• • •

Some days she had to stay in the hospital. Most days she was at home. I was up at the apartment constantly; Freddy had a summer job at a lab and was living with my parents. My father’s hours at the bank got shorter and shorter. Meanwhile, my mother could eat less and less. The doctors had suggested some crackers that were supposed to settle her stomach. She would sit down at the table with a plate of them in front of her and smile at the rest of us. “Would any of you care for a dog biscuit?” she would ask wryly before she started to eat. Still she continued, on nights when she was able, to go out with my father. She continued to have lunch with her friends.

“You shouldn’t push yourself so hard,” my father would say to her, but she would brush him off.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of a floor show on in the bedroom all day,” she said. “I might as well distract myself.” Laced through that tough stance, which she used to propel herself through the days, was a softness delicate as the silk left behind by a new butterfly. She told me over and over again, afraid perhaps that I would forget, how much she loved me. She had always told me that with what she did and the way that she was, but now she said it in so many words. She told my father and Freddy how much she loved them. Some afternoons, she would describe everything she had ever imagined for me, cataloging the pleasures and pitfalls of every stage of life in sequence; it was as though she wanted to pack into the little time that remained to us all the wisdom she might have dispensed over the ensuing decades. I tried to remember every detail of every day, as one tries to remember the nature of heat on the last day of summer. I spoke to Helen from time to time, but I did not sleep with her; I imagined that I was only a mind and a heart, that I had left my body as entirely as if it had been laid in earth.

Helen was crisp. “There’s no point arguing with you now,” she conceded on the phone at one point.

On a subsequent occasion, she said, “You haven’t been very nice to me, Harry. Why did you go and start all this if you didn’t want to follow through with it?”

I said I was sorry. I said that it was beyond me, that it was all beyond me. I said that I was feeling too overwhelmed to cope.

“There’s nothing to cope with,” she said. “It’s just me, Helen. I’m not so overwhelming.”

“This is not an easy time for me,” I said.