I understood why Em had told me I couldn’t look at her like this. How would it ever work, for me to love her that way? I must be crazy, I was thinking. I’d seen Em’s penis pantomime; I knew how she felt about penises. I felt so out of it. I might as well marry a skier who works in publishing, I thought. And Em had just lost the love of her life. How could I look at Em like this? How could I even dream of loving her that way? I went to bed feeling so ashamed. You have to be careful what you show or act out to a pantomimist. You better not pantomime those things you can’t take back.

42. A NORMAL LIFE

On the second night, Em went back and forth between my bed and Mr. Barlow’s. Em would lie back on the pillow and not move, but she couldn’t sleep, and she was too restless to stay in bed. I knew better than to try to hug her; I didn’t even touch her hand. I kept my back turned to her and pretended I was sleeping. Once, when I actually was asleep, I felt her arm around me and her breath on my shoulder, or I just dreamed this—for old times’ sake, or because I couldn’t forget how Em had hugged me, the way she would bump me with her head when she locked her hands around me from behind.

Em was getting dressed when I woke up. I looked away; I didn’t see what she was wearing. When I went into the kitchen, Elliot Barlow asked me if Em was going to church. It was Sunday morning, but we both knew Em never went to church. “Em is dressed like she’s going to church, or to a funeral,” the snowshoer said.

Nora had been blunt about her death; she wanted no “remembrance bullshit,” as she put it. “When I die, let there be nothing—I want you to do fuck-all about my dying,” Nora had told us. Considering the unlikelihood of Em going to church, Mr. Barlow and I remembered a more recent conversation. Nora had been railing against John Cardinal O’Connor and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s opposition to safe-sex education in the city’s public schools. We’d heard Nora on this subject too many times; Mr. Barlow and I were barely listening. We knew O’Connor had campaigned against LGBT nondiscrimination laws, and how he’d described homosexual behavior as sinful—even Em’s gay but homo-hating dad knew that. And of course Cardinal O’Connor was opposed to condom distribution. Who hadn’t heard about that?