Lil liked to say maybe it was a match made in tragedy, but they had built a beautiful and happy life on top of it. The knowledge and experience of tragedy groaned and heaved like an old furnace in the basement—and ultimately, sent waves of warmth that radiated and lit the good parts. Now, fragments of memory course through his veins like the pieces of plaque that threaten to seize his heart.

Frank often thinks of the man whose responsibility was to walk ahead to warn any approaching train—all of those people, their lives in his hands—and then he slipped on the ice and broke the fusee flare he carried. Maybe the man woke early that day and he chose the wrong shoes, he didn’t prepare; he slipped on the ice, and down he went. The snow was falling, and perhaps the sight had made him think things he rarely thought. He might have even looked out and beyond the ice-glazed trees and thought how beautiful it was, how excited his children would be, how good it would feel to get home and slip beneath the heavy pile of quilts where his warm wife was already sleeping. But he slipped and he went down, and how easy to make a mistake. And then one mistake begat another mistake: Doesn’t every human make mistakes?

Hadn’t Frank made a mistake those times, slipped and fell when Lil was so preoccupied, first with the kids, perfect mother, having lost hers, and then later, drawn to the sick and dying, while ignoring the living; it was like she chose to stand there by the exit door and see everyone off, bid them farewell, like some modern-day Charon paddling the Acheron. As if it was her calling, a kind of obsession, either to punish herself or to feel closer to her mother. At the time, she was lost to him, in a place he had no desire to visit.

He wanted to forget what he’d done, and who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t want to get beyond the turbulence into calmer waters. Of course he wanted to forget, and in fact, he had succeeded in doing just that until Lil brought it up again, as if referencing something they had been meaning to get around to, like cleaning out the garage or shredding old tax returns. How could he know what was on her mind? How could he know what was bothering her unless she just came right out and said it in clear spoken syllables?