He looked out the window just as a plastic garbage bag blew into the large V of the oak at the edge of his yard. The black bag snagged on a ridge of bark and began to flap and flutter as the Danzigers came into view, returning from their walk. The wind was now at their backs, but the two had slowed to half their previous pace. Something wasn’t quite right. Tom looked again and realized they had made a switch. Mr. D was now bent over his wife’s walker, and Mrs. D was walking with the support of her husband’s cane.

For reasons Tom could not explain, one eye began to water. He was witnessing an act of love.

He wanted to be loved. Or even liked. Love would be a bonus. He asked himself, Isn’t that what everyone wants? Ida and I loved each other in comforting ways. We were together many years. The emptiness of this house is too much to bear.

He looked at the strip of paper again. A discussion group about grief. Well, maybe on Tuesday evening he would walk over to Cassie’s and see what was going on. His attendance wouldn’t hurt anybody, would it? Maybe he would just go.

Facing Up

ADDIE

By late afternoon Saturday, the sky was awash with charcoal clouds nudging one another, shaping and reshaping until they merged into an edgeless mass. Addie leaned back in her living-room chair, feet raised on the jute ottoman she’d put at the top of her want-to-keep list years ago, when she and Tye split. She was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth and rose reluctantly during the abrupt silence that followed the tumultuous “Ode to Joy.”

She put away the CD and thought about Vienna, and about Beethoven in his fifty-fourth year. He was on stage the night of the premiere, but because of his deafness was uncertain of the moment he should turn to face the audience after the final note. A woman close to him on stage came to the rescue and gave a signal, hoping no one else would notice. Trying to save him from embarrassment but wanting him to know that the audience was applauding wildly behind his back.

Joy. Beauty. Music saves me, Addie thought. Music saves us all. I could not get through a day without listening to music of some kind.

She pictured Beethoven, entirely deaf while composing his magnificent final symphony, but never hearing a note except in his internal imaginings. Imaginings that, for him, would not have been silent at all. His interior creative self. Would the Ninth be the same if he’d been able to hear? This would always be unknown. Every time Addie listened to the final feverish note, she wanted to sit upright, fill her lungs with . . . well, song, actually. Yes, song. When she thought about this, she realized that she hardly ever sang.

She went to the kitchen to make tea and returned to the armchair. Her ankles were definitely swollen, thicker. She was putting on weight. She looked over at the Montreal letters, which were in chronological order atop a pile of books. The first had arrived eight months ago and was about the lumps. She knew the words by heart. At the time, Sybil was refusing to text or email. She refused to use her iPad while she was an in-patient after surgery. She wanted nothing to do with smartphones. What she did want was to articulate her thoughts clearly; to do this, she wrote them out in longhand. Now, all these months later, she had access to computer and phone but was too weak to use them or even to care.