“So sometimes it helps to act as if. There’s nothing wrong with as if.” I saw now that everything anchoring me to what was correct and in the scheme of things had gone with Maddy’s death. There was no long run. There was no last analysis. As if was not just a matter of survival, of getting through in any way possible. It stood for the fact that my relationship to meaning itself had profoundly changed.

Slowly, wonderingly, Norma whispered: “The snake . . .”

“Strange, isn’t it?” I winched what bound us together a little tighter. “I hadn’t thought about that in years. The fact is,” I said, “I get some comfort from the snake.”

“You do?”

“It’s as though it was already decided. As though nothing could have prevented it.”

A year ago, had I given it any thought, a coincidence like the snake would have struck me as cruel and irrelevant, another sick game the universe was playing at my expense. Now all I had were the patterns I could make, the metaphorical resonance I could find. Perhaps that was all there was to have.

I let Norma ask me questions. I told her about Maddy’s exhaustion and weight loss, the symptoms we mistook for teenage recalcitrance and sleep deprivation, the demands of a new body and a hectic social life; my absorption with Robin at the time and my sense that Maddy was on the eve of a new life and so was I; the misdiagnosis, which meant that the illness had been relatively advanced by the time it was discovered.

“Do you know how strange it is to have to think about the inside of your child’s body?”

She shook her head.

“A child’s supposed to be a child. Not an arrangement of matter in better or worse shape.”

I told her about the music, the campaign, Maddy’s determination to fit as much as possible into what time she had. I told her about my friends who organized a team of standby drivers, cooks, networkers, and consolers, and a rotation of people to stay with Maddy when Robin and I went out. I told her about our hopes for the new drugs, the relapse, the rapid decline. Maddy’s death I passed over in one sentence.

“You’d think, if the worst happened, that all your friends would be there for you forever? Instead of which, they seemed to withdraw. Even my close friends. Maybe especially my close friends. Ella was in the middle of moving, but Beth . . .”

Norma looked aghast. “They abandoned you?”

“Not exactly. Well, I don’t remember much about the first few weeks. I know people were there, helping. But after a while, something changed. It was like I was radioactive. No one wanted to come too close.”

“I guess no one knows how to do it,” said Norma. “What to say.”