I find the doorway to the room. I must scrutinize every inch of every wall before it finally materializes. Outside the doorway, a long hallway, painted a deep crimson, hung with photographs. And at the end of that, the way down. Soft plush material under my feet on top of polished wood, patterned with blue and green intertwined flowers.

I walk carefully, watching my feet and holding on to a long smooth piece of wood. I go down and I count. Twenty times I extend my right foot, place it on a lower surface. Twenty times I pull my left foot down until it is level with my right. And then again. The voices grow louder as I descend. There is laughter. I hear my name. I will proceed carefully.

There are two of them, a man and a woman, sitting in the living room, on the mission oak sofa. The woman has shoulder-length yellow hair, clearly dyed. It does not suit her. She is heavyset. Her pants are too tight to be comfortable, I can see the top button cutting into her belly.

The man stands up when he sees me. An older man. An old man. He opens up his arms. Jenny! he says, and without waiting, his arms envelop me. He smells good. His plaid shirt feels soft against my check, but his beard scratches. Snow-white hair with a bald spot on top. A gray, not white, beard. It looks dirty in contrast, gives him a slightly disreputable look.

Aren’t you glad to see your old friend Peter? asks the blond woman.

Oh yes, I say, and smile. Peter. How are you? I infuse my voice with warmth. I even force myself to take his hand. One must be cunning. One must play along.

Quite well, he says. Enjoying the sunshine. As you know, I was never a fan of Chicago winters. Although this one seems to finally be over. Here, sit down, sit down. Over here. He pulls over a beige chair, and I sink into its softness. He takes my hand again. It’s been too long, Jen.

How long has it been? asks the blond woman. She doesn’t wait for an answer. Your ears must have been buzzing! she says. Peter’s done nothing but talk about you!

She smiles. He smiles. I smile too.

Yes, they have been, I say. Indeed they have.

There is silence, rather awkward. Then the man speaks again, less heartily, more gently.

You don’t really remember me, do you? he asks. But he doesn’t have that pleading, hurt look that people generally have when they ask me this. That look that begs me to lie, to reassure them.

I immediately like him better. No, I say. Not a glimmer.

I’m in town to wrap up affairs, he says. I was here for the funeral, but everyone thought it best not to bother you. Unfortunately, things are a little tangled. Amanda never updated her will after the divorce. The estate has to go into probate. It’s going to take months to resolve, to find the next of kin who will inherit the house. That was really her only asset. But even in this market, it’ll be a substantial sum. For now, my hands are tied.

What divorce? I ask. What funeral?

He pauses. Well, I’ll just remember for both of us, he says, smiling. Then he turns sober. I understand you’re in a bit of trouble, he says. I wanted you to know that I believe in you. Without reservation. You clearly don’t know what I’m talking about. You probably won’t remember this. But on the chance that some things stick, I wanted to say it.

The blond woman makes as if to get up from the table.

No, no. There’s no need for you to go, he says. This isn’t a private conversation. It’s just something I wanted to get on the table. For myself, mostly, as it turns out. Otherwise, I would like to talk about good things, he says. Maybe it will spark something.

I’ll be the secretary, says the blond woman. I’ll write it all down. That way she can read it over when she’s in better shape. It might make more sense to her that way. She leaves the room, comes back with a large leather book, opens it to a blank page, picks up a pen. She writes something at the top of the page, pauses, and looks at the man expectantly.

Where shall I start? asks the man. Once upon a time. Yes, that’s the way to handle it. A myth-making event. Filled with archetypes.

I am interested. Go on, I say.

Once upon a time there were six people. Four adults and two children. Two married couples. One couple, older by about a decade, childless. The younger couple had a girl and a boy. The girl was very small, maybe two. The boy seven. Although not close in age, the two couples are close in friendship. He stops and thinks. What shall I tell you about them? No generalities. But one specific event. And he continues.

One day they decide to go to the beach. They pack some ham sandwiches, some hard-boiled eggs, apples, pears, and bottles of wine for good measure.

They decide to drive out of the city. Far north. To a state park on the lake that features large sand dunes that are mostly deserted on beautiful summer Sundays like this one.

There is a reason for this, of course. A huge nuclear power plant looms over the sand dunes, spills its excesses into the shallow water. It casts a pall on the scenery for anyone faint of heart. Which the adult members of these two families definitely are not. They joke about the relative warmth of the lake water, about mutant fish and the oversized shorebirds.

The two-year-old, relieved of all her clothes except her diaper, is taken to the edge of the water by her mother to wet her toes. The boy takes his shovel and bucket and begins digging random holes in the sand. The older woman and the two men settle themselves on beach chairs and talk. All is calm. An uneventful day at the lakeside. When they start feeling hungry, they break out the food, eat a few sandy mouthfuls, wash it down with red wine. An idyllic afternoon at the beach among dear friends. Everything is perfect. More perfect than it will ever be again. He stops, apparently in a reverie.

The blond woman is writing furiously. What a lovely gift, this story, she says. Jennifer will enjoy reading about it later. But I am getting a glimmer. More than a glimmer, a Technicolor movie. It comes in bursts of images. Invoking all the senses. I speak quickly before it dissipates.

Yes. The sandy ham that crunches between our teeth. The acidic wine. The power plant looming overhead. The grown-ups perhaps drinking a little too much. Voices are raised. Laughter comes easier. The older man abstains: He is the driver but continues pouring. The other three drink past the point of pleasure. Past the point of honesty. To somewhere more primal.

That’s right, says the man. He opens his mouth as if to continue, but I push on, following the movie in my mind. I can feel the heat of the noonday sun on my bare arms. The sand against my thighs. Hear the cries of the mutant birds.

The older woman starts it. She asks the younger man if he has noticed anything different about his wife.

Different how? the younger man asks.

Her hair. Her clothes. A general glow.

I can’t say that I have. She always looks terrific. And he gives his wife an affectionate smile, gestures to the older man to top off her glass of wine.

The younger woman is startled. Something is happening that she has not expected.

You didn’t think, for example, that perhaps she has reason to celebrate? asks the older woman. That something has happened that she considers a good thing? Perhaps not news that every woman would welcome. But she isn’t an ordinary woman.

The younger man doesn’t miss a beat. He is a lawyer with a growing reputation. This is what he is like in the courtroom, in the boardroom. There is no curveball he cannot catch, no supposed revelation that he does not appear to have intimate knowledge of beforehand.

My wife is no fool, he says.

But you might be, the older woman says. She takes a sip of wine but doesn’t take her eyes off him.

I don’t follow.

Power is a strange thing.

It is. But what does that have to do with this conversation?

They say knowledge is power, says the older woman.

And that ignorance is bliss, says the younger man, derisively.

Does that mean you want this conversation to end?

The younger man considers. No, he says. I want to see where you are going.

The younger woman speaks up: Me too, actually.

The older man is the only one not getting it. The other three are facing off . The kids are squabbling over sand toys.

The younger man is the first to break the silence. So she knows. I haven’t exactly been discreet. If she’d asked I would have told her. It’s not important. Nothing can touch what we have.

The younger woman relaxes. She is relieved by his reply, and the tension dissipates from her shoulders. She shrugs indifferently. There was nothing I wanted to ask. Nothing that was worth the bother of asking. I did a little checking on my own. Found out what I needed to know. A trivial liaison, soon to end. That was the end of it.

The younger man smiles, an odd, almost proud, smile. Yes, our marriage isn’t so fragile.

It most certainly is not.

Ah, says the older woman. But this is not about the trivial. Not in the least. Sex is banal. I didn’t want to talk about sex. I wanted to talk about the thing that either holds families together or tears them apart. Something much more powerful than sex or even love. Money.

The younger woman stiffens again, her features becoming rigid. Don’t do it, she says.

The older woman addresses the younger man. You lock your office door. You lock your desk drawer inside a locked room. You keep your wife out. Why is that?

The kids, of course. There are important documents in there. I can’t have evidence of confidential memos scribbled over with a red crayon.

Because of the kids?

Because it’s standard protocol when taking sensitive documents out of the office.

But what would someone find if they managed to circumvent your locked doors and locked drawers? the older woman asks. What if someone knew you well enough to know where you would hide the keys?

They wouldn’t find anything that would interest anyone outside corporate financial litigation, says the younger man.

The older woman raises her right eyebrow. It seems like a practiced gesture somehow, a dramatic device used to control others.

The younger woman interrupts. Now, that’s not quite true. She seems incensed by the younger man’s dismissive tone.

The younger man meets her eyes. And so?

And so, says the younger woman, and repeats, knowledge is power.

Seems like you relinquished a little of that power. To your good friend here. Why on earth would you do that? Cracks are appearing in his equanimity.

Seems like I did, the younger woman says, without looking at the other woman. Seemingly foolishly.

So? asks the younger man, addressing the younger woman. So what? What are you going to do? Turn me in? That would be against your own interests.

Absolutely, says the younger woman. It was a struggle, but I decided to not disturb the status quo. Not to confront you. This discovery was just a little curiosity I took out of my pocket and looked at every once in a while. As my dear friend here says, it was a power thing. It made me happy.

This was always about us, not just me, the man says. He is gulping his wine. He reaches over and takes the bottle from the older man, who is frankly bewildered, and pours himself another full glass. What I took will not be missed. I made sure of that. I didn’t hurt anyone, didn’t rob children and orphans. Only institutions have standards. Small amounts siphoned off over time. They added up. But no harm done to any human. This will never come to light. And it’s for you as well as me.

I believe that, says the younger woman. I believe that you tell yourself that and mean it sincerely.

And for the kids.

I believe that, too, says the younger woman. She turns to the little girl, brushes sand from her forehead, smooths her hair. The boy is still engrossed with his shovel and pail. He is digging a hole to China. The discussion is over as far as the younger woman is concerned. She is ready to move on. But the older woman doesn’t agree. She stands up.

But this is not just between you. It is a question of morality. This . . . activity, must stop. Right here and now. No more juggling of books. No more victimless crime.

No one doubts that this is an absolute order. And no one doubts that the repercussions of disobeying it would be severe.

I pause the movie. Come back mentally to the world. I ask the old man, Why would Amanda do this thing? What was her motive?

Peter seems resigned to the direction the conversation has taken. Who knows? he asks. One never knew with Amanda. Revenge? Mischief ? Perhaps she thought she was doing the right thing: preventing a serious crime. Or saving her friends the humiliation of being caught, incarcerated. But you haven’t finished the story.

I no longer need the film to guide me. The rest has formed itself in my mind.

Back at the beach, I say. The older man is upset. His world is being shaken.

Apologize! he tells his wife. Apologize for your appalling behavior. I don’t care how drunk you are, you don’t wreck lives for the fun of it.

But the younger woman interrupts him, addresses the older woman directly. No apologies are necessary because no apologies will be accepted. None would be acceptable. You betrayed my trust.

You see? the older woman says. Trust does matter. Betrayal is a serious act.

The younger woman considers this. Fair enough, she says. She picks up a hard-boiled egg. But seven hundred years ago I would have taken stronger measures.

And what would they have been? the older woman asks. She is amused.

I would have buried this under a waning moon in your yard, as medieval women did with their enemies.

And . . . ?

You would have commenced to rot. The younger woman pauses. Of course you are already rotten in mind and spirit, she says. Both men, the older and the younger, sit up and pay attention. This is serious. These are words that can’t be unsaid.

This would pertain to the body. It would start inside. With the heart. Then the other organs. You would start to stink out. The decay would reach your outer epidermis. It would start to disintegrate. And the scavengers would take care of the rest. Your eyes. Your genitalia. Your extremities—your ears, toes, and fingers.

The older woman laughs at this. She seems delighted. I always forget you studied medieval history before medical school. What a potent combination!

This is not an anecdote, the younger woman says. It’s a warning. You would be well served to pay attention to it. And she begins to put the picnic things away, as if a reasonable conversation between reasonable people has just concluded.

Magdalena is no longer writing. The notebook and pen lie in her lap.

What about the men? And the children? What were they doing while these things were being said? she asks.