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I know I am running out of time, myself. I won’t die of old age; my death will catch me up like a tornado and leave me broken and bleeding. But in these last days my time traveling feels both more random and more purposeful. I go somewhere, and if I can’t figure out why, I feel a sense of failure, as though I was supposed to do something in that time and place I didn’t understand. But now I am where I’m supposed to be. I sit with Kimy until the end, in the light of the first day I’ve known that won’t have my Kimy in it.

A different nurse comes in, cautiously, and tells me that she’s sorry, that Kimy was sweet. She turns off the machines. The nurse combs Kimy’s hair and repositions her head, arranges her hands, smooths the bedding. After she leaves the room I suddenly feel alone.

The door opens and Clare and Alba are here. “Kimy’s gone,” I say. My voice is hoarse and unsteady. Alba goes to Kimy and stands there taking in her stillness, her subtle absence. She bends over Kimy, touches her shoulders with both hands as though she’s about to lean down and kiss her but instead hovers uncertainly; she turns to me, flings herself at me and plants a kiss on my cheek, then finally alights on the chair next to the bed and wraps her arms around herself. Alba’s eyes brim. I reach out, and she clasps my hand for a moment.

Clare has paused near the door. I rotate my wheelchair enough to see her. Someone is standing behind Clare: a woman I don’t recognize. Clare seems tired, sad, dazed, even afraid. I say her name, gently.

“Henry.” Clare walks to me, leans down and encircles my shoulders with one arm, kisses me on the lips. There’s something different about her scent, as though she’s changed her shampoo; she smells of cinnamon. She goes to Kimy, cradles Kimy’s face with her right hand and kisses her cheek, a gesture I’ve seen Clare perform twice every time we visited Kimy, upon arrival and departure.

Alba is gesturing at the woman who is still standing in the doorway, come in. She takes a couple of steps into the room and stops. She’s a youngish Black woman, dressed plainly but stylishly in a long brown coat, tall boots, jeans; she wears wire-rimmed glasses and has her hair wrapped so it’s very vertical. She hesitates, tugging at the fingers of her gloves. Is she waiting for Clare to introduce her? I offer my hand and say, “Hello. I’m Henry DeTamble. I’m Clare’s husband and Alba’s dad.”

The woman steps forward. She pulls off her glove and takes my hand. “I’m Beck Charles. I’ve heard so much about you.” Her voice is low-pitched and soft. Her palm is warm but her fingers are cold. She seems a little freaked out. “I’m sorry about Kimy. She was so great.”

“Thank you. She was. Great. The best.” As we speak I’m aware of a silent conversation taking place behind me; Beck’s eyes dart away from me toward Alba and then Clare. I remember that I’m wearing a stolen bathrobe and an adult diaper. “I’m sorry I’m not very presentable.” I look up at Clare, who is staring at her friend with an odd intensity. “I’ve been here most of the night. She died around seven thirty.”

Clare asks, “Did she know you were here?”

“Yeah. She said she’d waited.”

“Well, that’s good, that she knew. She kept asking for you.”

“I told her—I would have come sooner—” I can’t continue. I don’t want to cry in front of this woman I don’t know.

Clare turns to Kimy. She smoothes her hair, caresses her forehead. Her friend, whose name I’ve already mislaid, walks around the bed and stands across from Clare. She looks at Kimy very tenderly, then rummages in her coat pocket and brings out a small notebook. She gives Clare a questioning look. Clare turns to me and says apologetically, “Beck brought a prayer. It’s by William Penn, you know, who founded Pennsylvania? Is it okay with you? She won’t read it out loud if you don’t want her to.”

“Um, sure. I mean, yeah, why not?” I’m not sure what to expect. Did Clare bring this woman along because she’s a chaplain of some sort? Kimy always said she was a Catholic Buddhist, or a Buddhist Catholic as the mood took her. I’m sure she would be fine with a Pennsylvanian prayer.

Beck bows her head and reads: “‘We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet as thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also if we are thine. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight . . .’” She continues to speak but I’m lost in the idea of an eternity just beyond my perception. I have never, since I was a child, been able to believe in any god, but here at the end of Kimy’s life, and near my own, I want to believe in something.

Alba is standing next to me. I look up at her; she’s sobbing silently. I put my arm around her waist. She leans into me awkwardly, the chair between us.

There’s a commotion in the hall. A nurse I haven’t seen before walks in but abruptly halts when she realizes what’s going on. She glances at me, at Clare, at Kimy and then back at Clare. Clare says, “Can it wait?”

The nurse looks uncomfortable. She’s a very young nurse, a sturdy Black woman who’s wearing orange scrubs and cat’s-eye tortoiseshell glasses. She glances over her shoulder at the commotion. “Sorry,” she says, and slips out the door. None of us has time to say anything before she’s back in the room. “I’m really sorry to interrupt,” she says, “but there’s a lady who’s raising a fuss because she thinks you have her father’s bathrobe.”

There’s no point in arguing about it. “She’s right,” I say. “Please tell her I’m sorry. I just needed to borrow it for a while. Here—” I try to take off the bathrobe without getting out of the wheelchair. Clare, her friend Beck, the nurse and Alba all watch me silently as it entangles me like a straitjacket, until Clare and Alba and the nurse all lurch toward me at once. Suddenly it’s off, my gooseflesh exposed for all to see. I hand the bathrobe to the nurse, who folds it neatly. We can hear a lady in the hall say, “What the fuck are they doing in there?” and the nurse makes a disapproving sound and leaves the room. Clare closes the door after her. Alba brings a bathrobe that I recognize as Kimy’s and helps me drape it over myself.

“Sorry,” I say. “Don’t mind me.”

In time, we’ll all end up in some equivalent of this room; more than most people, Alba and Clare and I know that time is unsparing. An horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. In my time, Kimy is alive; why am I weeping? Clare and her friend are watching me, uncomfortably, as though they don’t know what to do or say. Alba says, “Dad—?” and I am back in our own bed, in the dark, crying. Next to me, Clare sits up and says, “Henry, what’s wrong?” and puts her arms around me, and I think that I am lucky to be able to lend my time to Kimy, at the end, to see over death’s horizon.

Making Music

Saturday, June 6, 2015 (Alba is 13, Clare is 44, Beck is 39)

Alba: I wake up in my own bed, at home. I know where I am, but I feel lost. Upstairs, Mama and Beck are getting out of bed. I can hear the comforting sequence of sounds they always make, floorboards creaking, toilet flushing, water running in the sink, stairs squeaking. I know that it is Saturday, school is out, I don’t have to be anywhere, I am in the present and it’s a sunny day. Why do I feel so unhappy?

My dad always says, write it down, maybe you’ll figure it out, so I write in my notebook but it just seems like I’m whining to myself. Mama says, there’s no point in moping, make something. I draw a little cartoon Alba wearing a pointy striped party hat, looking depressed. I draw my mother flying around like one of her bird sculptures and my dad reading a book. I don’t want Beck to feel left out, so I draw her with Isadora curled up on her lap. I feel somewhat better so I get up and wash my face.

When I arrive in the kitchen I find Beck dressed to go out, with her backpack slung over her shoulder. Mama pours her a thermos of coffee and they kiss goodbye.

“Morning, Alba,” Beck says. “See you later.”

“Where are you going?” She’s kind of dressed up for a Saturday morning, though with Mama and Beck it’s hard to tell if they are being fancy or not because they both like wrinkled linen and clothes with artistically frayed edges. Beck is wearing some of her silver bracelets and her big hoop earrings, which means she’s not just going grocery shopping.

“I’m off to hire a detective,” Beck says. “I’m going to be that dame giving Philip Marlowe the runaround.”

“Wow. Uh, have fun,” I tell her. She smiles and heads out the door. Mama hands me her plate of toast and eggs, so I sit at the kitchen table to eat while she makes more for herself. “Why is Beck hiring a detective?”