I thought there would be time to tell my mother later on. Also, I had fought so hard to get her far enough to understand my anguish over Nick, and I wasn’t sure that there would never be a Nick again, and I didn’t want to lose that sympathy. It was too late for my loving Helen to make my mother well, and so I loved Helen for myself alone. When I held Helen in my arms, I came back to life. Nick had left me for dead. Helen saved me, or my love for Helen saved me, from despair. When I was with Helen, I believed, as I had not before, that I could do anything. I felt strong where Nick had made me feel weak.

“What would have happened if I’d been a boy?” Helen asked me one night. We were lying on my white sheets, and I was cupped around her body; her head was beside mine, but she was not facing me when she spoke. I touched her face, to get its expression.

“You’re not a boy,” I said. “That’s become extremely clear to me this week.” And I pulled her tighter, as though to remember her female body.

Helen laughed. “But if I had been,” she said. “Would we have become lovers years ago, or this week, or not at all?”

“If you’d been a boy,” I started, but then I stopped. Helen as Helen. Helen as a woman. Helen as the one in my life while my mother was getting sicker. I couldn’t separate it all.

“Would you love me more if I were a boy?” she asked.

“I couldn’t love you more,” I told her confidently. “I’ve never loved anyone more.” This was automatic, and true. Then I said, thinking, “Well, it would have been easier.” It was too much for me to explain to her. “It just would have been different, Helen. It would also have been different if you were a sixteenth-century Spanish courtesan and I were a pirate of the high seas.”

“But not easier, I think,” she said. She sounded almost coy. “Shame, isn’t it, that you never get to know what would have happened.” And I reflected that this had never seemed like much of a shame to Nick, and, to fill in the silence, I turned her over and stretched my body on top of hers.

• • •