“Why don’t you take a trip with your professor?” she said. “Isn’t that the kind of thing that makes you happy?”

I grabbed her wrist. “Why are you mad?”

She paused, considering her words. “It’s gotten so bad. I just wish you’d told me.”

“I did,” I said. “I tried.”

I called Louis from the train. Ordinarily, there would have been pride blocking my voice, getting in the way, but here I was, saying, “Take me anywhere,” adding, “If you can get away, I mean.”

“I’ll see what I can swing,” he said.

Crises made a difference to him. They could turn you into someone else, or they could become you. They were becoming.

He and his wife lived in TriBeCa, but he had a little cabin in Vermont near the Mad River Valley. That’s where we were going. I think he told his wife it was a place where he could find himself—when really, of course, it was a place he brought women. I didn’t kid myself. I knew I was part of a pattern. I’d been up once before, during the summer. The woods had been full of spindly mosquitoes, vicious in their veering, and moist heat that felt like the breath of a drunkard telling you a secret. I’d glimpsed important truths: I could tuck my pants into my socks or smear the stronger chemicals into my skin, but the bugs would always come around, and they would always leave with a little more of my blood; Louis would never make a life with me. These revelations were anecdotal and syntactically parallel: the trouble with insects, the trouble with expectations.

Now we were moving through the snow in his four-wheel-drive rental. He wanted to know everything about my terrible situation back home: Could Grandma bathe? Could she speak? Where could I see, especially, the outline of her bones? He’d made his life’s work from crafting words about the broken bodies of women—he saw something sacred in them, something breathtaking.

“It helps,” I told him. “Telling you all this.”

“This is hard,” he said. “And it’ll get harder. You’ll get yourself through it.”

You will. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what he would give and what he wouldn’t.

We drove past strip-mall buffets and the skeletons of fallen barns. We stopped for lunch in a town called Windsor, at a pizza parlor with two windows. One said PIZZA. The other said & FUN. They were full of ferns. You couldn’t see anything but leaves inside.

“This place used to serve pizza,” I said. “Before a ficus ate the owner.”

“Ah,” he said. “Carnivorous plants.”

There was a silence. He paused. I paused.

He said, “Should we eat?”

We ate pizza with pineapples and black olives. The marinara sauce was runny from canned juice. Each bite tasted saltier than the last. I didn’t make any more jokes.

I called my mother from the edge of Windsor. Louis said we were about to go off the grid. My mom didn’t seem worried that I’d be out of range.