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The lights in the chapel had dimmed, a slide show already under way, projected against the back wall, this latest slide showing a smoldering young man in a weird jacket with padded shoulders. Exhausted, drenched with sweat, he was hoisting a beer with other similarly exhausted-looking musicians. His eyes were dark with chaos, and brought forth slight responsive sounds, audience members laughing, someone sniffling. Probably half of the pews were unfilled, but the crowd seemed sort of large, not that Doe had any expectations. Her dad funneled them into a back pew; Mom stayed on the aisle. She reached into that depthless shoulder bag, emerged with cushions for her back and bottom.

The event honoring Mervyn “Merv” Goldin was more absorbing than she would have guessed, and Doe found herself relating as childhood friends recounted the funny young man who spent a lot of his spare time reading science fiction, and who seemed to push back against every fact or stated truth he heard. When somebody talked about Merv leaving college and pursuing dreams on the road with a band, her father gave Doe a look and whispered,
Don’t even think of it.
When an older guy—really nice hair, crags in his face like he’d had a rough go—reminisced about the hours they’d spent on a couch getting baked and brainstorming their now famous ploy—asking a girl you wanted to make if she wanted to go get ice cream—Doe could not help but smile and whisper,
Pretty good.
She decided she definitely wanted to wear her mother’s glasses with her outfit when she tried to get into the rooftop bar at the Standard, which
definitely
was going to happen. Her phone buzzed. Across the top of her screen, she read the first words of a text that appeared to be from Cyrus. Her mother put a hand on Doe’s wrist. Away went the phone.

Mostly the crowd was made up of the kinds of middle-aged men who played pinball in bars during the middle of the day, or congregated at classic car conventions on the open streets of Vermont towns, or maybe sold clocks made out of old records along some beach boulevard: aging hedonists and bohemians, potbellied, with consumptive faces and gray-streaked hair gelled back into ponytails; the women usually
juuust
too old, too heavy, to get away with those fluorescent dye jobs, those nose rings, those worn-ass tattoos. Today, however, among the pews, standing around the periphery, rumples had been smoothed away, collared shirts ironed, bodies squeezed into corsets and respectful office dresses and Sunday finery and what could best be described as
tasteful whore on the prowl.
A few air-kissed. Others nodded, let out warm
hey
s. Doe’s mother was spending a lot of time scanning the pews—and here she let out a gasp, whispered,
Carmen. Is that really?
Doe’s mom clutched her husband by the hand, then motioned, waved. Doe could not make out the intended target.

Never married, Merv had been engaged twice, one fiancée loving him when he was a raging alkie, the other when he’d dried out. Each of the goth-attired women who’d been handing out flyers agreed: he was funny, quirky, soulful, saw things his own way, and couldn’t be convinced otherwise. Once the pain of their prospective marriages had subsided, each had stayed friends with Merv, and to this day wished things could have worked out. There had been one or two other serious girlfriends as well, and a few bar chicks, some lady friends who through the years obviously had shared benefits with him, maybe a handful of musicians he’d gigged or laid down studio tracks with, plus honeys he’d met at twelve-step meetings, one or two he’d taken graduate school classes with or just sort of somehow came across, and more than a few of these women confirmed the effectiveness of his ice cream line. Tilda stared numbly ahead, once or twice squirming in place. She grumbled and let Doe’s mom hand her a tissue, wiped her eyes, and whispered to Doe’s mom: he’d been a fuck-up, but a harmless one, a really fun guy.

Doe thought maybe she’d ask Cyrus if he wanted to get ice cream sometime.

Tributes ranged from first-date awkward to show-business smooth, solemn to bawdy, but were always touching, occasionally suffused with blubbering—from both speakers and the crowd. The composite figure who emerged was difficult, cranky, charming, thoughtful, sensitive, someone who’d gone out of his way to show up for people he cared about, in a way that suggested not just thoughtfulness, but also loneliness; a hothead full of bluster who was perpetually caught holding the bag, letting himself be talked into storing band equipment, returning a van to the rental agency; a guy who’d been bitter about never making it big, but who never had any problem playing a simple duet with a sick patient, though that graduate degree in music therapy hadn’t been the guarantee of employment he’d thought it would (this line drawing laughs from the crowd); a Tuesdays-at-eleven meeting regular who took his sobriety as seriously as his friendships, and good thing, too, because it helped him manage the diagnosis when it came, right out of the blue, and changed his life.

Doe’s mother was holding her typed page again. Frail hands shook slightly; a dried and properly lipsticked mouth made small movements. On the stage four men with acoustic guitars who sat in a half circle finished performing their collaged interpretation of the deceased’s original music. A young man was waiting for them to clear, and now was nervous, stumbling into a story about his mother-in-law, a secretary, meeting Merv when her breast cancer had returned. Doe watched, surprised and interested in the intensity of her mother’s preparations.

A friend remembered smoking cigarettes deep into the night on Merv’s fire escape, talking about generic drugs, patent law, and his crazy-expensive hamster-ovary infusions. He remembered another fall that messed up Merv’s elbow and wrist, Merv’s body going on a spiral from which he was never able to fully recover. He’d seem to be doing good, but then would bloat, or might cut himself and bleed crazy amounts. He’d fall out of touch and you might forget about him for a bit and then out of nowhere he’d post something insane and funny on your Facebook page and remind you all over again how much you dug him.

Doe’s mother handed Doe the sunglasses and took her time in rising. Her father followed her into the aisle and took her by the elbow. Once behind the podium, Doe’s mother spent a moment adjusting the microphone, a bit lower now. She tapped into it, and Tilda’s voice was clear in calling back, “We’re good.” Her mother took off her hat and revealed a short shell of candy-pink hair. The crowd murmured approval. Her mother smiled and her eyes were bright. She looked so tiny up there. So old. She began to speak and then choked up and stopped and her face crumpled a bit and she did a half wave, as if dismissing the microphone.

“The first time I met Mervyn he tried to seduce me in a hospital while I was having chemotherapy.” She waited through the group laugh and then said, “That’s true. That happened. And I totally fell for him. It was brief and it was spectacular.

“The second phase of our relationship, I was recovering from a different bout of chemotherapy and he staked out my house and all but stalked me.” People laughed again and Doe knew her mother was being charming, but also felt the intensity of truth in her mother’s words, and while she was accustomed to her mother speaking truth, and being serious, this was different. Doe did not know how, but it was.

“Then the next phase. I was helpless. That man came to my room every day and sang his songs to me.” Her face crumpled. “I often was not in a condition where I could hear. He sang them anyway.”

Her father had lowered his head and was holding his eyes. Doe could not remember seeing him cry before, yet he looked pleased somehow.

“He was a friend, and he came and sang those songs and tried to help me to recover. That is an amazing thing. He came into my life in such a strange way and we had this wonderful arc.”

She cleared her throat, seemed to consider something.

Alice closed her eyes, took a breath, exhaled. “I did not know Mervyn very well. Nor was he the most important person I’ve ever met. But at a very hard time, he was special. He tried his best, for me.”

Through the crowd and pews, the murmur passed, a low, cresting wave, approval but something more as well. Doe kept her eyes trained on her mother: her turtle-skull lowered, a hand wiping away tears, purposefully heading away from the podium, into the open arms of her husband; Doe’s father helping her down the three steps from the stage. There, they stood to the side and looked at each other. The next speaker was saying something nice to them and heading up to the podium. Tilda was blowing her nose with force into a Kleenex. Doe knew her parents loved her and she knew they once had been in love, but she often wondered about whether they loved each other. Now she watched them staring at one another with a clarity and intimacy that she recognized as laden with tenderness, and history, and more than that, too.

The right thing for her to do was to rise from the pew. The right thing was to head toward the aisle, embrace her parents. Of course, she’d heard her mother’s cancer stories a zillion times. She had emails and texts to answer, exercises on the barre to complete—a host of other things she could do with this afternoon. But maybe it was worth talking to Mom anyway? Maybe there were stories she hadn’t heard yet. A restlessness, so familiar as to be eternal, swelled inside of Doe. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t have any answers, not any good ones, anyway. She stretched her arms over her head and toward the domed sky. Presently the confused young woman did something that, to be honest, she rarely did anymore: following one of her mother’s common pieces of advice, she took a deep breath and exhaled.

For Diana Joy Colbert. For Lily Bock.

Acknowledgments

In the summer of 2009, my late wife, Diana Joy Colbert, was diagnosed with leukemia; our daughter was six months old. Diana was sick for two and a half years, and passed away three days before our daughter’s third birthday. During those years, more people than I could ever document went out of their way to help our family. You tried and you made our lot easier. A thank-you doesn’t begin to convey my gratitude. Know you have my unending love and thanks. I hope these feelings have been conveyed in person. Again, you mean the world to me.

I similarly cannot begin to list or thank the many people who helped try to put me back together after Diana passed. There are just too many for these meager pages. We are the sum of our friendships, and this makes me very lucky.

Diana kept a journal during parts of her ordeal, in the hope that she would write a memoir and that her experience would help others. What she left was raw and in its early stages, far from finished, let alone publishable. But it was important to me to try and share Diana’s spirit and heart. With this in mind, portions of this book—specifically, its fourth section (“Enlightenment”), although also in the extended videotape scene near the end of section three (“And what if he flinched”)—have been inspired by select passages from that journal. In these and a few other instances, I created scenes based on journal passages, or fit sentences (or ideas) from those passages into necessary existing scenes. Sometimes this required rewriting Diana’s words, changing Diana’s voice to fit Alice’s, and/or editing down those journal passages. My goal was always to stay true to Diana’s feelings and respectful of her privacy; simultaneously, I wanted to keep the novel true to Alice’s arc and the book’s own life. I hope these many things have been accomplished, and that Diana’s love of life and will to live were properly conveyed. If they were not, it is because of my own artistic limitations.

Logistics: It’s important to thank New York University for the teaching gig; Paragraph Workspace (a.k.a. “Cubicle”) for the writing space and the support; the HALD Hovedgaard Danish-American Writers’ Retreat for some time away when I was a mess; the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, specifically Tina Summerlin and Dana Prescott, for embracing me during another horrid period; Candace Wait, Elaina Richardson, and the Corporation of Yaddo, for everything; and the Authors Guild and Alice Rubin at TEIGIT, who worked to get us a new insurance plan when life quite literally depended on it.

Special thanks to the wonderful women who’ve helped care for my kid: Sam Miller, Nina Namthip, Liza Reytblat, Jen Hyde, Joyce Sotter, Michelle Marisola, Lauren Piven, Jess Prestia. Lindsey Kennedy has been a tremendous friend.

Leigh Newman, Fiona Maazel, and Mary Beth Hughes organized and put on a fundraiser that was invaluable in help defraying some of the medical costs—this and many other generosities put me in your debt. Richard Price, Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jon Foer, Sean Wilsey: I can’t pay you back, any of you, not a cent, but maybe I’ll be able to pass your kindnesses forward, somehow.

Andrew Ginsburg. Gina Grimaldi. Hannah Tinti, Jaime Clarke, Nicole Krauss, Alison Smith, Sarah Jay, Sheri Fink, Will Lychack. Evan (The Rooster) Hughes and Adelle Waldman for every Saturday night for three years. Josh Ferris and Eliza Kennedy. Julie Seabaugh. Mark Roberts, who almost kept me sane.

I was supposed to deliver a manuscript to Random House years ago. The powers that be easily could have terminated my contract and saved themselves a lot of headaches; instead, under the direction of Gina Centrello, they sent my daughter a giant pink stuffed animal, helped me find sitters, were patient and supportive, and worked to turn this manuscript into a gorgeous book. Every writer should have a publishing house as supportive and smart. Thank you so much, Gina, for your care and attention. Thank you, Rodrigo Corral, for staying with it and nailing this amazing cover. Simon Sullivan, for the perfect interior design and art. Beth Pearson, for the unblinking eye and the gentle hand. Michelle Jasmine—master of the art of public relations. Andrea Walker, for stepping into a difficult spot and handling all matters like the champion you are. (I am so very excited to see what we can do together.) Caitlin McKenna, for your good spirit, efficiency, and keen advice. And my editor emeritus, David Ebershoff, is all class; he is a genius, and, moreover, he is kind. I am choked up writing this. Thank you, my friend, for holding my hand through this entire journey. No one could do better.