Antonia has signed up for a series of six workshops Beth invited her to attend at the center, where she is a member. Couldn’t hurt, Antonia encouraged herself. The workshops, Beth assured her, would not be hard-sell Zen, not playing dress-up with an Eastern religion, but fun, relaxing activities: rock gardening, Tai Chi, ink drawing, and today’s flower arranging. Bring your own vases and blooms, if you have them. Antonia harvests handfuls of flowers in the garden, hoping the teacher will enlighten her as to their names. But the teacher, an American woman with a placid face and closely cropped hair—perhaps a Buddhist monk or a cancer survivor?—rarely speaks. They are to circle their vases, breathing in, breathing out, observing the blooms, the grasses, their angles, this way and that, adjusting for balance. Antonia, accustomed to her own very different teaching style, where words and the structures made from them are the focus, nevertheless finds herself enjoying this quiet respite from the rigors of wordsmithing the world. Let it be, let it be, the lyrics play in her head. There she goes again, caught in the word thicket!

Unfortunately, this Saturday, Beth’s question reboots the internal debate of what to do about Estela. What is the right thing to do? The question rings in her head, worse than church bells. The nodding peacock orchid, the stalk of prairie grass, the sticks from the woods beyond the outdoor Zen garden—she can’t get her arrangement to balance.

Driving home, Beth asks how she enjoyed the class.

Too busy in here, Antonia cocks a finger at her forehead. My mind killed it.

Sorry to hear that, Beth says, and soon she’s hearing a lot more as Antonia voices her quandary: Estela, the baby, whether to or not to . . .

Finally, she says it: I’m just not up to it.

Well then, that answers it, Beth says with a certainty that settles the matter. No wonder Beth’s flower arrangement garnered gratifying bows from their teacher today. It’s all fine and dandy to be Mother Teresa, if you’re Mother Teresa, her younger friend expounds.

If I try to be like you, then who will be like me? Is it also a Zen saying?

Might be. Beth shrugs. It’s a magnet on my fridge. Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

Antonia laughs outright. Thank you, she says, and laughs again. This is therapy without the price tag—in other words, friendship.

Beth is absolutely right. No matter how worthy or commendable taking on Estela and her new family would be, when Antonia asks herself torturously, What is the right thing to do? The certainty is not there. What lies beyond the narrow path, the nibble, the sip, where the dragons be? Just because she doesn’t yet know doesn’t mean she should close down and settle for the joyless default. The earth doesn’t need one more resentful, depressed sort. Having studied and taught stories and poems all her own life, it’s now in her DNA, to want to give that life a shapely form, fill in the blank in the dangling line: And Finished knowing—then—

As if the fragile earth has not been informed of its imminent demise, the summer unfolds. It seems every living thing that can bud and bloom bursts open, spraying the air with fragrances, holding on tight to the earth with roots that sometimes poke through the ground wanting to see the immense blue sky, too. The evenings are long, the light lingering like a child fighting sleep to have one more bit of the day gone by. Antonia sits for hours in the garden, half believing she can hear the kernels of corn plumping in their husks, the vines inching up on their trellises, the bees raiding the blossoms. She is waiting like a numb animal for the warmth to penetrate, as in childhood after a bad fall when she would lie very still on the pavement, before the pain hit and the fear, waiting to learn what she had done to herself, what might be broken, whether she was already dead or not.

Daily, she checks in on her two sisters. How’s it going, baby sisters? They argue over an appropriate ceremony for Izzy. Do they hire a hot air balloon and throw handfuls of her ashes over the side? Do they go out on a canoe—Izzy loved canoes—to the middle of a lake, scoop up handfuls of ashes, and throw them over the side? Enjoy! Anything they come up with falls short of the extravaganza that Izzy would have devised. But wasn’t that over-the-top behavior part of her illness?

Do you believe me now? Mona has asked Antonia, not with the triumphant note of the vindicated, but with the defeated voice of someone who wishes she hadn’t been right. A pyrrhic victory, Antonia had explained to her students, is one that exacts such a heavy toll that winning looks an awful lot like losing. A definition of life on our dying planet, Antonia can now report back to them.

Since the sisters can’t agree on a ceremony, Antonia divvies up Izzy’s remains, as the official handlers of the dead call them, each sister getting her doggie bag to do with as she sees fit. Antonia has no idea what she will do with hers. She thinks about scattering the ashes in the garden, but that’s what she did with Sam’s ashes. Izzy would want something more original, all her own.

Late summer, the sisters gather to go through Izzy’s things in the storage shed she had rented when she sold her house. They embarrass themselves with their grabbiness. They all want the Russian doll nesting juice glasses, the lamp with the fabulous shade that lights up into a swarm of butterflies, Izzy’s funky hats and faux fur wraps, her beaded handbag, her large art nouveaux Buddha lounging on his side. They can’t have Izzy, so they want as many of her things as they can wrangle from the others, only to find that once they haul the loot home, they can’t bear to have it around, reminding them that Izzy is gone. Antonia holds a yard sale, all of Izzy’s treasures, many of Sam’s, throwing in freebies whenever anyone bought something. To this day, Antonia will spot a townsperson wearing a Cornhuskers baseball cap or a flashy yellow shawl and catch herself lifting a hand, on the point of calling out, SAM! IZZY!

They are here, albeit a little scattered, a matter of dispersal. Antonia never knows where they will turn up next. You really believe that? Mona asks, her sensible mind at war with her desperate yearning to fill the hole in her heart.

Bless the spirit that makes these leaps, Antonia quotes Rilke, sounding just like that widow therapist in the podcast, for truly we live in what we imagine.

I guess you’re right, Mona says tentatively.

twelve

Harvest

Once again, Antonia is driving to Boston. A trip she has made often in the past few months. At the edge of town, she passes several houses with flags flying; a yellow ribbon encircles a tree with matching leaves. September 11, she is well aware. No synchronicities, please, she prays. Let the troubles end now.

This morning on NPR, along with commemorative recollections by survivors and family members of those who died, there are reports of hurricanes battering the Caribbean and Chiapas, luckily an area southwest of where Estela and Mario hale from—although how can she utter the adverb luckily with dozens injured and thousands homeless? At the border, mothers and fathers seeking asylum are being turned away, or if they are lucky enough to cross, unluckily their children are then taken away.

Along with those towers, the world as Antonia knew it has collapsed. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born—so many of the words and works she has spent a lifetime teaching seem now prescient and apropos of what is coming to pass. At least, Antonia tries to console herself, neither Izzy nor Sam are having to live through these broken times.

But they are also missing the swallows, a large twittering flock darkening the evening sky as they flew off the roof of Roger’s barn yesterday; missing the early morning view outside her bedroom window, the mist dispelling, the far hills emerging, taking shape, having survived the night; missing the intricate spiderwebs on the barbed-wire fence, their dewed filaments jeweled with light; missing the brisk charge in the air as the wind sharpens, the maples turning red and gold, the kids walking to school with their brand-new paraphernalia, little battalions of bright colors, their shouts and laughter recalling a childhood world gone by. The garden is still flourishing with whatever late flowers self-seeded from the previous summer: asters, cosmos, sunflowers, and nameless blooming things about which she can no longer ask Sam, What’s this called? Earlier this summer, with help from Mario and José, Antonia did plant a few crops—potatoes, sweet corn, her favorite pole beans—Estela pitching in from time to time, her baby in a sling reminiscent of those the women in her village have improvised for centuries out of fabric, this one bought online at four, five times the cost, none of the profit going back to where the template came from.

A few days ago, Antonia delved into the soil and dug out Sam’s potatoes—she still calls them Sam’s, even though this year her own hands planted and harvested them. Will she ever use that verb again without thinking of Izzy’s body, split open, her heart, kidneys, liver placed in a cooler to be flown across the country to wherever someone awaited her sister’s gift of life?

Enjoy! Izzy would always say whenever she unveiled one of her lavish gifts, her extravagant surprises: eighty-three orchids, a kidney, a liver, a heart. Enjoy, enjoy!