But there she is on that simple little island, home to only ten or fifteen houses, feeling confused herself, wondering if dementia is setting in. Now that she is almost in her sixties, she feels worrisome anguish every time she forgets a name or misplaces her reading glasses or walks into a room completely forgetting what it was she’d meant to get there. Watching her friends’ parents—and, lately, some of her friends—battle with Alzheimer’s makes her worry about her memory the way she’d once worried about her weight. She completes crossword and sudoku puzzles every day and takes Spanish lessons. But this afternoon, she wonders why she worries so much about staying sharp. She almost wishes her memory could be erased like the ink on a dry-erase board, or at least the bad parts. She wishes she could only remember the exquisite pleasure of new love without feeling the horrible pain of loss.

She pulls to the side of the road, throws her car into park, grips the wheel, and lets out a scream. It feels good, necessary, cleansing. The sound scares a heron wading in the lily pads. It abruptly takes flight, seeking a quieter refuge.

There are only two points on the island, like the barbed end of a snake’s tongue, so what’s her problem? She’s crazy, as absentminded as Bayard! She backs up and returns, and again she can’t find the sweet little cabin with the fieldstone fireplace and the sunporch with the rusty screens. Where were all those sugar maples with squirrels and raccoons rustling in the branches? Gone—gone! But then she spies the shed she and Arthur had so urgently made love against. She realizes his sweet little cottage has been torn down and replaced with a modern, glassy structure so flashy and contemporary that it seems to have been designed with the sole intent of obscuring the past.

She turns off her car and pulls the mirror down to inspect her face, haunted as always by the lines from Auden: “O look, look in the mirror, / O look in your distress.” She applies a fresh coat of lipstick, kisses a napkin, and steps out of the car. She adjusts her outfit, now wrinkled and damp. She’d chosen it carefully: a simple black pantsuit with a colorful silk scarf to conceal the infirmity of the skin around her neck. She wanted to return to East Troy looking more confident and classy than she felt.