My heart skittered like mice under my ribs. He’d never said that to me before.

“Did you miss me?” I said.

He said, “I’m glad to be with you now.”

I lay on my back and hugged myself to cover my breasts. I looked at him. The stubble on his cheeks caught bits of glow from the lamp. I wanted him badly. He didn’t feel ashamed of anything he was saying. He owned trees! And he was not afraid of hurting other people. He made this seem like an important kind of bravery.

When we got back to Windsor, my phone told me I’d missed sixteen calls. They were all from my mother. I called her back, and she told me Grandma Lucy had collapsed. “Not like the other times,” she said. “She had a cardiac event.”

“What’s that?”

“You better come,” she said. They’d taken Lucy to Greenwich Hospital.

She was deep inside a coma by the time I got there. Tom had already arrived. I was the last one. My mother was holding a book called Precious Hours that was covered in flowers. It looked like a book you would buy at the hospital gift store. She was pacing the third-floor ICU when I found her. She looked tired, and there was a run in her panty hose the width of my thumb. “You’re here,” she said. “You’re finally here.”

I felt the sob rise, could do nothing against it. “She’s dead?”

“She’s on life support. Her mind is gone.”

I put my arms around her. She felt like a little girl, so much smaller than I was. She smelled like stale sweat and, more faintly, like coffee. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

She told me she’d given Grandma Lucy some pudding. That was when it happened, all of a sudden, for no reason she could see.

“Pudding,” I said. “She ate a lot of that.”

She gave me a look, and I realized I’d interrupted her in the middle of a thought. “She told me I had a run in my panty hose. That was the last thing she said.”

“I can’t believe it,” I told her.

Actually, I could.

“I’m just glad you’re here. I’m glad we’re all here.”

It wasn’t true, what she said. Matilda’s name was never spoken in that hospital room, not once.

They say the body knows things, can sense presence even when the mind has gone. I wondered if bodies felt absence as well. I saw a shudder pass through the collapsing cage of my grandmother’s chest, making her arms spasm as if they’d touched something electric. “These are movements the mind doesn’t even know about,” the doctor said. “She’s already gone.” For a moment I imagined she was clutching the daughter she’d never mentioned, the one whose body was too far away to touch.