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Their nightly crooning sessions had been neck and neck with the laps they walked together through Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s hallways, the twin peak joys of their time in New Hampshire: eighties hair metal ballads; self-pitying alcoholic nightclub crooners; the worst tripe they could come up with.

They paused, Alice asking if Dr. Eisenstatt wanted to join them, and took more than a little joy in his demurring smile, his uncertainty about whether they were still making fun of him. She and Oliver kept belting, side by side, all but joined together and at the same time forgetting themselves, their joy palpable, emanating.
Contentedness? Love?
Whatever this feeling, Alice felt it: intangible, inviolable, invulnerable. At the same time, she recognized something else. This feeling had its underside, its darkness. However, the contrast allowed her to focus that much more, gave her access. For now she understood that this palpable feeling of hers was so very fragile, nothing more than glued together, the reconstructed shell of a once-shattered egg.

Evening

S
HE MANAGED TO
eat almost a third of the black bean soup that he’d picked up from a Greek diner, and the food was sitting in her stomach without problems, so maybe the steroids were starting to work. Her blood pressure had normalized, one hundred over seventy. Her temp was stable. She was cleaning Oliver’s clock at rummy pretty good, the two of them snug together in the bed, idly discussing movies Oliver could rent for the next day, whether they had enough time together to do her walking laps. Their inside hands were entwined, her left, his right, and this mingling had its own associations: Oliver coming to bed late after a programming jaunt, Alice, half-asleep, reaching for his hand; that white-knuckled delivery room and him counting out breaths for her while she all but crushed his fingers; the pleading need while the paramedics lifted her on the stretcher, Alice not wanting to let go.

From the television on the other side of the room the newscaster promised audiences that in two minutes they’d hear all about the trendy restaurant and the mystery of where in the world they could be getting fresh crabs.
Hear what the Department of Health and the ASPCA have to say about this shocking obscenity.
Oliver clapped and hooted. Alice said nothing, but her eye contact conveyed entertainment, delight.

Then the call. She’d been expecting it. But for once Winnie was early, confirming she’d brought Doe, the two of them were downstairs, waiting. Only why was Oliver tensing? If things were what Alice wanted, his energy would have changed in a different manner, he’d have been devoted to preparing his wife to go to the lobby. So why was Oliver listening, agreeing, saying he understood, he’d be home as soon as he could? Alice gripped his palm, demanded,
“What?”

Placing the room’s phone back into its cradle, Oliver laid his free hand on the comforter, overturning an unimpressive run of cards. The baby was fine. Everything was okay. “I know you said we could rely on her. I know Winn’s a nice friend and wants to help and all.” Oliver assured Alice, as she removed herself from his side, “It’s no biggie. Some scheduling thing with her dance troupe. The easiest thing is for me to go home and take over child duty.”

Alice told him it was fine. There would be other adjustments as well. They’d deal with each as it arrived.

“We’ll be here first thing in the morning,” he said. “I promise.”

She released his hand; Oliver looked for his shoes, began the process of gathering his wallet, his sweater. Alice thought he looked anxious to leave, and this struck a low chord. She said maybe she’d go and try a few laps. It made sense to move while she could. “Better than just sitting alone being disappointed.”

Oliver returned to his wife and threw off the little paper rectangle. They held one another along the sides of their faces, Alice ran her hands down his jaw, felt his gristle. “I love your face,” she told him, and he violated hospital policy, pressing his lips onto hers.

“Your first night with her alone,” Alice said.

“If you need a nurse for those laps—”

“You should git.”

He tore the strings holding together the back of his smock, rolled off his gloves, slam-dunking the garments in the trash bin near the door.

Through the windows on the other side of the room, the night was weirdly vivid, the snow still falling at a crazy pace, the flakes distinct, bright enough to glow. In the opposite building, most of the windows were dark. One window on the right side was lit, body outlines half-shredded by flimsy blinds, two men sitting like potato sacks, facing one another at a desk, one man rubbing his eyes, the other drinking coffee.

Alice could hear Mrs. Woo on the other side of the partition, breathing through that pipe, rhythmic bursts,
long in, wheeze out.
It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard the television for a while, and for this she was thankful. She sat upright, shifted her legs to the side of the bed where Oliver had been, its safety bars still blessedly down. Easy to slip into her bunny slippers; Alice, however, searched out her knee-high boots, their leather so deliciously soft it did not stand upright. The million and eighth thing to be thankful for: that her feet had not swollen back up. Million and nine: she could still fit into the boots, Alice buckled, zipped, was surprised to feel the lack of a head rush as she rose, her balance natural, strong. She knotted her robe, reached for the wall, yanked with both hands, enjoying the exertion necessary to unplug her battery pack. How good it would feel to go on a looting, riotous rampage. Then she thought about the poor souls who’d have to clean up, and who’d have to pay for everything, and what about everyone who suffered because of the damage you caused?

Wrapping the thick cords once around her neck meant she wouldn’t trip over them. Alice took her time, dragging the battery pack and its tree of fluids alongside her, the IV pole jiggling, which was fine, except being on alert, making sure that all was safe, was even more taxing. Where visitors wore the mask and gloves and bib so they wouldn’t transmit anything, Alice wore them so she wouldn’t pick anything up.

In New Hampshire, after her numbers had started to climb, and the doctors had given her the okay, walking laps around the ward with Oliver had been her nightly chance to get out of that godforsaken room without some sort of test or probe, and she’d looked forward to that nightly hour as if it were her wedding. Barely managed ten laps that first go-around. By the time they’d released her, she was up to fifty, almost half a mile, thrusting her hands above her head for a five-lap set, jetting them out to the sides like an airplane and making circles for another five (the ward physical therapist had told Alice the exercises would prevent her arms from atrophying). Next to her, Oliver did the same, or held on to the IV tower so it didn’t wobble; he always counted out loud when they passed the nurses’ station and completed a lap, tracking Alice’s reps and pace. Every so often they broke into the chorus of that old Olivia Newton-John song. Nurses stared like these two aerobicizers were crazy, or made charmed cooing sounds, or else looked right through the two, just another day in paradise.

Using her body as leverage so the door stayed open, she rolled the battery tree out of her hospital room, and was surprised to find herself facing a different direction than when she left her New Hampshire room, the configuring of sink and supply nook different, too, more cramped, the shelves shorter, with supplies piled atop one another. The overhead lights were brighter, too, which seemed improbable, based on Alice’s memory of that place, only here was the evidence, glaring down, reflecting even more harshly off the tiles. The hallway seemed to run forever, like one of those visual effects to convey eternity—an Escher effect. Alice tried to remember specifics, his various lithographs. She thought of a hallway from some Kubrick movie, but couldn’t remember which.

Centered down in the distance on the other end, the outline of a person and an IV pole formed a small squiggle.

Expectations work against you,
she remembered Eisenstatt saying.
You think you know what’s coming.
It bothered Alice that Dr. Know-It-All was indeed correct. She wouldn’t have believed that she’d gotten weaker since coming home, but walking fifty laps in this place seemed as possible as being named the queen of Spain. Her feet did not leave the floor; she shuffled forward, her old person’s shuffle, in the direction of what looked like a barricade, a bunch of overflowing industrial clothing bins, gathered on the right side of the hall—the near door’s sign read
LINEN ROOM
, and she made sure to give it a wide berth, navigating the rolling pole, a wide arc around the mess. Soon she was passing a stray metal stacking table, its shelves overflowing with uncovered trays of sloppy, half-eaten lunches and untouched dinners, Saran Wrap still clinging to the tops of their square trays. A bit farther down, beyond the door for the social services worker, sat a lab rack filled with blood vials. The hallway’s near wall was lined with flyers and pamphlets: guides to various radiation treatments, how to deal with this or that chemotherapy, support group flyers, checklists for talking to your children about your disease.

Thank Goddess there was something else to look at. That little squiggle down the hall had taken the form of a person. A fully dressed man: loose blue-and-black lumberjack shirt, black jeans worn to dullness, the clothes hanging off his body in a manner she recognized all too well from Oliver and his friends. Would’ve been unassuming if he hadn’t been pushing an IV stand. Alice immediately classified him:
Phylum: grad student who lives down the hallway; Class: odd and interesting, with hints of intensity.

Moving parallel to Alice now, the man initiated eye contact. Gaunt, but not painfully so. Unwashed black hair splattered across his forehead, a boyish mess he was too old to pull off, but that held charm nonetheless. When Alice understood his brown eyes were trained on her, something inside her kicked up. She allowed a nod in his direction, kept on shuffling, the soles of her boots making scuffed sounds.

She’d made it down the hall, and completed a right turn, when he approached again—was it possible he’d lapped her?

His face almost alabaster in its paleness. A pronounced brow and pointed features made him look almost feral. Aquiline jaw muddled with a week of growth. “You need someone?” he asked. “To walk with you?”

She did not look at him.

“You sure?”

She wavered, but said, “Should be.”

For reasons unknown to her, Alice kept talking. “My drugs haven’t kicked in yet. And my counts are still high. The doctors felt I’d be okay—” She thought, laughed. “You know, I don’t think this is a very good hospital.”

His smirk was entertained, vaguely predatory. “I felt the same way when my doc asked if I needed to score.”

“I suppose I could use the company. After all, what can happen, I’ll catch cancer?”

He asked how she was doing. She gave him a tepid smile, and her fashion voice: “Let’s change subjects, shall we?”

The man acquiesced, taking hold of her IV pole, assuming the responsibility for pushing both of them. He volunteered that it was his fifth day here. The story of him getting here was honestly
bizarre.
He played keyboards, mostly session work, but since he had a station wagon, cats figured they could ask him to sit in a set, get him to haul and store their gear. “I was playing with my friend’s band at Brownies, you’ve been there, right?” He waited, checking if Alice had a reaction, continuing when there was none. “I’d had the flu, something. That shithole’s a total hotbox, so going in I knew it was going to be a long night. But it’s a gig, and, you know, playing is better than not playing. Anyway, behind the beat every song, head’s all sludgy, just slogging through.”

“You don’t say.”

“Carrying my gear outside afterward, arms were total noodles. I stopped to adjust my grip. Just looked up, like for a sec, up at the street. The old brownstones, snow hitting my face—”

Alice felt herself relating to and disappearing into the tale: the musician’s legs
turned into
buckling accordions;
the sound of his keyboards hitting the sidewalk; it registering upon him that this clatter had to mean hundreds of dollars in repairs. She didn’t give in to the temptation to ask if he’d been under the weather beforehand. Alice was going to have to ask his name again.

He was explaining about a youngish woman who’d helped him get to an emergency room. “We were getting to know each other, seemed like we had a little connection.” So when this art school chick said she had to check her messages—“like the third time she’d said that,
at two in the morning
”—the musician should have guessed someone was waiting on her, or she was waiting on someone.

“My husband’s been a saint.” Alice felt happy to volunteer the information; saying the words was a relief. “The pressure Oliver must be under— Sometimes, I feel guilty for getting this. Ridiculous, I know.”

He’d taken a few steps ahead, but stopped, and turned now, so he could watch her.

She kept on, dissembling: “I once heard that when you get past the honeymoon and the bliss, most marriages are one good fight away from being kaput. With us, the baby had already added a lot of strain. And all this dropped in Oliver’s lap.”

The keyboardist—“Mervyn? Merv? Thank you, Merv, I won’t forget this time”—asked if Alice was doing all right, volunteered to slow down, and, after a bit, admitted that he hadn’t added up all the signs with the girl, but “she must’ve taken her jacket with her, too. When you think about it, pretty big hint, right?”

“He’s been better than anyone has a right to ask for,” Alice murmured.

“Last thing she did: rubbed her hand on my cheek. Gave me this look, all soft and dewy.
You don’t even know
is what she said.”

Alice noticed him now, studied him, thinking. Her voice was sudden with amusement: “How could anyone have walked out on
you
?”