January 8

Early morning. In the Valley Park emergency room, they were separated by a green curtain hung on metal rings. From the bed, where she was fastened to some sort of monitoring device, Winnie couldn’t reach the curtain to pull it aside. She watched the number of pairs of blue-bootied feet in that next space, increasing as the hours passed, sometimes three and four at a time. Barely anyone came to Winnie, once her minor forehead laceration had been stitched. Nor could she hear Jerry, or be heard by him, in the general din. When the wheels of his bed suddenly began to roll, taking him away, she called out in fear, unable to follow. Rachel held her hand, saying, They’re just taking him for some tests. It’s all right.

Over the course of the night, their fortunes had tipped in opposite directions. In the initial hours after the impact, it was Winnie who caused the most concern. That was due to all the blood, of course, but her wound was a surface one, a half-inch gash near her left temple from the good hard smack she’d received from the window. Matty and Jerry had helped her from the car, now spun around and stopped in the middle of the intersection at Ardleigh and Meade. It wasn’t until Winnie put a tentative hand up to her head, and brought it instantly down, a wet red glove, that she felt faint. And then she merely floated in and out, while Matty carried her to the grassy knoll by the side of the road, while Jerry crouched on one knee in front of her, while the EMTs—one had a Yankees symbol shaved into his hair—strapped her to a gurney and spoke loudly to her, making little jokes as they fixed her up on the short drive to Valley Park. And wasn’t Jerry standing there while they stitched and bandaged her? Or perhaps that had been Matty. White-faced, sweating Matty. Not your fault, she tried to tell him. They had been on their way back home from cocktails at Rena Davidson’s house; Winnie argued they hardly needed to call Matty for this outing, just on the other side of town, but Jerry had insisted—he never liked her to drive him, anyway. Came out of nowhere, Winnie struggled to say, to Matty/Jerry, that other car. (Later, she would learn that the other driver was a fifty-year-old woman covering her son’s shift for a pizza delivery company in Mount Morris.) It flew through the light and plowed right into them. Lucky it wasn’t worse, she told Matty—or Jerry. Or tried to; in her shock, the words she intended weren’t exactly making it out as speech.

By 10 or 11 PM, though, she was clearheaded enough to be cross at Rachel, who asked only the doctors and nurses about her mother’s condition.

“I’m right here,” Winnie complained. “I’m not asleep.”

“Go right ahead and sleep, Mom,” Rachel said, missing the point entirely. “I’ll be here.”

From her curtained-off section right next to him, Winnie could only glimpse the flurry of activity around Jerry. Rachel was avoiding the truth, or didn’t know, either, what was wrong.

At 1 AM, the resident who had been on Jerry’s side of the green curtain came to her bedside. He was a kind-faced Japanese man, with bright gray streaks in his hair. “A fair amount of delayed disorientation,” he said, asking for details of Jerry’s medications and previous conditions.

At Winnie’s halting mention of the pre-Alzheimer’s tests that she had learned about that day at Ed Weller’s office, Rachel snapped her head forward in surprise, and the doctor’s eyes flared with new interest. He asked a few probing questions and then seemed to put the matter away.

“…well, sometimes a typical inflammatory response to injury…be admitted, CT scans…know more in a few hours.”

Winnie became soundless. She was afraid to ask any questions, in case the answers suggested that Jerry could die. And the doctor’s compassionate smile as he carefully explained things to her, and to Rachel, at the foot of the bed—that meant that Jerry couldn’t die. Didn’t it? When a gray-haired Japanese man, with warmth in his tired eyes, delivered news in such a way, when he touched your head gently and bent to examine your stitches, pronouncing them as fine and tight as if he’d sewn them himself, didn’t it mean that everything was bound to be all right?

January 10

In the hallway outside Jerry’s hospital room, waiting for the doctors to emerge, Winnie recognized the LuxPool number on her phone, and pressed ignore for the third time since yesterday. Keeping her distance several meters away, Annette, in a navy blazer and crisp blue jeans, still somehow managed to overhear what Winnie murmured in response to Rachel’s question.

“A pool?” she cried, a sharp sound of disbelief in her voice. These were the first words she had spoken to Winnie since arriving from the airport six hours earlier. “You think you’re putting in a pool. On that property.”

Winnie and Rachel just stared. Annette looked away. She dug an electronic device out of a bag and typed away with both thumbs.

A bent-over woman slowly pushed a walker past them, grinning up for approval with each step she took.

Annette let out a short laugh through her nose. “A pool,” she said again, confiding this idiocy to the electronic device.

Dr. Lee had apparently been briefed on the Trevis family situation; when she came out of Jerry’s room, she knew to address both Winnie and Annette (as it turned out, Avery didn’t come out until several days later), taking turns with which piece of information she would distribute, like a mother carefully dispensing equal amounts of cookies to fractious children.

“The scans don’t show any bleeding internally,” she said to Winnie. “But we can’t rule out swelling or brain contusion at this point.” This was directed to Annette. “I’d like to hold him for observation”—back to Winnie—“but I’m also going to order some more specialized brain MRIs, because of what we know with his prior experiences with dementia”—this last to Annette, who pressed her lips together tightly.

“I have to warn you,” Dr. Lee said, and this time she looked at the door to Jerry’s room. “Sometimes trauma to the head, in a patient with a previous history of Alzheimer’s-type difficulties, can speed up or exacerbate any existing or dormant symptoms.”

“What do you mean, speed up?” Rachel asked.

“Let’s just wait to see what these scans reveal,” Dr. Lee said, retreating to the safety of knowledge delayed.

Both Annette and Rachel launched a volley of questions at Dr. Lee, competing to drown each other out, but Winnie said nothing. She stepped quickly into the room with Jerry, and pulled the door shut behind her. What stayed with her: how much like Jerry Annette had looked just then, jaw thrust out, arguing her case.

January 16

The gift shop in the hospital lobby hadn’t gotten the newspapers yet; it was barely 8 am. When Winnie asked the friendly Indian woman opening up what the date was, she said “Monday,” but Winnie didn’t press the point. Magazines, candy, coffee mugs and wineglasses etched with Valley Park, a chipped red canister used to inflate balloons, T-shirts of all sizes, including the snap kind for small babies, greeting cards with out-of-focus photos of lilies, their insides blank. She moved around the tiny space, picking things up and putting them down. (They were giving him a sponge bath.) Winnie carried a spiral-bound date book to the counter and paid for it. By counting off days, she found what the date was. The Indian woman lent her a pen; Winnie flipped to Jan 16 and put a checkmark there.

“Take a walk, Beth Ann,” is what he’d said to her, when she asked if he wanted her to leave the room.

Beth Ann? But Winnie had said nothing.

January 30

It turned out to be a star day, so Winnie stayed home.

In the front lawn of 50 Greenham, there was now a large dirt rectangle, scraped free of grass, dusted with snow and staked on all sides by uneven slats of wood. Unable to explain why or why not, or to think everything through, Winnie had simply said yes to LuxPool.

She had been on her way to Fresh Market for milk and toilet paper, but after she saw Jerry tease the nurse when she fumbled with the buttons on his shirtsleeves, cursing them under her breath—they both liked her, the sassy one with the bleached blonde hair and a smoker’s cough—she took off her coat. These hours were not to be missed. But she would have stayed home even if it had been a check day, and so far these things—flirting with the nurse, and a good hour’s nap before lunch, and saying, “Ficus,” just like that, out of the blue, when she had wondered aloud what was this new plant the boy from Mendell Florists had just dropped off—had proved only that, a check day. A check was not nothing, though, especially this first week back home. She knew enough not to hope for more. But she had only found out that it was a star day when his eyes lit at finding her there, tucked into a quiet corner of his bedroom, watching the ritual of his vitals check, warming to the way he smiled up at the nurse.

“Well, look at the little church mouse,” Jerry had barked, delighted. “Who you hiding from, Winnie?”

There. A star day. Then she had hurried to his side when he slapped the mattress next to him.

“We don’t object to an audience, do we?” he asked.

“No, sir, we sure don’t,” the nurse said.

So Winnie had curled there on the bed next to him, in her slacks and sweater and stocking feet. She had held as still as if it were her own temperature, blood pressure, and respiration being assessed. Only her eyes moved, sliding back and forth between the nurse’s busy expression—how she muttered so, this one with the nicotine breath, but he didn’t seemed to dislike or notice it—and Jerry’s reaction to her swift, competent hands. When Nurse Bottle-Blonde slapped him gently on the side, saying “Let’s have at your back, big guy,” Jerry rolled toward Winnie—eyes snapping with mischief—and they cuddled there, faces not two inches apart, his breath warm and musty. The nurse bent lower to listen as she moved her instruments along his back, mouth working, her lipstick flaking off in frosted pink shavings. Jerry stage-whispered to Winnie, with a lascivious wink: “In my fantasies, as a younger man…this wasn’t quite the setup.” Both women laughed, told him to just hush.

A star day.

That night, Winnie firmly drew one—two intersecting lines in an X, a horizontal line, and then a vertical—next to the date, in the Sierra Club book she’d bought at the hospital, now kept bedside. With great effort, she resisted the urge to page back, past bear cubs and sunsets and snowcapped ridges, to count the number of star days—or notice their absence—since the accident. On a star day, Jerry knew who she was. He said her name. For the other kind, the bad sort—well, she either marked nothing or put down a squiggly kind of blot, the sort of thing you’d use to cross out a mistake or a wrong word.

A merely good day, on the other hand—one marked with a check—meant that there was little pain, no falling down, minor instances of confusion, and that it was likely she would be Beth Ann. Beth Ann, when she brought up his soup around noon, his cookies at three, or when she coaxed him out of the same undershirt he’d been wearing for days. “Beth Ann’s always making me eat,” he’d grouse to whatever nurse happened to be nearby. “Beth Ann says” or “Don’t tell Beth Ann, but…” The nurses would nod or agree sympathetically; either they didn’t care that he was mixing up her name with his first wife, dead now for almost twenty years, or they didn’t even know Winnie’s first name themselves, rotating in and out of so many different homes as the job required. Or they cared, and they knew, but what was there to do, really? That was fast becoming her own attitude. So Winnie would grit her teeth when he called her that, to others, to her own face—it was worse when he did it so lovingly—and muster strength against everything that shouted within her, I am not your Beth Ann!

February 9

Began as a check day, quickly downgraded.

“That boy never cleans the shitter! He oughta be canned, on the spot! That boy—” Roars coming from his room; she had been on the phone; she had thought he was napping. Flew across the room at her, naked legs covered in excrement, the stench like a slap in the face. He had gone to the bathroom in his closet. Batting away her fluttering hands, face red and violent, he smeared his filth across the blue bedspread.

“I’ll whup his ass for him! Teach him not to do his duty!”

She ran the shower, in a panic from his bellowing. The room fogged, Jerry rushed in and out, calling for men she didn’t know. His yelling was brutal and nerve shattering in that close, tiled space.

Finally he sat on the toilet, a naked, shivering bear of a man. She cleaned him with a warm washcloth, terrified he might hit her. He grumbled and spoke nonsense; Winnie agreed with everything he said.

Outside, the pool men clanged their metal on metal; they were happy, almost to lunch.

February 12

“I should bring them some tea,” Winnie said, more to herself than to Jerry. They were sitting out in hard iron chairs on the front patio, well wrapped, holding mugs of hot tea, for a fifteen-minute fresh-air break. Jerry was watching the workers with great interest, despite the cold, following their every move. He took out a worn, folded red handkerchief and blew his nose loudly, with relish. For some reason, this cheered Winnie up.

“It’s fun, isn’t it? But I had no idea there would be so much to do before the actual digging.”

The men walked back and forth across the bare ground, carrying tools and equipment, speaking to each other in Spanish. Jerry craned his head to get a better view.

A pine needle fell onto the surface of Winnie’s tea; she picked it out. “This is still…all right with you, isn’t it? Going through with it, building the pool? You still want to have it done, don’t you?” Winnie spoke in a low voice, almost to her mug. Jerry hated to waste money; was that what she was doing? And why hadn’t she really talked this through with him, before? Last year, anytime the pool had come up, all he’d ever said was, Go ahead, Winifred, knock yourself out. But she hadn’t really taken the time to find out what he thought; she’d imagined that his reticence was about the back pain, not about any reservations he held about the expense, or the location of the pool, or the tree. She’d dismissed what Rachel had argued, that the pool would damage what the house was worth, but now Winnie wondered if this was Jerry’s view. Was he able, now, to tell her what he really thought? Had he been able to, back then?

“I’d better see about this,” Jerry said now, pulling the blanket off his lap. He stood to go to the men.

“They’re fine,” she reassured him. “They know what to do.” He hesitated, looking back and forth between the men on the lawn and the woman beside him.

“Straighten things out,” he said, but uncertainly.

“You have,” Winnie said. “You already did. They’ve got their orders.” This last came out of the blue, but it seemed to work. Jerry sat down again, still keeping a sharp eye on the pool men, but content to stay on the patio. It was sunny, and the hedges mostly blocked the wind’s chill. The sky was a cloudless, pale blue.

“I like to watch them build it,” Jerry said in a confiding tone.

“I do, too,” Winnie said. After a moment, she asked—not being able to stop herself from giving the test—“Build what?”

But Jerry didn’t answer; he either didn’t hear her or wasn’t paying attention to anything other than the busy men: doing a job, earning a wage. That, he could understand.

February 16

Check.

The backhoe heaved and halted, tearing skid marks in the lawn. Its driver made no sign of hearing what the other man was yelling from the sidelines. Avery and Winnie stood at the living-room window, a draft of cold air whispering through the lead and the glass. The arm of the yellow machine lifted and stopped, poised above the ground. Avery held up both fists, and Winnie mimicked him. She was trying to snap back into it. Why shouldn’t she? They’d been home for more than two weeks. Jerry was responding well to the medicine; everyone said that. To want more than being here together again, his brain unswollen, and Annette back in Chicago (for now) seemed like pushing it. In comparison to all that good, the matter of being called by another name was a small one, even she could see. It had taken every ounce of sheer will the one time Winnie had asked one of the doctors about it, blushing furiously. “Well, yes,” the woman had said, looking up briefly from his chart. “But we can’t have everything.” Nor could Winnie quantify, or even put into words, the things that were missing—Jerry was too tired, now, to wander the house with her after dinner, peeking in little-used rooms and telling stories about them. That night she had stood naked before him…

But that wasn’t something that could go on a chart or be measured, could it? So she was trying, in the face of a string of check days—and worse—to be upbeat. After all, Avery was here, even if Jerry had gone down for a nap just ten minutes before he’d arrived. And it was clear that he was upset about something beyond his grandfather’s illness, with that pinched don’t-ask-me smile and wounded eyes. So if Avery was trying, couldn’t she?

When the arm of the backhoe wavered and turned, she let out a disappointed sigh.

“Fake out,” Avery groaned. “This guy’s killing me!”

“Maybe they’ve never used this machine before,” Winnie mused.

“Maybe they have frostbite and can’t work the controls. Wait, here they go again.”

This time, the arm rose and the claw reared back, ready to dig down—but once again pulled away, at the last second.

“Oh, come on,” Avery protested. As if the driver could hear him. “You totally had it. That was the one, bro!”

Winnie wandered away, toward the base of the stairs. Did she hear him? In a heap on the kitchen table was a baby monitor setup that Rachel had brought over last week from Hand Me Down. Every time Jerry tottered past it, Winnie hastily covered the speakers and wires with a dish towel or newspaper, though he’d never wonder, of course, what it was for. She still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to install it. Was that him? She went halfway up the stairs and held the banister, which rattled now, loose in its sockets.

Several thoughts occurred to her then, in succession, each one sliding inevitably down to another. Jerry might not be waking up now, but he would soon, and there was no telling what kind of mood he would be in—relaxed and alert, sullen and confused. There was no way to know what was coming, this day or the next. That meant either that she had done all of it, the falling in love and getting married, blind to the possibility that Jerry could disappear—even without leaving—from their home, from their life; or that she had known pain like this existed, somewhere, and had chosen to press on despite the terror of the uncertain. Had it been a mistake? Opening herself to this kind of grief, so late in the game? Their time together was always going to be short, Winnie knew. But now she realized she had stupidly counted on certainty; she had generously traded more time for a higher quality of time that they would share, together. Winnie squeezed her eyes shut and hung on to the banister. The sacrifice was supposed to be what they hadn’t shared, all those years that had gone before! It wasn’t supposed to be like this, with her alone again and so uncertain!

She stood waiting on the stairs, feet on different steps, hand on the wobbly railing, intent upon the possible cry of her nap-dazed husband. Avery shouted for her to hurry back, but Winnie was suspended between the changing present and the possible future, and couldn’t move. In this way, she missed the claw’s committing to a decision: the sudden bite into earth, the grinding gears, the beginning.