During the final week of her life I sat beside her bed in the house I grew up in. She was unrecognizable. My mother—Mom—had been reduced to some childlike, larval version of herself. Hairless and wheezing and addicted to morphine. Her hands were monstrous and skeletal. Her breath tinged with a chemical rot.

I read to her from her favorite Anne Tyler book: The Accidental Tourist. She was sixty-three pounds. She was blind and didn’t know her own name. Eventually, she dissolved into nothingness. Like a patch of snow in a surprising, warm winter rain.

I don’t have neurofibromatosis. I just have good old-fashioned cancer.

2

Bella’s office. A desk. A few chairs.

BELLA

(To the audience) Reading Fiction for Craft is a requirement for aspiring Creative Writing majors. The purpose of the class is to read classic novels and discuss authorial strategies. And then I conduct writing exercises designed to employ various techniques.

The first novel we always study at the beginning of the fall term is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Crime and Punishment. One of the many things I love about Dostoevsky’s masterwork is the way he renders his antihero. Discussions about Raskolnikov never disappoint. I’m always surprised by who connects with him, especially after he commits the two grisly murders. Gender doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Despite the fact that his two victims are female, the young women in class jump to his defense as aggressively as the young men, sometimes more so. It turns out that Raskolnikov is an equal-opportunity sympathy monger.

One day, while the class was engaged in a lively discussion about the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister, during the only lull in the conversation, a young man named Christopher Dunn said, “Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.”

It was the first time he’d contributed to the discussion without being solicited. Blurted from the back row, his statement silenced the class for a solid minute.

It was as if someone had tossed a dinner plate into the center of the room.

“Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.”

Just saying it out loud takes courage.

(A young man appears.)

CHRISTOPHER

Can I talk to you, Professor Baird?

BELLA

(To the audience) Christopher Dunn hovers at the threshold of my office. At the beginning of the term one of the first things I tell my students is that office hours are by appointment only.

CHRISTOPHER

If it’s a bad time I can come back.

BELLA

Come in.

(Christopher enters.)

(To the audience) He looks around a bit and is drawn to my lone piece of artwork: a framed twenty-by-twenty photo of a woman standing in the middle of a harvested cornfield. She’s in all black and tiny in the vast dead field. Spectral. In the distance, there’s a water tower with PLANO printed on it.

(To Christopher) That photographer graduated last year and she’s currently repped by a gallery in Chelsea.