I showed Em what the snowshoer had written, not bringing up anything remote, wild, watery, or unshored. For a writer like Em—who was waiting for an upheaval of some kind before she finally read Moby-Dick—I thought “the region of the strange Untried” might be enough of an upheaval.

“I intend to read that novel someday,” was all Em said; she was not sufficiently upheaved to start reading Melville.

Like me, Em imagined that the snowshoer might leave her something in writing. The little English teacher, it turned out, had left more than a literary quotation for Em, who was contacted by a lawyer representing Elliot Barlow’s estate. Em was a beneficiary of the snowshoer’s will; Mr. Barlow had bequeathed her the late writing team’s apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street.

Grace declared that Em was “property rich”; she’d inherited real estate in midtown Toronto and on the Upper East Side of New York. “If your new novel isn’t the breakout book for you that I believe it will be, you can unload the house in Toronto—the snowshoer’s apartment is small, but people would kill to be given a closet on the Upper East Side,” Grace told Em in that sure-of-herself, New Yorker way. Grace had never been to Toronto, but she was confident that New York was superior to any other city in the world—and Em had been given a pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side.

To be fair, Grace wasn’t alone in believing Em would never move to Canada—as Em occasionally threatened to do. It seemed stubborn to me that Em refused to sell the house in Toronto, but she insisted she wanted a place to go if she ever left the United States. It had been a while since I’d seen Em do her seagull thing—her arms spread like a seagull’s motionless wings, which sometimes meant she was thinking about drifting back to Canada. Yet a drifting seagull was also Em’s way of pantomiming Ronald Reagan’s laissez-faire abstention from interfering with the AIDS epidemic—this was what Em’s seagull thing had meant to most of the regulars at the Gallows Lounge. To be fair, Grace was ever the champion of Em’s writing.

When my mom got sick and the snowshoer and Em left Manhattan to come to Vermont, Grace introduced Em to the booksellers at the Northshire. Grace saw to it that the bookstore had Em’s backlist in stock before she got to town. Grace had been telling the booksellers that Emily MacPherson’s new novel would be her breakout book.