Ada couldn't forget the lights in the house going out, and the irritated sputtering of the chain saw until it expired, and she couldn't forget looking out the window. She couldn't forget the sight of her husband's body. Her memory was blank after that. The emergency workers had told her she'd behaved rationally on the phone, reporting all the details, not touching the ladder, speaking coherently when they arrived. He'd been lying on the ground, and she'd been trying to revive him. But all this was a story they'd told her. She remembered none of that part, except Wyatt's blackened hands.

She'd buried him two days later, with only the children and Buzz and Chick and Tim in attendance. She wanted the formalities as few as possible -- no church ceremony, no eulogies. It was the children who insisted on the wake. Only Melody was missing. She never gave out her phone or address, or any other way to contact her. She'd left the family. Except for rare visits or calls to Clover, across the San Francisco Bay, she'd cut herself off.

People came whom Ada hadn't seen in years. A grapevine existed, or came into existence, that she hadn't expected. She hadn't wanted a wake, but Gabriel insisted, and Clover backed him up: "People need a way to remember him. We'll take care of it." Ada didn't want to see anyone. She yielded because she didn't have the spirit to fight her son and daughter.

Word went out, in mysterious ways. People the children knew, or found in their father's address book, called other people, who called yet more. Even the surviving members of his original band, most of whom he hadn't seen or talked to in decades, showed up and offered the conventional condolences and platitudes. Ada had to take the names on faith, because she didn't recognize these people. She'd met them only briefly, in college. Now they looked like decadent Angelenos or successful businessmen.

Gabriel had made the phone calls, and Clover the arrangements for food and drink. She'd set up a table in the living room with photographs of Wyatt, the awards he'd won, and copies of a brief biography. The living room was large, and full of folding chairs rented for the day, but the crowd spilled into the kitchen. People stood and told stories of Wyatt: how they'd made music with him, or gone backpacking with him. There were hitchhikers he'd given rides to, and befriended. There were people he'd loaned money to, or given money to outright.

Ada scarcely heard what the speakers had to say. She was thinking that if she included the time she'd been with Wyatt in college, she had spent exactly half her life with him. She had expected to spend the remainder going to bed and waking up with him, eating her meals with him, getting his help with the heavy chores around the house, listening to his stories, and missing him when he travelled.

She twisted the ring of gold on her finger. She had no reason to wear it now, but she couldn't bring herself to put it aside. The final words of their wedding promise came to her: "for so long as we both shall live". How was she supposed to continue alone? The word alone was inadequate, because she had been cut in half. One side of her was missing, and unrecoverable. This was a greater loss than one of her senses would have been. She could have compensated for the loss of sight, or hearing. She would have learned new ways. She could not imagine going on without her mate. The house had been empty since the children left. Now it would be airless and dark.

A world had disappeared with him. There was no one to share anecdotes about the children with ("Do you remember the time...?"). A language had gone extinct -- all the shorthand references to memories in common. A culture of two had been extinguishe -- a certain way of touching her he knew she liked. A language was no more: the shorthand that referred to shared events and notions. All had vanished. The people who said a language died when the last surviving speaker died were wrong; it died with the next-to-last, when the only survivor had no one left to talk to. She had spent decades building a world with this man, sharing it with him. Now that world had no existence outside her brain. Her husband's death had, in a moment, taken away the substance of that world. Those million sharings no longer existed tangibly, between them. They had evaporated. All that remained of that world was her memory of it. A language, customs, a history of two, had turned from solid to gas, and floated away. Now all these things existed only in memory, only in one memory: hers. When she died, no more of Wyatt would remain; until then, the thought of him was all she had. She would never touch him again. He would never hold her again.

Since she had been young, Ada had begun every day with a prayer of thanks. Now that practice changed. She had never asked for anything, but now she knelt by the side of the bed and asked, "Take away this pain. Please take away this pain." She had never experienced anything like it, not when her mother died, not when she and Owen had divorced, not when her father had died. She had had time to prepare for all those things.

Every day the details reminded her of him: the limb, not yet cut up; music sitting on the piano; his shoes in the closet. Even the old dog seemed to miss him. She had always loved silence, but its quality had changed, and now she hated it -- the silence was empty, not full. He would never be coming back. She knew this. But she found herself filing away things that happened, to tell him, when she forgot momentarily that he was gone. Worse, when she didn't forget that he was gone, she found herself remembering: the first evening in the snow; their first time in bed together, and how he had told her he loved her, and laughed at her tears; their conversations; nights worrying about a sick baby; disagreements, even. Memories she couldn't touch. All they could do was bring her more pain.

She did have the company of her son. He and Julia were having problems. After the wake, he said, "Mom, can I live here a while?"

"But what about Julia?"

"She thinks we should take a break." He picked at his lip. "You know how she is."

"Certainly you can stay. This is still your home."

But she knew he was there as much to watch her as to separate from his girlfriend.

He took his glass in the music room one evening and noodled on the piano.

"That was lovely," Ada said from the kitchen when he stopped. She came in and sat on the couch. "What is it?"

"A song I was writing," he said. "Dad was helping me with it."

"I'd think you'd be finished by now. It's been a long time."

He shrugged and played the opening bars of Pictures at an Exhibition. "I don't know. It's hard. He did a lot of the work. When I got stuck, he'd find a way to get me started again." I closed the piano.

"Play some more," she said. "It reminds me of him."

He played Weightless because he knew she liked it. When he finished and turned around she was staring through him. He sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. "Mom?"

"The first time I came here to this house he played piano for me. In this room. That song. He knew I liked it. How I miss him."

"I know."

"Do you? I don't think so." She looked at her fingernails. They were bitten, as always. She rubbed the end of the middle finger of one hand with its thumb. "I mean -- " She gestured around the room. "The house. You children." She looked sideways at me. "That isn't the half of what we had together. I knew him. Knew him, almost from the moment we met, with nothing between us. Being with him was like dancing with someone you never make a mistake with. You each know exactly what the other is going to do. You think together with your bodies. How do I dance alone?"

"Find another partner."

"I don't want to," she said. "Besides, men don't want a woman in her fifties with three children."

She should have been telling these things to Sarah, or Muddy. What son wants to hear his mother's problems? Wants to hear that his mother's life is empty and despairing? Especially when he has no father to help ease the sting of knowing.

She stood and said, "Don't worry. I'm all right." She brushed back the hair that always fell onto my forehead. She pressed a hand to my cheek. "I also have laundry to do."

"Stay here. I'll play you Thumbelina." This was the song Wyatt had written about her.

But she left.

That night, he heard a wail from his mother's bedroom. He opened her door and saw her kneeling, slapping the wood floor. "Come back to me! Come back!" she cried.

What he saw next made his skin tingle. Her hair was moving as if someone was stroking it. That went on for a minute or so, and then she was raised to her feet, and her arms went around an invisible body, and she pressed her cheek against it. Her sobs quieted and she closed her eyes and turned her head a bit more and nestled in. She couldn't have held herself comfortably at that angle. She was being supported. Gabriel drew back and watched through the crack of the door.

"I love you," she murmured. "I know how hard it must be. Please stay as long as you can."

Then she fell asleep.

Everything vanished: Gabriel was absorbed in the sight of his mother asleep and leaning forward against the empty air. He didn't know how long this lasted. He simply watched. The feeling of the uncanny, of awe, absorbed him. Then she woke and stepped back.

"Are you staying because of me?" she asked.

"Yes." It was Wyatt's voice. "I don't want to any more, but your need is holding me. You have to understand. I'm like the kids. They have their own lives now. I have something to do, too. A task."

"What's that?"

"Being dead. You have to let me go, Ada. You have to let me go. You're the reason I'm still here. You have to give up."

This expression on her face was not pain, but a horrifying dismay. A betrayal she never could have anticipated. She made a gesture like stroking his hand. Probably, she was. "I need you to stay," she said.

"I know. But I'm too tired. More tired than I ever was when I was alive. Let me go. Stop being selfish."

"I'll try." She thought for a while. "Just a little longer," I said. "Please. There are some things I haven't figured out yet."

He was silent.

"Wyatt, I need to know. Are you real?"

"No," he said. "I never was. No one is."

"I mean, am I imagining you?"

"How would I know? I can't even tell who's dead and who's alive."

"Am I imagining your hand?" She lifted it, invisible, in hers, and lowered it back to the table. "Am I imagining the things you tell me? Am I imagining that you've come back to me?"

"I can't answer that. I don't know how. I don't know what you mean. I don't understand these distinctions any more."

"I love you, Wyatt. I have always loved you more than anything, or anyone. I'll find a way to be alone. I don't know how, but I will. If you have to go, then go."

Then she reached out, but did not grasp anything. The room had lost a dimension.

Gabriel went back to his room and lay on the bed and examined the cracks in the ceiling.