“Including aplastic anemia and the common cold. Don’t you see?” he said desperately. “Hope is what medicine is really about. I finally learned that this year.”

She shook her head. “It’s no good, Adam,” she said quietly. “What kind of marriage would it be with that hanging over our heads? Not only for you. For me, too.”

“We have things like that hanging over our heads anyhow. The son of a bitch of a bomb may go off tomorrow. I could die in the next year or be killed in half a dozen different ways. There are no guarantees. You just have to live life while you can, take it in both hands and squeeze it to get the last drop of juice out of it.”

She didn’t answer.

“You need guts to do that. Perhaps you prefer Ralphie’s way. Just tune out. That’s easier.”

He had no other arguments. He felt exhausted and futile and he drove in silence, not knowing how to make her understand.

In a little while they became aware of something up ahead, a convention of gulls, wheeling and squawking and dropping toward the ground as if they thought they were hawks. There were cars parked all along the right shoulder of the road.

“What is it?” he said.

“Where are we, Brewster? The herring run, I guess,” she said.

He parked and they got out and went to the edge of the stream. He had never seen anything like it. The fish were stacked almost solidly, bank to bank, facing upstream, a fantastic flotilla of dorsal fins splitting the surface of the water, beneath the dorsals the greenish-grayish-silvery bodies iridescent, the ventral fins gracefully fanning, the forked tails, hundreds of thousands of forked tails, waving in gentle rhythm as they waited—for what?

“What are they?” he asked.

“Alewives. My grandfather used to take me to see this every spring.”

The herring gulls screamed and feasted. On the banks human predators dipped flapping fish from the brook with nets and pails that could not miss. Some of the children were flinging the live fish at one another.

As quickly as a hole was formed in the almost-solid mass of fish it was filled in by the patient, slow-swimming bodies moving up from the sea.

“From how far away do they come?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe New Brunswick. Or Nova Scotia. They come back to lay their eggs in the fresh water where they were born themselves.”

“Think of all the natural enemies they had to pass through to make it,” he said, awed. “Killer whales, sharks, stripers, all the other big fish.”