The bed feels like a boat on choppy water. She pulls her foot out from under the covers and rests it on the floor for ballast. That’s what they used to say to do if you were drunk and had the whirlies. The phone rings in the living room and she hears Sarah’s voice against the sound of the television. In those old TV shows and movies way back when, the husband and wife had to keep one foot on the floor during the bed scenes. It meant everything was friendly instead of passionate. Well, the trick is working here tonight, the nausea is receding.

A wand of light appears and then widens; Bone’s head is framed in the doorway. He pads across the room on velvet cat paws and freezes when he sees her bare foot on the floor. He stares at it in the dark with wide terrified eyes, then takes his place next to Nimbus at the foot of the bed. The girls were helping her burn leaves all afternoon and now the cats smell like marijuana smoke. In this morning’s vision, her first husband was standing waist-deep in some unkempt garden of theirs, hair in a ponytail, a small frown on his face, and a joint behind his ear. Back in New York, one of her chemo doctors had discreetly mentioned marijuana for nausea, and some kind soul had given her a plate of pot brownies that she had taken like medicine, eating one each morning for breakfast. She had wandered her Brooklyn apartment in a state of muffled calm, straightening bedspreads and dish towels and staring slack-jawed out the window until the monster awoke, nudged her back into the bathroom, pushed her face in the toilet.

Cheri stretches her toes reflexively, making sure they still work. She’s seen pictures of her spine, ghostly negatives resting against a light box, and the cancer looks tiny, like a baby’s grasping fingers. The doctor used a pencil with bite marks on it to show her the metastases: Here, here, and a tiny bit here. Her relaxation is so complete that the bed now has the soothing, side-to-side rocking motion of a train car. Scenery floods past, mostly clumps of rocks and little hillocks scattered with dark green trees. Here, here, and a tiny bit here. A farm, a collie dog loping next to the tracks, and then the sudden startling face of a long-dead uncle. It seemed like he had shouted something but she couldn’t catch it.

“What?” she says into the dark.

“Nothing,” Sarah whispers from the doorway. “I was just standing here for a second.”