Though he and Irene had never spoken of it openly, Matt knew they both harbored some envy toward Paul and Helen Brashler.  Matt’s own envy stemmed not so much from the money Paul made as from his assumption that Paul had a better time at work than he and Irene did.  Matt had supposed that presiding over what was essentially a big toy store for grown-ups must be more fun than trying to figure out ways to help single mothers stretch a welfare check.

He suppressed a yawn.  “How much?”

“You have good taste” was such an obvious line; it ought not to have worked on Irene, who was no fool, but Matt saw that it did work.  She seemed suddenly taller than herself, holding herself straighter as she sat on that sofa.  “It feels wonderful,” she said.  She spread her arms long across its back, crossed her slender legs.  It was as though she already owned the sofa.

“I can tell it’s comfortable just by looking at it,” said Matt, and Paul laughed.  Paul often laughed at things Matt said when Matt was not intending to be funny.

But over the years Matt had, for the most part, come around to Irene’s way of thinking.  What Irene said was generally true: if you wanted something but you stopped yourself from buying it, gave yourself a few days to think about it, chances were the wanting would go away.  If it didn’t, if you found yourself still thinking about the object, then and only then could you consider buying it.  Or rather, a more economical version of it.  A used version of it.  A second-hand version of your heart’s desire.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I must have drifted off.  This sofa is very comfortable.”

“What about fifteen percent?” said Matt.  “If it’s been on the floor a while, it’s a little shopworn, right?”  Irene, beside him, went very still.  But after all, how could it hurt to ask?

Paul hesitated, then smiled.  “Well, why not?  Fifteen percent it is.  And how’s this for service?  Normally we don’t do deliveries on Saturday, but I have a guy working today on a special order.  I could get that couch delivered to you at the end of the day today.”  He winked at them.  “A special deal for my best neighbors.”

Paul and Helen never seemed in the least put out by Matt and Irene’s lack of reciprocity.  They kept inviting them up for cocktails.  Matt sometimes thought the Brashlers were motivated as much by a desire to show off their house as by simple neighborliness — but either way it was hard to say no, since they lived so close, especially when Lizzie was included in the invitation.  Lizzie loved going to the big house on the hill — Helen showered her with compliments and attention, and on summer nights she was allowed to play croquet on their lawn.  Lizzie had developed an only child’s ingenuity — there was almost no game Matt could think of that she hadn’t figured out how to play just as happily by herself as with others.

“I don’t know,” said Irene irritably.  “That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Hell,” said Paul, and swirled the ice in his drink.  “I’m the least prejudiced man I know.  Harry Weinstein is one of my good friends.  I’ve got a colored guy working as a deliveryman in my store right now, and if he proves himself, I won’t hesitate to promote him to the floor, let him try his hand at sales.  Nobody can accuse me of being prejudiced.  I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with a club that makes its own rules.  Every kid on every playground is a member of a club – ‘No Girls Allowed.’”  He turned to Matt.  “You can’t tell me you weren’t a member of a club like that when you were a kid.”  He didn’t wait for Matt’s answer.  “If Harry Weinstein wants to belong to a club that won’t let me in because I’m not Jewish, that’s fine with me.  If my guy Mark wants to belong to a club that says, ‘Negroes Only.  No Whites Allowed,’ why shouldn’t he have that right?”

This, Matt thought, was exactly why he’d come to dread drinks with the Brashlers.  He’d never felt comfortable arguing politics, didn’t like the way such conversations could take sharp, ugly turns when you least expected it.  He didn’t even like talking politics with people who voted the same way he did, and the notion of arguing with somebody who was completely opposed to you, who would never come around to your way of thinking any more than you would come around to theirs, struck him as futile to the point of absurdity.  But Irene was always itching for a good political fight.  Paul should have been the ideal sparring partner for Irene.  They were on opposite sides of every conceivable issue, and Paul liked sinking his teeth into an argument as much as Irene did.

“I think we’re getting off the point,” said Matt, finally annoyed enough to speak.  He knew Paul well enough by now to know the direction in which Paul tended to steer every conversation.  In Paul’s view, the world was clearly divided not between black and white, rich and poor, but between people who used the opportunities they’d been given and people who did not. “Irene’s not saying those kids aren’t being allowed to go to school,” said Matt, “just that they’re not allowed to go to the good schools.  Let’s be honest, the white schools are better — they have more money, they can pay teachers more–”

“Oh, what the hell,” Paul said good-naturedly.  He swirled the ice in his glass again.  “You’re probably right, Irene.  You too, Matt.  I get carried away.  I get on my hobby horse.  Let’s have another drink and change the subject.”

“Fine, thanks, Mr. Brashler,” said Lizzie, smiling at him shyly.  She wore her leotard and pink dance slippers, and her hair was in a falling-apart pony tail.  Lizzie was trying to grow her hair long enough to wear in a bun — a chignon, her ballet teacher Mrs. Swainey called it — but it was at an in-between stage.  No matter how carefully she pulled it back, how many bobby pins and barrettes she used, by the end of every lesson, every recital, every practice session, the rubber band had come undone and her hair fell in sweaty tendrils across her face.

“So soon?”  He looked at his watch, surprised to find it so late.  It was that cocktail hour — it had delayed dinner, and disrupted their usual routine.  It was bedtime, or nearly bedtime, but he didn’t feel tired.  “I’ll stay up a while and read,” he told her.

She had left the ledger out on purpose when she went to bed.  Maybe consciously, maybe not, but she had meant for him to look at it.  Always Irene would put the ledger away when she’d finished working on it, in the middle drawer of the dining room sideboard.  She did not leave it out on the end table next to the sofa, as she had tonight, its gold edging glinting under the lamplight.  Such an act was as out of character and unprecedented as if she’d left the dinner dishes piled on the counter without washing them.

“We’ll just have to take the sofa back,” he said, knowing as he said the words how impossible that was.  He pictured them going back into that cavernous store, Paul greeting them at the door like the party host he was.  He couldn’t face Paul looking at them pityingly, as though he’d always known that, even with his fifteen-percent-off gift, they’d been in over their heads the moment they walked in his store.

He and Irene had met just three months before he was set to go into the Army.  The week before he was due to take the bus to South Carolina where he would ship out, he’d stayed up most of the night rehearsing the good-bye speech he would make to her.  He and Irene were just getting to know each other, really just beginning to feel comfortable in each other’s company.  Even if he’d been sure he loved her — and he wasn’t, at all — the war would change them both in ways they couldn’t begin to imagine.  They would be strangers when he came home.  The only thing to do was to make a clean break now, say goodbye, walk away without looking back.  Though it would be painful at first, in the long run they would both realize it was for the best.  If you see something you want and you walk away from it, if you give yourself time to think, usually the wanting will go away.

When Lizzie was born, Matt had felt tempted to say to Irene, “You see? We did the right thing after all.”  But he hadn’t been able to find the right words, without admitting that he’d gone to her that night intending to say goodbye.  It was one of the few secrets he had ever kept from her.

The animals had been cleared out, sold one by one to families looking for pets or fresh poultry. Only one remained: a fat, over-wooled, gray-speckled llama name Mel. He was twenty years old, with arthritis in his front legs. No one would buy him, trade him, or take him for free. His wool grew in steel knots because he would not behave for the shearers. His left ear had a bite out of it—just a small, triangular nip, but a bite all the same—from taking on a younger male who still had his fighting teeth. That llama had been sold shortly after the fight, but not Mel. Now Helen had no choice but to take care of him. Three buyers in a row had examined him and decided to pass. Helen was almost ready to sell him for meat, but he was so old he would probably be all gristle.

She imagined him divided into cuts—rump roast, shoulder, tenderloin—but Brian would be disappointed. They’d been vegetarians for three years.

“Come here, boy,” Helen said, waving a carrot over the fence. She had a whole bag of them, ten pounds that she’d bought at the grocery store on the drive out. She’d have to buy some proper feed soon, but she couldn’t remember where the feed store was, hadn’t been there in almost twenty years—not since she’d moved out of her mother’s house and into her dorm room. After that, her mother had kept up with the chores on her own. Whenever Helen came home for a visit, she was more of a guest than a daughter.  Her mother had redecorated Helen’s bedroom, painting over the green walls with gray (the easiest color for the eye to look at, Helen’s mother said). She bought guest towels, guest soaps, guest pillows. She made pancakes for breakfast and grilled cheese for lunch.  She claimed she’d made Helen do enough chores for one lifetime. Brian, whom Helen had married with only an Elvis impersonator for a witness, was allowed to wash dishes and carry palettes of alfalfa to the pens.

But now Helen’s mother lived at Country Gardens, in a room facing an oak tree and a parking lot. She took pills from a white paper cup and reread piles of romance novels with broken spines from where she folded them. On her last visit, Helen had asked for directions to the feed store and received instructions on how to make chicken potpie.

“Mom.  The feed store. To feed the animals, not to cook them.”

To which her mother had waved a hand and dismissed the notion.

The llama stood in his pen, several yards from Helen, flicking flies with his ears.  His jaw sawed at a mouthful of cud, his giant worm of a tongue occasionally darting out to lick something from his lip.

Helen shouted: “Carrots, Mel.”

The llama took a few steps forward, focused on the food in Helen’s hand. He swallowed his cud and licked the side of his nose. A few steps more, his ears pointing forward, folding back, pointing forward again. His upper lip, split down the middle, stretched forth like fingers, feeling for the carrot, his long neck straining toward Helen while his body remained planted as far from her as possible. He grabbed the tip of the carrot and bit, yanking downward to snap off a chewable chunk.

“Good boy,” Helen said. She bent her knees slightly, trying to be as short as possible. Llamas, her mother once told her, like to be in charge. They like to be the biggest, toughest animal on the farm.

Helen kept her arm extended and Mel took another chunk of carrot, scrutinizing her as he chewed.

“Isn’t it nice to be nice?” she said. She wasn’t sure why she was talking to him, but it seemed like the thing to do.

The llama’s ears folded back against his head and he raised his nose, clucking in his throat.

“It’s okay,” Helen said, crouching lower, trying her best to be submissive. “I’m a nice lady.”

The llama thrust his head forward, and Helen was sprayed with recently chewed carrot.

“It could have been worse,” she told Brian at dinner. “It could have been cud.” She’d been spit on before, by various pets of her mother’s, and needed several showers to kill the smell of stomach acid and straw. Since nothing Mel spat had been digested, Helen had left the encounter feeling more lucky than put out. She should have known. She should have thrown the carrots into the pen and walked away. But then she would have had to cut them up first—Mel couldn’t eat them if they weren’t in bite-size pieces. She’d tried handing him whole carrots once and he’d chewed for a moment, most of the carrot hanging from his jaws like an orange cigar before he dropped it. She handed him a new carrot and he dropped that one, too. And he wouldn’t pick them up again. He wouldn’t eat anything directly off the ground, except maybe grass.

Brian pushed his food around his plate. Olives, potato salad, coleslaw—all things Helen had grabbed at the deli counter on the way home. She’d thought she had veggie burgers in the freezer, but she didn’t, so it was cold side dishes, even on Brian’s day off.  The pots and pans were all in boxes, anyway, waiting to be moved from the apartment into her mother’s house. Their house, now—but still her mother’s, really.

Helen stood to clear the table and Brian’s hand encircled her wrist as she reached for his plate.

“You know it’s going to be fine,” he said, fixing her with his gaze.

“Of course,” she said. What “it” was, she didn’t know. Maybe all of it. The llama, the house, her mother’s new home at Country Gardens. He released her wrist and she put the dishes in the sink, turned on the faucet, sudsed up the sponge.

A woman in kitty cat scrubs led Helen down the hallway toward her mother’s room. All the nurses at Country Gardens wore scrubs like that, with various cartoon animals or smiley faces or hearts splattered across their chests. The walls were painted in pastels: pink for the hallways, green for the common areas, blue for the bedrooms. Calming colors, Helen supposed, though even with all the color therapy and the soft-spoken staff and lacy curtains, Helen found it difficult to be calm. Her pulse always rose as she walked down that hall, quickening with each door she passed.

The nurse knocked on the open door with one knuckle. Helen’s mother was in bed, staring at the pages of a paperback that rested on her thighs.

“Mrs. Clemens?” the nurse said, as though they might be at the threshold of the wrong room. This was something the nurses did every time, like a test to see if her mother could remember her own name. Someday, Helen knew, she wouldn’t. There were probably days like that already, but thankfully they didn’t happen on Tuesdays. Maybe she pulled it together for her daughter’s visits. If anyone would be that thoughtful, it would be Helen’s mother, setting out her sanity like fresh guest towels.

Helen’s mother looked up from her book, her expression morphing from bewilderment to delight.

“Sweetheart!” She held out her arms and Helen walked in to hug her. She smelled like antibacterial soap and dryer sheets, which Helen found comforting. Just being here, even though it was a high-end facility, Helen expected her to start smelling of stale sweat and urine. She expected rats skittering inside the walls and bandages in the food.

The nurse stepped into the hall, pulling the door most of the way shut like Helen’s mother used to do when Helen had a boy in her room, to make sure they studied and that was all.

“How are you, Mom?” Helen always made sure to call her “Mom,” just in case.

“As well as I can be sitting around here all day.” She sighed, looked down for a moment, then looked into Helen’s face expectantly. “How are the animals?”

Helen reminded her mother of the animals’ departure, that Mel was the only one left on Mother Clemens’ Family Farm.

“Don’t call it that,” her mother said, laughing. Helen had come up with that name when she was a teenager and her mother had first started filling her four acres with farm animals. Not for resale or for food—though the daily influx of eggs was quite welcome—but for company. She had no husband—he’d been gone since before Helen was born—and her daughter was about to leave for college, so she’d done what she’d always wanted to do. She got herself a menagerie.

That reminded Helen—she needed directions to the feed store. She thought back to last week and the chicken recipe, but the nurses had told her not to expect the same mother from one day to another. Today’s mother seemed lucid, bright—a little forgetful, perhaps, but not too far from the mother she used to be.

“All the way out on Via de la Valle,” her mother said. “Just past the sign for farm fresh eggs, past the house with the sunflowers. Make a right on Blackbird Lane.” She shook her head, clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “Mel. How is Mel? Is he behaving?”

Helen shook her head. She didn’t want to mention the spitting.

“I thought so. He must be lonely out there all by himself. He used to get on really well with the goats. You should try putting him in with the goats.”

Helen reminded her mother, again, that the goats were gone.

“Well, he needs a herd,” her mother said. “One way or another.”

“I’m thinking about putting the llama down,” Helen said to Brian, over the phone. He was at work; she was trying to get to the feed store.

“You can’t be serious.”

She knew he would react this way.

“The llama isn’t sick. You wouldn’t be putting him out of his misery.”

“No,” Helen said, more meekly than she had hoped to. “I’d be putting him out of mine.”

“That’s clever.”

“It’s not like I’m planning to eat him. Though I’ve read that llama meat is a delicacy in some countries.” Actually, she couldn’t remember if she’d read that or not. It seemed plausible. And if it wasn’t a delicacy, there was certainly someone eating it somewhere. In South America, probably. Maybe Peru.

“Think about your mom. It would absolutely break her heart.”

Helen didn’t know what to say to that. Most likely, her mother wouldn’t even remember that Mel existed. Except she’d been so lucid today. Maybe she was getting better.

“She said I should put him in with the goats.”

“As long as you don’t put him down.”

Helen pulled into the feed store parking lot. She remembered coming here with her mom when she was little, mainly by the smell. The people next to the feed store raised pygmy goats, rabbits, guinea pigs—Helen’s mother had bought most of her menagerie there. Her mother would step out of the car and breathe deep, like mud and pig were two of the best smells in the world; Helen liked to bring a handkerchief to hold over her nose. She’d forgotten her hankie this time, but the smell of animals and hay didn’t seem so disgusting now. Maybe it hadn’t been when she was little, either.

Helen went through the feed store as quickly as possible. She bought a palette of alfalfa, some oats, and a goat—a little black pygmy. It had been standing by the fence as she stood in line to pay, and she had to have it. Since it was so little, Helen let it ride in the backseat of her car, where it pooped on her upholstery and chewed on the passenger seat.

“Her name is Cordelia,” said the woman who sold the goat, a round, pink woman in a floppy straw hat. “It’s Shakespearean.”

Helen raised her eyebrows as if to say, How interesting. The woman wasn’t too keen on Helen’s taking Cordelia away in a coupe, but a sale turned out to be a sale and she waved at them from the driveway as they turned onto the street.

“Do you have other goats?” the woman had asked as she led Cordelia to the parking lot.

“Sure,” Helen said. “A llama, too.”

“Oh, llamas get on great with goats.”

“That’s what I hear.”

The woman smiled, squinting despite her shady hat, and pushed the goat’s rump into the backseat of the car.

“What do you think, Cordelia?” Helen said when they pulled up to her mother’s property. They drove past the house and toward the llama pen. As soon as the door opened, Cordelia clambered out of the car. She ran a few steps on her short legs, stopped, and looked up at Helen with those unnerving, slitted eyes. Helen walked toward the llama pen, but Cordelia didn’t follow. Helen had to herd her, walking behind her with one leg on either side of the goat’s round belly. Cordelia walked slowly, carefully. Mel watched from the far edge of the pen, his ears cocked back.

“Now you two play nice,” Helen said once the goat was latched into the pen. She went to the car and unloaded the feed from her trunk, which was now covered with fine bits of green since she hadn’t remembered to bring a tarp.

“You have hay in your hair,” Brian said. He pulled a stubby stick out of her ponytail and handed it to her. They were on the couch, cozying up with the evening news. He pulled the ponytail maker out of her hair and ran his fingers through it, plucking out another twig. “Look at you,” he said. “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

Helen leaned her head back. His fingertips were icy where they touched her scalp.

“So,” Brian said, exhaling loudly. “When do you figure we’re going to move in?”

Helen dropped her chin to her chest and another bit of alfalfa fell into her lap. She thought about the lease on their apartment, up in only two months. She thought about her mother’s mantelpiece, with all the ceramic figurines gathering dust: the chipmunk, the penguin, the elephant. She hadn’t been in the house since she packed her mother’s clothes. Brian had gone in a few times: to make sure things were clean, to pack some boxes, to retrieve the rusty alarm clock her mother simply had to have. There were things to be done in there, things to organize, things to get rid of. She’d have to go through it all sometime, whether it was going into storage or to Goodwill.

Her mother would never live there again, the doctors said, not after nearly burning the place down, not without a caretaker. And Helen couldn’t be a caretaker. She knew she couldn’t. She had Brian, her medical transcription work (which made her sick enough), a cat who sometimes came out from under the bed. She had a life, and along with that a general squeamishness about bodily fluids. Just thinking about changing her mother’s diapers, giving her sponge baths—it turned her stomach. She was sure she should be more grateful for all the wiping and bathing her mother had done for her, that she should be down on her knees thanking the lord to have such a wonderful mother—that she should be so lucky to have her mother alive at all, with or without several chunks of her mind. But that feeling was locked away somewhere inside her, perhaps with the part that desired children and dogs. If she had to, she would blame it on her father. She’d blamed him for her crooked teeth, her terrible singing voice, her strawberry allergy—he could take the weight of this one, too.

And then there was Brian. Her mother wouldn’t even look at him straight, let alone live with him. She’d even stopped calling him by name shortly before entering Country Gardens—he was now known as Killer, though Helen didn’t know why. It had started suddenly, after he had gone to Helen’s mother’s house to pick up a sweater he had left there. The next time they visited, her husband had a nickname, one that her mother said through her teeth. And then her mother stopped being available for lunches. Helen tried to get the story out of Brian, but he would get angry and find something unrelated to growl about: the laundry needed doing, the cat was getting fat, there were cobwebs on the ceiling. She didn’t want to ask her mother. At this point, she couldn’t trust much that came out of that mouth, and even when lucid she was prone to exaggeration.

So the house had to be cleaned out. Her mother’s things would leave; hers and Brian’s would replace them. Something had to be done about the stupid llama. And now there was his goat friend, too.

            *

“Are you sure you want us living there?” Helen asked her mother. It was Tuesday again and her mother was sitting in a wheelchair this time, looking out the window that overlooked the parking lot. Once in a while, a squirrel would dart down the trunk of the oak tree or appear in the grass under the windowsill and her mother would clap her hands like a little girl at the circus.

“You can live anywhere you like,” her mother said, her eyes still trained on the patch of grass where the last squirrel had been sighted. She turned her wheelchair toward Helen. “Excuse me,” she said, wheeling past her daughter and out into the hall. Helen wasn’t sure what to do. She followed her mother to the lobby, through the automatic doors and into the parking lot.

“Mom, where are you going?” cheap propecia blog Helen called. Her mother didn’t answer. She just pulled her chair up to the oak tree that was in view of her bedroom window, stood, and then parked her rear in the dirt at the tree’s roots. She leaned her head against the bark and closed her eyes, a look of ecstasy spreading across her face. Helen thought about calling the nurses, but sat down next to her instead.

“Isn’t this nice?” her mother said.

Somehow, Cordelia claimed the llama pen. Helen peeled a few flakes of alfalfa off the bale and scooped a pitcher of oats.  She dumped the food in the trough and waited for Mel to come bounding over—but he didn’t. Instead, little Cordelia came tottering on her miniature legs, flicking her tail from side to side, and dove her snout into the oats while Mel stood in the corner, craning his neck but keeping his toes firmly on the ground.

Helen called to him, cupping her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and angled his ears in her direction but stayed where he was, a safe distance from the goat that was eating his breakfast. Cordelia snarfled up the entire serving of oats and sniffed the alfalfa.

Helen scooped some more oats from the bin and ducked between the fence rails. Cordelia followed for a few steps before deciding to drop onto her side and roll in the dirt. Helen trudged through the pen, swinging the pitcher of oats at her side. Mel watched her nervously, shifting from foot to foot and backing into his corner of the pen. His ears flapped back and forth, and his nostrils widened with the smell of breakfast. He snorted once, though Helen couldn’t quite derive the snort’s meaning. She kept coming, fully prepared for another incident.

“Here you go, you big baby,” she said, thrusting the bucket in his face. He clucked in his throat but eyed the food, still shifting back and forth. Helen held the bucket level, waiting for him to eat, but he wouldn’t. He looked at the oats, and looked at her, seemingly pleading for her to drop the pitcher and go. His eyes were a muddy brown, more human than she remembered them, and framed by a brush of black lashes that had always made visitors think he was a girl. Helen’s mother had complained about it during their weekly phone calls. People would drive up to the house, knock on the door, and ask if they could see the llama. In most cases, her mother had been glad to oblige, but then they would look at the llama and ask how old she was, what she ate, was she nice to have around. Helen had heard many stories about such visitors, and though she’d never met a llama that looked distinctly gendered, she had always taken her mother’s side. Now, looking into Mel’s face, she saw what everyone else did. The eyelashes, the delicate cheekbones, the precocious way his head rested atop his neck. He even stepped lightly as he paced back and forth, barely making a sound despite his weight.

“Come on,” she said in a low voice, as soft and smooth as her vocal cords could manage. “Eat your breakfast.”

Mel’s head pulled back and the clucking in his throat grew louder, more violent. She could see him pulling his reserves up from his stomach, ready to send them flying her way.

“Fine!” she screamed. She threw the oats at the llama’s feet and ran.

Helen crouched by the bed, a dish of Meow Mix in one hand, the other holding a drape of blankets. The cat was curled in the corner with its paws shielding its nose. She rattled the dish, but the cat didn’t stir. She pushed the dish under the bed and let the blankets fall.

“She’s just upset by all the packing,” Brian said. “She’ll be fine once we’re settled into the house.”

Helen nodded. She’d come home that afternoon to the sound of blaring guitars and found Brian in the living room, taping up boxes, his head bouncing up and down to the music. She’d turned off the stereo but Brian’s head had continued bouncing for a few seconds, until she called his name and he looked up.

She asked him what he was doing.

He’d decided, he said. He wanted to be out of the apartment by the end of the week. It wasn’t healthy, putting it off like this. They were only upsetting the cat.

So Helen decided to lure the cat out and give her some attention, but of course, the cat wouldn’t come.

“Just think,” Brian said. “The new house is so big, she can practically have a room to herself. We can get her one of those cat trees with the little house on top, and a scratcher pad with catnip.”

“The house isn’t new,” Helen said, flopping back onto the bed. She could hear the cat crunching the kibble through the mattress.

“New to us,” he said. He caught himself. “New to me.”

“New to you. Because that’s all that matters.”

Helen stretched her arms above her head, considered going to sleep despite the fact that it was only seven-thirty. The kitchen would be new to her, at least, with all the work that had to be done after the fire. All her mother’s old kitchen towels, the crocheted trivets, the plaque that said, “Bless This Mess.” All of it, gone. Replaced with new drywall, new fixtures, Helen’s rarely used kitchen accouterments. She felt a swell of anger in her ribcage. Why had her mother started a fire in the kitchen? Why not in the fireplace where fire belonged? But then, her mother hadn’t meant to start a fire. She hadn’t meant to lose her mind. She’d meant to make tea and wipe up a puddle of water on the countertop, not to let the towel fall into the flames. And she’d walked away, taken a shower, gone to bed, and eventually been hauled out by the firemen.

Grandmother’s cookbook, the school pictures on the refrigerator, the fake flowers that no one ever dusted—Helen had planned to keep those things. She’d planned to give them to her own daughter someday, though it was looking increasingly unlikely that she would have one.  Maybe that was it—her mother had given up on her. On everything, really.

“It’ll be nice to get out of this dump, won’t it?” Brian said. She looked around at the walls, the dark spots where Brian had pulled down pictures. They’d never meant to stay in an apartment so long.

Helen stayed near the llama pen while the movers did their work. Some things went in, some things came out, like the furniture was playing musical chairs. Whose things would win, hers or her mother’s? She knew the answer, of course, knew that her mother’s old couch with the sagging springs would be going to Goodwill while her Pottery Barn sofa would be pushed into its place. She knew that the stained pine coffee table would make way for the mahogany, that the particle board bookcase would be moved out for the brand new, carpet-covered cat house. But the pictures would stay on the walls. Her mother’s table would stay in the dining room, along with the hutch and all the good china that no one ever used.

Mel stood a few feet away, watching the movers and chewing absently on the fencing. His mouth grabbed the top bar, his tongue wrapping around it, paying no mind to dirt or germs or bird poop. His tongue moved across the metal, feeling for something, or maybe just tasting the salty tang of it. Helen wondered if he had an iron deficiency.

“What’s up?” Helen said, stretching her arm toward the llama. He looked at her sideways but didn’t give up chewing on the bar, didn’t move or step away. Helen looked around the pen. Cordelia was in Mel’s usual corner, munching a tuft of grass. She didn’t seem to notice the movers or any of their commotion, didn’t seem to care.

“She kicked you out, huh?” Helen moved a little closer to Mel and he shifted his weight from foot to foot, but kept chewing the bar. She stretched out her hand and her fingertips brushed the short wool on his neck, much softer than it looked from a distance. He reared slightly, letting go of the fence, and folded his ears back once more. Helen stepped backward, crouching, waiting for the spit to come. Mel’s front legs stamped and his nose bucked upward. Helen squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself for impact, but none came. When she opened her eyes he was calm again, watching her sideways, his mouth clamped on the metal bar once more.

“Mel let me touch him,” Helen said first thing, once the nurse had left her alone with her mother. “I touched his neck. I think I’m making progress.”

“Well, Mel always was a nice man.” She was back in her bed today, a copy of Reader’s Digest facedown on her lap. “Not like Killer. Is he still working at that garage downtown?”

Helen shook her head. So it was going to be a bad Tuesday.

“Well, that’s too bad. He was an excellent mechanic.”

“What do you mean, not like Killer?”

“He never killed a rabbit, as far as I know.”

She could tell she would get no straight answer today. She tried to remember a Mel in the real world, a non-llama Mel, but she’d never met one. Maybe he was real, tucked into her mother’s deep-fried brain, or maybe he was a hallucination. Maybe Killer wasn’t Brian at all, but some bunny-killing motorcyclist her mother had imagined.

*

Helen drove all the way to the apartment before realizing it was empty and heading back toward the house. She didn’t even have a key anymore. She’d turned it in to the landlord that morning.

The house was all lit up inside. It was nice to see it that way. The yard was gloomy, about to be swallowed by dusk. Cordelia stood at the edge of the pen, scratching her back on the fence.

“Want some help, girl?” Helen whispered. She crouched down and scratched the little goat’s back, feeling her wiry hair under her fingernails. Cordelia lifted her nose in the air like a dog might, then turned toward Helen and nuzzled her wrist. She couldn’t see Mel anywhere but knew he had to be around, as far away as possible, watching.

“There you are,” Brian said as the front door squealed shut. It had been squeaking since Helen was in junior high and her mother had never bothered to fix it. She said it made the place feel homier. “I’m in the kitchen. I need you to come look at something.”

Helen edged toward the kitchen door. The cat was sitting on the roof of its new house and Helen ran her palm across its back; it sniffed her wrist, curious about the goat stench.

For a moment, Helen imagined her mother at the kitchen table, eyes bright, flipping through Grandmother’s cookbook. She shook the image from her mind.

She opened the kitchen door and saw the table, covered in a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. A bottle of wine stood open, flanked by two empty glasses. Brian was at the stove—not her mother’s, but a brand new stainless steel model—stirring a pot of what looked like tomato sauce.

Helen tilted her head and smiled.

“Not that,” Brian said. He lifted the spoon from the pot and gestured toward the window. “That.”

Helen looked up. The llama pen came close to the kitchen window, about six feet away, and there was Mel, chewing on the fence and looking in.

Helen moved to the table and poured herself a glass of wine. Mel continued to chew on the fence, but his eyes followed her: to the table, to the stove, to the refrigerator. Helen wondered if he did this with her mother, communicating through the kitchen window.

“I’m going to feed him a carrot,” Brian said. “Watch the pot.”

Helen stirred the sauce and watched him bound out the backdoor, not bothering to shut it. He ran to the llama pen and opened the gate, waving the carrot theatrically in the air. Helen hoped he wouldn’t get spit on. Nothing and no one had ever spit on him before, and Helen wasn’t sure he could take it.

The sauce was starting to bubble. She wondered if it was supposed to do that or if she ought to lower the heat. She added a little salt and pepper and stirred. After a few minutes, she felt something nudge her shoulder.

Helen turned, expecting Brian—possibly spit-soaked, possibly dry—to take the spoon and resume his cooking. Instead, she found Mel standing in her kitchen, looking almost as confused as she was.

“Hello,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle him. “What are you doing in here?”

The llama hummed inquisitively, as if he might ask her the same question.

Brian appeared at the kitchen door, breathless from running. “He got away from me.”

Mel looked at Brian and sniffed around the countertops, snorting every once in a while. He came to the salad bowl and dove in, munching the romaine lettuce.

“Look how comfortable he is,” Helen said, watching in awe as the llama ate their dinner. “Do you think my mom let him do this? Do you think she let him inside?”

Brian’s mouth moved a little, but no sound came out. Finally, he said, “Do you think he’ll poop on the floor?”

Helen couldn’t believe it. The llama walked carefully through the kitchen, around the table, without disturbing the dishes or the chairs. She called her mother at Country Gardens, but a honey-voiced nurse told her she was sleeping. Helen didn’t leave a message.

She drove out to see her.

“Hello,” her mother said, a beat or two after Helen walked through the door. She was in bed, sitting up with one of her novels abandoned on the bedside table. Her voice was higher than usual and her face was creased where it had pressed against the pillow.  “What can I do for you?”

Helen moved to the side of the bed, standing as close to her mother as she possibly could. She was bursting to tell about the llama in the kitchen, but her mother only looked at her quizzically, leaning away.

“I’m sorry,” Helen’s mother said. “I don’t mean to be rude.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom. I just wanted to tell you—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but would you mind telling me who you are?”

Helen looked at her mother’s eyes. They seemed to be focusing. She wondered, for a moment, if she was in the right room, if she was speaking to the right mother.

“Honey?” her mother said, blinking rapidly. Her head shook a little, from side to side. “Helen, what is it? I thought you weren’t coming until next Tuesday.”

Helen had to think, to remember what was so urgent. She sat at the foot of her mother’s bed.

“The llama,” Helen said.

Her mother stared.

She said it again. “The llama.”

Helen’s mother smiled. There was no recognition in her face, but no confusion either. She seemed sympathetic. Strangely enough, she seemed happy.

Helen sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and remembering where the llama had stood the night before. She’d had to lure him back to his pen with the salad bowl, had to compensate a braying Cordelia with a head of iceberg, to be fair. When she got back from Country Gardens, she’d found Brian sanitizing the entire kitchen, mopping the floor with extra Pine Sol and grumbling. The cat was back under the bed.

Helen wandered out to the pen, where Mel stood in his usual corner and Cordelia circled the feed trough, waiting for her breakfast. She filled the trough with oats and hay and kept one eye on Mel, who edged his way toward the fence one delicate step at a time.

She wondered if she should leave the gate open, if she should tempt him to leave his pen again. She imagined putting Mel on his lead and taking him for walks, but she would have to catch him first. She imagined him folding into the back seat of her car, his head hanging out the back window like a dog’s. She imagined him wiping his feet on the way into the house, angling his body onto the couch.

She would buy sweet apples and feed him where Cordelia couldn’t butt in. She might borrow one of her mother’s blouses or wear her mother’s perfume.

First, she would build a separate pen for the goat, a separate food trough. She would feed Mel from her hands. She would start leaving the gate open, and the back door, too. She would put a dish of vegetables on the floor by the refrigerator and move the cat’s food to the dining room. She would leave a path for Mel to wander into the living room, perhaps tempted by roses on the coffee table (he’d all but stripped the rose bushes that grew through his fence), and a nice space for him to sit next to the sofa. He would stay with her while she watched TV.

Mel made his way to the food trough and dipped his nose into the oats while Cordelia chewed alfalfa on the other side. Helen took a few steps toward him, her hand extended. He didn’t look at her. His nose stayed in the trough as he ate. For a moment, her fingertips brushed the wool on his neck. His head jerked sideways, but the rest of him stayed put.

If Ariel ever found a lover, Summit once teased her, it would be at the hospital where she worked.

“Because of all the sexy orderlies?” she asked him.

“Because,” he said, “you work all the time.”

This was when Summit could joke with her about adultery, when the topic was theoretical.

This was before he moved out of their house in Lexington and into a one-bedroom apartment in Boston. This was before he suggested they share joint custody of Carla, their six-year-old daughter, and she said, “You’ll be lucky to see her one day a week,” her anger surprising both of them. This was before she called him at midnight three nights in a row and no one answered.

She envied the excitement she was sure he was finding without her. Most of all, she missed him. She was afraid to think about what her life would become without him.

At lunchtime on an early January day, with the usual bitter cold and snow, Ariel dashed out of the Boston Children’s Care Center wearing nothing warmer than her white pediatrician’s coat and ran a block-and-a-half to Yaz’s Diner, named after a retired Red Sox player. She glanced at the man sitting at the counter. He had ink black hair and pale skin, and he was thin without being gaunt. His black turtleneck hugged his chest like skin.

When Ariel sat next to him, he smiled at her, a smile at once wry and inviting, and asked, “Is a doctor’s life as glamorous as the movies make it out to be?”

“Of course. Especially a pediatrician’s life.” She held up her left forearm and explained the scar: two days before, a five-year old, afraid she would give him a shot, had gouged her.

“I’m sure you were doing nothing more than saving his life,” the man said.

After Ariel ordered, the man introduced himself: Tim Rubenstein, the film, drama, and occasional music critic of the Boston Phoenix. Ariel told him her name, although redundantly because it was pinned above her breast. “You’ve given me an idea for a story,” Tim said. “The ten best films about doctors as rated by doctors.”

“Does Doctor Zhivago count?” Ariel asked. Once upon a time, Summit told her she looked like Julie Christie’s Lara, with her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her “fierce fragility.”

“It’s one of my favorites,” Tim said.

Ariel’s matzo ball soup came, steam swirling off it.

“Every time I see matzo ball soup on the menu, I think, ‘Today’s the day I’ll make my mother proud,’” Tim said. “Then I order a ham-and-cheese sandwich and think, ‘Tomorrow’s the day I’ll make my mother proud.’”

Putting on his coat, he said, “Will you be here tomorrow? I’d like to follow up on our conversation about movies.” He handed her his card. “If we miss each other, call me. I’m serious about my story idea.” His eyes lingered on her.

Ariel made it home in time to see her au pair, Hidalia, from Colombia, lifting Carla out of the bathtub. Enveloped in a white towel, Carla looked like she was plotting a walking tour of the Sahara. “Mommy?” Carla said. Either Carla wasn’t certain about who was in front of her or she couldn’t believe Ariel was home this early.

Tonight, at Carla’s request, Ariel read Good Night Moon, although Carla had long outgrown sing-song picture books and preferred plots and villains and tantalizing complications. She wondered why her daughter had requested such a simple book.

“Would you like one more story?” Ariel asked, and when Carla said yes, Ariel said, “Would you pick one out from your shelf?”

Ariel yawned, amazed at the soporific effect children’s books had on her. As soon as Carla left the bed, Ariel closed her eyes and saw a hospital corridor. But she didn’t know what room she was supposed to enter, what patient she was supposed to see.

She woke up at 2:43 in the morning; Summit’s digital clock, which she hated but couldn’t bring herself to dispose of, glared red at her. Carla was sleeping beside her. Why isn’t she in her room? Something’s wrong. But even as she moved to touch Carla’s head, to feel for fever, she remembered where they had ended the night. Beside Ariel in the insufficient light, Carla looked spectral, a round-cheeked ghost. The signs of her breathing were invisible; she was as immobile as the moon. In her left hand, she clutched another picture book: Mama Doesn’t Know My Name.

“Okay, give me the names of other doctor films you admire,” Tim said the next day at Yaz’s. He was wearing a burgundy turtleneck sweater.

“Dr. Strangelove?” Ariel said.

Tim laughed. “How about Dr. Doolittle?”

“It won the Oscar, didn’t it?”

“Close. It was nominated but lost to In the Heat of the Night.”

Ariel bit into her turkey sandwich. As a joke, perhaps, Tim had ordered matzo ball soup. “Maybe this isn’t such a great project,” he said. “Maybe there are only a few genuine doctor movies of any merit.”

“M*A*S*H,” Ariel said.

“Now we’re talking. Or does it qualify as a war film?”

Ariel had another bite of her sandwich. She had to be back at the hospital in ten minutes, but she didn’t feel compelled to hurry her lunch.

“Is your husband a doctor?” Tim asked.

“Of philosophy,” Ariel said. She looked down at her untouched potato chips. “We’re separated.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’d been drifting apart for several years,” she said. “We have a daughter.” She paused. “Are you married?”

“Never,” Tim said. He smiled and turned his head to look out the window at the bleak Boston afternoon. “I have a proposition,” he said.

When Ariel returned home at eight, Carla was asleep in her bed. “She was very tired,” Hidalia explained. “Too tired for a bedtime story.”

Ariel wondered if Carla hadn’t slept well in Ariel’s bed. Usually, the opposite was true.

“Mr. Summit came by to see her.” Hidalia always called Summit “Mr. Summit.” Ariel had stopped correcting her. She liked how it made Summit seem ridiculous, like the host of a children’s puppet program.

“When?” Ariel asked. “For how long?”

“Before dinner,” Hidalia said. “He stayed for maybe two hours.”

“He probably rough-housed with her and tired her out.”

“He asked if you would call him. He said he wants to talk to you about Carla.”

“All right,” Ariel said. “Sure.” She thanked her and walked into the kitchen, where she intended to pick up the phone. But she remembered the day she and Summit had toured the house. She’d had no strong feelings for it until she walked over to the window above the kitchen sink. Outside, a pair of cardinals, male and female, sat side by side on a branch of a blackberry bush, singing.

If she called Summit, she thought she would yell at him or cry or both. She looked into her refrigerator, but nothing appealed to her. It isn’t even nine o’clock, and all I want to do is go to bed.

So she did.

In the morning, Ariel rose before Carla and Hidalia, as usual, although because she hadn’t even seen Carla last night—she had fallen asleep before fulfilling her intention to go into Carla’s bedroom—she had the just-woken-up sensation that her daughter could be merely a wish or a dream. This wasn’t unusual: She often had the feeling, especially in the darkness of the early hours, that who she had become, not just a mother but a doctor, a homeowner, and a wife in a precarious marriage, was a peculiar premonition her true self, young and single and more sure of everything, was having.

Ariel thought to go into Carla’s bedroom, to kiss her hair or merely gaze at her. But she worried she would wake her and thereby leave Hidalia with a cranky child. She walked outside, climbed into her Corolla, and drove automatically, the route from Lexington to Boston so familiar the houses and trees on the side of the road were invisible. I have a child I don’t see and a husband who doesn’t live with me. Two ghosts.    In the pediatric ward, whose doorways were painted in rainbow colors, Ariel stopped at the nurse’s station to say hello to Pammy, who said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Bloom, Duncan Tibbs died last night.”

Ariel’s lips trembled. “What?” she said.

Duncan, who was four years old, had been brought in two days before with pneumonia. Ariel had seen him twice. Both times, he’d been asleep. He had been under the care of the unit chief, Thomas Bowers, who had written a textbook on pediatric medicine, required reading in medical schools around the world.

“He didn’t come to us in time,” Pammy said.

“Right,” Ariel said. She looked at Pammy, and Pammy nodded, acknowledging, Ariel guessed, the terrible side to the work they did.

Ariel walked down the hallway and stepped into Peter Hessan’s room. The boy, her patient, was six years old and had been hit by a car. On arrival, he had lost so much blood he looked translucent. But today, a week later, he was going home. On seeing Ariel, Peter’s mother, whose hair was a glorious mess of uncombed curls, cupped her hands as if in prayer and whispered, “Thank you.” Ariel allowed herself a small, satisfied smile before wishing them a safe trip home.

Over the course of the day, however, her thoughts returned frequently to Duncan Tibbs. Each time, she tried to push him aside with words she had first spoken to herself as a resident: Heal the next patient. But the words seemed as much wish as command.

Tim lived in an apartment whose living-room window, if one craned one’s head eighty-five degrees to the left, had a view of Boston Harbor. “Beautiful,” Ariel said, un-craning her neck and looking at Tim, who stood beside her. “I love harbors at night. There’s something timeless about their twinkling.”

Ariel had arranged for Hidalia to look after Carla tonight. Ariel felt derelict and guilty, but she wanted to keep her relationship with Tim, such as it was, moving. She had grown weary of inertia. She and Summit were stuck in a marital murkiness, neither moving toward reconciliation nor initiating a divorce. Perhaps if she found a lover, it would force the issue.

Tim asked if she would like wine, and she nodded and he left the living room and returned with a glass of cabernet sauvignon. Hoping for help in feeling less awkward, she drank half the glass in a single sip, as if she were throwing back a shot. She glanced at him to see if he’d noticed. He smiled neutrally. In his apartment, with its single-man decor—he had two shelves filled with videotapes and DVDs and nothing on the white walls—he looked older. There were shadowed lines around his mouth, and his black hair glinted every so often with silver. She wondered if he might be ten years older than she was. But he smiled, erasing a few of the years, and, pointing to his movie collection, began to talk with enthusiasm about his favorite films.

She had another long sip of her wine. After a third sip, it was gone.

“Would you like a refill?” he asked. He hadn’t touched his wine.

“Sure,” she said. “I guess I was thirsty.” She laughed.

He smiled ambiguously.

He left with her glass and returned with it filled higher than before. She thanked him and took a small sip. “I’m not thirsty anymore,” she said. She thought his smile was genuine this time.

He said, “I told you I had something special related to film to show you, but now I’m feeling bashful.”

“Why?” Ariel asked.

He blushed. At least, she thought he did, although it was difficult to tell in the light. “It’s a film I made as a grad student at B.U. A short feature. My dream is to have a feature-length version made.”

“Super!” Ariel exclaimed. She hadn’t eaten dinner—she had expected it to be part of their date, if a date was what they were having—and the wine had climbed to her head.

“It’s set in a hospital,” he said. “I was hoping you might verify or debunk its authenticity.”

“I’ll do my best.”

He asked her to sit down, and she did, on a leather couch, which had a two-inch slice in it, revealing the pink material inside, like fiberglass. She was going to make a joke about the little known benefits of insulating one’s couch, but she refrained.

Tim located a videotape on one of the shelves and crouched in front of the TV. “The sound quality isn’t the best,” he said, “so I’ll turn up the volume.” The music accompanying the opening credits was as loud and discordant as gunfire. Tim manipulated the volume control before he found a place on the other end of the couch from her. “Should I refill you before we start?” he asked.

Ariel looked at her glass, at the teaspoon amount of wine left. “Perhaps later,” she said, and slapped her hand across her mouth to capture a burp.

The film was about an outbreak of a mysterious illness, its victims only artists—poets, playwrights, sculptors, musicians. The illness manifested itself in extreme concrete thinking and a zombie-like affect. A local hospital had set up an isolation ward.

“It looks like a school building,” Ariel observed.

“I shot it at my high school,” Tim snapped. Apologetically, he added, “I didn’t have much of a budget.”

“It does the job,” Ariel said, although she wondered why a hospital room would have on its walls posters illustrating the declension of –ar, -er, and -ir verbs in Spanish.

Ariel had a difficult time following what was happening. There was a lot of talk between the doctor (there was only one) and her patients, who were complaining of feeling “inauthentic” and “the opposite of who I used to be.” At some point, Tim refilled her wine glass. She wanted to say, I need something to eat, but she decided this would be rude.

Ariel wondered why Tim wasn’t moving closer to her. Wasn’t he supposed to be seducing her? I’m a beautiful woman. Everyone used to tell me so ten years ago.

The doctor tried all sorts of cures—pills and injections of experimental medicines—but they all failed. Eventually, a blind painter—of course the prophet has to be blind, Ariel thought, and of course his art has to be preposterously incompatible with his condition—announced, Confucius-like, “Before we find our way back to the art we love, perhaps we must practice an art we fear.” After tentatively casting aside his walking stick and careening into a diorama of a bull-fighting ring, he danced, Baryshnikov-like, around the room, somehow avoiding desks and a bust of Cervantes. The others soon joined him.

“I wanted a happy ending,” Tim admitted.

“Who doesn’t?” Ariel replied.

Although she thought Tim’s movie was awful, she found something appealing in its earnest portrait of creative lives deadened and revived. Fearing she might be caught in a similar predicament, but thinking she knew how to escape, she threw her arm around Tim’s shoulder. “It’s wonderful!” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. She registered his reaction—a stiffness, a chilliness—without contemplating its meaning.

“When are you going to seduce me?” Ariel asked. She was conscious of the absence of flirtatious humor in her words. Despite her best effort at joviality, she spoke in a monotone. She tried again: “This wasn’t the main attraction, was it?”

She saw something fall in his expression but couldn’t imagine she had offended him.

“Here,” she said. “Let me introduce you to the rest of the evening.” And she kissed him on the lips. But the kiss lasted no longer than a second before he pulled back.

“I think we had different ideas about tonight,” he said. “I mean, I like your conversation. It was nice to meet a doctor with an interest in movies. But you’re married and you have a child and…”

He looked around, as if hoping to spot an audience, a third party who might rescue him from what was unfolding. “I was hoping for your insights into my film. As I said, I’d like to see where I can go with it. Do you think the doctor’s interaction with her patients is realistic?”

Ariel felt whatever socially inappropriate elation the wine had produced in her disappear. “Your movie is an allegory,” Ariel said. “Does realism matter?”

“Oh,” he said, unsure, apparently, whether she meant this as criticism or only as an observation.

There was a pause. “Carla,” she said.

“I’m Tim,” he said, his smile a 9.5 on the condescension scale.

“And I’m in a hurry,” Ariel said, “to see my daughter.”

Back in her Corolla, she discovered her cell phone on the front seat. It must have slipped out of her purse. She’d received calls from Summit and Hidalia. She didn’t listen to the messages, but immediately called Hidalia, who told her Summit had taken Carla to the hospital.

Carla was sleeping in the bed Duncan Tibbs had died in, her body looking tiny, shrunken, and defeated, her blond hair curled on the pillow above her head like a question mark. Summit, unshaven, brown hair left weeks uncut, sat slumped in the armchair next to the bed, and he rose slowly to greet her. But Ariel rushed down the other side of the bed and covered Carla’s forehead with her palm. “She’s on fire!” Ariel said.

“One hundred and four point five,” Summit said. He added, “Where the hell were you?”

“What antibiotic are they giving her?”

He began to speak but cut off his words with a shrug. “I’ve forgotten. She threw it up, whatever it was. They tried to put in an IV, but they can’t find a vein. They’re talking about putting in a PICC line.”

“Of course they are.”

“It might be viral pneumonia anyway,” Summit said. “Which means we can’t do anything but wait.” He repeated, “Where the hell were you?”

“She needs to be drinking. Is she drinking anything? And if she isn’t drinking, she should be given ice shards to suck on. Is she dehydrated?”

In response, Summit gave a tired shrug.

“What exactly happened with her IV?”

“The nurse tried to put it in. When she couldn’t, she called in one of the paramedics who flies with the emergency helicopter. He’s supposed to be an ace at this.”

“Danny,” she said. “And?”

“It stayed in for maybe five minutes.”

“Is Lydia Emerson her doctor?” Ariel asked.

“Uh…short woman with gray hair and a scar under her right eye?”

“Summit, you’re amazing,” Ariel said. If she had called him the filthiest word she knew, she couldn’t have spoken with more bitterness.

“Listen, I was around,” he said.

Ariel found Lydia Emerson down the hall and around a corner, gazing at a child’s drawing of a rainbow on the wall. Ariel had never had much faith in Lydia’s doctoring skills. She had graduated from medical school in the 1960s, “in the age of leeches and lobotomies,” as Lydia liked to put it. She always seemed a little lost, as if she’d been blown into Boston Children’s corridors from a lecture she was giving on knitting.

“My daughter,” Ariel said when she’d drawn close to Lydia.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” Lydia said, turning to her. Her teeth were as gray as her hair, although Ariel couldn’t say she was unattractive. “Her x-ray, however, is cloudy.”

“Will you show it to me?”

In a room across from the nurse’s station, Lydia propped up Carla’s X-ray on a light table. “I had a look at this five minutes ago,” Lydia said. “Here’s the problem.” Lydia pointed to the bottom of Carla’s right lung.

“It’s in deep,” Ariel said, panic at the edge of her voice.

“I told your husband…” She paused, as if to consider whether she’d called Summit by the correct term. “I told him he should try to pound her back, to break up the mass.”

Ariel had given the parents of children with pneumonia the same advice. Had Thomas Bowers given this advice to Duncan Tibbs’ parents? And what did they think of it now? She felt rage and impotence—but whether on their behalf or her own, she wasn’t sure.

“It’s technology cave people might have employed,” Lydia said quietly.

“The amoxicillin you’re giving her,” Ariel said. “I’m concerned it won’t be sufficient. I think Carla’s been sick for a few days. I wasn’t paying attention.”

There was a pause. “As soon as I saw the X-ray, I ordered a more aggressive treatment.”

Ariel mentioned a drug, and Lydia nodded.

When Ariel returned to Carla’s room, two nurses followed her. The doctors called them Loveless and Light because one was always frowning, the other always smiling as if every day were the first day of spring. They explained what they were going to do, for Summit’s benefit, and Ariel explained it as best she could to Carla, who fell back to sleep.

“Summit, you’ll have to help hold down her thighs,” Ariel told him. Summit had been standing facing the television. He looked like he might cry. “Why are they using injections?”

“It’s Rocephin,” Ariel said. “It’s given by injection. It’ll start working fast.” She paused. Softly: “If it works.”

Summit stepped over to Carla’s bed and put his hands on her left thigh. His fingers, which she had first seen strumming a guitar in Harvard’s Freshman Union, seemed enormous, weathered, and red against Carla’s pale skin. Ariel gripped her daughter’s right thigh. She glanced at Summit, wanting to tell him something, something without bitterness. But she could only feel her little girl’s feverish skin and think, Please. Not her.

“Carla,” Ariel called. “It’s time to wake up. I don’t want you to be surprised.”

Carla’s eyes fluttered open, and when Carla saw the needles, which the nurses did nothing to hide, she looked ashen-faced at her mother before bursting into tears. “If you could hold her legs down better,” Light said brightly to Summit, “it would help.” Summit pushed Carla’s thigh into the mattress. “Like this?” he said, although he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Ariel. He murmured something. She wanted to ask him what he’d said, but she turned back to Carla. “Look at me, sweetheart,” Ariel said to her daughter. “Look at me. It’ll be over quickly. I promise.”

The needles were in her and she was screaming. Ariel hadn’t heard her daughter scream this loudly, or with this much pain, since she was a baby with colic.

“It’s over,” Loveless said in a voice so low Ariel doubted Carla had heard her. Ariel moved to her daughter’s side and pressed her face against Carla’s. “It’s over, sweetheart.” She kissed the tears from Carla’s eyes, but Carla continued to cry.

“Look!” Ariel said as cheerfully as she could. “Pink band-aids!”

But Carla didn’t want to look at her band-aids. She cried like she’d been betrayed.

“Oh, hell,” said Summit, who wiped his eyes. He looked at Ariel. Their gazes met, held, drifted. What did I just tell him? she asked herself. What did he just tell me?

Ariel hugged Carla until Carla’s crying subsided. Carla’s eyes closed, but she opened them to gaze at Ariel and said, “Where were you, Mommy?”

Outside of Carla’s room, Ariel told Summit she would sleep in the armchair next to Carla’s bed. Summit, who was standing under an arch of cut-out angels, didn’t protest. He was, as usual, willing to concede to her on matters of parenting. Before he left the hospital, Ariel thought he might say something encouraging about Carla. Or perhaps he intended to ask her again, “Where were you?” He nodded several times, looked down at his shoes—black high-tops, the kind he had worn in college, the left shoe untied—and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

Ariel might have said, “I have it under control.” Or: “Do you think you’ll be able to wake up so early?” Instead, she said, “Okay. Good.”

There was a pause. “This must be hard for you,” he said.

“Only for me?” she replied.

“No. Jesus, no. That’s not what I meant. I meant it must be hard for you to be both the mother and the doctor. You’re used to all this, right? Machines and injections and pain. But this time, it’s Carla who’s sick.” He paused. “It’s fucking terrifying to me.”

Ariel felt like wrapping her arms around him and sobbing on his shoulder. But the setting, as well as who they were to each other now, fixed her in place. “It is hard,” she said. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and he reached out as if to give her an awkward high-five, although perhaps he had been intending to touch her face but had thought better of it. She put her hand in his. They held on to each other, a spontaneous gesture of solidarity—if this is what it was—and then he released her and was gone.

Presently, Ariel glanced down the hallway and, for a moment, thought she might be resuming her day at work, with patients to see, colleagues to consult. It was a happy thought. But it disappeared, and she moved quickly toward Carla’s room.

Carla was asleep, and when Ariel felt her forehead, her hand burned. Loveless came in to take Carla’s temperature, which was 104.3, and wake Carla to give her Tylenol, in purple liquid. The Tylenol hadn’t done anything to lower Carla’s temperature before. Carla swallowed without ever opening her eyes. For the next few minutes, she whimpered, which sounded to Ariel like someone whose distress had given way to terrified resignation. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think this, but she did: She’s going to die.

She’s going to die.

She’s going to die.

Ariel stood up, wanting to rush into the hall and shout, “Help.” Or: “God.” Or: “Please, please, please.”

But this wasn’t the way a doctor was supposed to think. I know the odds of Carla’s recovery are excellent. But what were the odds in Duncan Tibbs’ case? He was dying when he came in, Ariel reasoned. There was nothing we could have done.

She thought about Duncan Tibbs’ mother sitting in the chair she sat in now. She had dyed blond hair with black roots and had a red stain on the shoulder of what might have been a waitress’s uniform. It was her eyes Ariel remembered most, wide with fear. Now here I am, no less afraid.

Lydia stepped into the room and sat on the end of Carla’s bed. She looked at Ariel, at Carla, again at Ariel. Out of a need to touch her daughter, nothing more, Ariel again felt Carla’s forehead. It was fire. “She was sick well before Summit brought her in,” Ariel told Lydia, although she knew she was repeating herself. “She was lethargic. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“It’s hard to keep your eyes on everything,” Lydia said. “Here.” She handed Ariel what looked like a tomahawk, with the point softened by cotton balls and medical tape. “I modified it myself.” Lydia smiled her gray smile. “It does help sometimes, if used with vigor.”

“I shouldn’t have let it happen,” Ariel said.

“You didn’t allow it to happen,” Lydia said. “It happened on its own.”

“I’ll never forgive myself,” Ariel whispered, turning to look at Carla, who hadn’t moved. Ariel wondered if the fever had put her in a coma. Irrational thought, she decided, but she touched Carla’s forehead again.

“If you would like a job,” Lydia said kindly, “you could encourage your daughter to drink. I’ll have the nurse bring fresh ice water.” She stood up. “If she can’t drink, we’ll need to put in the PICC line.”

Ariel nodded.

“I feel silly telling you what you already know.” Lydia paused. “Maybe I’m hoping you’ll find something comforting in the words I would use with any parent. Or maybe, after all these years, I don’t know what else to say.”

After Lydia left, Loveless brought in ice water with a pink straw and a cold compress, and Ariel tried to wake Carla. When this failed, she slipped the straw between her daughter’s lips and urged, “Drink. Drink, sweetheart.” She thought she saw Carla’s throat move, but her hope might have made her hallucinate. She turned Carla on her side and thumped her back with the archaic instrument Lydia had made. Carla coughed twice, then moaned. Ariel eased her back on the bed.

Ariel sat in the armchair, leaned back, and closed her eyes. Oxygen, she thought. They should be giving Carla oxygen. She remembered Summit saying, a month before he left their house, “I need to breathe. I’m suffocating.” If Summit never returned, she would be all right. But losing Carla would destroy her.

Please, Carla, you can’t leave me. Please, sweetheart. Please.

Ariel tried to keep her eyes open, but exhaustion stole up on her, her sleep carrying her down troubling corridors. She felt like a zombie, clumsy and numb, and when she at last found a room and stepped inside, the bed was empty.

She woke up shouting. Immediately, she reached to touch Carla’s forehead. It was cool, and this scared her into hyper-alertness. She’s dead, Ariel thought, and she felt the whole world grow cold.

But in the next instant, Ariel felt calm, as if her rational, professional double had stepped in to relieve the apocalyptic parent. “Her fever has broken,” she said aloud.

“Mommy,” Carla answered. How long had her daughter been awake and gazing at her? “Mommy, you’re here. You’re in the dark, but I see you! I see you crying. We’re happy, Mommy. Okay? Mommy, I’m thirsty.”