But for her, he would try.

He bent over and placed his gloved hands flat on the toboggan, and with his head down, he started running, pushing with all his might. Dabney whooped. Clen felt the momentum of the hill pulling him down. Inertia was real. He could not stop his legs from running. He would never be able to fling his legs up and get on behind her. Never.

No wonder the horse was dead, he thought.

He sent the toboggan down the hill while he stumbled behind it for a few steps before doing a spectacular face-plant into the snow. He raised his head to see Dabney flying indeed; the fancy toboggan might have been a magic carpet. She careened down the hill away from him, getting smaller and farther away, until she disappeared behind a stand of fir trees. He had lost her.

He had thought, When she gets back up to the top of this hill, I am going to kiss her. I am going to make her mine.

Thirty-some-odd years had passed, but there was an eerie similarity in Dabney’s tobogganing down the hill at Dead Horse Valley and the slide for the worse in her health, which had started in late September. Clen felt as helpless and inept and incapable as he had then. She was going. He could not go with her.

For days, she was bedridden. The pain, the pain! Agnes called Dr. Rohatgi. There was nothing he could do; this was how the disease progressed.

She was being eaten from the inside. That was how it felt, she said. Like thousands of tiny razor teeth. Her healthy cells were being attacked and colonized by the mutant, deformed, cancerous cells. There was pain medication, but many times Dabney cried out in the night. She cried for him, mostly, but also for Agnes, and for her mother.

Mama!

Clen tensed, believing he had misheard her. But then she said it again, in a voice that was much younger than her adult Dabney voice.

Mama!

There had been times in their growing up—high school and college—when they had talked about Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson, and what she had done. Dabney had consistently spoken with what Clen would have called “resigned indifference.” She wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Whatever. Lots of people aren’t. She didn’t smother me with a pillow or drown me in the bathtub, she walked away. She left me in capable hands. I am grateful for that. I’m sure she has her regrets, wherever she is.

Clen had puzzled over her attitude. He knew that Dabney had spent years in therapy with Dr. Donegal in order to achieve such insouciance. But really, wasn’t she angry? Clen himself was furious at his father, the empty bottles of Wild Turkey on the coffee table, the long hours at the bar after work and all weekend long when he should have been teaching Clen how to throw a spiral pass, or how to run skillfully behind a toboggan and then jump onto it. He had cared only about drinking, drinking, drinking until it killed him.

The ugly truth was a punch to the gut: Clen was no better than his father or Dabney’s mother. He was no better.

Mama!

Clen wiped Dabney’s forehead with a cool washcloth and watched her eyelids flutter closed.

There were still good days, days when Dabney got out of bed smiling and went for her walk, although slower, and then slower still. One day, Dabney came home and said, “Mr. Lawson asked if he could drive me home. I said no, and still he slowed all the way down and trailed me for the last quarter mile. Do I really look that bad?”

Clen kissed the tip of her nose. “No,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

He could feel sand running through the hourglass. There wasn’t enough time to tell her how beautiful she was—how much he loved her or how sorry, how hideously, awfully sorry, he was that he hadn’t come right home from Bangkok. He should have come right home!

He had wasted twenty-seven years!

Twenty-seven years, it seemed impossible. Where had they gone? It had taken him seven years to learn the country of Vietnam, to learn how to live with people who looked at him in fear and distrust. His language skills were poor; he had gotten by with French and broken English. The country was as hot as soup; the only place he had truly loved had been Dalat, in the hills. The Times had gotten him a room at the Dalat Palace and every morning he opened the wooden shutters and gazed out over the lake. Every night he drank a dozen bottles of ice-cold 333 and shot billiards in the stone-grotto bar. Best billiards table in Southeast Asia, he could attest. People would come and go—French, Australians, soldiers, doctors, entrepreneurs who said that communism wouldn’t hold. It was human nature for man to want to make his own money, it didn’t matter if he lived in Dalat or Detroit.

Clen could have been with Dabney all that time. He had smoked so many cigarettes, and eaten so many bowls of pho and so many banh mi prepared on the side of the road by a woman wearing a triangle hat, squatting by the grill, turning the meat, layering the meat on a freshly sliced baguette with carrots, mint, cilantro, cucumber, and the sauce of the gods.

He could have been with Dabney.

He’d spent five years with Mi Linh, but she wouldn’t come with him to Bangkok. Bangkok was a hole, she said. He was lucky to have gotten out of there after his first year. Why go back? She had been right, it was a hole, far worse the second time. And then, he’d lost his arm.

He did not rue the loss of his arm the way he rued all those years without Dabney.

While Dabney slept, he worked on a surprise for her. It was taking him hours and hours to interview and transcribe—and still it would be incomplete. He just didn’t have the resources. Agnes helped him where she could. Agnes assured him that what he was doing was awesome in the truest sense of the word. It is the best thing, she kept saying. It is the very best thing.