I have to pass the cemetery, the big ugly one beneath the BQE and alongside the LIE with rows upon rows of gray slabs, dirty obelisques and angels peaking dingily out from the green gloom, to get to Luke’s apartment. The neighborhood in which it sits consists of dilapidated, low-roofed warehouses, a small florist and a single pub, Galway Bay, in which I imagine sad, tattered funerals, where everyone drinks too much and everyone is too in shock to cry. The day is gray. It might be the first snow of the year.

I am suspended. I keep telling all my friends that we’re done. Then when he summons me, I go. One quick text, unimaginative and drab. “Can you be here? Now?” Words are not Luke’s medium. I used to love words. But it’s been so long since conversation has thrilled me, that I’ve learned to prefer silence. The black stakes of the cemetery gates fall slowly past my shoulder as I glide down the empty street to the bridge that divides our neighborhoods. My phone buzzes on the passenger seat. “Get here quick, will you?” I pretend that there’s some sort of romance in his “will you,” and feel like I’m not quite in my seat but somehow above myself, being hurled uncontrollably westward by an unseen force.

Luke lives like a gypsy in a former factory that someone sub-let to him as a loft. One wall is pink, like a little girl’s room, two are brick, and one is unfinished sheetrock, shaky and dangerous, fabricated by Luke to partition rooms out of the single space for the friends who keep moving in. Now there are three, though he’s always alone and pensive when I visit, as if I’ve violated his hermitage.

He opens a metal door of several locks to admit me. It hinges open with a metallic hum and click onto the quiet street, the light falling blue and peach into the water of the East River. I tell myself that I will look Luke in the eye and kiss him to say hello, but with the yawning of the door, I look down and away, mumbling a lame, “Hey,” feeling as skittery as a pigeon.

I walk down and in as if I’ve been sentenced. My punishment.

Today the couches are pushed into an inviolable square by the pre-fab wall, all backs with no center. We never make love on the bed. It’s always the kitchen table, or a coffee table, or a chair, or one specific couch which he claims is cleaner than the rest, but is always piled high with dirty clothing or spiritual books.

“I just remembered, I have an important business call,” he says as he places his hands on my hips. I extricate myself from my coat and wonder where his mouth is, lost inside his dark beard that he’s grown to mountain man proportions. His long, wiry hair is pulled to the side in a knot. I remember taking his yoga class one night around Halloween and thinking he looked like Roderick Usher, gaunt, with his dark hair pulling back from his temples. One day he’ll be bald. I wonder if he’ll care.

His face is mainly hair, and though his eyes are dark blue, I always think they ought to be brown. They’re so small and hidden, it doesn’t really matter that they’re blue. He hikes my dress up and backs me into the back of the clean couch.

“You should make the call if it’s important.”

“Mmm,” he says and kisses me. His mouth is insistent and tight. Always.

Every time is as awkward and as weird as the first time he decided our friendly goodnight kiss outside his front door should involve a full body grope and the laconic invition of, “You mean you aren’t coming in?”

I always have to wrench my attention away from the loft where his friend, Layla, has been crashing for six months, (her clothing hangs from a pole above her bed) or from the door through which a roommate might enter at any time.

When it’s over, I slip into a gray robe from the back of a dirty couch and snail up in the center of the couch island. He heads to the kitchen, lanky and impenetrable as when he was inside of me.

“Do you want tea?” He looks at me. After sex I’m better able to look him in the eye, but only just.

“You better put your clothes on. Mark is coming home any minute. That’s why I rushed you.”

“Oh.”

This is what passes for conversation. He brings me tea and I read a book about astral travel while he is mostly silent, ear to his phone, the occasional “uh-huh” or sentence punctuating whatever the woman on the other end is blathering about.

“Boy, could she talk,” he says and climbs into the couch island. He sits across from me and I wonder if we should snuggle, if that would somehow lend legitimacy to this strange association.

“Why are you so far away?” he says.

The heat, a big box vent above the door, rattles loudly on. “I’m cold,” I say.

He pats the space beside him and I crawl over, settling against his narrow torso. He rests his arm lightly over my back and his cheekbone on the crown of my head.

“I never get to be like this,” he says. “I can’t remember the last time I actually sat on my own couch.”

He’s always running around, doing something, hurtling at inhuman speeds to avoid actually examining his life. Then he pretends to be into meditation. I think the motion is one more defense, but I don’t say this. He makes me unusually reticent, as if I’m so morphable that I adopt the dominant characteristic of whomever I’m with. My body picks up and remembers his scent, so that days from now, I’ll smell my own skin and it will smell like Luke’s, warm and dusky.

I disturb him, looking up at his closed eyes. I kiss his beard and settle back down.

*     *     *     *     *

“Never marry. But never.” My cousin, Stacey, crouches before the garbage pail underneath her sink, scraping uneaten peas and carrots into the bin, and hissing at me.

“You know, my mother once said the same thing to me.” I accept the scraped plate, stack it in the dishwasher and pass her another to divest of its remains. “I believe her exact words, however, were ’never marry a slob.’ Her pronouncement was mitigated at least.”

Stacey scrapes a fork edge across the china, and this rasp is somehow louder than the clatter and chatter from the living and dining rooms. We’ve been through at least four magnums of wine by now. My family is loud to begin with. I imagine that the scraps of chicken and decimated vegetables are Bill, and Stacey is scooping him into the garbage with every swipe. Last I saw him, he was wandering around the front yard. He always disappears at family occasions. Sometimes my little brother goes with him. Bill grows his own weed in the greenhouse out back and then keeps it in ziplock baggies in the produce drawer of the refrigerator. He always adds a bag to my brother’s fee when Vince handymans around their home.

“I should have known at the bachelor party. I should have listened to Gwen. It’s just I hate when she’s right.”

“I think that though she added the ’slob,’ part, what I really heard was exactly what you just said. ’Never marry.’ You wouldn’t have this house if you hadn’t, though. There’s that.”

We exchange plates. Stacey scrapes; I stack and sip red wine, placing the globe of a glass back on her granite countertop.

“Do you think you can try to wrangle him back inside? It’s so embarrassing when he gets this way. Especially at parties. My mother is ready to kill him.”

Stacey’s eyes are beautifully large, like deer eyes, and when she’s upset they get watery and larger. She looks like a tragic heroine from one of my favorite novels. I pat her curly head. “It wouldn’t be difficult. Just wrangle him into bed and pour a bottle of his painkillers down his gullet after an afternoon like this one. Find him in the morning.”

“Oon!” She pauses mid-scrape, suspended, like a tableau of domesticity before the garbage bin. “I can’t believe you said that.”

People never follow their ideas to their logical conclusions. I have a family full of people who love to complain, but then do nothing about their problems other than wallow in them. Complaining and drama are how they make meaning in their lives. How they make time pass. How they break up the boredom.

Stacey’s deep black eyes snap from watery tragedy to confused disapproval. I take another sip of wine and laugh. I pretend I didn’t mean it. My aunt, Stacey’s mother, and Stacey’s sister who just divorced, (though to the naked eye there were no problems in her marriage), are the only people in this family who actually get things done. Gwen’s unspoken of, speed-of-light divorce has been added to the list of things I admire about her. Barely a complaint; no warnings; she missed one family gathering. The divorce took place. She skipped another. Here for Easter, she’s about fifteen pounds lighter, (though she was a little too thin before), a wraith in black. But a woman who gets shit done.

“Do you want me to go whisper Bill back inside or what?”

“Is he still out there? Maybe your brother.”

“Gwen and I will fetch him. She’s the Bill whisperer. Don’t you remember how she got him off the hood of the car and into the front room last year? The kids swung from him like a jungle gym and he never moved.”

“Your brother’s friends shouldn’t have brought that bottle of tequila.”

I make a face.

“I do have children with him, Oona.”

Spring is beginning to burst. The air has that promise to it—the one that guarantees clothing will soon be shed, and, as Luke says, “We’ll all be thirty-five percent hornier than we are now.” Gwen asked me why thirty-five and I had to admit, I didn’t know. I hadn’t bothered to parse the sentiment, resting unthinkingly in my certain distaste for it.

I can relate to the people in The Waste Land as I wander the periphery of Stacey’s woodland estate, the bare trees standing stoically in their blankets of dead, wet leaves. Who wants to come back to life? There’s comfort in this barely living life. And the wine helps. Luke doesn’t drink and doesn’t say why. I fill in reasons. #1. He’s a weepy drunk.

I do know his brother is an alcoholic. We had to go upstate to bail him out of jail. I didn’t have to go; Luke did. I went because I wanted to make some sort of impression on him. He reminds me, however, of set cement. Any new impression would have to be a crack.

I spy Bill stumbling through the clearing that leads to the fire pit. With him in my sites, I whistle three short, sharp trills to Gwen, who is searching on the far side of the house. Bill’s gait, impeded by the vodka, wine, weed and percosets, is made worse by his bad back, causing him to hunch left and forward, like Quasimodo.

Gwen rustles along the back of the barnhouse like a gazelle, all limbs, prey eyes and sure readiness.

“The wildebeast is in my sites.” I point into the stark trees that are like black brushstrokes against the grayish yellow sky. A chimney, acres away, sends smoke signals into the air. I wonder how someone could amass enough money to own a home this beautiful and large, and still wind up lost, wandering around the outside of it.

“Has he seen you?”

I shake my head no.

“Not even when you whistled?”

“He looked at the sky then.”

“Thought you were a bird.” Gwen links her arm through mine and leans into me.

I think she’s a bird, startlish and tenuous. The bones in her face stand out in the cold. She looks so sad.

“You okay?” I say.

She smiles a smile with no joy and stares at Bill in the trees, or maybe at nothing, or maybe at the graying sky and the thin air. “Oh lovey.” She rests her head on my shoulder and exhales slowly, then speaks brightly. “Okay. Let’s get our man!”

The last time Gwen hunted Bill, she was still with John and lived in an equally lavish home in Westchester. When I visited she would take me shopping and drop a hundred dollars on new jeans or sunglasses for me, because they were “fabulous,” and she couldn’t not have me in them. She didn’t have a job and we ate lunch in expensive restaurants while John worked, picked the kids up from school late in the day and then made dinner together, drank copious amounts of wine while the kids sat in front of the television and John still worked. He would leave the house at 4AM and not return sometimes until 10 or 11 at night. I think that then, this sadness which is now so apparent, was the foundation of Gwen’s personality. All of the things John gave her and surrounded her with just helped her to hide it from herself.

The last time I slept over there, she crawled into my bed in the guest room in the middle of the night.

“Can I sleep here, lovey? I don’t want to disturb Daisy.” She smelled like calendulah, clean and crisp.

Sleep-confused, I rolled toward the wall.

“It’s just he disgusts me. Do you know he texts me all the time now? If I don’t get right back, he just keeps doing it. Can you imagine being creeped out by your own husband?”

“Sadly, I kind of can. I think I’ve always secretly feared that would happen to me.”

“Silly.” She spooned me, nestling her nose against the back of my neck. “It won’t happen to you. It happened to me for you.”

Later, when it was still dark, she shrieked and startled.

“Why are you in here?”

“You smell like beer and flatulence. You’re disgusting. And you’re scaring me.”

John was a silhouette in the doorway. I must have been picking up on Gwen’s creeps, because my skin prickled. The darkness made me afraid he would hurt us.

“Come back to bed, Gwen. You’re being ridiculous.”

“Leave me alone.” She put her mouth close to my ear. “I can’t believe I ever slept with him.” She said the second part lower. I wonder if he heard.

“Gwen.”

It was the way he said it. She slipped out of the bed and landed on the floor with a light tap. She scuffed into the hall and shut the door.

When I woke up, Gwen was back in the bed with me. The sun came cresting into the room and we got up, made breakfast and drank coffee. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. We pretended sunshine.

“Dessert’s ready,” we call to Bill in the trees.

“Hunh?” He looks at us as if he’s in a dream and doesn’t like the way the landscape has just shifted.

As if ignoring us will enable him to return to the fantasy of Playboy bunnies. We have to physically escort him and he manages to grope my breast and Gwen’s ass before we deposit him in the barn kitchen in front of the fire. I want to place him close enough that he might hurt himself, but Gwen thinks I’m kidding and we put him on a couch instead of the warm slate.

*     *     *     *     *

Steven’s most remarkable quality is his insane, other-worldly beauty, and I suppose also his enthusiasm, I am thinking, as he drops into the chair across from my desk. He has the grace of a panther or some other wild, explosive thing. All of his limbs have of way of making a poem, no matter how he’s moving, even just dropping into an office chair to talk about his short story. No grad student has ever been so comely. Maybe will ever be again, I think.

“I was going to cry if you didn’t fit me in today. You know, last week, I sat outside that door and practically wished you into opening it. I don’t even think you were here.” From another student, I might take this as a veiled threat. “Some of the other students you have are real weiners. I won’t even tell you what they said. I should have kicked their asses for you. They don’t deserve you.”

Why does Steven Swander have a way of making everything sexual and promising? I blew off office hours last week to rush through what passes for love with Luke. Afterwards, I felt as if I’d eaten a large McDonald’s french fries and drunk a medium Coke.

Disgusted with myself.

And self-sworn to never duck office hours again, even if they did consist mainly of freshmen jockeying for higher grades on moronic pieces of writing that were masquerading as essays. If I had known Steven was going to drop in, I wouldn’t have raced to my convertible to beat the traffic to Luke’s loft.

I pick up my mug of coffee and then set it back on the desk when it’s obvious that my hand is shaking.

“Too much coffee. Ha. I know how that is. Look at how giant your cup is!” His teeth are white enough to be in toothpaste commercials. I bet his breath smells like peppermint. Sometimes I see him after class talking to a willowy nineteen-year-old.

Aging is the worst.

I fiddle in the desk drawers, looking down, letting my hair fall in my face, afraid that Steven Swander’s taboo status is making him all the more attractive to me. “I have your story here somewhere.” The full-court press atmosphere isn’t making my job any easier. I wish Luke made me feel like he was coming for me the way this 25-year-old does.

“You are the most awesome teacher I’ve ever had. I bet a lot of students say that to you. I sound stupid, right? But you’re so . . . intellectual. I don’t know anyone like you. I definitely don’t know anyone who talks like you do.”

James pops his head through the half-closed door, eyeballs Steven and steps back. “We can discuss Lullaby some other time. Didn’t know you were so popular.”

Steven smiles at him genuinely and warmly. Maybe it’s just how he looks. Like he’s in love with everything in his line of vision. I wish I could be that way.

I finger through the pages of his manuscript, unable to focus on anything. “I loved the scene in here with the main character in the bar, when he sees his ex-girlfriend in his old vintage t-shirts, the ones she steadily pilfered from him over the course of the relationship. It was the perfect detail. Said so much, so effortlessly, and in this highly personal way. This real, honest way.”

“Yeah. That really happened. She was a nut. I’m not saying I was an angel. I mean, I’m no prize. But she was abusive.”

“I think that with a few revisions, you might get this published.”

“Yeah? No joke?”

“Your voice is honest. I can only speak from my own experience, but even here, at this university, that’s kind of rare.”

Summer session is usually split down the center, half dead-wood, half ass-kissing go-getters. Steven is one of those dream students, the non-academic who sees the world in this clean, pure, vibrant way. I wonder if it’s his stories that are leading me to fantasize about breaking the university code, or his coat hanger cheekbones and almond-coffee skin. I imagine he would be good around the house. The kind of guy who would paint walls and porches, change light bulbs, put in new floors. Luke made a floor for his loft. I watched and read a book about inner light.

“Or you don’t have to. I mean, maybe that was too forward.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I spaced.” I place my hands flat on the desk and shake my head, as if to dislodge the inappropriateness of Steven Swander, shirtless, in my apartment after DIY. I shake harder and blink. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

He smiles knowingly. I wish it were like that. I lay awake and thought about numbers, bill amounts, dates on calendars. It was one of those nights. Sancho snoozled his furry black self in next to me, but not even his calm surety could get me to doze.

“If you have suggestions of places. You know. To send it to.” He spiders his fingers on the arm of the chair and looks down. His eyelashes are like Luke’s, dark fringes, girl’s eyelashes. And his hands are perfect. Capable. Strong. His hands are artistic.

“I have a book at home. I live. . . . Well. I mean, if you aren’t uncomfortable, you could come by.”

Could I be more awkward? This is wrong. I am a tomato. Or a cherry. Something ugly, bright red with embarassment and old. Old.

“That would be awesome.”

“It has contests and small presses.”

“We could make dinner or something.”

“I mean, I don’t know why I didn’t just say I’d bring it here. To school. Or class. That’s really.”

“It’ll be awesome. I’ll bring wine. I kind of know where you live. I get a little stalker-y sometimes. When I’m excited about something. But not in a scary way.”

I breathe and settle back in my chair, the color leaves my face. “I’ve always found stalking kind of sexy.” I feel defeated. Resigned. There’s a pleasant space in feeling this way, however. Kind of like Hamlet in Act 5. “Like Heathcliff.”

He tilts his head at me, the way Sancho does when I’m particularly confusing and human.

“Wuthering Heights?”

“I haven’t read it yet. I should, right? I will. When should we have dinner?”

*     *     *     *     *

I had been hoping that my brother’s wedding would manage not to happen. On Independence Day, in Stacey’s backyard, he said he wished the summer would never end.

“Me, too. Always. Every year.”

“No. This summer. This particular summer.”

I ran my finger along the edge of the margarita glass and rubbed Sanchie’s dark, fluffy head with my free hand. He was taking a brief break from trying to hump Dolly, Stacey’s ancient Golden Retriever.

Bill had thrown up behind the outdoor bar about fifteen minutes earlier. My father, Vince and I were all witnesses; my father even tried to help him clean up. Now Bill was cracking a Corona, though his face was green. Literally. I raised my eyebrows. Vince didn’t care.

“Because at the end of this summer, my life ends.”

“Vince,” I said.

“Don’t start.” He put his half finished beer down on the glass counter of the bar and walked off, toward the house.

They chose November for the wedding, a few days off from the anniversary of my mother’s death. My family has a talent for mixing up deaths and weddings. My own grandmother died on my mother’s honeymoon, and was in the hospital for the ceremony. My father and mother had to fly home two days after arriving in Bermuda. Her wedding album is filled with pictures in which she ought to be radiant and more gorgeous than she would ever be again, but instead, just is sad. Which maybe makes her beautiful, too. But in a different way, one that has less to do with bridal albums and more to do with tragedies and achingly profound poems.

But the wedding day does arrive, bright and cold. Luke watches Sancho instead of attending as my date and I tell myself this is a fine compromise. I have to wear a plain brown dress and be a bridesmaid, though I am ten years older than the bride. I doubt she even realizes the insult inherent in this. I feel like I’m in Pride and Prejudice and imagine spending much of the evening without a dance partner, saying witty things to hide my pain.

My Aunt Lena walks me to the bridal suite, where the bride, her sister and the other maids are drinking Coors Light from cans and ignoring me. I share a look with Lena. She squeezes my elbow. “You okay, kid?”

I nod.

A make-up artist airbrushes the bride while girls mill around with flowers, sashes, fake pearls and cans. They’re keeping them in a black bin of ice in the closet. It smells like mothballs in here and looks sad and tawdry. The city outside is dingy.

“Okay. I want to make sure Stacey and Gwen got in alright. I’ll move your things to their room. Okay, kid?”

I nod. My Aunt smacks my ass, a little hard. It’s a thing she does. She’s looked out for us since my mother died. They were best friends. I try to imagine under what circumstances I would drink Coors Light from a can and conjure an image of myself canoeing, in a bikini and cargo shorts, Steven on the seat in front of me, rowing, his back the most perfect shade of tan, like Greek God tan, Italian Lothario tan, a six pack of something tied to the back of the canoe, dragging through the icy water. Sun glinting off of the river and reeds whispering to us as we float. Sancho swimming alongside the canoe, giving me that big smile he does when things are particularly awesome.

I wonder if there’s a bar upstairs I can attend alone.

Bill was banned from the wedding after a final incident, apprehended drunk in a Target, shoplifting condoms. The police followed him to his car and miraculously never asked him how he had managed to get to the Target, to weave and stumble up and down its aisles, probably knocking over a display in his inexplicable act of five-fingering. The family, meaning my Aunt Lena, decided that the wedding would be too much of a temptation. Especially with Vince’s friends.

In the limo, we drink cheap champagne and Vince’s bride stares blankly before her. She looks small and scared, like a little girl in too much make-up.

“Bug,” her sister says. “Buck up. This is the big day. This is everything you’ve ever wanted.”

Her roses tip forward in her lap, as if they’re suddenly too heavy to hold, but it’s true. I haven’t been able to speak to her for months now without falling into hour long info sessions on the price of candles, bride blogs and discount dress events.

“I just feel weird. I feel scared.”

“That’s normal,” her sister says.

I wonder if she senses my brother’s hesitation, or even shares it. Maybe she focused on planning to avoid the bigger questions. Question. Steven said that when two people really love each other they shouldn’t even need to get married. They should just feel it. And that should be enough.

“That would put an end to all these questions and possibilities that boggle your poor taxed brain,” he said, and kissed my forehead. True it was summer, but his skin was always warm. Sometimes I would just sigh into him.

But mostly I felt like he belonged with the willowy nineteen-year-old and worried about my job.

As I walk down the aisle at the ceremony, I see Gwen wrapped in a black pashmina, her blonde curls pulled back tight, making her look gaunter, standing beside Stacey, who looks radiantly Bill-less, fit and happy, and I hear Gwen say, “Look at Oona.”

Like I know I’m making a bad face or I’ve tailored my dress too short. Which I have. The bride said nothing. It was why I made my Aunt Lena walk me to the suite.

The reception is a good party, with lots of dancing and wine and my brother and his bride making the rounds, thanking people they do and don’t know, firmly caught in the center of this moment she has exhaustively planned. Despite his summer dread, he seems to glow, and I wonder, while I dance with my English cousins and flirt with my father’s friends, one of whom takes what seem like hundreds of pictures of me, if maybe he was just afraid to fling himself into this, but now that he has, is warm and content, and wondering what he was so scared of.

Gwen haunts the reception, swathed in the black pashmina, which she clutches to her sunken chest with her bird-like right hand. After dessert, she disappears and Stacey dances with me, drawing the bride’s friends into a tiny circle with us. When the electric slide starts, I head for the restroom and then the bar for water. Reason #2 Luke might be an alcoholic. He’s depressive.

The bar seems to hold Gwen up, her martini glass like some sort of grail between her two hands.

I grasp her shoulders and press my face into the space between her shoulder blades.

“Oh, lovey.”

I let go, kiss the back of her head. “You should dance. It’s good for the spirit.”

“I was outside trying to convince the driver to take me back to the hotel.”

“Gwen.” I laugh. I imagine her scaling the little hills between the restaurant and the chartered bus in her strappy heels, long gown and tragic pashmina.

She laughs. She sips her martini. “Only you could have gotten me to laugh.”

“Just the image of you. All hapless and woeful, like an apparition at the wedding and then wandering outside to appeal to a bus driver. It’s too hilarious.”

“I could see what you were imagining.”

We laugh more, until my stomach hurts, until it turns painful again.

“It’s so hard, Oona.” She sips. “Everything seems so pointless.”

“You miss John?”

She stares into the glass, as if the olives somehow could tell her future. “I thought I could let him go and be new. But I feel like I’m so dead inside. All I keep thinking at your brother’s wedding is that it will end badly. I shouldn’t be here.”

“You’re like the thirteenth fairy.”

“I am the thirteenth fairy.”

In the hotel room, Gwen offers me a Zanax.

“My mom gave them to me,” she says. “I think they make me more depressed. Just take a half.” I take it with water. I ask Stacey, when Gwen is in the bathroom, if she would be happy if Bill really cleaned up.

“Or is it just gone? I mean, how could it still be there after everything, right?”

Stacey looks at me with her eyes all hopeful, her hair pulled back in a knot at the base of her skull, her face scrubbed clean. “Oona. I would be happy. It would be so good for the boys.”

I sleep in the bed with Gwen and dream about Sancho. He’s sick and needs me.

*     *     *     *     *

When I pick Sancho up from Luke’s, he’s tired, which he never is, but I tell myself that maybe Luke walks him faster and longer than I do. I imagine them jogging through parks, instead of remembering that Luke kills plants, fish and frogs. And then pretends he didn’t want the things he killed anyway.

“Weddings make you horny?” he says, as he starts to fiddle at the buttons of my jeans.

He’s ripped two of my pairs of stockings, popped the buttons off of a pair of pants and ripped a silk shirt.

“You know. I’m not in the mood for three second sex.” I step back. “Sorry.”

He’s not the person to take this tack with. Reason #3 Luke might be an alcoholic: He’s the most broken person I know.

Back in June he told me that he wants to put his energy into building things that last, like a yoga studio and a sustainable farm, because romantic relationships always end. And then you wind up not being able to speak to someone that you used to really like. And care about.

We had the conversation on the phone, and like a dog, I think I responded more to the sound of the words than the actual words. Poor Luke, I thought to myself. I stepped back. I felt bad for him.

Then Steven happened.

He was early the night I invited him over; I laughed at my lameness as I sauteed plaintains and simmered black beans. His feet on the wooden steps announced his arrival before he rang the bell. My spine thrilled like it hadn’t in forever.

“Here.” He pushed a bottle into my hands and kissed my cheek. Sancho jumped on his leg and he picked him up without asking. Luke’s roommate once told him he had such a physical presence, but watching Steven in my doorway, I can’t imagine what she meant, because Steven was really wherever he was, and Luke was somehow just haunting. Steven hung out in the first chakra,which I read about it in The Eight Human Talents at Luke’s loft. First chakra people belong on this earth. They say, “Of course you love me. Of course you do.” The way Sancho would rush a new person and insist on being adored. Not, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you might have loved me.” The way Luke would rarely look me in the eye.

“It smells amazing in here. What is that?” He picked up the wooden spoon and stirred the beans around, Sancho still in his left arm.

“Mexican, I think. I make it pretty well.”

“This is incredible. A woman hasn’t cooked for me since my mother moved to Florida.”

He put Sancho down on the floor and followed him through the rooms. “This place is great. You live here by yourself? Do you ever get scared?”

He was upstairs, a disembodied voice. “You said you weren’t a scary stalker.”

His laugh tumbled down the stairs and made the hot night warmer. He was one of those people. Sancho hardly ever liked men, ignored Luke and never liked anyone more than me, but when Steven was there, he was enchanted. Not his flirty self, but finally in his place, part of a bigger guy’s pack. Probably like he always wanted to be.

We ate dinner on the front porch and Steven let his leg rest inside of mine under the table. I was afraid to move. As if it were somehow an accident that he was touching me.

“I read your book.”

“Yeah?”

He poured more wine in my glass and smiled his infeasible smile. “You’ve dated a lot of worms. Like, if I may say, assholes.”

“It’s fiction. It’s a book. You shouldn’t have thought of the main character as me.”

“But she’s cute like you.”

I blush.

“And needs saving.”

I sipped the wine and wondered if I should say anything. Luke had made me reticent. This was why I let it go. “Why are you so confident?”

“Why aren’t you?” He thrust his chest forward when he said that, like it was the final point, and it made me smirk.

“Oh, Oona. If you only knew.”

“Knew what?”

He grabbed my hand on the table and somehow we wound up what could only be called necking on the front steps for, I think, hours, though somehow, Steven stopped or expanded time.

I only know that when it was morning and we woke up upstairs in my bedroom, I thought how I used to wish I could just make out for hours with Luke, but he always pushed it so fast, so far, into nothing. And that Steven, somehow, made everything feel like kissing. Like kissing when you’re sixteen and kissing is brand new and magical, and star soaked and an end in itself.

After Steven, Luke remained, like residue that you can’t quite remove from a bathtub or an old tea mug. And the relationship continued to be no more fulfilling than an ATM transaction, with the occasional friendly sentiment thrown in to remind us we were human. A long hug before I would leave. A sly comment about my dress. Nothing to so much as hang a wet towel on.

“So. How was the wedding?” He won’t look at me and is now busy on the far side of the loft, as far from me as he can get without going outside.

“It’s just, your roommates are always about to barge in, or you have a phone call coming. And I don’t mean this as a complaint. I just mean it as the reason that this is not fulfilling for me. And you should think about that.”

“I didn’t know it was so unfulfilling.” He sits down at his computer and pretends I’m not there.

“You should figure out what you’re so afraid of, Luke.” I move closer to him at the computer and tell myself to be like Steven, that certain, that careless. “I think if someone really knew you, she’d still like you.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and it’s kind of like touching a statue, solid and inhuman. “I think. Maybe I wouldn’t know.”

“Why would you know?” he says. “Like, you in particular?”

“Fling yourself wildly into life, but don’t be surprised if life flings you back again. It’s from this poem I love.”

Luke flinches under my hand, but I keep steady. “You survive the flinging back, buddy. Your barriers don’t really protect you from anything but living.”

I pick Sanchie up, instead of hooking him onto the leash. He seems so wiped out, his little eyes heavy and ready to be home. “Maybe there is a woman out there who will break them down. Or maybe you could help out, by, I don’t know, blowing a few of them up yourself. Or building a bridge.”

He doesn’t look up or say anything. I head to the door and clank myself out of his dungeon, hoping he’ll say one thing.

I don’t look, but I imagine he picks up his iphone and calls someone right away, so as to wash off any of what I said, even any remnants that might later creep in to haunt him, maybe in the middle of a night that he cannot sleep.

*     *     *     *     *

It takes three days. That’s all. After the sleepiness at Luke’s, he vomits, and I make concoctions to tempt him. Activia seems to still his stomach, and he licks honey off my fingers. But all the time he looks at me with heavy eyes.

On Tuesday, I go to work, and ask my neighbor to look in on him. She calls me at lunchtime to say, “He looks like he’s dying, Oona.” She’s a nurse and the words are so serious that I race home and take him to the vet.

Who doesn’t know what is wrong with him. But Sancho gives me his big smile as we walk back home, and I cling to hope. Even though I know.

Andrea, my neighbor, tells me that Sancho must love me to look at all like he’s fine, because when she looked at him, she knew. “He’s putting on a good face for you, honey,” she says.

On Wednesday night, he keeps crawling out of my lap to be alone, and I think of Harvey Stone in The Sun Also Rises who crawls off on his own like a cat. I know he’s dying, but I won’t let him. I keep going after him and putting him on my lap. If I love him enough, he won’t die.

At 4AM he jumps off the bed, landing with a thud. He makes it to the bedroom doorway and starts to seize. Hard, violent seizing, his legs paddling like he’s running and his eyes gone. I try to hold him still. I wrap him in a towel. I do everything wrong. Even in his seizing, with his jaw snapping, he seems somehow careful not to bite me. It makes me think I can bring him back, that he’s still there. If I hold him, he’ll stop. But he doesn’t.

I call Steven and say, “He’s dying. I don’t know what to do.”

“Honey, honey, who?” he says. Though I haven’t spoken to him in over a month.

“Sanchie. I’m holding him, but he won’t stop seizing. What can I do? What can I do?”

“Oon, you need to go to a hospital.”

“How?”

I always thought I was decent in a crisis.

“Look on-line.”

“Can’t you tell me what to do? Something to stop him now?”

“Find a hospital and call me. I’ll meet you.”

All hospitals are stark and lonely, and until they take your person or dog away from you, you just hold together, and breathe and have things to do. But then they take him away behind a door and you’re left alone in a too bright, cold light and the hugest breath and cry crashes through you, much louder than you ever thought you would cry in public.

“I think it’s lucky I’m here. I think I’m glad I was the person you called.” Steven looks at me. If it’s possible, he’s more unmitigated. Time adds to his beauty instead of taking it away. He puts a hand on Sancho and his other on my shoulder, making a chain.

Sanchie’s nose is in a cup and they have him under a warming blanket. Though he’s dying and we’re about to put him to sleep, he still seems so alive. His body is so perfect, so solid and young. The vet said that they can’t get his brain to stop seizing. They had to keep pushing valium to get his body to stop. I put my hand on his little head. It feels bigger.

“It’s swollen, isn’t it?” I say.

The vet nods. Steven moves his arm around my hip. He doesn’t say anything.

“You were the best dog,” I say. “You’re the best dog ever and I want you to go where you need to go. I love you so much. I love you.”

“I can feel him above us,” Steven says. “We’re sending our prayers with you on your big journey, buddy.”

The vet pushes the plunger. I don’t really think I feel anything. He was supposedly there, and now he’s not. But I still kind of feel like he is.

The vet cleans him up and puts him in a room for me to say good-bye. I hold him, but he isn’t there, and a look must cross my face that says that even though he isn’t there, his weight and smush might just be enough, because Steven says, “Okay,” in a way that makes me put Sancho down.

He takes my hand. He’s still summer warm in the season of death. “Let’s go,” he says.

And I let him lead me. But then at the last second, I dash back in. I have to kiss his nose one last time. Even if he is dead.