This evening, he called Calista en route to ask if he could visit, and she invited him for dinner. “Maria cooked a scrumptious brisket and left a rice-and-beans casserole, and as we speak, I’m making a salad.”

Maria Alvarez shopped and cooked, her sister Josefa did the cleaning, and one or the other of them looked after Calista for a few hours every day, though the indomitable Mrs. Carlino could otherwise take care of herself. In fact, even after all this time, she complained to David that he was pampering her inexcusably by providing this level of care.

When she answered the door, she was wearing white athletic shoes and a white kimono with a spare pattern of red hibiscus. She placed a hand on his chest and leaned in unerringly to kiss his cheek. “What a sweet surprise,” she said. “I’ve missed you, child.”

“I’ve missed you, too, Calista. Very much.”

When he was in Manhattan, he called her once a week, and when here in Newport, he visited often.

Her blue eyes searched his face as though they could map his features and know his mood by some sense other than sight. “Are you all right, David?”

“I’m fine. I should have called you from New York to let you know I was coming, but events got away from me.”

As she welcomed him into the apartment and closed the door, she said, “I was going to eat from my special tray with its separate little compartments, but now that you’re here, we can use plates if you’ll just set the table. It’s warm enough to dine on the deck.”

She had a stainless-steel cart with which she wheeled food and utensils to the table where she was taking her meal. He used it to transport plates and napkins and whatnot to the deck and then to convey the salads, rolls, and wine.

She moved with ease about the apartment and onto the deck, the steps between one thing and another counted so often and memorized so completely that she didn’t consciously count them anymore, but she knew her way as instinctively as a fish swimming in the depth of a night sea knows what temperatures it must seek and currents it must follow to go where it wishes and find what it needs.

She had been blind since the age of six, when her severely alcoholic mother failed to seek medical treatment for Calista’s eye infection and chose instead to treat it with herbal remedies more in line with her faith in holistic healing.

Calista’s husband—Emily’s father—married with the expectation that a blind woman could be easily controlled, oppressed, abused. Five years later, realizing his error, he abandoned wife and child when Emily was four. Mother and daughter had lived a hardscrabble life for a long time thereafter.