But they wouldn’t give her a mirror. She could feel the right side of her face under the bandages. She was sure she was blind in that eye. It felt like a meteor had crashed there.

“You’re going to look a fright for my mother,” she says, her voice low.

“When’s that, now?” he mutters unhappily.

“Thursday,” she answers. “And Rose says Percy is worse next door. She’s sent for their daughters. I listened to her braying into the phone all yesterday while I hung the laundry. July is going to be a long month.” She taps the spoon against the edge of the cup and drops it the last few inches to the floor; it hits the softwood with a flat, contracted ping. Holding the cup in one hand, Sylvia dips two fingers into the slushy paste and gently begins to smooth it over the hard, knotted bee stings.

Her fingers on his skin. His softness, the radiating heat of his burning face. It feels oddly different to her, new in a way. New as the stranger who came back to her hotel in London six years ago, as she was leaving Cambridge for spring break. The ex-Cam poet with the broody cowlick, with the voice she could hear in the soles of her feet. The one with Shakespeare in his pocket who met her at the train station with his friend. His friend, his groomsman, who soon disappeared. All the next week in Paris, magnolias blossoming along the river, she could think of nothing but him. His fingers on her throat, her ribs. Magnolias blossoming, flushed and heavy scented, parting like lips as she walked through the gravel of the Tuileries.

The cool milky paste is dripping down his neck. Into his thick dark eyebrows, down his shirt collar. Neither of them says a word. She holds her hand to this new face. Ted doesn’t even look up. He doesn’t move. She catches the drips with her hand. She wipes them away with her finger.

*   *   *

Sylvia rakes the lawn her husband mowed, the blades cut down like overrun soldiers, broadcast with random finality over the yard. Her shadow looms over the clipped grasses. She covers their shocked faces with a bag.

*   *   *

Old Percy across the lane, blue-faced, wheezing, is dead. Three months ago he had stooped through her April daffodils in his billowing jacket, waving, his eyes soupy in his collapsing face. He had called to her through the window glass. She couldn’t understand what he was trying to say: the wind was eating his voice, as something else had eaten the rest of him. What was he doing in her garden? It wasn’t a public park. She couldn’t hear and turned away.