She felt a quick wave of self-reproach for being even slightly interested in this, interested in anything else besides the fact of Graham’s death. Though she understood too that this interest wasn’t real, in some sense—that it was a way of not considering what was real. She felt it intensely then, the sensation of living for these moments on two levels—the one that seemed to be trying to disengage from what was happening, the one that was trying to realize it, to know it.

She leaned forward and put her hands on his cheeks, holding his face between her palms. There was something that she should be doing, or feeling. Surely this would come to her, the answer. Nothing she was doing now, nothing she could think of doing, felt right. She took her hands away from him. She stayed there, her hands in her lap.

She lost track of time. Perhaps twenty minutes passed, perhaps only a few. She wept, finally, she remembered that later, but she knew even as she did that she was weeping mostly for herself, for the life that she could already feel stretching out in front of her, without him. How would she live? How on earth would she pass the days? He had been so much at the center of her life, of their life together. It was, so much, one life.

She got up and took a tissue from the box on his side of the bed. She wiped her face, she blew her nose.

When she looked at Graham again, she noticed that he was wearing one of his old T-shirts, grayed with age, pinholed here and there. He had nothing else on, she knew this. This was his bedtime uniform in warm weather, it was all he ever wore. She sat next to him again and pulled the covers down. There: his long, shapely white thighs, the darker penis curled over one of them, the grayish, abundant pubic hair. His belly had relaxed and flattened out slightly.

She had the thought that she should put some clothes on him. Someone would have to come, someone who would see him like this. She couldn’t think who that might be at the moment—the doctor, some ambulance guys?—but she’d have to call someone at some point, and she didn’t want anyone looking at Graham naked.

But then she couldn’t imagine dressing him. The work of it seemed impossible: lifting his heavy body, turning him.

It was crazy to think about it anyway, she told herself. Nobody cared. Nobody cared but her. And she didn’t care, not really. She pulled the sheet and the light blanket up to his chest, as though he were a child she was tucking in. She leaned forward and kissed him, and was conscious even as she did it of how false this was. She didn’t feel anything for him, for this body. He was gone.

And finally she wept for that, for how hopeless it was, anything she could do for him now, any gesture she could make. For how empty his body could be.

She couldn’t have imagined it. Graham was his body—big, energetic, alive. Stilled, he was more absent than anyone else would have been.

They had trouble getting him down the stairs, he was so heavy and unwieldy, and the twisting, uncarpeted stairs were so narrow and steep. Plus one of the EMTs was a small woman, as small as Annie—though her arms, in her short-sleeved shirt, were ropy with tanned muscle.

Annie wasn’t looking. She never looked, even when it was just furniture being moved up or down the stairs. There was something about it that was reasonlessly terrifying to her. She could never stop imagining everything that could go wrong, all the horrible possibilities—things dropping, breaking, people falling backward under their heavy loads, getting crushed. And now, with Graham, her fear was more intense than ever. While the EMTs struggled, Annie was in the bedroom, sitting in Graham’s chair, trying not to think of what was going on out in the stairwell.

The rumpled bedclothes still held the suggestion of his shape, his body. Through the open window drifted the pleasant smell of the nighttime damp burning off. She heard birdsong and the quiet stir of air in the trees. Somewhere in the distance there was the sudden clash and clatter of an extension ladder being raised. Life, going on.

From the hall came a bump. “Jesus Christ!” the woman said softly, but not softly enough. The man whispered urgently, “I know, I know,” and it sounded as if they had stopped for a moment.

Then, muffled laughter.

Laughter!

Well, okay. After all, there was something comical about it, wasn’t there? The ridiculously perilous stairs, the big man, the little woman trying to carry him. Laurel and Hardy. All you’d need were the bowler hats.

Suddenly she found herself starting to laugh too. She went quickly into the bathroom and shut the door. Sitting hunched over on the edge of the tub, Annie let it come, the laughter, snorting and sniggering in her effort to be quiet, not to shame herself. It quickly began to feel dangerous, something she couldn’t control. It went on and on. She couldn’t stop herself.

Finally, thinking it would help, she went to the mirror over the sink and looked at her reflection. Her face was wet with tears, but she was still laughing. Laughing and crying at the same time. It was grotesque. She was grotesque, a mask of tragedy with strange, humorless laughter coming out of its downturned maw. She turned the faucet on and bent over the sink, lifting the cold water to her face again and again. She tried not to look at herself when she wiped her face off with the towel. Her breathing had grown regular, but she felt exhausted.

She opened the door and heard nothing. They were gone, then. She stepped into the hallway and stood there, looking across it into Graham’s study. She’d left his yellow filing cabinet drawer open when she went looking for his living will, the brightly colored metal drawer stuffed with information important to him. On his desk were his piled papers, his books, his computer. Above it, on the wall, a framed photo of her, staring out of a window, the cold light falling on her dramatically. Her photographer friend Natalie had taken it when she was pregnant with Sarah.

The telephone sat there too, a landline only Graham used anymore.

Annie had to start calling people, she knew this, but she hated the thought of it—the necessarily dramatic announcement, the inevitable reaction, the need to give herself over to other people’s responses: to their shock, their pain. She wasn’t ready.

She thought of Sarah. She would call her first.

But what time was it there, in California. Fiveish?

No, she should wait a bit longer.

Then: Lucas.

But Frieda, Frieda should be the one to call him.

And she couldn’t call Frieda first, before Sarah. She’d wait. Wait to call Sarah first, and then Frieda.

She went down the stairs herself then, the painted narrow stairs. She crossed the living room into the open kitchen. It was a little after 8:15, she saw on the stove clock. The sunlight was pouring into the room—weekend light, as she thought of it. On weekdays she would be getting ready to go to her studio by now.

She turned on the coffee machine she’d bought for Graham and did the minimal pushing of buttons that resulted in two shots of espresso and a pitcher of steamed, frothed milk. She sat at the table in the kitchen. The bouquet Graham had bought her had wilted a bit more in the night, she noticed. She drank her coffee slowly, falling again into the almost tranced state she’d been in earlier. She was conscious of time passing, but she couldn’t have said how much, how long. She heard Graham’s phone ring and then a distant voice leaving a message. Her cell might have rung too, but she wouldn’t have heard it—she’d turned the sound off last night before they’d gone to bed. Even after she’d called the doctor and the funeral home this morning, she hadn’t turned it back on.

Abruptly, she remembered the motion she’d felt in the bed in the night. She’d woken partway—it came to her now—with Graham’s stirring. She’d thought he might be about to get up, to go to the bathroom, and she’d turned over to try to go back to sleep. Was it then, she wondered? Then that his heart was stopping? Was he aware of it? Did he know he was dying? Was he in pain?

She’d started to rock herself back and forth, thinking of that moment for him. His aloneness in it seemed so pitiable, so awful.

And then the thought: Could she have saved him, could she have helped him, if she hadn’t turned away because she wanted sleep, more sleep?

She stopped. She put her hands down flat on the table. There was no point to this. It wouldn’t have made a difference, in all likelihood. And perhaps she was wrong anyway. Wrong about the moment of death, wrong about the motion she’d felt, or thought she’d felt, whatever it was.

It made no difference. He was gone, either way. He was dead. She made herself think the word, and then she said it out loud. “Dead.”

She’d used it earlier with the policeman, too, the young policeman, a boy really, who’d asked her how long she thought Graham might have been gone when she woke.

“You mean dead?” she had said.

He blushed, oddly, and looked down quickly at the pad he was writing on. “Yes,” he said.