Tending to his chickens, he seemed himself: gathering eggs, feeding his geese and ducks, picking lilikoi and avocados, making his meals. Something might not be working inside him, a nerve circuit might have died, yet he was alive. But the stories, the smile, the head-bobbing—her worry was their sameness, and her anxiety wearied her.

He took no notice of her. He was asleep when she set off for work; he was tired on her return, so she saw only the limp man, doddering in his fatigue, and was often grateful, because she was tired too and hadn’t the strength to rouse him, even less to listen to another story she already knew.

Her weakness was like a reproach—her need to sit down to look at her laptop (she’d always done it standing), or bracing herself to clutch her tablet to look at a patient’s history, or to read a temperature or a heart rate or bloodwork. She’d climb a flight of stairs and feel lightheaded and need to steady herself on the handrail—and then the griping in her gut and the intimation that she was about to heave, her mouth filling with saliva.

Just as quickly it would pass and she’d regain the confidence that it was nothing, or something she’d eaten, a chunk of bad ahi, or—powerfully—that it was a visceral reaction to her worrying about Sharkey; how nothing had been the same since the accident. But she was cautioned too, and thought, I’m probably in worse shape than he is.

With her it was physical, and these days laid her low, napping in the nurses’ room at the hospital; with him it was a dropping of his spirit, a diminishment, seeming like obstinacy, the great flame of his being reduced to an afterglow, like the ocean after sunset, blackening, going cold. There were no words for his condition; for hers there were plenty: she was weak and nauseous and easily fatigued, she felt disgusted and sad and futile.

She was no use to him; he said he didn’t need her. She was superfluous, except at work.

And that was the great thing about a job, the sustaining illusion that you were necessary, and if you didn’t show up, the work would never get done. It was the conceit of your being essential. Except for a spell as a lifeguard, Sharkey had never had a job. He knew nothing of deadlines and emergencies, nothing of budgets, of money. He lived in his passion for the water: if the surf was up, he was up, in his car or on his board, all other promises were broken, all other urgencies faded into insignificance, his whole attention was fastened onto his being on a wave, even in rain and wind, sometimes in starlight, sometimes in moonless darkness.