I was halfway down when I realized that I’d left my iPhone in the house. Carefully, I went back up the steps and, facing the brass door knocker, remembered another evening, a summery September evening, when I’d first arrived in this exalted, arcadian corner of the city to take Glenna to Little Italy, and I knew that I’d want to stay forever. I ran my fingers over the cold brass and knocked, but Glenna didn’t answer. I tried the door and it opened. My phone was on the pedestal table. After sticking it in a jacket pocket, I called out, “Glenna!”

“Upstairs,” she called back, and I hiked up to the third floor.

Glenna was sitting in the bay-window seat. Her eyes were red, and she had a wadded-up ball of Kleenex in her hand.

“I forgot to tell you something,” I said.

“What’d you forget?”

“I forgot to tell you the truth.”

“Which is?”

“I couldn’t take losing you. Not again. Ever.”

Softly Glenna said, “We won’t lose each other.”

I sat with her and wondered how old I would have to be before I stopped thinking she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“We won’t,” she said. “You have to believ—”

“I do.”

Glenna was holding my hand when she said, “I want to travel more.”

“With me?”

“If you insist,” she said, and grinned. “But you didn’t tell me if you had a favorite place.”

A tugboat was heading up Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and I watched it move through the water, feeling the sun on my face and looking into the bright winter light.

“Here,” I said, putting my arms around her. “Right here.”

Epilogue

Summer: Two Years On

THE SIREN. THAT’S all I could perceive through the pain, the noise swelling in my ears until I felt like the hippopotamus squatting on my chest had started kicking me in the head.

“Let me straighten that,” the paramedic said, leaning over to adjust the straps of the oxygen mask covering my nose and mouth. He was a beefy kid in his twenties with a four-leaf-clover tattoo on his forearm. I wanted to ask him if the tattoo helped my chances, but I couldn’t talk, so I pointed at it.

“Tattoo’s mad lucky. Don’t worry ’bout nothin’.”

I wasn’t worried. I was too busy wishing the pain would stop.

At the hospital, they rushed me into the ER as if I had a malpractice attorney on retainer. A nurse, a perky redhead in a baby-blue smock, stood to my left and asked, “Mr. Meyers, is this the worst pain you ever felt?”

Before I could reply, a balding guy with the cheery demeanor of a mortician appeared on my right. “Sir, I’m Dr. Silt. Do you have a history?”

I lay on the gurney and peered up at their faces. The worst pain ever? Like most lives, mine had included its share of pain. A history? Hell yes. Who didn’t?

“Mr. Meyers?” the nurse said.

“I’m thinking.” I laughed, but neither the nurse nor Dr. Silt appeared to get the joke.