While I was in Selma’s apartment on the phone with my father, the phone rang in my apartment. “Please call, Luisa,” Frederik said to the answering machine, and the answering machine cut him off. Frederik said: “Making a phone call is very complicated and this damn machine doesn’t make it any less compli—” and the answering machine cut him off. “I’m calling because I’m worried,” he began, and the answering machine cut him off. A tinny female voice said: “Your connection is maintained, your connection is maintained.” With that, Frederik had enough, and the answering machine announced: “End of message, end of message, end of message.”

At noon my mother made chicken soup, which Selma had always liked but now didn’t want. The shopkeeper brought a plastic bag full of Mon Chéris, each one already unwrapped. But Selma politely declined them, too.

Early that evening I went to the garage, because it was Tuesday and I had to chase away the deer. It was, in fact, standing in the meadow at the edge of the forest, the deer that, after several generations of deer, was no longer the original one. I opened the garage door and slammed it shut. I did it again and again, long after the deer had run away. Suddenly Palm appeared behind me.

“You don’t need to worry about the deer,” he said.

I slammed the door one last time and looked at Palm, standing there holding a Bible to his chest.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Fine, but I don’t think she has much time left. Are you coming?”

Palm followed me to the house but stopped at the doorstep. I turned around. “Come,” I said.

But Palm stayed where he was, as if afraid of the weak spots in the floor. He stood there for hours. And no one in the world looked more lost than Palm, standing there in front of the door.

“I’m hot,” Selma said. The bedroom window wouldn’t stay open. I opened it and propped a photography book against it so it wouldn’t swing wide open. It was very windy.

The optician sat on the edge of Selma’s bed. He hadn’t sat there since he’d told us about blue whales after Martin died.

Nothing in the room had changed since then. The alarm clock in diarrhea-colored imitation leather that ticked too loudly, the quilt and the large flower pattern, the fat lambs in the picture with the carefree shepherd boy, the bronze bedside lamp with a frosted glass shade shaped like a gnome’s hat: it was all still there. And again, the optician saw none of it. Again, the room would have been very beautiful in his eyes if he had eyes for anything other than Selma.

“I’d like something to read,” she said.