By the time my mother came home, I had had my fill of New York. The prospect of London and Bernard filled me with joy. How sorry I felt for my father, who had no escape, who had no one to go to! In some very secret part of myself, I thought I might go to London and never come home again; when Helen told me that I was being extreme, I told her about concerts, which I had, in fact, scheduled thick and fast for the following month. I planned various programs for forthcoming performances. I talked to my agent daily. The drift away from Bernard seemed to me to have been arrested, or even reversed, as I had spent more and more time thinking about him as a way not to think about my mother. If anyone had ever been ready for a spa vacation, I was ready for one at that moment. My mother was about to start her minor, easy, nearly unnoticeable chemotherapy. I wanted to get as far away as possible, to where I could continue to imagine that chemotherapy could be easy, to where things happening to my mother might be unnoticeable.

“That sounded lovely, Harry,” said my mother, drifting into the living room one evening when I was practicing. She had given up that hospital tone of despair.

“It’s a technical nightmare,” I said. “I want to work on the melody but I can’t do that until I get the fingering down better.”

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said. “Go on playing. I’ll just listen.” She sat down on one of the yellow chairs.

“I’ll play something else,” I said. “This is no fun to listen to.”

“No, don’t do that,” she said. “Play what you were working on. It changes each time you play it.”

I did not entirely know it then, but my mother had that week given up on the hope of a cure. She had stopped treating each day of sickness as part of a temporary punishment, to be endured until a better time would come; she had accepted that she had only these days left, and that she should make the most of them. She was trying simply to live in the world and in the moment, something she had never done before; it had been her way to negotiate the present as though it were laid on for future memories. She sat that evening in one of the yellow chairs, listening, and I worked on fingering, and after the first fifteen minutes, the fact of her being there ceased to distract me. I played better than I had played in a long time. When she stood up an hour later, I had almost forgotten she was in the room with me. “Well, you’ve solved that,” she said with satisfaction as she left.

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