THE COUPLE FIRST SAW THE HOUSE FROM A GREAT DISTANCE. They merged onto the highway and spotted it way off the shoulder, over the tops of trees, a crumbling majestic estate with brittle gardens and large empty windows.
“Are you sure that’s it?” the man asked.
“I’m checking the map,” the woman said. She piled her hair on top of her head, then let it drop around her shoulders. He loved when she did that.
“We should have followed the caravan from the cemetery,” he said.
“You mean the procession.”
“Parade?”
“Definitely not that,” she said, laughing.
There had been a funeral that morning, and now they made their way toward a hosted brunch. The address was printed on a small cream-colored card, with a style of calligraphy Lydia especially liked. It was the type of thing she might’ve picked out herself. Please join us for refreshments and remembrances. She folded it several times into an accordion shape and slipped it in her pocket, then leaned over from the passenger side to rest her head on her husband’s shoulder.
“Hey, be careful, I’m driving here.” George swerved the car as a joke, and she flinched. He was always making jokes like this, with inscrutable punch lines. He was not a comedian; he was a historian. He specialized in the Middle Ages, which wasn’t typically funny, though he claimed it had its moments.
“You’re just hilarious,” Lydia said, catching her breath.
George couldn’t help himself. She was a delightful object of torment. She made it so easy for him. He put on his blinker and rejoined the right lane.
Maybe the punch line had to do with the fact that someday one of them would die.
“I’m going to ask Rose why she raised such an adorable backseat driver,” George said.
“You will ask my mother nothing of the sort.”
Outside, the cicadas were symphonic. The clouds rolled past their windshield in crumbling formations of limestone and pink quartz. The sky was one shade of blue with the windows up and another kind of blue when they were rolled down. Or was that a memory from a different car, on a different day?
They took the next exit and after a mile or two, there it was: a long, snaking driveway that opened onto a mansion of sorts. One of those paved entrances that could have been a moat in another era.
“Where are we?” Lydia asked, looking around.
“You have reached your destination,” George said.
“But when are we?”
“Half past one.”
“What century, I mean.”
She smoothed out the fabric of his sleeve. He was still in his black suit. Lydia was wearing a beautifully tailored blazer, a thick charcoal tweed that she had worn to another funeral a long time ago. It still fit around the middle. After all, she was barely showing. She was puzzling over something but couldn’t remember what. The question rotated inside her for a sustained moment, then dissolved like sugar in hot water.
The house was somehow larger and smaller than what she had imagined from the interstate. Which is another way of saying, she had been doubly wrong. Lydia thought about how the mind’s eye can be inaccurate in both directions, leaving room and also not making quite enough. The body is much better at expanding, even though people are always claiming you can expand your mind with books or courses or concertos or a really good joint.
“A quaint little cottage, huh?” she said, and he kissed her ear.
It looked monstrous from the side but modest from the front. The bushes surrounding the door felt crisp to the touch. And there was a smell. Mulch? Putrefaction and the turning of soil, a landscaping project no doubt. The only welcoming aspect of the property was the row of cars parked along the street, signaling a gathering somewhere close by.
“Well, you’ve always liked rustic,” George said.
“No, sir, I like retro,” Lydia said, piling her hair on top of her head again.
“Retro, rustic, let’s call the whole thing off,” he sang.
“I love a ruin best of all.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm. And remember: where there is death, there are bagels. Come on,” she said, taking his hand. They walked through the unlocked door to find a host, or a guest, or a friendly face. Ah yes, then the question returned. For the life of her, she could not remember who had died.
SOME TIME PASSED. George was holding a warm mug and looking at the framed photographs on the wall. His body must have been carefully arranged in this position; he could not remember lifting the mug nor filling it. His wife appeared by his side out of nowhere, as if from a mist. Dull murmurs and muffled sobs could be detected in a nearby room. She held out a plate of deli salads, crackers, miniature toasts, fruit, a bialy with schmear. This was something he loved about their marriage, the shared party plate. Once, at an event with gorgeous canapés and soufflé on tiny spoons, Lydia went foraging and brought a saucer filled with lime wedges back to their table, plus two cocktail forks. That wasn’t their wedding, was it? It could have been.
“Something’s not right with this place,” she said.
He was about to agree, but low vibrations of music sounded from an upstairs floor, and he lost the thread.
Suddenly, the parlor. Lydia found herself standing over an etched crystal bowl of punch and a ladle engraved with a familiar monogram. Or maybe it was a store brand. The glasses were dainty and looked extremely fragile. All around her people spoke in hushed tones. She couldn’t quite catch anyone’s eye. She somehow knew that the glassware had been purchased as a set and that one piece was missing. Sure enough, there were only eleven vessels where there should have been twelve. She went looking for George, to tell him about the missing cup, but he was nowhere to be found.
Then she realized the twelfth cup was in her hand.
“Does this have alcohol in it?” she asked a group of turned shoulders, gesturing at the punch, but no one responded directly. One sip wouldn’t hurt the baby. It might even help, she thought, taking in the grim surroundings. Chilly. Everyone here was so rude. She thought of the old turn of phrase. You look like you’ve seen a ghost! Maybe they had. Now she was the one being rude.
Lydia’s mind had wandered and so had her feet, landing her up on the other side of the estate, gazing into a bedroom. It was tastefully decorated, out of a catalog really, with chenille throws and pressed linen sheets. Her neck was hot, and she kept piling the curls on top of her head, only to let them fall back down again. A silly habit that drove George wild. She went to the dresser as if it were the most natural thing and rummaged for a hair clip.
“There you are,” George said, falling back onto a love seat in the corner of the room and pulling her into his lap.
“I got lost.”
“You got nosy.”
“So? You abandoned me,” she said.
“Hardly. I’m the one who was left alone, bereft!”
They sat there for a moment together, looking out the window at the property, which was enormous and seemed to span a full county. There were stately trees that housed entire ecosystems, and farther in the distance, trellised gardens with wilted flowers. It could take you a whole lifetime to frolic through the grass here, if frolicking was your thing. Near the edge of the road, they could see the folly. A stone wreckage, like a medieval tower that had sunk below the surface of the earth, leaving only a cupola aboveground.
“What is that over there?” Lydia asked him, pointing.
“The folly? It’s decorative.”
“I mean what’s it for?”
“Nothing, it’s decorative,” George said. “It doesn’t have a purpose.”
“It needs a life coach.”
“Or a lover.”
The folly was not so terribly far from the house, but through the window, it seemed to be in rapid retreat, fading into the scenery.
“Maybe we can go exploring?” he asked.
“After the eulogy,” she said.
“They did the eulogy at the cemetery.”
“Where oh where did my little mind go?”
“Let’s find it,” he said. “Should we tell them we’re stepping outside?”
“Tell who?”
IT HAD TURNED into a hot autumn day, and Lydia molted her blazer along the path of the hike. Once they had arrived in the domed shade of the folly, she tested an overturned stone with her foot to make sure it didn’t wobble, then sat down. All around her the light and leaves were gold and soft, and the beauty settled in her chest the way beauty often did, transitioning from something seen to something felt, something both remembered and experienced at the same time. Tucked above one of the cornices, she spotted a small doll, a colorful children’s plaything with a lanyard dangling from its middle. Ivy and moss had grown around its edges, and it looked trapped in its little nest. Lydia had an impulse to bring the toy inside, but when she reached for it, her heart sank. Or maybe the baby kicked? She confused these two things quite a bit. Lydia stopped reaching and fanned herself dramatically with an outstretched hand.
“It’s not that warm out, is it?” George said.
“Warmth is not empirical!”
“Of course it is.”
“Well, clearly I am be-shvitzed over here, darling.”
“Be-shvitzed, bo-thered, and bea-utiful,” he sang.
“Do you remember,” Lydia asked, “when autumn was chilly?”
George wiped her brow with the side of his sleeve, and she grinned, wiping the rest of her sweat on his chest, nuzzling into his belly and the soft meat of him that gave way for her affection. She left a round wet mark on his pressed shirt.
“Come on,” he said, out of breath. “How in the fuck are we going to chase around a toddler if we can barely go for a walk?”
“Fee, fi, fo, fum. What folly!”
“I’m serious.”
“Shall I steal a child from near the punch bowl,” Lydia said, “and ask her to run for her life?”
“No. Race me instead.”
George grinned at her with a playful meanness. He knew she could not turn down a contest. It did not matter what kind.
“I will do no such thing,” she said, but she was already relacing her boots.
“Winner buys dinner?” he suggested, stretching his calves against a Doric column.
“No, we have the meat loaf defrosting,” she said.
“Loser eats crow?” he said.
“Crows are nearly extinct, my love, try to be more sensitive.”
“Fine. Winner gets to die first.” Another one of his jokes.
“Terrific. How funereal!”
“I can read the room.” Now George was doing exaggerated lunges and she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Doesn’t winner want to live longest?” After saying it out loud, Lydia immediately knew she was wrong. Winner wants to live together, not alone.
“On your mark . . .”
“I’m not falling for this!” she shrieked, and ran back to the house without waiting for the countdown, knocking into George and squeezing out a narrow lead. He easily accelerated and lifted her up around her waist, which she called her Middle Ages.
“Let me go,” she said. “I’m ancient history!”
He placed her down to the side of the path, then trotted forward. They had each cheated so as not to live without the other. But he had won.
On the drive home, it occurred to Lydia that they might’ve offended the bereaved with their silly game, but again, she could not quite put her finger on who was bereaved, or who had departed. The information fluttered against her face, too close to see but near enough to be a bother. If she couldn’t remember whom she had offended, then she probably had not offended anyone. Right? No, that wasn’t right. And yet. The mourners were a gray faceless cloud that tottered to the back of her consciousness, rarely to be considered again.
They had to stop many times so she could use the bathroom. Her bladder was infamous in those early months. At each rest area, George bought a souvenir and begged Lydia to save the knickknack for his impending funeral. She emerged from the ladies’ room, and he held up a bright green mug that declared a certain state to be, in fact, for lovers.
“Oh, hello, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” she said to the mug. “How do you do.”
“Bury us together,” George said. “Please, dear, don’t forget.”
“I’ll remember you and your lover fondly.”
He accumulated a bag of candies, a key chain, and a bumper sticker that warned of BEARS CROSSING.
“My most prized possessions,” he said.
After she agreed to bury George with his prizes, they moved on to the finer points, like speeches and songs. He didn’t want anything fussy. Just a sixteen-piece orchestra.
“And you’ll write something,” he said. “What’s your fee?”
“You can’t afford me,” Lydia said, sticking her nose in the air, but he absolutely could. She was very, very affordable.
It wasn’t until later that night, in bed, when the idea of George’s death landed differently. Her husband’s death, which he had won fair and square. Lydia had not felt this pointless circle for some time, the unmistakable shape of dread, the Questions. She was in its circumference now. What kind of demise had they invited by playing their stupid game? Would George die young? Was he still considered young, and more important, was she? She could be a blushing widow and old mom, both! Geriatric birth and geriatric death were two separate things, after all. She leaned over to make sure he was still breathing. Ah, he was snoring. The mediocre meat loaf from dinner sat funny in Lydia’s stomach, but at least if she’d accidentally poisoned him, she’d also poisoned herself.
“Mommy brain,” George said when she finally confessed her fear. She had been holding it in for weeks. He wasn’t wrong about the hormones, but did he have to say it like that? Mommy brain, the mind expanding. For a moment Lydia wished him dead, and then she started to cry.
“I’m sorry. I just wished you were dead!”
“You’re not that powerful, you know. You can’t think me to death.”
“Why not? I think myself to death all the time,” she said into a tissue.
“That’s true. But I’m not going anywhere.”
“People drop dead every day,” Lydia said. “We were just dressed in black for old so-and-so.”
“Dressed in black for who?” George asked, which surprised her. She had hoped he would fill in the name. Now Lydia was even less certain about the funeral they had attended.
“People are dropping like flies,” she said, swinging her hand around for effect. “It’s the latest craze.”
He laughed and wrapped his arms around her. “I thought flies were dropping like people.”
“Only in Nevada,” she said. “The scientists are looking into it.”
“Would you like a rematch?” he asked. “I’ll let you win this time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, but yes, really that was what she wanted more than anything. She did not want to outlive anyone, let alone him.
George returned to grading papers, and Lydia went back to writing an article about shrimp, and how they had been overfarmed, and how very soon there would be none left in any of the oceans. No scampi, no cocktail, no coconut. None whatsoever.
THINGS WERE BETTER then. Lydia had a bump the size of a novelty gumball machine. She had a chart that showed her how to measure. People were happy to see her wherever she went, and she was not used to this feeling, the ability to make strangers smile and look grateful for her presence. In this way, carrying a child was like being a child. The world opened its arms to you, whether you wanted it or not. And she couldn’t worry about her husband dying when she was consumed with keeping a baby alive. All the books and tricks and whole grains, she had charts for those too. George was on a health kick of his own. He rode his bike to their birthing classes, to work, to the market. Once, he went to buy some necessities for dinner and took a long time coming home. His bike careened across Lydia’s mind and straight into traffic, overwhelmed by the weight of the ginger ale and the family pack of chicken thighs. Before she could call him or send him a message, he was walking through the front door, as alive as anyone else, telling her about the long lines at the cash register. Lydia pretended that everything was fine, and pretending was almost the real thing.
On certain nights, she found herself dreaming of the folly, especially in the third trimester. At the end of the dream, an earthquake split the grounds apart, and the folly gave way to reveal a fully interred fortress, with burrowed parapets and towers, rising to greet the sky from the dust and rubble. It had been a castle all along. She hoped that when she died, they buried her all the way down, nothing left poking out aboveground, for god’s sake. But who would be there to bury her if he died first? Oh, right. She touched her belly.
George was working with his students on their dissertations. The Venerable Bede, the bubonic plague, ten different approaches to the Crusades. Lydia was calmer than before but still prone to outbursts. When he did not show up for a sonogram, she called him thirty times. Dead on the side of the road. Dead under the heel of a villain! Hog-tied to the train tracks, like in the cartoons. No, he had been caught up at work, didn’t she understand? Yes, he was caught up at work with the very pretty graduate student, but nothing had happened. They were just reviewing for a presentation. He wondered why Lydia couldn’t worry about infidelity, like a normal person. Every story had to end in his death. Couldn’t she let him die at his own pace, in peace?
“You’re stealing my thunder,” George said. Lydia was sobbing over some bread sticks because he had been away from his phone all day. “When I die, I want to really surprise your socks off!”
“That’s not funny,” she said, pressing her runny nose into his neck.
“It’s hilarious,” he said. “Think of how cold your feet will be.”
“You’re cruel.”
He carried her into the bedroom and pulled down her pants, moving his hands under each leg, tracing her skin with the tips of his fingers. She sighed. With his head between her knees, there was very little worry about death.
“Please. Don’t be an English major,” he said, before she could find the pun.
Then afterward, he read the latest journals and scholarship while Lydia slept next to him. It’s not that he thought he would be able to survive without her. But sometimes he thought that perhaps she was less likely to survive without him. It was an ungenerous feeling, but that didn’t make it untrue. A stingy little fact, taking shape, bending and twisting his heart in unexpected ways. He envied his graduate students who still believed themselves to be immortal. Nothing could shake the invincible realities they inhabited. Their worlds were unending. The pretty graduate student spoke in whens, never ifs. When I get tenure, she said, when I have children, when I travel. When I’m older. When I’m old. When you’re long gone, she meant.
THERE WAS THE extinction of shrimp, then trout and salmon, and at last, the aforementioned crows. Lydia’s work kept her busy. She was halfway through writing a long-form piece on the inevitable loss of snails when she started having contractions.
“I’ll call the doctor,” George said.
“Call my editor first.”
The line was busy, and then they were on hold, and then the nurse begged them to wait a little longer.
“Snail’s pace indeed!” George said.
“Everyone,” the nurse said, “I mean everyone, is having a baby today.”
Oh, Lydia hated that she was doing something popular. Then again, extinction had to start somewhere. She squatted, kneeled, and melted sideways until her whole body was on the ground. Then she put her head against the floor and laughed. George joined her there.
“This is where we live now,” she said.
“I’ve always thought you were down-to-earth.”
She could feel their messy apartment, the crumbly bits of daily life against her cheek. How was she supposed to teach their child anything if she could not even manage to use a broom? But there were other points of expertise to share. The best way to clean hair from a round brush was with a flat brush. The list of gastropods that were still alive, updated every morning at six o’clock. Not the meat loaf recipe, but the recipe for movie theater popcorn at home. You go to the movie theater, buy popcorn, bring it home. What was playing at the multiplex? Lydia was dying to see the new comedy with the actor from the lawyer show they liked, and the actress who looked like George’s cousin, who was also a lawyer, but a real one. The cousin, not the actress.
Then Lydia’s mind fell down a gully of pain. She was so scared that she had forgotten! They had other, urgent plans.
For once, George was scared too. When it was finally time to go, he did not swerve into traffic or make remarks, or challenge Lydia to a battle of wits. He drove them to the hospital and parked the car, carried the overnight bag, and silently helped her inside.
“I should give birth more often,” she said.
While she was heavily medicated, Lydia asked George to bury her all the way down.
“What do you mean, my love?”
“Don’t leave my head aboveground like some stupid folly,” she slurred. “Get me in the ground good.”
“Something’s wrong,” the doctor said.
This is what George remembered hearing. Really, the doctor did not say anything at all. Certain moments can become very literal in retrospect.
But something was wrong. The baby had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. A strong pair of arms shuffled George out of the room and he started crying, as if on cue. Then he was holding a paper cup of water. He thought about the funeral from all those months ago, at that horrible house, holding a mug and not remembering who had put the mug in his hands. Why was he always stranded with beverages of unknown origin? And who had died? For the life of him, he couldn’t recall.
Their daughter, Anne, did not die that day; she lived. Lydia lived too. For a moment, watching Anne in her incubator, George finally understood his wife a little bit better, the way the mind tries to expand and bend itself to accommodate someone else’s survival, as if such a thing were possible. Together, the couple watched the baby breathe in and out, and in again, thinking the air through her lungs. Anne fit against Lydia’s chest so naturally, and Lydia fit against George. They were nested like a set of bowls. They had all outrun the shrimp, together.
George went back to work, and his graduate students presented him with a gift for his new daughter. It was a tie-dyed onesie printed with a very niche joke about Charlemagne. He knew that the pretty graduate student had picked it out. Her cheeks went red when he opened the wrapping paper, and she walked outside before everyone else, hoping he would follow.
Lydia dressed Anne in the onesie and sent a photo to George with a silly caption so he could share it with the department and thank them. She didn’t quite get the Charlemagne joke but again, the Middle Ages weren’t really all that funny.
“You had to be there,” George often said.
“No thanks indeed!” was her reply.
After feeding, Lydia showed Anne a colorful book about a farm. No plot, just a series of animals introducing themselves, one by one. What a crock! But that is a plot, she thought, after reading the book for the seventieth time. Life as a series of introductions. Maybe there was a new edition with a series of departures. She wondered if the cows ever raced the horses in a competition for who would go extinct first. Who would be left to tend the ranch? Not the chickens, god help us. They would fly the coop. And of course, a family is an ecosystem that sometimes goes extinct too.
Anne looked up at her mother, not guessing that anything ever died. Things lived and drank milk and produced sounds. She wanted to touch the page with the fuzzy lamb, to feel the soft fibers against her skin and hear her mother make the corresponding noise.
Anne had dozens of picture books, but there was one that Lydia and George read to her every night. Most of the details have been lost. It went something like this.
There was once a king, and a kingdom, and an old, crumbling tower, a folly on the edge of the royal grounds. After letting it sit empty for a while, the king hired a man to live in the ruins and work as his hermit. The hermit dressed in a yellowed tunic, a cap, and a cape, and he was conscripted to listen to travelers and their woes. Seeing as the hermit was just a regular man with a debt to the king, he did not have any specific wisdom to impart. And so, he invented a sham, a game to satisfy the passersby, and to entertain himself.
“If you walk around the tower two times backward, you can choose one of two fates,” he would say. The first fate was to live forever. The second fate was to die alone.
Of course, both fates were the very same. But the hermit’s visitors seemed satisfied with the riddle. They tromped around his home, stumbling in reverse, and then of course they chose to live forever. They left his domain feeling like they knew something about the future and how to greet it. They were less afraid.
The hermit’s game became very popular in the village and beyond. He set up a small souvenir shop nearby, with key chains and bumper stickers, mugs that declared this kingdom was, in fact, for lovers.
Finally, the king visited his hermit. He had heard good reviews and wanted to see for himself. The hermit read him the possible fates: live forever, die alone. And the king laughed. He was a kind king but not an idiot.
“That’s just two ways of saying the same thing!” the king said. “Give me a real bit of wisdom.”
“You want real wisdom? Hire a real wise guy,” the hermit said. “I’m just some doof who owes you money.”
“But haven’t you learned anything out here all alone in the woods? Hasn’t wisdom come to meet you?” the king asked.
“I have learned that no one lives forever, and that if you don’t want to die alone, you should keep better tabs on the queen. Catch my meaning?”
After that, the king banished his hermit and hired a new one. A professional.
No, it wasn’t a book for children. It was something else. It was a word problem, or an article on feudal states. It was maybe from a eulogy.
NOTHING WENT WRONG, but nothing went right. People came to meet the baby, and then no one came for a very long time. Lydia often missed George from the other room. She could always call for him, but yelling seemed unnecessary, and loud. George longed for solitude but was afraid. What if he never liked his own company quite as much as Lydia did? Ah, loneliness, they thought to themselves. The kind that walks around in pairs.
“Who’s that guy?” Lydia said. She hadn’t caught the first ten minutes of the movie.
“Who is anyone, really,” George said, cradling a handful of popcorn.
The two anonymous characters drove around in circles, and Lydia never learned their names or what they meant to each other.
Sometimes Anne cried at a volume tuned to shatter their loneliness, and then their loneliness reassembled itself in a series of abrupt, awkward sketches. Lydia entered the bedroom looking for George, right when he had left the apartment to look for Lydia. They sat across from each other in silence, then started speaking at the same time.
“No, you,” George said.
“But you,” Lydia said.
Lydia made a pun about recycling that was not worth repeating. She checked for a stray cane coming around a corner to drag her offstage. After all, it was what she deserved.
George made a grilled cheese sandwich and added the butter to the pan after the bread was already hot. He had not yet grated the cheddar.
“Oh, interesting. Is that how you’re going to do it?” Lydia asked, peering over his shoulder.
Their home was too big when they desired each other and too small when they were fighting. It was never the right size. It was wrong in both directions. They argued about why they were arguing, until every argument collapsed on itself and fit precariously in the bad kitchen cabinet where the miscellany of their marriage languished in obscurity. The heavy jar of coins, the tower of sponges, the ruined Tupperwares turned permanently red with sauce. None of the dishes matched, and Lydia’s set of elegant glassware was missing a piece. She put Anne down on her activity mat and wound the toy that hopped on one foot. Lydia wondered if this loneliness, gone unmanaged, would become a member of their marriage, would become the thing that in fact made their marriage possible. So invasive that if ever properly treated, it would have to end in death.
When Anne was two years old, they attended another funeral, this time in a normal room across town. She had been an esteemed colleague in the history department. Lydia had met her several times, with George, at faculty gatherings. The professor had always seemed breathless and flushed, which Lydia had loved. Now she thought maybe it had been a sign of underlying illness.
“Come on, Anne. Where there’s death, there’s bagels,” George said, buckling his daughter into the car seat and kissing her nose.
“Jesus, don’t say things like that,” Lydia said. “It’s a tragedy.”
“She was sick for a long time,” George said, not turning around. “And anyway, she wasn’t your friend. She was mine.”
Anne gurgled. “Dad!”
This is how their conversations had been going lately, blind alleys and impasses where there had once been an endless volley of words. Lydia used to think they would never run out of things to talk about. But most resources run out, so why then not conversation? Extinction knows no bounds. Pretty soon she would be writing an essay about the death of dialogue. A crisis for cafés across the world. She piled her curls on top of her head and shook them down around her shoulders, the way George used to like. Her style was cut shorter now, and the effect was less dramatic, but maybe the action would soften him. Or maybe if he didn’t like it, he would at least remember that he used to like it and find the memory of liking it just as nice.
“Do you need a hair thing?” he asked, handing Anne her bun-bun.
“No, never mind. Let’s get on the road.”
The funeral was beautiful. Laughter and good food and people hugging other people with no space between their bodies. This was a person who was loved and respected. The word treasured hovered over the proceedings. George gave some brief remarks during the service about how his colleague had championed him early in his career, how she had gone to the mat for him when no one else had believed in his potential.
I believed in you, Lydia thought, sitting in the crowd, though she knew that was not what he had meant. She was feeling uncharitable more and more, and doing this horrible thing, looking for ways that his words could hurt her, seeking out the obsolete meaning resting dormant in whatever he chose to say. She was trying to foreshadow their underlying illness, just in case she had to look back for proof.
George took his seat next to her. Then a very pretty graduate student spoke about how there were so few opportunities for women in this field, but this woman had been a mentor to all, had made anything seem possible. The whole time she spoke, she was looking at George.
“Is that one of yours?” Lydia asked.
It was a neutral question, George thought, but his wife was always asking neutral questions that contained hidden traps. He pretended not to hear her.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said.
After the remarks were made, Lydia found herself at the refreshments table. She vaguely remembered that odd, uncomfortable funeral from a few years back. The monogrammed ladle and the etched crystal punch bowl. What was in that punch? Who had died, again?
An older man joined her, and she poured him a drink, then one for herself. She recognized him as the husband of the deceased professor. He was very handsome, with bright curious eyes and a bald head like a smooth and gorgeous planet.
“Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Lydia said. Anne was sitting on her hip and stole his attention.
“Mine now,” she said, touching his sleeve.
“How old?” he asked with a smile.
“About two, but who’s counting. I feel like I’m carrying a freight train.”
“I’ll bet. My eldest is twenty-four.”
“And what kind of freight train is she?” Lydia asked.
“Oh, mostly import-export. Here she is now,” the professor’s husband said, ushering over the pretty graduate student.
“Hi, I’m Patricia,” the girl said. “I’ve heard so much about you.” Her face was covered in freckles and her hair was tucked behind her ears in two neat columns. She was even prettier up close. “I’m in your husband’s group.”
Lydia thought how odd it was, the way Patricia had talked about her mother during the funeral. A few weeks later, she ran into the older man at the grocery store, and after they recognized each other, then discussed the coupon flyer, and climates, both political and environmental, she could not help but bring it up. She was always saying exactly the wrong thing, tucking her foot directly under her tongue, letting every petty thought make its way toward language.
“Patricia, you know, she kept calling her mother a mentor, not her mother,” Lydia said, passing a can of tomatoes back and forth between her hands.
“Why should that be odd?” the man said. “She was a mentor too.”
“Okay,” Lydia said.
“Mentor!” Anne said from the front seat of the shopping cart. She grabbed at the bags of wild rice. “Mentors.”
“I’m glad that my daughter’s role models are at least high in fiber.”
“See?” he said, laughing. “Don’t complicate things.”
He said the same thing two weeks later, when they crossed paths at a lecture in a small bookstore and she tried to expound on the themes of the talk. Of course, she had been only half listening. Lydia was a champion daydreamer.
“Oh, and that one comment toward the end,” she said. “The part about really listening.”
“It was a bore,” he said. “Don’t complicate things.” He gave her his phone number printed on an old-fashioned calling card.
“We should have food together,” he said. “You look so sad.”
“No, you’re the one who’s supposed to be sad!”
Before she could tell if he was hurt by such a stupid remark, he laughed and walked off to greet some old friends. She wondered how he and his wife had greeted people together, when they were a couple. Did she do the schmoozing, or did he? Or was it a duet?
“A duet,” he said when eventually she asked him. “I am still sometimes waiting for her to chime in with the second verse. It’s silly. I will probably wait for the rest of my life.”
They had lunch every Thursday at a café while Anne was at her play group. They mostly talked about the news, and television programs, and sometimes about Lydia’s articles. He was a professor in the English department.
“Ah,” she said, “so you also specialize in extinction.”
Lydia drank espresso and the professor had tea and a croissant, and a very grumpy waiter tried to get them to order an actual, honest-to-god meal.
“Have a salad,” the waiter said. “It won’t kill you.”
“That’s exactly what they say right before they feed you lethal salad,” Lydia said.
Sometimes, after lunch, they would walk to the park and continue talking around whatever topic pleased them. They passed an oncoming brigade of ducks and made their way to a pond at the center of the meadow. Or they stopped at the benches near the edge of the path and watched a cavalcade of bikes ascend the steep hill. The professor had wonderful, impatient hands, which he devoted to the articulation of difficult ideas. She hoped to one day be the subject of his enthusiasm. On a certain afternoon, he bemoaned the final chapter in a disappointing book: “A torrent of vituperation!” Did people really say these things? Lydia nodded, but agreement was not the same as affection. And yet, she could not bear to sacrifice agreement, when it was all she had! Lydia was not familiar with the disappointing book in question. She was busy concocting a daydream where George died heroically, painlessly. A funeral procession of ducks and bikes. She had to knock off her husband before she could properly fantasize about anyone, it was only fair. But there she was again, thinking people dead, and worrying her head would make it so.
If Lydia ever brought anyone back to life, it was the professor’s wife, so she could feel jealous without feeling macabre. They would meet for dessert like adults. Here, have an éclair, don’t mind me.
Winter, spring, and summer all passed, and on their regular walks and lunches, Lydia learned her new friend’s seasonal attributes. The donning and shedding of scarves, hands both gloved and bare, a chapped row of knuckles soon smooth with a slight change in weather. The loafers without socks and the boots with rings of striped wool peeking out from their tops. Something nudged at Lydia’s heart, imagining how the garments had arrived in the old professor’s life, if his wife had furnished his closet for the eventuality of her death, or if his daughter and sons gave him sweaters for the holidays. Or maybe he wandered through department stores with his impeccable taste, browsing the random Oxford collars and blazers, drifting from one aisle to the next, alone.
She asked if he wanted to go shopping with her, and he gave Lydia his stern professor face, as if she were an outrageous person, a ridiculous event without precedent.
“I just thought you might like an unbiased opinion,” Lydia said.
“Do I look so very terrible to you?” he asked.
“No, the opposite. In fact, maybe you could give me some pointers.”
He laughed. He was wearing a perfectly tailored shirt, and she wished she could touch his perfect sleeve for no reason, the way Anne would. Mine, Lydia thought. Possessions always made Lydia so sad, and she had never been sure why. Now she knew, yes, it’s because they stay here forever. Possessions are the loneliest things in the world, lonelier even than people, because we leave them all behind. When everything finally went extinct, the planet would be a walk-in closet, with no one around to brag about having a walk-in closet.
One day, the café was closed. There was a note on the door. The grumpy waiter, whose name was Simon, was getting married to the chef’s daughter, Sylvia. The whole restaurant staff was at City Hall. They peered in the darkened window and saw tables arranged in long rows with gauzy napkins and pretty centerpieces.
The professor invited Lydia to eat at his place instead.
“Would that be fine with your wife?” she asked.
“What she doesn’t know can’t kill her. Because she’s dead.”
Pass the scones, nothing to see here.
Lydia said yes. “But only because Simon wouldn’t want us to skip lunch.”
They walked upstairs and he unlocked the door, and they left their shoes in the hall. Lydia joined him in the kitchen to help fetch seltzers from the fridge.
He made them chicken salad on pumpernickel, and they ate sitting next to each other on the low, deep couch. On the coffee table, he placed a small plate of sour pickles, a bowl of gymnastically folded potato chips, and for dessert, a round glass dish with ice-cold strawberries. His home was cozy and smelled good, and had the feeling of stuff without the feeling of clutter. Every vase was a gift from someone special and every book was dog-eared. He had put a shelf on the radiator and on the shelf were old photographs of his kids, his friends, people he loved. Just being in the apartment made Lydia feel like something with a really charming backstory.
“What is this?” she asked, pointing to a delicate green leaf sprouting from the sandwich.
“That’s watercress.”
“I like it. I like watercress.”
“I like you,” he said. “Thank you for keeping me company.”
He was really kind to her. It felt as if no one had liked her in one hundred years.
He moved the sandwich off her lap and put his hand on her leg. She was so hungry for him then that it was overwhelming, like humidity descending on the entire city.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, taking his hand in hers.
“Well?” he said.
Lydia climbed into his arms and they undressed right there. When they embraced she could feel him shivering all over.
“Well!” she said.
He moved their plates and seltzers to the floor so they wouldn’t get knocked about. Lydia was on top of him now, and she reached to close the ugly blinds, which she worried was presumptuous, both finding them ugly and closing them, since this was not her home.
The room was very dark. She had never seen him before, in shadow. There was so much she didn’t know. For instance, had a doctor checked that mole, or was it watercress?
The next part was so earnest it made them laugh, which led to a more serious approach, the way laughter often does when people aren’t wearing clothes. Her breathing became heavy and desperate, and they laughed again at the incredibly serious turn things had taken, which only made the moment even more dire.
“May I?” he asked.
And then he did!
Later, she curled against him and cried.
“Why tears?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s all right. It’s fine.”
“Is it fine?”
“Don’t complicate things,” he said, and he smoothed her hair down along her neck.
“I shouldn’t have done this,” she said, and a few minutes later they did it again. They did it a few weeks after that, and then another time in winter. It was so cold, what did they expect?
“Never again,” she said after the last time. Then she cried, because she knew she had to put an end to it and would not see him anymore. He was gentle and good. He was a good person who would be all alone. Or was it that she would be all alone? Lydia hoped her math was wrong and that he would live forever. She was always shitty with numbers. She wanted everyone she loved to survive her, but also, she wanted to never die.
“I don’t know why I tried to be your friend in the first place,” she said. “I’m so selfish.”
“Most friendship is feigning,” he said, “most loving really foolish.”
She cried even harder then, because she was curled against a man who could not even properly quote Shakespeare. She grabbed her clothing and dressed as quickly as possible.
Pulling up her pants, Lydia found a small card in one of the pockets, folded into an accordion shape. Please join us for refreshments and remembrances.
WE SHOULD PROBABLY check and see if the king was ever able to keep tabs on the queen.
When the professional hermit took over, the queen started visiting him at night, just as she had visited the hermit before him. The king banished this new hermit and replaced him with another, then another, and one more. The queen conquered them all.
“What can I tell you? I have a type,” she said.
She could not resist draping their capes over her body afterward, the way the rough fabric felt against her skin in the moonlight. She loved running through the forest with nothing but the sound of insects at her feet.
The king was exhausted. He loved the queen so much. She loved him too. But people in villages talk, and their kingdom was at stake.
His advisers begged him to consider finding a side piece of his own. They brought a series of townspeople to his bedchamber, each one more beautiful and handsome and doting than the last. There was this one stonemason with a particular way about him. But you can’t solve a problem by doubling it. And he didn’t want to do something just because the queen did! The king was kind of punk rock.
Instead, he went to the palace horticulturalist for a remedy or a potion, and she applied dandelions in embarrassing places.
“Are you sure this will work?” he asked, adjusting his pants.
“Trust me!” the horticulturalist said, stuffing some clover in each of his pockets and pinching his tush.
Next, the king stopped over to see the castle librarian. In a different kind of fable, he would’ve fallen in love with her mild-mannered temperament and mysterious past. But when he asked for a recommendation, she always suggested Chaucer. Chaucer this, Chaucer that! After a while he was convinced she had never read anything else.
“Shh,” the librarian said, lowering her gaze. Her cheek paled. Was she sexy, or was it plague?
Finally, the king visited his cranky royal astronomer in the north tower.
“Don’t touch my cosmos!” the astronomer yelled, apoplectic, rearranging the orrery on the mantel.
“Sorry,” the king said, laughing. He loved messing with the astronomer’s cosmos.
“This is the Terrestrial Sphere,” the astronomer said, tinkering with the heavenly orbs. “And beyond this, the Celestial Sphere. And beyond this, nothing.”
“Any advice on the marital sphere?”
“Beyond this, nothing.”
The king was suspicious of Aristotelian astronomy and said as much. Then he spun the orrery without thinking.
“Whoops,” the king said.
“You know, the kingdom to the south has something called a telescope,” the astronomer said. “Maybe if I had a telescope, I could formulate an opinion on your dumb marriage!”
The king thought he should probably burn the royal astronomer at the stake, but stake-burnings were a real bummer. The king had a feeling that someday, with a little perspective, people would not find stake-burnings all that great.
And so he left the north tower and traveled across several mountains to find the original hermit he had banished. The hermit was now a butcher, with four children and a house that was not crumbling, nor was it a sham. His apron said WORLD’S BEST DAD. All the magic in his life was real.
“Have you heard the one about Charlemagne?” the kids asked the king, and then they ran off to play.
The butcher poured them some drinks and they traded stories.
“You’re the only one who has ever given me any true wisdom,” the king confessed, his head in his hands. He brought the butcher up to speed and asked him for advice. A baby crawled over the butcher’s shoulders, and he packed him in a blanket like he was making a sandwich, put his son to sleep in the glow of the fire.
“The answer is clear,” the butcher said. He sent the king on his way with a solution and a rack of ribs coated in a secret family spice blend.
Of course, why not ask the queen if she herself wanted to be the hermit?
She jumped up and wrapped her arms around the king’s neck and moved to the woods that very night. They were happy. Every evening, the king came to visit her, and she met him in the moonlight, covered them both in the wool cape.
WHEN PATRICIA TOLD George about her father and his wife, together, he was surprised. He was a little bit angry too.
“But why?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears, pulling the sheets up around her chest. “If us, why not them?”
That was true. But the word us really made him cringe. George and his wife had used to be an us, and somehow, the word had changed meaning when he hadn’t been paying attention. He did not know words could do that, swap their key components overnight. George reached over Patricia to grab his phone from the pillow. There were no messages from Lydia, no worried missives, no one frantic to find out if he was dead or alive or something in between. The last note sent between them was from days before, a question asked across the rooms of their apartment. He had thumbed the letters with one hand instead of traversing the short, easy space between them. A longing emerged at the bottom of George’s stomach, for the time when someone was afraid of losing him. That’s how he knew he had already been lost.
He sat with the feeling for a while and Patricia moved around her room naked. She stacked her papers on her desk and placed an article that George had mentioned on her nightstand, so he would know that she was reading it too. She brought him a glass of water from the sink and plugged in his phone. She could tell that he was feeling unloved, so she populated the room with her feelings, hoping they would become his. Maybe in the morning he would see. Then she put on his T-shirt and went to sleep.
Eventually, George got up the nerve to confront his wife. He knew that Lydia could not resist a competition, so he suggested that this would be the best way to approach their separation.
“I don’t understand. What kind of contest is divorce?” she asked, holding Anne in her lap on the floor.
“An adult contest.”
“Oh, is that what you call leaving your family?”
“Maybe I’ll lose. Maybe I’ll come back.”
“Maybe we won’t be here, and you’ll have to eat crow.”
“Look, you know the crows have been gone for years,” he said. “And anyway, that would count as a forfeit.”
“What about Anne?” she asked.
“I’ll see her all the time.” George picked his daughter up off the ground and swung her around until she squealed.
“Funny Daddy,” Lydia said, not laughing. What was the punch line? That he hadn’t dropped her?
“Funny Mommy,” he said, putting Anne back into her arms.
“Already you’re keeping a tally?” she asked.
“That one was a practice round.”
THE SEPARATION WAS a long contest with no rules and no scoreboard. It lasted most of Anne’s early childhood. Her parents called it the relay sometimes when they were dropping her off or picking her up. Other times they called it the competition, the homecoming game, the sprint. Anne liked games. She liked the one where you run in a circle until everyone falls over. She liked duck, duck, possum (the geese were gone). She didn’t like winning, she liked playing.
“Mommy, I like the feeling of everyone on the ground laughing,” she said. It was her fifth birthday party, and everyone was on the ground laughing, even Grandma Rose. Her grandma’s knees were muddy, and she scooped Anne into her lap, and they all stayed there for a while, just talking and playing. Her grandma asked Anne to sing the song with the made-up words (“All songs have made-up words, Grandma Rose!”) and to bring the plastic clamshell of frosted cupcakes over from the picnic table. Anne got to have two birthday parties every year, and she liked them both the same. This was what she told people, and she said it so often that it became true. She did not spend a lot of time back then thinking about different degrees of love. Love, as she knew it, always arrived in equal amounts.
When Anne turned six, her dad had a brief illness. She wasn’t supposed to tell her mom about it, but her mom found out anyway. Her mom was good at finding things. Lydia drove to George’s apartment and brought him a box of knickknacks and some strange bumper stickers, and left them outside his door. Anne asked if she could play with the old magnet in the box, with the mug that was for lovers, but her dad said no. Her mom said he was not always such a strict person, but for a lot of reasons he was now very strict and stern and that was okay too, that was a kind of love. He was always worried about Anne’s leaning too far out the windows, even though the windows had bars. When she was seven, he still made her hold his hand crossing the street. Even Patricia let her cross the street alone, in front of an adult, so long as she looked both ways.
When George was sick, Lydia brought him dinner if he would allow it. She was furious that he hadn’t told her sooner, but that was when she thought things were more serious.
“My degree is terminal. My illness is not,” he said.
“You’re such an idiot,” she said, crying. “Where’s Patricia?”
“I broke up with her. A month ago.”
“Oh, you really are an idiot. I had no idea I procreated with such a dummy!”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You should’ve married that girl. Her hair was perfect.”
“You can’t get married when you aren’t divorced,” he said, coughing. He walked across the room to get a drink.
Lydia didn’t say anything to that. It was true, they had never gotten around to filing the paperwork. It was too expensive anyway to declare a marriage extinct. When an animal goes extinct, the paperwork is free.
“Why didn’t you ask me? I would’ve done it.” She was trying to be considerate, but the words wounded him all the same. He looked so thin in his Middle Ages. She looked around his apartment and did not recognize the brand of soap he used, the squished loaf of nutty bread he bought. The daily decisions they used to make together had diverged. George was wearing a sweater she did not remember, some gray situation with buttons and a little pocket. She hated the sweater. No. She was jealous of it.
“Maybe we shouldn’t meet like this anymore,” George said, buffing the wood table with the edge of his thumb.
“Oh.”
“Well, I can’t imagine that what’s-his-name likes you coming over here all the time.”
“There is no what’s-his-name.”
“The one from the magazine?” George asked.
“Honey, magazines haven’t existed in years.”
They laughed together at that, but still, it was the last time she came over for dinner.
Before the publication folded, Lydia had written an article about the extinction of extinction. That was really the nail in the coffin, her editor said.
Now she was working on a book about certain types of flora and fauna that survive, despite inhospitable realities. The book was called In Ruins and it had a photorealistic painting of a crumbling edifice on the cover. It’s out of print, but you can still find it if you know where to look.
THE QUEEN LIVED happily for many years as a hermit. The king still came to visit her every night, and they took each other in every position, some bad, some good, out in the forest, beneath the stars, and afterward always collapsing in a heap on her cot. Sometimes they stayed awake like little nocturnal beasts, talking away the darkness, then berries for breakfast and more aerobic lovemaking under the dawn firmament, during the brief hour when the sun and the moon stood in the sky together.
One day, he didn’t show. She waited for him, but it was soon morning, afternoon, evening again, the light changing with her worry. No word from the king. She hung the CLOSED sign on the folly and walked through the woods, over the drawbridge, and back to the castle, where burial and funeral arrangements were already underway.
His body was on display for visitors in the throne room. They had dressed him in the awful shirt that pinched around his neck. The king looked so much older than he had looked the other day. What age are you when you are dead? The queen touched his hand. She did not know.
“I’m still your queen,” she said to the attendants, with a haughty affect she had not used in years.
“We weren’t sure,” they replied, “if you were.”
“Fair,” she said.
The palace librarian caught up with her in the great hall.
“I think this will really help,” she said, and handed her a copy of The Canterbury Tales.
The queen went to her old keep, the rooms covered in bedsheets, and slumped on the pink divan that had been a gift from a rude duke. She ordered in food every night and when it arrived, lost her appetite. She cleaned out the armoire, threw away old tchotchkes, traced the patterns on her heirloom tapestries. Constellations, galaxies, predicted by royal astronomers, then carefully sewn and preserved in the sanctum of the castle. Earth, the center of the universe! What a relief.
The king kissed the queen on her bare shoulder, and she could feel his lips lingering there even after her eyes opened. She missed him so much that sometimes, in the moments before waking, he was still alive.
“Enough,” she said. She stole a tapestry or two and went home.
Back to the folly, back to the chorus of insects, back to the clouds that could only be observed between the necks of trees. The smell of pine and mulch filled her with endless comfort. Even the rotting berry bush smelled good. She tied the cape around her neck and let it cascade along her body, but one of the folds remained creased. And so the queen gathered the fabric in her hands and shook, then shook again, and shook once more. The cape billowed at its seams until a young woman emerged from the cloth. She’d been hiding there, like a toddler tucked behind a curtain.
“Are you a child?” the queen asked.
“I’m your child,” the young woman said.
“That’s strange,” the queen said. “How long have you been here?”
“Oh, the normal amount of time,” her daughter said. She was probably the same age the queen had been when she’d married the king.
“Would you like to tell me what I’ve missed?” the queen asked. But she was no longer a queen. She was a hermit again, and also (even though she couldn’t name it) a mother.
She listened to the girl’s tale, which was really just a series of introductions. There was a long tangent about her friends, her lovers, and something called an internship. The sky darkened and the evening animals emerged, braying and howling in the forest. How odd the world felt at night, lodged between what had happened, and whatever happened next. The girl reported a series of plans that would have sounded to anyone like a very good life indeed. But whether she got to live them, or just describe them, no one can really say.
WHEN ANNE TURNED seven, she learned to ride a bicycle. When she turned eight, the English professor died in his sleep. Her mother sat at the kitchen counter and cried on the phone. It was a stroke, unexpected. Anne knew the expression “a stroke of luck” from a chapter book she was reading, but that didn’t sound quite right in this context. She pictured a brushstroke from her watercolor set looping over his dreaming eyes, painting L-U-C-K in cursive.
“It’s a different kind of thing,” her mom said. “Sometimes words are tricky like that.”
At the funeral, Lydia went over to say hello to Patricia, who had married a very successful athlete. Anne dove into Patricia’s arms.
“Thank you for coming,” the pretty grad student said. She wasn’t a grad student anymore. She still had freckles, and also faint creases around her eyes. She was beautiful. Lydia had spent so much time wondering about her over the years. What was that mauve lipstick she wore? How did she always smell like she had just gone for a swim? All she could think now was that Patricia had no parents.
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure if you would want me here,” Lydia said.
“Of course I do,” Patricia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You’re family. Excuse me,” she said, and went to look after her other guests. As she walked across the room, Lydia saw George standing against a wall, waiting to say hello. He was holding a shared party plate out to her. A bagel, a deli salad, a pile of fruit. She remembered how, at their wedding, he had brought them a saucer full of limes with two spoons. They had been so busy dancing that they had forgotten to eat.
“But, Dad, melon is not my favorite,” Anne said, grabbing a slice from the plate, and they both smiled.
AFTER THAT, THEY started taking long drives together. Sometimes they would have a destination in mind. A museum, or a park that Anne would especially like. Lydia would push her on the swings and George would catch her at the bottom of the slide, or encourage her from the top of the slide, or lift her off the middle of the slide into his arms when she did not want to scoot all the way down. Sometimes the drive was the point of things, and they would get lost in a town out of state. They went on a hike and arrived at a scenic lookout, where a soft campfire smell drifted up and over Anne’s face. It was her first time in the woods.
One hot day in autumn, they spotted a beautiful old home off the shoulder of the road.
“Look,” Lydia said.
“A castle!” Anne cried.
“A house,” George said.
He took the next exit and they drove for a mile or two before ending up in front of a long, snaking driveway. One of those paved entrances that could have been a moat in another era. But the house was just a normal house. A split-level with pretty window boxes and a lush, green lawn. At the end of the ridiculous driveway hung a Realtor’s sign: FOR SALE.
“Where are we?” Lydia asked, looking around.
“You have reached your destination!” Anne said.
Lydia squeezed Anne’s hands from over the back of her seat. “But when are we?” she asked.
“Half past four,” George said.
“So late!” Lydia said. “It’s nearly five.”
“That’s just two ways of saying the same thing,” George said. They unbuckled their seat belts and climbed out of the car.
The azalea bushes were still in full bloom even though it was late in the season. The front door was unlocked. Hadn’t they done this before?
“Hello,” Lydia called before entering. When no one answered, they walked through the empty rooms. One wall looked perfect for hanging family photos, Lydia thought. She could picture a dresser here, an end table there. Chenille and linen, like from a catalog.
“Check this out,” George said. He somehow knew where to find the side entrance, and opened it to reveal the trees, gardens, endless exploring.
“I think this is right on the edge of the nature preserve,” he said, looking at his phone. “It would take a year to walk all the trails.”
Anne ran under his arm and out into the meadow, where a crumbling structure caught her eye. She fell and skinned her knee in the grass but rallied and kept running, until she reached the domed shade of the princess’s lair. Everything looked out of a fairy tale. She put her new toy with the braided lanyard on top of a high rock and called to her parents.
“What is that? Is that safe?” Lydia asked, pointing to their daughter.
“It’s a folly,” George said.
“What’s the purpose?” Lydia said.
“It’s decorative. It doesn’t have a purpose.”
“Ah, another extinction to add to my list.”
“If it never had a reason, can it ever go extinct?” George asked.
“That’s actually the title of my next book,” Lydia said, laughing. She wanted to smooth the sleeve of his jacket but wasn’t sure if that was okay. Don’t complicate things, she thought, and reached for him.
“Run to me!” Anne was yelling in the distance.
The couple looked at each other.
“Shall we?” George asked.
“It’s your funeral,” Lydia said. She could not resist a contest. Anne would be the referee and decide who had won. Lydia tightened her laces, and George stretched his legs. Then they ran as fast as they could, without stopping.
Anne watched her parents fumbling toward her. They looked absurd, and also, amazing. It wasn’t until later, after they bought the house and moved in, long after, that she would understand their limitations. Of course, they died, but the order of things doesn’t matter. This is one of the last good days that Anne remembers, and if memory is what we have left, when all is said and done, it may as well have happened at the very end.