A FEW DAYS later, when Sarah is dozing and Laurie has gone for an evening walk on the Heath, Lissa goes downstairs to feed Ruby. While the cat is busy at her bowl, she fills the old watering can in the dim kitchen, goes outside, and drenches the beds with water. The garden is full of the smells of evening—the jasmine, the honeysuckle, and the lavender—and the low humming of the bees. As she makes her rounds, she feels how her mother loved her garden—easily, simply, without rancor or friction or pain. She feels her mother’s choices, her mother’s care, her mother’s subjectivity like a veil hovering over this small patch of earth, merging with the night. Perhaps, she thinks, this is what remains.

She thinks of smoking a cigarette but does not. Instead she goes back into the house, puts the teapot on the stove, and makes herself a cup of tea. She takes it back up the stairs, her eyes adjusting to the lack of light. As soon as she enters the room, she senses it. She puts down her tea and walks slowly over to where her mother lies in her bed. She lifts Sarah’s hand, which is cool, and she rubs her mother’s thumb with her own. At first she wants to rub and rub, to rub the life back into her mother, the way you would rub warmth back into someone who is cold, but then she understands that she cannot—that the time for that is past—and so she stops, and holds her mother’s hand instead. She reaches over and brushes her hair gently from her forehead. Someone has shut the window—it must have been Laurie—and Lissa stands and opens it. Then she comes back to sit beside her mother, to hold her hand.

THE MORNING AFTER Sarah’s death, Ina arrives. She is a hospice nurse and knows what to do. Lissa watches as Ina unpacks her bag beside Sarah’s body: small brown bottles with stoppers, scissors, string, muslin squares. Ina is small and steady and purposeful. “Can I watch?” she asks her.

“You can help,” says Ina. “If you like.”

First Ina straightens Sarah’s limbs, then takes her head in her hands and moves it gently from side to side, placing it down on the pillow, placing another pillow beneath her jaw. “We’ll clean her now,” says Ina.

Lissa fetches boiled water from the kitchen, and Ina adds lavender oil and sage, and soaks swabs of muslin in the fragrant water. The women clean Sarah’s armpits, her chest, her legs. Ina swabs in between her legs. She takes a fresh square of muslin and folds it, placing it in a pair of clean knickers.

“She might leak,” she says matter-of-factly. “We all leak.”

These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, at the point of death.