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Hopper’s lonely paintings. I had little family left, Paul was almost all of it, but, like family, Ann knew our joys and sorrows. Together we mulled over several large urban hospitals offering intensive stroke rehabilitation programs.
    “I could contact a friend at Hopkins,” she offered somberly.
    “But, at seventy-four,” I thought out loud, “with his heart trouble and diabetes, could he even handle the upheaval of the trip, and cope with living in a hotel, let alone a strange city, all the new faces— he’s so confused! —and completely unfamiliar doctors and therapists? Could his heart take the upheaval?”
    “I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “And, you know, he may have to wait a week or two for an opening . . . then we can arrange to have him transferred. . . . Or he could stay here, and maybe go into the Rehab Unit downstairs—maybe even tomorrow, if they have a free bed.”
    “There’s a rehab unit downstairs?”
    That was a land I didn’t know about and had never visited. In my imagination, it existed as the Land That Time Forgot, a preserve of dinosaur-like patients lumbering over linoleum floors. Or will it be brisker and brighter than that, I hoped, more of a workshop for broken racing yachts?
    Over the years, while he coped with diabetes and a pacemaker, the hospital had already become a too-frequent port for Paul. Now it would be a salvage yard, for how long I didn’t know—surely a few weeks. But that made the most sense, at least for now. I returned to Paul’s room.
    “MEM, MEM, MEM, MEM?!” he demanded hoarsely, which I took to mean, Where did you go! Don’t leave me!
    “I was nearby, at the nurses’ station, talking with Dr. Ann.” Bedbound as he was, I might just as well have been in China.
    In a fog, without sleep, I tried to explain to Paul what was happening and discuss where he would be going—instead of home. He understood just a fraction. “Mem,” he uttered first pleadingly, then angrily, over and over.

CHAPTER 4

    A S I WOKE, THE SUNLIGHT, FILTERING IN THROUGH THE bedroom window, shimmered across the floral quilt and hit my eyes. I raised myself languidly onto my elbows. Distant gagging and ripping sounds trickled through the windows. But that was only the raving of crows and the downshift arpeggios of trucks, scattered voices of summer. I dropped back onto the bed with a groan. I used to feel a sensuous joy in waking up, sometimes slithering around in bed for a few moments, just taking pleasure in having limbs that glide in different directions, and enjoying the feel of the soft warm sheet under my shoulders, before padding across the ridged carpet in bare feet to a skylit bathroom, where I was greeted by teal and lavender tiles and a wallpaper motif of peacocks and trees of life.
    Now I woke in a state of anxious hurry, rushing to wash and dress, while worrying about how Paul might have passed the night and what momentum, if any, his brain might have gained. The idea of breakfast simply didn’t occur. Driving to the hospital with a dry metallic taste in my mouth, I felt as if the minerals were leaching out of my bones. I wanted somehow, miraculously, to right the wrongs in Paul’s head. But, at the same time, I didn’t want ever to arrive and face the helplessness and emotional turmoil that awaited me. Between those two fates, the miles evaporated and I found myself turning into a woodsy parking lot, forgetting to lock my car door, lumbering into the building without a sense of walking.
    At first it was easy to get lost in the hospital’s maze of shiny hallways linking whole neighborhoods of rooms and winding past departments called Emergency, Imaging, Intensive Care, that appeared out of the fluorescent dusk like brightly lit upstate towns. Hadn’t I just passed the cafeteria and kitchen? Where was the Rehab Unit? I pressed on, entering hallways that narrowed and widened and narrowed again, branching like a well-lit circulatory system.
    Quietly, sometimes