Next morning I got up really early and it was beautiful outside, warm and everything blue and sort of ruined-looking, the little courtyard with its rusted wrought-iron table and broken clay pots and feral cats peeking out from the foliage, and I saw a narrow crooked set of steps and climbed up and stood on a crumbling balustrade and looked at the blue, blue sky and a flock of green, green parrots through the crumbling archways. When Kathy came out on her canes I said, “Hi, I’m up here,” and she who could not climb said, “Tell me what you see,” and I described everything because I could see the whole little town, all the backyards, and how some people had goats tied on their roofs and other odd and (to me) terrible little details. I was standing up there when Emma came out and I talked to her too.

Emma and I were so sad about Kathy and communicated it without speaking, and our sadness, our worry, and our silent understanding became like another person on the trip. While I was up there, after framing myself under a broken arch against the sky so Emma could take a picture of me, I wandered along the back edge and looked down and saw—holy shit—the open-air kitchen in which the guys had prepared our dinner the night before. It wouldn’t be possible to describe even for me, the describer, but it was as squalid and rudimentary as anything I have ever seen, and I called down to Emma, “You have to come up here,” and so she obliged by climbing the little stone steps and I pointed down at the kitchen and she had a mute, smiling conniption while Kathy gazed peacefully up at us from her iron table with the broken clay pot and its tattered pink geranium. The silent person between Emma and me was freaking out, but not us. We were perfectly calm. We had the kind of look on our faces that my sister had when the team of doctors told my young nephew that he had cancer and it might be a kind that little kids don’t recover from. He had refused to listen to them and stared only at his mom, whose eyes were fixed on the doctors, her expression not worried at all, smiling almost. When the doctors filed out, my sister said, “Okay, Aunt Jo Jo and I are going to the cafeteria for malts. What kind do you want?” And this little boy who refused to look at or trust the doctors but trusted his parents utterly said whatever he said, chocolate. And when we got down the hall, Linda fell like a tree.