“I let you call me sweetheart only because I like you,” came the faint notes of the voice from the bed, eyes still closed. “But don’t make a habit.”

“There you go.” Clara chuckled. “Now you open your eyes and have a nice visit with your granddaughter, Miz Gottesfeld. She’s sitting right in the chair here beside you.”

The eyes fluttered open and Esther looked around blankly for a moment until she recognized Rebecca. She moved her hand very slightly toward Rebecca and smiled, closing her eyes again.

“I need to rest my eyes, but I know you’re here,” she whispered. “Just sit by me and I will keep knowing you are here.”

Rebecca had been sitting beside her grandmother’s bed for almost two hours, just watching her sleep, listening to her breathing, which kept stopping and starting, with longer and longer pauses. Rebecca realized that she had become light-headed at one point because she was unconsciously holding her breath each time Esther’s breathing stopped, and the intervals were growing so much longer. Rebecca idly considered turning the television sound up, but decided that she preferred the silence and the sound of Esther’s breathing. She wished she had thought to bring some music along. Esther liked Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky. (She had a natural affinity for the wild Russians, George had pointed out years before.) But Esther wouldn’t let her leave a CD player in the room, saying that she listened only when Rebecca or George were there anyway so if they wanted to play her some music that would be nice if they brought it along but she didn’t want a CD player of her own, it would just be a waste, a confusion, someone could break it or steal it. She had been giving away her things for several years, refusing to accept gifts, stripping down to bare essentials; it was her plan that by the time she died there would be almost nothing left of her worldly possessions that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase.

The regular nurse’s aide had come by to check on them and take Esther’s vital signs, and then Clara had come to urge Rebecca to stretch her legs, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, while she stayed with Esther. Now Rebecca had settled back in the visitor’s chair, pushed right up against the bed so she could hold her grandmother’s little blue-veined hand with its familiar leathery burn mark running up her wrist into her sleeve.

Rebecca studied the hand she held, so gnarled and breakable, the yellowed nails ridged and hornlike, the skin now oddly mottled and dark. The hand that had baked so many noodle puddings and sponge cakes, chopped so many beets for borscht, sewed so many millions of stitches.

Esther Gottesfeld had been famous for most of her life because she hadn’t died on a certain day when she was sixteen years old. It was an old story she had told many times, to Rebecca and to the strangers who always came by to ask about it, who always wanted to hear it again and again. She was now the last person alive who could tell the story that people wanted to hear one more time, and one more time.