Helen interrupted after about twenty minutes. No one else said a word. “What you’re saying is that you want her to die soon,” said Helen.

I didn’t stop. I went on and on. I said, of course, that I wanted my mother to live forever.

“She’s not going to live forever,” said Helen. “You know, it’s not going to be a relief when she dies. It’s going to be pretty awful.”

I went on talking and talking and talking. No one else said anything. I felt that I was taking up the entire room, squeezing everyone back into the silence of the walls.

“It sounds terrible,” said Helen. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but I hope, for your sake, that she dies soon.”

We all stayed over that night. I asked the others not to leave, and by the time I asked them it was already late, and so we all camped out in solidarity on Helen’s floor. I lay on the floor like a tightly strung bow, and then suddenly I fell asleep, into a turbulent sleep full of dreams, an exhausting sleep, in which it was as though I had gone on talking and talking and talking.

• • •

There is a silent time when you wake up, and another before you fall asleep. There are moments of silence during a shower, or while you brush your teeth. There can be silence if you drive in a car alone. I found the silence unbearable at all these times. On Monday morning, I woke up at Helen’s apartment. She had left, and so had the others. I’d slept through everyone’s leaving. I called my mother on the phone and we talked about nothing. Then I went over to my parents’ apartment, in principle to pick up a package my mother told me had arrived.

A sofa had also come back that morning. My mother had been systematically reupholstering things that spring. She’d had all the curtains cleaned, some of them changed. She’d had the restorer in to treat all the wood surfaces in the house. She’d had the kitchen ceiling repainted. My mother was getting things in order. “Your father would never cope with any of this,” she said. “If I get all these things done, he’s got a good five years of the apartment looking all right, and by the time five years have gone by, I hope he’ll have found another woman.” So that Monday, the sofa came back. I thought it looked great; I have a feeling my mother was not entirely content with it. But it was good enough. She couldn’t very well have it redone again at this stage.

I helped arrange the pillows. “That looks fine,” she said.

We went into the kitchen and I made tea. We took it back to her bedroom.