A nun! A single, singular woman, making a contribution to the Roman Catholic faith, in the seventeenth century. The nun is long forgotten, but here in the twenty-first century there remains the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  Michaela hesitated to ask what Pentecost is?—not wanting to further annoy her husband.

  For no one is comfortable being interrogated about a religion in which he no longer believes, Michaela thinks. Speaking of such things Gerard would be both embarrassed and defensive as he’d been in speaking, obliquely, evasively, of his first, “failed” marriage years before he’d met Michaela.

  You don’t need to ask, dear. You don’t really want to know.

  And really, I don’t remember. The details are gone and don’t concern us.

  Examining the garish, crimson-red Sacred Heart of Jesus positioned in the middle of the statue’s chest Michaela understands that her question about this tradition was naive. The grotesque heart, the wounded, bleeding and burning crimson heart is the heartbreak that cannot be hidden, the suffering you must endure whether you are Catholic or not.

  All who gaze upon this lurid sight understand, feelingly. As they understand the broken body on the cross.

  Michaela swipes at her eyes. But no more tears!—she vows.

  Since Gerard’s hospitalization she’d cried more than she had cried in the first thirty-seven years of her life. Usually, hidden away alone. Where no one can see or hear her. She is stricken with shame now, she’d broken down in Gerard’s presence, he’d had to endure his wife’s (premature) grief.

  Stumbling to a pew, to sit for a few minutes and try to summon back her strength.

  Hide her face in her hands like a communicant humbling herself to accept the sacred wafer.

  But where are you, my dear wife. I am waiting for you.

  BLUR OF WHITE-FEATHERED WINGS!—on the cathedral steps doves flutter noisily up beside Michaela beating their wings uncomfortably close to her face.

  Michaela waves the doves away, shielding her face until they are gone.

  Recalling how, months ago, white doves fluttered about their heads as she and Gerard exited the cathedral, also. Tourists could not be dissuaded from scattering bits of bread on the cathedral steps for the birds that arrived in thrumming swarms as if eager to be photographed.

  Michaela is not sure what to do next. Where to turn. She has not (yet) sighted a tall solitary male figure who might quicken her interest. Virtually everyone she sees is a tourist, here in Plaza Square in the heart of the Old Town.

  At the southern end of the square is the gleaming new Santa Tierra Opera House from which in a burst of manic enthusiasm Michaela acquired two tickets for a performance of Orpheus and Eurydice in early August.

  That had been on a harried April day that seems now a lifetime ago. What had Michaela been thinking!—of course, poor Gerard could not have lived so many weeks. And if he had, he would not have been in any condition to attend the opera.

  She blames the oncologist Dr. N___. Bitterly. If but for Dr. N___, whose incomprehensible slowness had allowed the fatal urethral cancer to grow, and grow, Gerard McManus would now be alive. Michaela believes this to be a fact, indisputable.

  She hasn’t seen the (expensive) opera tickets since and guesses they are lost.

  There is the Café de Palomas Blancas where on one of their first days in Santa Tierra, Gerard and Michaela had stopped for lunch.

  Walking in the historic district hand in hand for the first time. Breathless from the altitude, somewhat light-headed, giddy. It had seemed like a honeymoon then. The Santa Tierra adventure.

  Michaela swallows hard. How has it happened, she has become a ghost haunting her own, lost life . . .

  Michaela requests a table on the café terrace though (she knows) the waiter would prefer to save the table for a couple, and seat the solitary Michaela inside the cafe; but this table is near the table at which, months ago, she and Gerard sat. Almost, Michaela can see them: Gerard reading to Michaela out of the Santa Tierra guidebook, in which he was making annotations. When not immersed in his work Gerard brought to leisurely activities the same sort of attention to detail he brought to his work.

  Faint with memory, feeling her eyes mist with tears. How close she is to that other table—yet, strangers are seated there, and not Gerard and Michaela.

  Michaela is tempted to ask waiters at the Café de Palomas Blancas if they remember her and her husband from weeks before, but no, of course no one would remember.

  No one cares about us, except us. No one cares about me. Except you.

  Even if she doesn’t see Gerard it’s possible, with the logic of blindsight, that her brain will “see”—register—his presence. And if Gerard doesn’t see her—(as he hadn’t seemed to see her peering down at him from the grief counselor’s window)—he might yet “see” her with another part of his brain.

  For such reasons Michaela does most of her work on the copyedited manuscript outdoors, in public places. She has become too restless to remain in the house on Vista Drive, that contains odd, untraceable odors, as of rancid food, rotted meat, faint feculent gases though each room (Michaela has made sure) has been thoroughly cleaned, and she never prepares food in the kitchen; the refrigerator is virtually empty. For some reason the grief-vise grips her tighter indoors: sometimes she has to sit down, gasp for air, stricken like an asthma-sufferer . . . Until the grief-vise releases her, and oxygen flows again into her lungs.

  How much better to work outdoors, amid a bustle of strangers, anonymous in their eyes, thus invisible. And if Gerard discovers her, it will give him pleasure to see how devoted she is to The Human Brain and Its Discontents.

  He couldn’t have been happy with the neglected manuscript, those final two weeks in the hospital. Michaela is eager to reassure him, she will prepare the manuscript for publication as he’d wished.

  You can’t let me down, Michaela. I have only you.

  Another reason for taking the manuscript everywhere she goes is that Michaela doesn’t want to risk leaving it behind in the house. Like leaving a candle flame, or a living thing—you dare not risk its extinction.

  Also, Michaela worries that the Institute will try to evict her. Move her things out onto the road, in her absence. Or worse yet, destroy her things.

  Seek out Gerard’s manuscript, and destroy it.

  Michaela has come to see that The Human Brain and Its Discontents may be a masterpiece. And, in its questioning of (White) academic appropriation of native languages, it might be heretical. There is good reason for rival historians to wish to destroy it.

  Michaela has been alternately excited by, and discouraged by, her progress with the manuscript. Sometimes it seems that work she’d done one day has been lost the next. As she has located misnumbered pages within the manuscript she seems to have misplaced other pages. Post-its have disappeared, and with them precious editorial queries. Some of Gerard’s marginal notations are not decipherable, and some have faded. Those paragraphs in the later part of the manuscript which she has revised to make clearer seem knotty and obscure to her when she rereads them, as if in her absence Gerard has stubbornly, perversely, reverted them to their earlier state.

  She has been working on the manuscript for months—or has it been years? The fast-approaching deadline is just nine days away.

  If you need an extension, Michaela . . . Just let me know.

  But Michaela doesn’t trust Gerard’s editor. Michaela doesn’t trust the Harvard University Press. She is concerned that, using Gerard’s death as an excuse, they will postpone or even cancel the publication of his book because of its controversial nature.

  This concern, Michaela wants to shield from Gerard. As she’d breathed with him in the hospital, matching her breath to his, and as she’d eventually breathed for him, substituting her (stronger) breath for his, so it seems to Michaela that she can give life again to Gerard through her work on the manuscript. Immersed in his words, as in his very brain. And so it is particularly distressing to Michaela to discover lapses and errors in the manuscript which she is certain she’d corrected, which she must correct again.

  Carefully Michaela spreads the manuscript onto the café table. It is not ideal to work on a table this small, but Michaela can manage. In such places she feels that she is part of the flow of normal life. She is not a solitary individual, a woman who has lost her husband, thus her place in the world; amid swarms of tourists, Michaela is protected by anonymity.

  A widow must have an escape hatch.

  This widow has enough pills to kill a herd of elephants.

  Michaela laughs. An abrasive voice, new to her. Good!

  Whenever Michaela can, she laughs. Her laughter sounds like hoarse choking. Croaking. The sound a crow might make mocking human laughter.

  “Ma’am?”—a waiter approaches, as if Michaela had summoned him.

  Not so deferential as the young waiter at the Café Luz de la Luna. Older, closer to Michaela’s age, standing close to her, smiling/sneering down at her.

  “Shall I bring you another glass of wine, ma’am?”

  Has Michaela been drinking wine? She’d meant to order seltzer water. Lifting her glass, surprised to see that it’s nearly empty, and indeed it is a wineglass containing what appears to be (white) wine.

  Not good to be drinking at this hour of the afternoon. A solitary woman, at the Café de Palomas Blancas. In white-hued sunshine that makes her eyes ache even behind dark-tinted glasses.

  Shut her eyes and she can imagine: Gerard is sitting across from her.

  Or, Gerard is coming to meet her in a few minutes. (She checks her wristwatch: but it is Gerard’s wristwatch. For a moment she can’t comprehend why she is wearing Gerard’s wristwatch.)

  Michaela thanks the waiter but doesn’t order another glass of wine. Instead, seltzer water. With mock politeness the waiter inquires: lemon, ma’am?—or lime?

  Michaela laughs, the question is so absurd. Your husband is dead, do you prefer lemon or lime?

  “Lime. Thank you.”

  “Gracias, señora.” Shifting to Spanish, tourist-Spanish, is a rebuke of some sort, which Michaela will ignore.

  She will leave the impudent waiter a sizable tip. Surprise him with her generosity. That she is a White woman, that she is an American, a gringa, he has no right to judge her without knowing her.

  Small gusts of wind arise, blowing tiny bits of grit across the plaza. Michaela wipes at her eyes. She has been squinting at the manuscript for nearly an hour, she has made very little progress. Reads, rereads the same paragraph(s). A sensation ripples over her skin of anxiety, dread: she is being seen.

  But when she glances up, she sees no one. No one whose eyes engage hers.

  Michaela has come to believe that the man outside the grief counselor’s building had indeed been Gerard, and that he’d been drawn to her, and was waiting for her; but she’d failed to identify him. She’d been filled with fear, she’d held back. A part of her had resisted knowing who he was, and that she must go with him. She’d thought—Of course that isn’t Gerard. Gerard has died, his remains have been incinerated . . .

  As soon as she’d articulated this thought, Gerard had “died” a second time, and had vanished. She is sure that this is what happened, but also that it is an insight possible only in retrospect. At the time she’d been too confused and frightened to know what was happening.

  She’d been doubting, yet hopeful. For to doubt is to hope. Where there is no doubt, there can be no hope. Recalling bitterly from the hospital vigil, hope is what most wounds us.

  So many days of hoping. Weeks. Willing the man for whom she was responsible to live, to breathe. Her soul had consumed itself in the effort, as in a blazing inferno.

  It was not Dr. N___’s fault of course. Death had invaded their lungs like a malevolent breath, unstoppable.

  Michaela glances up, shades her eyes—sees an older man in a wheelchair, being pushed past the café by a boy of about twelve. The (portly, flush-faced) older man is not Gerard—(she sees at once)—but Michaela feels a wave of compassion for him, not love but the possibility of love. For he is someone else’s husband, if not hers. As if she’d become a wound—raw, implacable—her own heart exposed in her breast garish and absurd as the Sacred Heart of Jesus—that would bleed, bleed without end, out of pity for all who suffered, as Gerard had suffered, in her desperate need to alleviate their suffering and in this way, her own.

  She would never comprehend how swiftly—how brutally—their situations had reversed. Gerard the protector and comforter, the stronger; Michaela the indecisive, hesitant, weaker. Within weeks, days, it was Michaela who must protect and give comfort, and Gerard who was dependent upon her. My wife. Don’t abandon me, take me out of here . . .

  So badly she’d wanted to be her husband’s caretaker in the hospice. She’d planned—they’d planned—a beautiful honeymoon, which would be their hospice. There would be music, and flowers. Fresh flowers each day. Holding hands, kissing. Only tender words not recriminations, expressions of despair. No more bloodwork, “vital signs.” No more hunting for the elusive oncologist sporting the bow tie. Fuck him. Who needs him. However long and however bravely Gerard would continue to live, Michaela would live, too; and when at last Gerard began to surrender his life, when there was no alternative but that Gerard must surrender his life, Michaela would prepare for her death, too.

  Unhurried. Unharried. Utterly private. A beautiful death, guaranteed by a plethora of painkillers, sleeping pills Michaela has been hoarding for years with the instinct, as methodical as it is grim, of a squirrel burying nuts in the earth for its own survival in an (unfathomable) future. As many of these pills and capsules as she could tolerate swallowing with mouthfuls of water, she would take at precisely the correct time.

  A singular death, shared by wife and husband. As in the prime of their lovemaking they’d been one person, transformed in a joy so extreme it lay beyond language, even imagination.

  But that hadn’t happened. Nothing like that had happened. Cruelly, something else had happened, the stunned survivor is still trying to understand.

  “GERARD!”—YOU WAKE FROM A HAZE of sorrow seeing your husband across the sun-drenched plaza, staring in your direction.

  You will recall afterward—he must have sighted you first. His gaze on you waking you like an electric current rippling through your body.

  Is this Gerard?—a man of Gerard’s approximate age and height, standing very still and observing you with unusual interest.

  Your heart begins to beat rapidly. You are in dread of this person, this stranger, calling out to you—Hello! I think we’ve met—you’re Gerard McManus’s wife?

  If so identified, you would shrink away in pain. Your lips shrinking back from your teeth in a grimace.

  But the man who resembles Gerard is too gentlemanly to call to you across the plaza. Indeed, he seems not to recognize you after all. But something about you has attracted him, unmistakably.

  He is taller than Gerard had been, leaner, with a somber yet affable face and the slightly sunken eyes of one who has been ill. His jaws are unshaven even as he exudes an air of dignity; he wears a short-sleeved white cotton shirt, blue-striped seersucker trousers that fit him loosely; in the bright sunshine he is hatless, his eyes squint.

  A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth—shy, tentative—inquisitive—as Gerard used to smile at you in the early days of your knowing each other. So tender a smile, you feel your heart constrict in pain.

  Not knowing what you are doing you rise to your feet, you approach this man like a woman in a dream.

  It is expected that you will shatter. You, the wife, revealed to be so weak. Clutch at the man who’d been your husband, lose your composure utterly. Wanting only to throw your arms around him, collapse into tears. But you will not succumb, like Orpheus: too much is at stake.

  A delicate moment like passing a thread through the eye of a needle. The slightest misstep, all will vanish.

  The bright-hued air has narrowed, you are making your way through a sort of tunnel. Around you the sound of voices, music, traffic has become a buzzing roar. Your vision has weirdly sharpened, even as it has greatly narrowed. There comes a sudden clamor of horns—rude, jarring: you have stepped into traffic, at the edge of the plaza, and might have been struck by a vehicle except the driver brakes to a stop just inches away from you, shouts at you in a vexed voice.

  Gerard hurries to you, seizing your arm and pulling you to safety—“Excuse me! Take my hand . . .”

  Not Gerard’s deep-baritone voice as you recall it, nor is this something Gerard is likely to say to you; in actual life, Gerard would have scolded you, and wouldn’t have smiled.

  Michaela! Watch where the hell you’re going!

  Yet: there may be an impediment of some kind to prevent Gerard from seeing you clearly and knowing who you are. A scrim of moisture over his eyes. A blurring of his vision.

  Roughly he has pulled you up onto the sidewalk, out of the cobblestone street. For an awkward moment he continues to clasp your hand—a small-boned hand, in a larger hand.

  It is nothing like you remember, this handclasp. But yes, it is everything you remember.

  The vigorous Gerard, before opioids dulled his soul.

  The sexually alert, warmly aroused Gerard, before the shadow of his death unmanned him.

  Though it seems that this Gerard has been ill he is (evidently) now a convalescent. His head has been shaved (for surgery?), his hair has grown back thinly, metallic-gray. Unsteady on his feet like one who must monitor his strength but he’d managed to make his way quickly to you, to pull you out of the street and save you from injury. You see with relief that this Gerard is straight-backed, he has not (yet) been broken by pain and by the narcotic dulling of pain.

  Is this the man you’d seen from the grief counselor’s window? Is this the man you’d held in your arms, for so many hours?—urging him to breathe?