“Sure? We miss you.”

Close the curtains. Is it nighttime?

“Thanks, Robin. I’ll be okay.”

My father took my hand and held it, saying nothing.

He doesn’t know, Mom. I wanted him to love me.

My mother’s weight depressed the bed’s edge. “You won’t always feel this way, Eve. Believe me.”

I smiled for her.

Water, please.

My mother stroked my hair. “Beth and her kids stopped by. Everyone’s calling. Everyone’s thinking about you.”

“Tell them thank you. Tell them not today.”

She tiptoed out. I turned to the wall.

“Spare me.”

Spare me belief of any kind. In the unfathomable will, in appalling luck, in random error, in the life everlasting. Spare me belief that the complex universe can’t fit our simple ideas, that bad things happen to good people, that the journey is the destination, the true body awaits, the veil is thrust aside, the person slips into the next room. Spare me belief in the futility of belief.

Spare me the casually alive sons and daughters of my friends. Acquaintances who turn away in banks and aisles with relief in their eyes only I can see, that it happened to her and not me. Spare me the solidification of time. The slackness of the house when I want it to resist me in a way I never asked for and could not foresee. Spare me the tedious sounds I make, and the silence.

Spare me fluorescent glare and aquarial gloom. Plastic tubing, peel-apart packets, fluid-filled sacks, machines that click, hum, suck, or drip; anything pointed, jointed, tapered, or interlocking; anything rubber-soled, rubber-wheeled, padded, or palliative or sterile or collapsible or disposable with extreme caution. Above all, spare me that morning in November, when bearing my tray of dispensables I closed in on the bed, and Maddy rotated her fragile head, and the whites of her eyes said, Spare me.

PART III

Eve

28

During the long wait at Dulles, I asked Alison the standard questions and she answered in a reluctant monotone. She’d grown up in Baltimore, youngest of a family of three, her mother an elementary school teacher like mine. Her father owned a liquor store that went under when she was eleven.

“People in DC all come from somewhere else,” I said. “You and I are natives.”

“I come from Baltimore.”

“Close enough.”

She had been something of a prodigy in high school and won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke. Her interest in art came from “just looking at things.” When Alison was a junior in college, her father left the family for good, her mother moved to Detroit with another man, and Alison did not do as well as she’d hoped on her exams. Besides, there weren’t any jobs out there for art history majors.

“Half the waiters in the country are art history majors,” she informed me.

“I thought waiters were all actors.”