“Stuart,” I called. “Lola’s going home.” Stuart didn’t look surprised. I dare you, I thought, to ask me why. He shrugged and swam to the steps. Lola followed, but didn’t meet my eye.

That evening, Gloria and Grady came for dinner, and afterward, Gloria and I cleaned up while Dennis and Grady went into the living room to set up a game of poker. Gloria washed and dried the dishes while I cleared the table. “The boy rushed out of here earlier,” she said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“He was red as a beet. Problems?”

“No problems.”

She turned off the water and faced me. “Is it the girl?”

“What girl?”

“You know what girl.”

I hesitated. “How did you know?”

“Just a hunch,” she said.

“Have you seen anything? I mean, anything—substantial?”

“Of course not. I would have told you.”

“What do I do? Do I fire her? Do I confront him?”

She dried the last dish and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “You do nothing. I doubt anything has even happened yet, knowing that boy. These things work themselves out.”

I nodded. “We could be wrong.”

“We’re not,” she said. “We are lucky, you and me,” she said, and though I hadn’t been feeling particularly lucky, I knew she was right.

The following Saturday, at water aerobics, I struggled through the cycles until we reached the ending ritual, in which I’d learned to close my eyes and lose myself in the shorthand meditation. I always wished that this part lasted longer, but this time, instead of letting Cynthia’s calming voice lull me into that feeling of peace I’d come to cherish, I opened my eyes partway through and looked over at my daughter. She did not look peaceful. Her eyes were closed, but they were closed as if she were shutting them against something she didn’t want to see, and her face was tight. I nudged her, and she looked over at me. “What?” she whispered, and I said, “Are you OK?” I felt Cynthia giving us a look. Margo started to cry. I held her in the water while the ladies dispersed, and before she left, Cynthia patted Margo on the back and said, “It’s cathartic, exercise. It will heal what ails you.”

Not this, I thought.

It was around this time that we had a lift installed on the downstairs toilet, along with grab bars on the wall and in the shower. I asked Dennis if we might want to ask Paul to build a railing on the pier—I lived in fear that Dennis might lost control of his wheelchair and plummet into the water—but he just smiled and said, sloppily, “Silly goose.”

The summer had ended, but I hadn’t really noticed. In November, Dr. Auerbach told us that Dennis’s progression was faster than he’d hoped it would be. This came as a surprise—I’d had nothing to compare it with. Then one afternoon in December I came home from work to find Stuart sitting on the raised toilet in the guest room bath. Dennis was in the tub. The water had drained.

“We’re waiting,” said Stuart when he saw me in the doorway.

“For what? Are you OK?” I said to Dennis.

“We tried to get out, but it didn’t quite work,” said Stuart. “We’re resting.”

“I’m fine,” said Dennis. The word fine was one elongated vowel, with hardly a hint of a consonant.

“I brought this,” said Stuart, holding up a dry-erase board the size of a placemat. There was a blue marker affixed to its side with Velcro. This was something I’d asked him to pick up after Lola and Dr. Auerbach had recommended it. Dennis’s speech had been getting worse. Within a month, he would be writing more often than speaking.

“Hate . . . writing,” said Dennis. Long hard a, long hard i, short soft i.

“I know, baby. But I like reading.” To Stuart, I said, “You can go. I’ll help him out.”

“No,” said Dennis.

“It’s difficult,” said Stuart. “I think I should stay.”

“I have to be able to do it,” I said, looking back and forth between them. I’d been helping Dennis into and out of the tub when Lola and Stuart were not around; the last time I’d done it, however, had been weeks before, and I admit it had hurt my back. I figured there was a trick I was missing, a stronger posture. Lola was such a little thing—surely she wasn’t more capable of lifting my husband than I was?

“Trust me,” said Stuart. To Dennis, he said, “Try again?”

Dennis nodded and Stuart braced himself against the tub, then reached down and put both arms under Dennis’s armpits and stepped into the tub between Dennis’s legs. He was confident and sturdy, and I knew that even if this attempt failed, he would be able to put Dennis down gracefully. I trusted him. This was, I suppose, as good a reason as any for not somehow forcing his flirtation with the therapist to end: what would I do without him? It was shameful.

When Dennis was standing, he could help a bit by getting his legs under himself, and Stuart reached down to bend Dennis’s leg from behind and help him step over the side of the tub. He wrapped a towel around Dennis’s shoulders and supported his weight while they walked to the guest bedroom. Dennis’s spine had never looked more prominent, his knees never so knobby. But once he was dressed—Stuart helped, but as long as he was sitting down in a chair with arms, Dennis was still able to pull on his own clothes—that malnourished figure disappeared, and he was himself again. Skinny and weakened, yes, but himself.

I took Dennis and Margo—Stuart had a meeting—out on the boat that night, and we anchored in the spot where the stilt house had stood and ate stone crabs at the stern. I’d cracked all the claws into bite-size pieces before we’d left, and Dennis was able to dip each morsel in the mayonnaise sauce and eat it without too much trouble. Margo and I ate the same way. When we finished, I cut a piece of key lime pie into little squares and put the plate on Dennis’s lap. We all ate from it. The downtown skyline, which had doubled in height in the thirty years since I’d come to Miami, resembled a foggy lineup of many-sized blue bottles. The buildings gave off faint stars of light. “From here,” Dennis said very slowly into his voice box, taking a deep breath, “it looks like nothing changes.”

The first time I’d been on Biscayne Bay, the only tall downtown building was Freedom Tower, where immigrants were processed when they first reached the country. It had changed slowly, yes, but it had changed.

“I miss Stiltsville,” said Margo.

“Me too,” I said, though I had the thought that with Dennis so sick, we wouldn’t have used the stilt house much even if it still existed. It had collapsed before becoming a sad, abandoned treasure.

“Me too,” Dennis said. The antidepressants were working: he didn’t cry, and neither did I.

That second year after the diagnosis went by in a bright, blinding flash, blanketing us in doctor’s appointments, symptoms, and steady decline. Dennis woke almost every night coughing violently to rid his throat of phlegm, which he was no longer able to do naturally. We finally got around to having the house tented in January, during which time Dennis and I stayed at Marse’s condo, as she’d offered. We spent evenings drinking wine in the chaise lounges on her balcony, watching the lights of the cruise ships making their way up Government Cut. “We could go on a cruise,” I said one night to Dennis, thinking that surely cruise ships had handicap access.

“Why?” he said softly.

“Because it would be relaxing and fun. People would cook for us.”

“People—already—cook—for us,” he said.

It was a cool night and I’d spread a blanket over our legs and moved our lounges next to each other so I could hold his hand. Being at Marse’s was a little like a vacation in itself. She had good crystal wineglasses and a big-screen television with more cable channels than I knew existed, and her bed was as high and wide as a boat, with a view of the bay. We used an ottoman to help Dennis climb into it. Lola had the week off, and every morning Dennis and I used the pool at Marse’s condo for his exercises, but more often than not we ended up floating around with foam noodles laced under our arms, talking idly. “That’s true,” I said. “I guess we don’t really need to get away.”

“I—don’t,” he said. “My life is—vacation.”

I looked over at him. His hair was disheveled from the breeze. I’d taken to cutting it myself, on the back deck with a sheet tied around his neck like an apron. In the moonlight, I could see the lines around his eyes and his sweet, soft half smile. He was happy. He was deteriorating and wheelchair-bound, and with anyone besides me he was more comfortable writing than speaking, and we were short on cash (a cruise was out of the question financially, anyway)—but still, in these and other moments, I saw his happiness. The illness takes the body, not the mind or the spirit.

In February, Dr. Auerbach offered us a twig of hope: a clinical trial. He mentioned it offhandedly, as an afterthought at the end of a checkup, saying that it was unlikely to work but he didn’t think it would hurt. Dennis shrugged and wrote on his board, LET’S GO FOR IT. Later that week, we went to a clinic at the University of Miami and picked up a box full of needles and vials, a chart to mark each time the shots were given, and a list of dates when we had to check in at the clinic for tests. A nurse at the clinic showed me how to administer the shots on a grapefruit, then drew a bull’s-eye on Dennis’s hip with a permanent marker. The drug was called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, though in the weeks of the trial, after mixing up the letters a dozen times, Dennis and I would come to refer to it as BFD—Big Fucking Deal. There were almost two thousand patients enrolled at forty sites. We started the injections the night we received the drugs, and for a month the scheduling and checkups were like another job in our lives, but then the study was halted. No patients had reported progress. It was a bust.

In March, at his appointment with Dr. Auerbach, we learned that Dennis had lost a total of forty-five pounds. He hadn’t been eating very much—this I had noticed. At first I’d thought he just wasn’t hungry, but then I’d watched as he fought to swallow a piece of lasagna, and I realized that the struggle simply wasn’t worth it. The doctor suggested a feeding tube—this was something we’d anticipated distantly, and now the time had rolled up on us in a tidal wave—and at the end of that week Dennis spent the night in the hospital to have the tube inserted into his stomach. I was taught how to attach the feeding bag to the tube, how to add a can of Ensure to the bag, how to clean it before and after each use. Dennis could still eat—thank God, he could still taste food—but he could not get enough to sustain him, and from then on I, or Margo or Lola or Stuart, gave him a bag of Ensure three times a day.

And then one night I realized, after Dennis grunted his thanks when I handed him a pair of pajamas from the dresser, that he hadn’t said a word to me in a week. His voice had trickled away like a stream in winter. This is actually what I thought of—the stream behind the home in Decatur where I’d grown up, which flowed modestly but steadily in summer and then in the fall slowed to a trickle, then stopped entirely after the first freeze.

Since inventing her image in the backyard on my birthday almost a year earlier, I’d thought of Bette every day and called her every week. We had long conversations, but they weren’t the same as being together. When the doctor gave us some bit of bad news, as he seemed to do at almost every one of our monthly visits, I thought about what she would have said if she’d been around, what irreverent quip she might have added. When she flew in at Christmas, we spent an evening on the back deck together drinking wine, and in a weak moment I told her that I didn’t think I could keep it together anymore without her. I said, “I feel like you chose her over us.”

She wore turquoise earrings and a large silver ring on one index finger. “I wish you didn’t think of it that way,” she said.

“We could really use you around here.”

She stared out at the waterway. “I used to sleep out here when I was a kid, did you know that?”

“Dennis mentioned it once.”

“My father would try to make me come inside, and my mother would say to him, ‘Dear, it’s Florida—what’s the worst that could happen?’ It was different then.” Her hair in the moonlight looked like the feathers of a white bird. Her sharp face was free of lines, free of worry. She said, “Once I thought I saw a ghost in those bushes over there, but it was just my eyes playing tricks on me. And once Dennis spent the night out here with me, and that night I found that with him there I was more afraid, not less. I lost all my gumption.”