Maricarmen was tired, not the drowsy kind of tired that comes from missing a habitual cup of morning coffee, but an exhaustion that can make a woman cry over something as small as breaking an old bowl. Maricarmen was this kind of tired and she wore it in dark circles under her eyes, like a pair of half-moon black licorice candies. Paco was in the hospital for the fifth night that week and she couldn’t sleep on the cool, thin cot the nurse put in the room for her, as though anyone could sleep in those hospital rooms. Fluorescent lights creeping in from underneath the door, whispering nurses at the desk down the hall with their squeaky, white tennis shoes. The low moaning of her husband, his normally combed blonde hair, mussed and dry, transparent tubes running from machines to his lower chest and stomach. A line on a screen, vacillating with his quiet consciousness.
    They had come home early from the reception Saturday night. The only daughter of their best friends, Elena and Martín, was getting married and they had booked the finest dance hall they could find on the Costa Brava, a little more than an hour from central Barcelona. Maricarmen had not left the city in so long that she felt a little nervous on the highway. She sat stiffly, her hands clenching one another (“Slow down, Paco!”).
    It was a beautiful silver and blue shimmering ballroom in the Hotel del Mar with space for over five hundred people. Paco and Maricarmen sat at the table nearest the front, just beneath the newlyweds and their family. She’d gone to the peluquería to get her hair done and even bought a new outfit, the first piece of clothing she hadn’t bought on sale in over ten years. The deep crimson dress stopped a little above her knees with a neckline revealing just enough to show she wasn’t yet past the age of being sexy. She couldn’t wait to dance.
    After dinner, as everyone was forming a circle around the wedding pair, Paco slowly drifted out of the ballroom. Maricarmen waited at the table for him, nearly the only one left seated, it seemed. Women my age don’t dance alone, she thought. She went out into the hallway, timidly checked the men’s bathroom, the echo of his name on the tiled walls, and then took the elevator up to their room on the fifth floor. Paco was spread out on the bed with his hands lightly grasping his stomach.
    “Indigestion again, Paco?”
    “Yes,” he said softly. Maricarmen went automatically to her overnight bag and took out a pair of pills and drew a glass of water from the sink. She gave them to her husband and helped him sit up on the bed. He made thin hissing noises in his mouth, sucking in air between sips of water, like the sound of gas escaping from a leaky pipe. After a long silence Paco groaned and turned to his wife. “Come,” he said, “we’re going home.”
    “What? Home?” she asked in disbelief. “Paco, we can’t leave.”
    “Mari, I can’t move. Ah, how much this hurts me!” he said, laying down and curling his legs into his body.
    “We’ll stay here if your stomach gives you so much pain. We’ll drive home early tomorrow morning.”
    “No, no. We’re going home,” he said shaking his head, holding his stomach again.
    “Paco, I don’t understand. You’re not making any sense.”
    “No, no. Home, we’re going home.”
    “Paco, they’re our best friends. We’ve known Elena and Martín since—”
    “They’ll understand, they’ll understand,” he said drifting off, his voice muffled in the pillow. She stood watching him, her heartbeat quickening.
    “Always, always,” and she was surprised how loud her voice was getting. “I told you not to work yesterday. I told you, but you nev—”
    “Mari, enough,” he said with another groan.
    “If you would just take a day off during the week, a half a day even, you could relax, you wouldn’t feel like this all the time, we could—”
    “Mari,” and he turned to her so their eyes met, “enough.”
    They dropped the keys off at the front desk, leaving without saying goodbye to their best friends or wishing their daughter and her husband well. As they walked to the car the ballroom music faded into the hum of the tide on the shore.
    Early Sunday morning back in their Barcelona apartment, Paco woke up, went to the bathroom, and saw his blood in the toilet. “Mari,” he called to his wife. Seeing the blood, the too red blood that didn’t look real, Maricarmen quickly flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink over Paco’s hands. Ten minutes later they were checking into the Hospital Clínic on Comte Urgell.

    Every week she did all of the shopping. After fixing him breakfast and washing the morning dishes, she watched the seven-thirty news, the same news she’d watch again at two-thirty, then again at nine o’clock that night. A shower after the morning news (if she hadn’t taken one the day before) then she blow-dried and curled her dark hair that was graying at the roots. The first Friday of every month she got it dyed, cut, and styled, before having her two children over for lunch. After her hair, she cleaned the house and started a soup broth for that afternoon. By ten she was out the door with her canvas grocery bag in hand.
    Juan Carlos had the best artichokes. They were never too ripe or too green and always a good size. Although his store was well outside of Maricarmen’s neighborhood, every Tuesday she would take the number fourteen bus—stuffy and crowded with people—to la Esquerra Eixample to fill her bag with his produce. Juan always greeted her by name and asked how her children, Lisu and Adán, were doing and if Paco was still busy at work. They would chat for a little while, talking about the weather or the EU summit that was to be held. Then he’d tie up her bag, reminding her as she was leaving to wash the artichokes before she cooked them. She’d soak them as soon as she got home, placing them in a tub of cool water with lettuce leaves and spinach, the dirt and bugs floating to the top around the meniscus, clinging to that outer edge. Shaking the water from the vegetables, she’d rinse the bacteria out of the tub and down the sink.
    She cleaned the windows until they disappeared. First the spray, then the paper towels. More spray, then sheets of the newspaper from last Sunday. The sports section always went first, Rivaldo’s jersey and shorts melting into the blue cleaner. To his fans, he was a god. To Maricarmen, he was just another guy getting paid too much to run around in the grass and kick at a ball. She used to know a woman whose husband hit her every time Barça lost. This usually non-violent man began to throw remotes, ashtrays, and vases at the walls and television. On game days, the woman spoke with the men at the newspaper stands, asking questions about the team they’d play, until they thought her a fan. She read the statistics in the paper and followed the league rankings. Soon, she grew to know more about Barça than the kiosk workers.

    Paco woke up at five-thirty every morning, showered, dressed, and ate breakfast. By six-fifteen he was taking the elevator down to the parking garage in the basement of their building and by six-thirty he was out in the early morning traffic, heading southwest out of the city towards the airport. He drove fast, passing cars on the left and right, their headlights still shining in the gray morning. Hostia! Va hombre! By the time he got to work his heart would be pounding heavier and the low thumping would begin in his abdomen.
    Maricarmen knew, unlike so many of Paco’s co-workers—men who stayed glued to their chairs inside their cubicles all day—that he welcomed the time in which he could sit down at his own desk, in his own office. A coffee with milk. A long stare out the window or maybe just a deep sigh and a stretch. And it was indeed his office. His company. Caballer Transportación. Three days out of the week he was driving shipments to Madrid or driving empty trucks back from Paris with his son Adán, a thinner, younger version of himself. It was the same in the office. It would seem that, because he was the boss and owner, people would always come to him, that he’d sit back in that big leather chair and simply approve of people’s work—a constant overseer around which all else thrived and hummed—but Paco was always moving. Shuffling, pacing, filing, talking, calling. Moving. Forever en route to a place that he had to get to on time, from a place that he had not stayed long enough.
    But now, he wasn’t moving anywhere. Eyes closed. Chest gently rising and falling with each breath, the line on the screen rising and falling. His hand under Maricarmen’s hand, though he didn’t know it. She was always warning him to slow down, suggesting he take days off, or that they go away for a weekend. And she wasn’t the only one who said it. Doctors cautioned him about stress. Two years ago an ulcer had eaten a hole in his duodenum and despite this and constant warnings from his wife and the professionals, he worked hard without rest. Now, it had caught up with him, hit him harder than any deadline or overnight trip. It stopped him the way a door suddenly slams into a face. The ulcer had returned and he’d ignored it longer than the last one. Now he was bleeding in his small intestine and it wasn’t clotting properly. His blood kept moving.
    The doctors told Maricarmen and her daughter, Lisu, that they’d have to remove the first thirty centimeters of his small intestine. Tomorrow, the doctor said. I’m sorry. She did not cry, but instead whispered into Paco’s ear what was going to happen to him, although she knew he probably couldn’t hear her. They’d given him many drugs and his body was tired. Lisu pulled her up and told her she’d take her home, that she’d been in this hospital room for too long and she needed to eat some real food. She went with her daughter, but moved with a slowness from her chair. They’ll change his bedpan, she thought, give him a bath, feed him dinner, and he’ll see that I’m not here.
    Back at home, Maricarmen cooked. Lisu urged her to relax, to take a nap, a bath, or do nothing at all, but instead she flew around the kitchen moving from the refrigerator to the cutting board to the gas range to the stove timer that kept buzzing. She served her daughter, whom she had expelled from the kitchen, dinner like any other night. Mediterranean salad with lettuce, olives, tomatoes, oil, and vinegar, fresh toasted bread with oil, sautéed eggplant, and a prime sirloin cutlet. (“Mom, please. I can do this.” “Oh, no, no. I have it.”)
    When Lisu was still in the apartment, Maricarmen would watch her scribble in a notebook and drink coffee and read books that couldn’t fit into a handbag. She was always running off with her friends, sneaking in the apartment past curfew, nearly light outside, the time Paco would leave the house for work. And all the boyfriends. So many, it seemed to Maricarmen, that she could hardly keep track of them coming and going through the door. When Lisu finally got married, she was ten years older than her mother had been when she’d married Paco, Maricarmen’s first and only boyfriend. Now Lisu dressed in stylish black suits with long white collars smoothed over the jacket. Sometimes she ate with her mother during her lunch break, allowing Maricarmen the indulgence of cooking for her. She’d throw her briefcase in the same chair Maricarmen would later fall asleep in.

    Paco’s mother lived in the apartment upstairs, one story directly above them. And sometimes, no matter how loud the hums of the microwave, the sizzle of olive oil in a pan, or the big knife dropping on the cutting board, Maricarmen could still hear her. Even with the window over the sink to the pantry shut, closing the connection to the other kitchens through clotheslines and drying shirts, she could hear her. From upstairs, the mucous-filled lung coughs echoed through the breezy space. When she spoke, the phlegm rolled in the back of her throat, like someone gargling an acidic liquid. She was always complaining. The volume on the television was too low. The tea was too hot. She was too cold (“Is the door open? How chilly!”). Her hands shook. Her whole body did. It wasn’t a fast, out-of-control shaking, but like she was a passenger on a slow, bumpy car ride that was never-ending. Her glasses were big and took up nearly half her face. One wondered why she still wore them. There was a cloudy film over everything for her now, yet she wore them, yelling when someone would try to take them off her face as she fell asleep. Always the struggle of speech. Always the phlegm rattle of her shaky voice playing into their kitchen. And until Paco wheeled her down into their apartment, opening those two big doors to roll her through, head hung to the side, burgundy afghan covering her lap, Maricarmen could forget the woman was his mother.
    Not long after the death of Paco’s father, they moved her in upstairs. She hadn’t been sick, but Paco and his sisters from the south foresaw a decline in their mother’s health that would soon follow their father’s. The long shadow of an object in the sun. People tied by a short, rigid string.
    It wasn’t until June, two years after Paco’s mother first got sick, that they decided to take a vacation. Lorenzo, one of Paco’s work associates, had a beach apartment in a little town north of the city and told Paco it was his for the month if he wanted it.
“Stay a week, stay two weeks. I don’t care. Stay as long as you want, because Paco,” and this was when his voice got quiet and low in a way that told him Lorenzo saw more than he let on, “we all know you can use a break.”
    And so they’d packed books and magazines and crossword puzzles and bathing suits and blankets and towels. They told their doorman, who was surprised to see them going, to hold their mail and packages. Maricarmen asked Lisu to water the plants twice a week and dust the furniture and shelves, just to make sure things didn’t get “too dirty.” Paco wrote out a list of instructions for Adán, who was eager to run things at the office for the short time they’d be gone. Lorenzo told Maricarmen and Paco of the small markets and street-side stands that sold home-pickled olives, local wine, and lemons and oranges from nearby groves. They could drink fresh juice every morning and watch the sunrise if they wanted to.
    But the day they were to leave, their bags packed and ready by the door, Paco’s mother coughed up mucous traced with blood and said she felt dizzy and nauseous. Upstairs Maricarmen heard Paco’s muffled voice under his mother’s supplications (“No, you stay”), an opening and closing of a door, an elevator’s ring; then he was wheeling her into the apartment, moving the bags out of the way.

    They sat in the white, silent waiting room, and that’s what they did, wait. Adán tapped his foot and checked his watch frequently, as though he had somewhere to go. Lisu’s face fell into a look of worry and compassion for her mother who had returned to the hospital late the night before. “You’ll sleep better in your own bed,” Lisu had told her, knowing how tired she must’ve been, her eyes glossed over with fatigue.
    “They’re cutting open my husband’s abdomen and taking out part of his intestines tomorrow. I won’t sleep well no matter where I am,” was her response. Lisu could’ve fought with her if she’d wanted to, but she wouldn’t have won. Though thirty years old, married, and with a home of her own, Lisu knew she was no match for her mother’s determination. Lisu had told herself she’d been lucky to get her mother to leave even for the short time that she had.
    Back at the hospital that night, Maricarmen had sat unmoving in the bedside chair watching her husband. It seemed to her that she’d seen his face more this week than she had in the past couple years. Hardly a moment went by in that room that she wasn’t watching him, guarding his breath, after breath. Sometimes, he’d open his eyes and smile and ask her how she was doing, as though he weren’t lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines monitoring his vital signs, a catheter bag underneath his thigh, but instead coming home from work, calling out into the kitchen, giving her a kiss on the cheek, a pinch to her side. She had found herself slumping further and further into the chair as the night went on, a gravity that was heavier than before. She’d never been much of a sloucher. The nuns in school had kept the girls’ backs straight as a ruler, pulled up and stretched taut like wooden marionette dolls at the end of a short, tight string. Shoulders back, legs together. Chin up.
    As Adán paced, Maricarmen’s eyes lost themselves on a blank spot on the wall and her hands gripped themselves tightly, as though one would run off if the other weren’t holding onto it. And what will I do if Paco doesn’t get well, she thought. He is my security. The house in which I live, the bed in which I sleep, the food I cook. His pension would last, but for how long? Rosa’s husband died years ago and she counts every peseta. I could not work for myself. I can cook and I can clean. I can sew a little. But who would hire someone like me to clean their house? Especially when there are hundreds of young Ecuadorian immigrants in the city ready to work for so little. So willing, so full of energy. I get tired enough doing my own chores.
    Everyone knew that this was the worst part, waiting. It always was. That early morning discovery on Sunday, though horrifying, was easy. The first important step: get him to the hospital on time. Then, in the little white room: keep him comfortable. Maricarmen could watch him, pour him water if she needed to, stroke his forehead, ring the nurse. She could watch him. Here, in this room, there was no doing. In fact, they’d prefer it if you didn’t do. Don’t pace. Don’t get in the way of the doctors. Don’t keep standing up to ask the nurse questions she can’t answer. They’d say, Why don’t you get some coffee in the cafeteria? Or maybe take a walk outside? Get some fresh air. Move around a little. But she couldn’t. She’d get up and they’d have put him in the recovery room or the doctors would tell them how the operation went. There were…problems, Señora Ferreres. She would not be there. Instead, Maricarmen sat motionless. It seemed as though she didn’t want to interrupt the equilibrium that existed in this room, this hospital. In these moments, perhaps if she stayed still enough, breathed lightly, spoke softly enough, the balance would be maintained. Paco’s operation would go well, he would go back to work next month, and everything would return to normal, even if it meant that someone else’s husband wouldn’t make it.
    We’ll take that vacation now, she thought. We’ll go to Italy. Roma. the Sistine Chapel. Touch those hands of God with our eyes. I’ll hold my neck up to that ceiling until I can’t bear it any longer. Or maybe we’ll rent a beach house for the summer. We’ll go to Palma de Mallorca and lie on its long stretch of sand, crowded with beautiful young people. Lots of blonde German and English tourists. Catch a glimpse of King Carlos and the prince golfing. We’ll swim. Eat smoked salmon. Rent boats and take pictures. We have to leave. We can’t be held in that apartment forever because of what is dying upstairs.
* * *
    In the afternoons, Maricarmen would fall asleep in that chair in the living room. The living room that she hadn’t decorated since 1972. The soft, chestnut brown couch nestled itself into the beige carpeting. Pillows with paintings of Pomeranian dogs on them lay on the couch. On the coffee table was a big brown vase in the shape of a dove with burnt orange synthetic flowers in it. The shelves were a dark pinewood, holding books on Spanish art and Catalan history, dozens of cookbooks, German figurines of school scenes, old jazz records, and an outdated encyclopedia set. The walls were covered with landscapes: little houses on the other side of a brook, forests with bits of light on a rough dirt road, curving fences that separated field from field. And of course, Maricarmen’s portrait.
    It was bigger than their sixty-centimeter television. One walked into the living room and wondered what kind of house this was. This house, watched by the woman in this picture. She’s neither smiling nor frowning, but her face is not expressionless either. It seems to be a face one makes after years of having people look at them, knowing they’re beautiful, like a China doll’s head. Her medium brown hair is feathered around her face like the ring of plush fur on her neck. Mother of pearl pendant necklace. Pink cheeks. And lips, those lips. This woman that no one could know by looking at her. Before the welter of Paco’s hospital stay, she fell asleep in the afternoons, staring at herself thirty years ago. And she would see herself twenty years later in that same chair, seeing that same young face, but the wrinkles on her own deeper, her hair thin and white, a blanket covering her legs. And in those moments she thought she heard echoing coughs creeping in through the kitchen.
    In another picture she is smiling. She stands in front of a brand new 1988 SEAT with a big red bow on the top of its gray hood. Paco’s arm is around her waist and it looks as though he could have been tickling her or someone had said something funny just before the picture was taken, because it is not a laugh, it seems, but an outburst. A scream that lasts but a second. A smile that shines like the windshield of the car reflecting the sun. People who look at this picture, if they haven’t known her for very long, would say she’s never looked so happy.
    In another, she’s wearing her portrait face. She never liked having her picture taken and was always hesitant to smile. They’re at a dinner. White tablecloth and crystal candle holders with people milling around behind them. A New Year’s Eve party some years back when they still left the house for dinner. He’s looking at her, not at the camera. A look that is sneaky, sly. Half-closed eyes and a little grin. A look that seems to say,“Hola, ¿cómo estás, cariño?” One would assume, from this look, that they’d made love that night after the party.

    The operation had gone well. Thirty centimeters of Paco were gone and the stitches were clean. They kept him in the hospital for another week, feeding him and bathing him. They sat him up, brought the spoon to his mouth, combed his hair over, and helped him to the bathroom. Lisu and Adán came in the evenings after work, before dinner, though not at the same time. Lisu wasn’t worried about her father; she knew how strong he was, but it still pained her to see him like this. His face bony, cheeks sallow. An opaque glaze over his eyes that usually looked wet, like big, blue marbles. When Adán came in, crisp and tall in his suit, he’d say, “Don’t worry, Dad. Everything’s under control.” One not in the family might think he was referring to the efficiency of the hospital, but Adán wore the same suit and walked at the same pace as his father. He went to work with Paco during his last year of business school; he knew this was what he wanted to do at the age of fifteen when he and his classmates were taking placement tests that determined the field they would enter. At work with Paco, he watched furtively and talked very little. A strong, steady shadow standing beside him. Even now, in this little room he watched his father. His slow breathing and unsteady consciousness.
    By the end of the week, Paco was staying awake during the day, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Awake, he was aware of the achy, sore burning in his abdomen, as though someone had ripped his stomach in half like it was an old shirt, and he made no efforts to stifle his moans, his face wrinkling into his eyes, his teeth clenching. He was too tired to pretend for his wife, who knew his aches even before he tried to hide them. Why go to such lengths when swallowing the pain made it hurt even more?
    Slowly but surely, though, the cramps in his stomach grew weaker and less frequent, and he was getting out of the bed by himself, grasping the silver bars on the walls, shuffling to the bathroom, Maricarmen supporting the air around him. She was growing impatient to take him home. Look, he is walking just fine and he finished all of his soup. He is nearly well if he is eating. With the last ulcer, he could hardly eat anything without loosening his pants in pain. The doctors had told Maricarmen to cook him “mild things.” Flavorless is what they mean, she’d thought. She had ignored the doctors and still cooked him steaks and breaded manta ray and peppery zucchini slices, but he wouldn’t eat it. “What is this, Mari?” he’d ask. So, she’d boil and steam and puree the vegetables until they lost all their flavor in an indiscernible light green soup. These purees turned into guessing games for Paco. Broccoli? Lima beans? Celery? In the end, it didn’t matter anyway. Maricarmen ate the plates of fried fish and cured ham that he couldn’t finish. After dinner she’d give half of a seltzer water to her husband and drink the other half herself.

    The drive home was a long one. Lisu was hitting all the red lights, stopping abruptly at each one, watching the pedestrians cross in front of the car. Young women in tight jackets and knee-length skirts. Boys in blue and red soccer jerseys. Children in white school uniforms and businessmen flipping cigarettes and walking fast, maneuvering around them. Paco sat in the front seat with the chair half inclined, his head hung to the side. Maricarmen sat in the back, holding her handbag in her lap tightly, with both hands. She sighed as the car slowed to another stop. These streets with a small stop light at nearly every intersection. These octagon blocks that people called manzanas, designed long ago to put more light into the streets, streets that were now crowded with taller and taller buildings that often blocked the sun.
    An old couple passed in front of them, though the walking signal had begun flashing, warning them that the light would soon change. He shuffled along, a cane supporting his right side, a white-haired woman at his left. The light turned green and some motos zipped off in loud bursts of acceleration and exhaust, swerving around the old couple, dangerously close. He didn’t quicken his pace, though the woman at his side seemed to walk the way people do when they’re waiting for someone, intentionally slowing themselves down. A car horn honked as the couple finally got out of the street, just onto the curb.

    It was the only thing he ate when he got home. A baguette from the panadería down the street, sliced thinly, toasted just enough, drying the surface to soak up the oil and essence of the tomato. She usually waited until they were just past ripe, the juices looser, the meat of it softer, but it was all Paco was eating. So she cut the pink tomatoes, nearly crisp if bitten into, and rubbed half over the bread. No tomato physically on the slice, but its taste saturated in the sponge-like bread and maybe some seeds. The idea of the flavor of a tomato.
    And his mother is like this, Maricarmen thought, as she sprinkled the bread with salt. She’s not here physically in our home. She’s not sitting in our living room yelling at us or our television, coughing phlegm into my handkerchiefs, but the idea of her is here. A squeaky un-oiled wheelchair that rolls in and out. The stale smell of unbrushed teeth and the only soap that doesn’t dry out her skin. She was the taste of an old tomato in that bread, the sour flavor of fruit when it has rotted. The stain that never really came out of the rug.

    After dinner that night, Paco got up out of his chair, went to the bathroom, and threw up. It wasn’t much, green and watery, streaked with mucous, but it knocked out what little energy he had left in his worn down body, as though he’d spent the day in a hot, steamy room without any windows, like those reliefless summer days of humidity in the city, sticky after the rain, an invisible wave of heat radiating off the buses and cars. It was the third time that week that he’d vomited after dinner, his body growing more and more unaccustomed to substantial food. He’d begun skipping lunch at work (back two weeks after leaving the hospital and even he knew it was too soon), replacing it with coffee and maybe a croissant, though he’d only finish half of it. Anything more, and the relative calm in his stomach changed to the knotting, twisting pangs—someone wringing out his insides like a wet dish rag.
    He sighed, his eyes watery, chest heaving with the endorphins that came up through his throat, the taste of acid on his tongue. He flushed the toilet and went into the kitchen where Maricarmen was washing the dishes.
    Turning to her husband, she asked, “Did you vomit again, Paco?”
    “Yes,” he said nodding slowly, taking the seltzer water she was handing him. They shared a long sigh, their eyes set deep with the lassitude he had caused them. The silence was interrupted by an echoing cough that was not his own, but of a woman above them, losing herself among the passing days. Maricarmen knew where he was, his face weary, pulled with the weight of responsibility, a look that said “I’m sorry” and “Please” at the same time. She turned back to the dishes as he finished his glass of water.
    “Come,” he said, “we’re going.” Paco put his glass on the table and picked up the telephone (“Yes, we are going. No, Adán, see her every day.”) Maricarmen dropped the towel in the sink and went to their bedroom closet where she had placed their bags, already packed.

    Their bodies are nearly bare, stretched out on blue and white chairs. A pair among the many faithful observers of the tide. Their one responsibility of the day, to watch the sea curl onto the sand, pulling gently on the beach. Maybe two clouds in the sky. A half-empty pitcher of sangria and two glasses sit on a little, white table, orange and lemon pieces floating in the deep burgundy wine. Two keys on a chain, a paperback novel, and two white towels. He could be asleep behind those sunglasses, but his breathing has always been this way, deep and steady. Long sigh after long sigh. One hand is laying palm up on the chair. The other rests gently on his stomach, a gesture people sometimes make when they’re hungry. Behind them, come the distant sounds of music, slow and lilting. She’s staring out into the horizon, somewhere indefinable and infinite. An oscillating line between sea and sky. A continual hum that quiets her.