We tapped our cans together and drank.

We walked without speaking, choosing our route by silent accord. Light seeped onto the street from every window: families and trees and carols sung in warm rooms. It was on that Christmas Eve walk I finally understood that I had begun to care for Clive Richardson. I don’t mean that I had become any less suspicious. When I forced myself to imagine what he might have done, my blood ran cold. Yet when I did not force myself to imagine it, I was able to believe the lie that Clive was just a taxi driver with whom I’d struck up one of those unlikely urban friendships you hear stories about. (A hair colorist officiating at the wedding of a client who has become a dear friend. A manicurist and an Upper East Side mom brought together by a passion for mah-jongg.) A few months earlier, I had to exert tremendous mental energy to convince myself that the man before me was not the same man Alison had known, simply to bear being near him. Now that same process was effortless—the separation of one man into two was total, complete.

As we walked, it began to snow. The light from the streetlamps caught the falling snow in big, soft halos.

“Beautiful,” I said.

He shrugged.

“But not home, right?”

He didn’t respond.

“Why don’t you go back? I can tell you miss it.”

Clive’s face tightened. “It’s for the best.”

“But not even once? Not even to see your son?”

He shook his head.

“You have secrets.”

He stopped walking. “Pardon?”

I took his hands in mine. “It’s okay. I just mean, you have your secrets and I have mine. That’s why I know I can trust you. Because you understand what it’s like.” He started to protest, but I continued. “You don’t have to tell me I’m wrong. We don’t have to say anything about it. Not unless we want to.”

ONE NIGHT I dreamed I was riding with Clive in his taxi. We were in New York, but it didn’t look like New York. It looked like Saint X. We drove down sandy streets lined with palm trees, past fish-fry stands and pink motels; I understood that this was the secret city, a submerged place that existed beneath the city where harried workers and dithering tourists cluttered the sidewalks—if I listened, I could hear the shuffle of their footfalls filtering down from some distant, forgettable world high above. On a long straight stretch of road, we came upon a girl crossing the street. It was Alison, though in the dream this meant something different—my heart did not leap to see her, she had not been dead and was not now alive; she was simply a girl taking her sweet time in the middle of the road. Clive honked. She idled. He explained to me that this was always happening, that it was one of the primary aggravations of his job, these girls in the road. He honked again, but Alison was not the least bit concerned, and I started getting annoyed. I shouted, “Move! Move!” Clive honked and honked, and as I surfaced from sleep I realized that the honking was my apartment buzzer. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

“Who is it?” I asked groggily.

“Emily, thank god. It’s me. Please, please let me in.”

Jackie. I looked around my apartment—it was a disaster, an easy visual symbol Jackie would be eager to latch on to, physical disorder as a sign of emotional disorder, and so on. “Wait there. I’ll come up.”

I threw on some clothes and met her at the vestibule, where she at once threw her arms around me.

My body went rigid. “What are you doing here?”

“Don’t you know I would never, ever forget? I’m not just going to leave you alone today of all days, even if you have been a totally awful friend lately. You and I are going to a barre class that starts in twenty minutes.”

I didn’t move.

“Come on, Em, get your butt downstairs and get changed.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“I’m not going with you.”

“Of course you are. I have a whole day planned. After barre class there’s brunch at this amazing vegetarian place on Bedford. They do a homemade chai that is life-changing.”

I tried to walk around her, but she reached out and put her hands on my shoulders.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“What the hell? Are you seriously going to walk away from me?”

She held me firmly and our eyes locked. In that moment I saw many things clearly that had previously been opaque to me. Jackie was a basically good person, but I did not like her and I never had. It wasn’t just Jackie. It was all of my friends. They were dramatic, self-absorbed, ridiculous people, and I had always thought so. I had cultivated friendships with them not for intimacy and connection but to be able to judge them, and to extract from our every interaction a sense of my own superiority. Look what I had been through! And still I was better than the lot of them. What was wrong with me? Why was I the way I was? Alison, Alison, the answer was always Alison.

“Excuse me,” I said again.

Jackie’s eyes filled with tears. She released me.

As I hurried down the street I heard her call after me. “I’m trying to help you! Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”

WHEN A person you love dies, the calendar becomes a minefield. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. There is the loved one’s birthday. One’s own birthday. Various national and religious holidays, if one is religious. All of these days are difficult in their own ways. The loved one used to call you and sing happy birthday over the phone, awful and tone-deaf. Cranberry relish was the loved one’s favorite Thanksgiving food, they used to eat and eat. But the anniversary is different. On the anniversary of the loved one’s death, you slip backward through time to this same day one, five, ten years ago. (Eighteen years … How could it be? She had been gone as many years as she was alive.) You live it all over again, minute by minute.

I made my way to Clive’s apartment building just before noon. I was sitting under the faded blue umbrella then. We were sorting through the woman’s basket of beads together, picking out purple and white beads, colors I had chosen not because they were my favorite but because they were hers. As I walked east on Cortelyou, I felt the brisk, delicate movements of the woman’s hands braiding my hair.

The light was on in Clive’s window. I walked to the end of the block and sat on a front stoop diagonal from his building to wait. I’d left my apartment in such a hurry, what with Jackie’s unexpected appearance, that I hadn’t even grabbed my coat. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and within minutes my ears burned with cold. Alison pecked me on the forehead. She walked down the beach and was gone.