Carol insisted on going down to Warrenton for an extended stay, despite the fact that it meant her own treatments would be interrupted, since her health insurance wouldn’t apply out of state. Her oncologist in Wheeling disapproved, but recent scans hadn’t shown promise anyway; it was unclear if the treatments, which made for fevered, nauseous days and sleepless nights, were having any effect. Lisa lacked the will to fight her mother on this, though she disliked the idea for various reasons. Carol arranged her own travel, and arrived with many frozen casseroles stacked in a cooler, books and candies for Kimmy, and some thoughtful cards from family friends in Wheeling.

The moment Lisa set eyes on her mother, something that had been rock hard inside her for decades suddenly buckled and gave way and was gone. Carol’s face was grayish and wan beneath a knitted cap. Lisa ran to her mother and wept into her warm neck, which smelled different than it ever had before, yet so much like home that every cell in Lisa’s body responded with recognition.

Carol stayed for over a month, finding herself energized by the ways she discovered she could make herself useful. She finally learned her way around their kitchen, mustering the courage to use their fancy appliances. She woke when she heard Lisa make her way into Rae’s room in the middle of the night; she joined her there and they cried together. She helped with laundry, sorted the abundance of cards that arrived in the mail, brewed fresh coffee for visitors. She hadn’t felt so healthy or industrious since long before her diagnosis.

Carol decided it was time to go back to Wheeling when she retrieved the messages from her answering machine at home indicating that she was delinquent on her utility bills and in danger of being disconnected. She also listened to multiple concerned voicemails from her oncologist, neighbors, and friends from church. Lisa was saddened to see her mother go. They had shared so much in these weeks. Lisa felt she had been stripped down to muscle and bone and little more that resembled humanity; no hope, no dignity, no will to carry on. She was a raw body housing a broken heart, and nothing more. Carol saw it all and she didn’t flinch.

A few months after Rae’s death, Scott left Raslowe & Associates, taking a major pay cut to work in the legal department of a nonprofit in D.C. that provided counseling resources to families who couldn’t afford health insurance.

Lisa and Scott clung to one another desperately and hard; it seemed like a powerful gravitational field had attached them. They reached for each other involuntarily. They watched for glitches in one another’s daily consciousness and gently corrected them: a shirt put on backwards or mismatched socks, an extra packed lunch, dinner reservations made for four instead of three. They finished each other’s sentences when a train of thought became unclear, interrupted by something dark and deep within. Shock waves of grief kept them wary and turbulent, dubious of the world and nearly everything in it. But for one another, they were soft and steady and certain.