Emma and I collapse into each other for a moment, stricken and panicked. Then the nurse leads us back out to the living room and positions us on either side of the bed. Touch her, she says, and we do. At some point Emma leans in and speaks quietly. In less than five minutes, we don’t have her anymore. She’s gone.

I left India a day before Emma and a week before Kathy, who stayed behind to attend a book festival in Rajasthan and give a reading. On my flight, somewhere on the giant, auditorium-size plane, there was a baby who couldn’t stop crying. It was worrisome after a while, the baby growing audibly weary, and eventually two flight attendants started moving up the darkened aisles, quietly asking for medical help. The man across the aisle from me woke up briefly to say he was a doctor and what was wrong. The flight attendant crouched next to him and said the mother was vomiting uncontrollably and the baby had a fever. The doctor waved her away and closed his eyes again. The flight attendant stood for a moment in the aisle, her face impassive, then moved on.

Four a.m. in Newark and there are only a few cabs and a lot of people. At the stand I tell a man I’m going to Eighty-Eighth and West End, our pied-à-terre, and he takes my money while another man stows my bags. As soon as we’re on the highway, the driver announces that a mistake was made and it’s going to cost more.

This, apparently, is what I’ve been waiting for. We yell at each other for about ten miles, him threatening to take me back to Newark and me telling him to go ahead, asshole, it’s a fixed fucking rate. Stony silence as we cross the bridge into Manhattan and the streets begin slipping past. Every moment of your life brings you to the moment you’re experiencing now. And now. And now. I’ve never been on the streets this early, predawn, and the driver agrees that it’s eerie and perfect.

“They say India: I’ll Never Do It Again,” he tells me in his Russian accent, decanting my bags onto the curb and accepting a tip.

The street is shrouded and cold and the bags are heavy. I drag them into the foyer and leave them at the foot of the stairway. The steps look endless from the bottom, I can hardly carry my own weight, but halfway up, our door comes into view and under it a narrow band of light. M. left a lamp on for me.

Then a shadow passes through the wand of light, and I begin crying because he’s awake, in the living room, waiting.

We’ll always be together.