“My father can’t reach my mother because she left him after he’d left her because she was always asking herself if she should leave him,” I said. “And he says hello.”

“Can’t they leave you out of it?” Frederik asked, and lay back down. “Give me your hand.”

I scooted to the edge of my bed and stretched my arm out. It was just the right length for Frederik to hold my hand. We lay there holding hands.

“Shall we drive to the village tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yes, I’d like to,” he answered.

We lay there like that until Frederik finally fell asleep and his hand slipped from mine.

SIXTY-FIVE PERCENT

Frederik and I sat in my car. It was pouring rain and the windshield wipers wagged furiously back and forth. “I can hardly see a thing,” I said.

Frederik leaned toward me and wiped the windshield with his sleeve. He was humming a song I didn’t recognize. I thought of the list I’d carried around the village in the hope that more of the points would be observed than just the new pair of pants, which I had, in fact, bought. I leaned forward, very close to the streaming, fogged-up windshield as if there were something on it to decipher. Alaska, asleep on the back seat, found it all very cozy.

“Breathe, Luisa,” Frederik said, and cleared another patch for me to see through. The optician had been repeating this constantly since he’d started reading books on Buddhism.

“I’ve been breathing all my life,” I said.

Frederik put his hand on my stomach. “Yes, but into here. You shouldn’t breathe only with your upper body.”

Selma was right. I’d been confusing two things. Frederik was bowling me over, but not like a bailiff or a heart attack, and, as directed by my list, I was not drawing a blank. Here it is, I thought, that famous here-and-now the optician was always talking about. Here I was, although I could hardly see a thing, right in the middle of the here-and-now instead of in my usual when-and-if. I took Frederik’s hand and there was a loud bang. I was sure one of the bands around my heart had snapped, but it was a piston.

Frederik ran through the pouring rain to a phone booth, Selma’s number in hand, to let her know that we would be late and to ask her to use the optician’s German automobile club card to send a mechanic. Alaska and I waited in the car, and suddenly I noticed my feet were getting wet. I looked down. A deep puddle had formed around the clutch and the gas and brake pedals. I looked in the footwell of the back seat and saw water there, too. I got out and circled the car with Alaska, without knowing exactly what I was looking for.