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fix drinks and put on avant-garde albums—one favorite a meandering recording of airplane takeoffs and landings—and he would say absurd things like:
Do you feel that growing old is something we should all be doing a little more consciously?
    And:
Have you considered that probably each day of your life has changed you? If there was a way to track that, would you?
    And, of course:
Have you seen Helena? Has her hair grown out or has she kept it short? Does she still walk like that?
    —
    T HE FIRST WI NTER WITHOUT HER , Edward read Kant and Wittgenstein with a sophomoric fervor and an oversized highlighter, dressed in grays and blacks like the rest of the city, and avoided a series of phone calls from Los Angeles. Thirteen months before, towards the beginning of the end, at the urging of his agent, he had written a screenplay during a five-day cocaine binge. It was an insipid script—write a Christmas movie, his agent had said, they want one from you, the “they” always changing, the interest always urgent—that concerned a down-on-his-luck mall Santa and a series of perfectly timed misunderstandings, plus a beauty far out of Santa’s league and a greasy Italian shoe-store owner as the antagonist.
    “The thing,” as Edward called it, never referring to it by its ludicrous title, had now sprouted hideous blooms everywhere: billboards in subway stations, marquees downtown, print ads, echoes of punch lines in sports bars by men whose idea of humor was straight regurgitation. He would see a particularly beer-saturated group outside a pub, their breath visible in the fifteen-degree weather, their Neanderthal faces red and loosened, and sense it coming like an arthritic feels a storm.
Hey, Antonio, check out this North Pole!
And he would hurry around them, eaten with alarm.
    He continued to accept payment for the thing, though even that filled him with pulsing dread: in every gourmet dinner he ate or cashmere sweater he purchased, he saw the look of panic in the main actor’s face as frozen in the poster, the jumble of gift boxes at his feet, the beauty next to him with a shopping bag, the evil shoe proprietor leaning in with a textbook smirk on the other side. He had gone to see it the very first week, if only to grasp at some understanding of the man who had been capable of such asinine pursuits in the name of too much money. He left waitresses and cab drivers, especially those who seemed unhappy, extraordinary tips drawn from a great well of guilt. He tried to forgive his mother, which he found much easier since her death, and let his father talk to him about the monstrosity of the world for as long as the old man deigned. He cleaned the dishes until they were gleaming, the brilliant red pots Helena had left behind in her hurry to transform, and spent slow hours imagining an inviolate place where he wouldn’t feel his past as if it were some punishing physical affliction.
    Mostly, he thought of Helena, and sometimes his neural pathways brought her so close—her left index finger crooked from a childhood Ping-Pong accident; her long-limbed way of occupying and redefining physical space; the face she offered upon waking, both confused and grateful—that he felt like a magician.

E DITH AND D ECLAN HAD LIVED a life together. She needed to remember this, and she worried she could no longer do so effectively. At times, she explored the possibility that all their possessions, all this carbon proof, might have been placed strategically throughout her living space as some elaborate ruse. Of course this was not, could not, be true, but her brain stumbled blithely over the sentiment that this would be an easier truth to accept. Where
was
he, then? Why hadn’t they spoken? What had he forgotten to tell her?
    At the funeral, dressed in an old black suit and pearls, she had kissed everyone’s cheek, had told the story of their first storm in the house. How they had run around placing pots under every leak, and how that evening