The snake is exactly the same dappled-dirt color as the ground, but the rattles, black and white, stand out starkly, as they are meant to. The biggest rattlesnake I’ve ever seen stretching all the way across the trail, thick as my forearm, the head somewhere in a creosote bush, giving me leave to pull out my phone and call Mary, back at the rental house.

Other people’s fear always takes my own away. I let her instruct me not to get any closer, to turn around, which I wouldn’t have any choice but to do, but then I take a couple of pictures for later of just how enormous and palpable it is and how it’s wearing a scrunchie. I move carefully to the left and suddenly see its head, mingled in with the creosote branches, and it’s lifted, moving slightly, tracking me. Licking the air. This reminds me of something but in the moment I can’t think what it is. Hooded eyes, the head nodding ever so slightly, like a jealous man or the snakes in India that live coiled inside baskets. Cruel confinement, but nobody cares because it’s a snake, just like nobody cares because it’s a cow, a dog, a litter of puppies smashed on a road, a starved cat carrying half a desiccated rat. Kathy on the phone that time: A group of men doing something to a pig.

Emma and Kathy want to spend a night in the glass-and-marble Lake Palace, but I stay behind in the room with its sepia window and its private courtyard where I can read my book and pretend to still be sick. I tell M. over e-mail, sent from the fragrant, lotus-blossomed office on the first floor, that I am cheaping out, but in fact I can’t bear the thought of it. People on glass floors shouldn’t use crutches.

There are e-mails from him about our dogs, the snow, my favorite duck named Ira whose wife died but who now, after months of feather-shedding grief, has a new wife he’s harassing. Standing on top of her, pushing her head under water. The usual. I linger, reading and rereading, until the young woman behind the desk brings me a cup of tea. On the saucer, a tiny purple flower and a small spoon holding a cube of sugar.

“You are here with Kathy-ji?” she asks me. “How is she?”

She’s fine, I say. She’s dying.

“Yes,” the young woman says.

But she wasn’t then, not yet. In the evening I walk down to the lake through the grainy twilight and a man takes me across to the palace and another man helps me disembark and hands me off to another man who seats me in the gleaming lobby to wait while my friends are summoned. The men are all in crisp uniforms and I am wearing a sheer black dress and some jewelry. I know because there are pictures, and in them we all look happy, eating dinner in a corner banquette under a chandelier, toasting each other with stomach-settling seltzers, holding our dessert spoons over some gooey shared mess that isn’t sweet enough.