She was a university professor. She understood, if not in precise detail, the undergraduate culture of alcohol, drugs.

These were not university students, however. Though her niece Kelsey was enrolled in a community college.

Like this, Aunt Agnes.

It was sweet, they called her Aunt Agnes, following Kelsey’s lead.

She liked being an aunt. She had not been a mother.

They passed the joint to her. With shaky fingers she held the stubby cigarette to her lips—drew the acrid smoke into her lungs—held her breath for as long as she could before coughing.

She’d never smoked tobacco. She’d been careful of her health. Her husband, too, had been careful of his health: he’d exercised, ate moderately, drank infrequently. He’d smoked, long ago—not for thirty years. But then, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer and rapidly it had metastasized and within a few months he was gone.

Gone was Agnes’s way of explanation. Dead she could not force herself to think, let alone speak.

Kelsey was a good girl, Agnes was thinking. She’d had some trouble in high school but essentially, she was a good girl. After rehab she’d begun to take courses at the community college—computer science, communication skills. Agnes’s sister had said that Kelsey was the smartest of her children, and yet—

Silver piercings in her face glittered like mica. Her mouth was dark purple like mashed grapes. It was distracting to Agnes, how her niece’s young breasts hung loose in a low-slung, soft jersey top thin as a camisole.

She brought the joint to her lips, that felt dry. Her mouth filled with smoke—her lungs.

He’d died of lung cancer. So unfair, he had not smoked in more than thirty years.

Yet individuals who’d never smoked could get lung cancer, and could die of lung cancer. In this matter of life and death, the notion of fair, unfair was futile.

“Hey, Auntie Agnes! How’re you feelin’?”

She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn’t feel drunk.

Auntie they were calling her. Affectionately, she wanted to think—not mockingly.

So strange, these young people in her house! And her husband didn’t seem to be here.

Strange, every day that he wasn’t here. That fact she could contemplate for long hours like staring at an enormous boulder that will never move.

Strange, too, she remained. She had not died—had she?

There was her niece Kelsey and there was Kelsey’s friend Randi, and bony-faced Triste, and—was it Mallory, with the tattoos? She wasn’t sure. She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was not sad. These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss.

If the plank were flat on the ground, you would not hesitate. You would smile, this crossing is so easy.

But if the plank is over an abyss, you feel panic. You can’t stop yourself from looking down, into the abyss.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

Her young friends were watching her, and laughing with her. A silvery-haired woman of some unfathomable age beyond sixty in elegant clothes, rings on her fingers, sucking at a joint like a middle school kid. Funny!

Or maybe, as they might say, weird.

How long the young people stayed in her house Agnes wouldn’t know. They were playing music—they’d turned on Agnes’s radio, and tuned it to an AM rock station. The volume so high, Agnes felt the air vibrate. She had to resist the impulse to press her hands over her ears. Her young friends were laughing, rowdy. Kelsey was holding her hand and calling her Auntie. It was a TV comedy—brightly lit, and no shadows. Except she’d become sleepy suddenly. Barely able to walk, to climb the stairs, Kelsey and another girl had helped her. Someone’s arm around her waist so hard it hurt.

“Hey, Aunt Agnes, are you okay? Just lay down, you’ll feel better.”

Kelsey was embarrassed for her widow-aunt. Or maybe—Kelsey was amused.

She was crying now. Or, no—not crying so they could see. She’d learned another kind of crying that was inward, secret.

Kelsey helped her lie on her bed, removed her shoes. Kelsey and the other girl were laughing together. A glimpse of Kelsey holding a filmy negligee against her front, cavorting before a mirror. The other girl, opening a closet door. Then she was alone.

She was awake and yet, strange things were happening in her head. Strange noises, voices, laughter, static. Her husband was knocking at the door which inadvertently she’d locked. She had not meant to lock him out. He was baffled and panicked by the loud music in his house. Yet she was paralyzed and could not rise from her bed to open the door. Forgive me! Don’t go away, I love you.

After a while it was quiet downstairs.

* * *

In the morning she woke to discover the lights still on downstairs and the rooms ransacked.

Ransacked was the word her husband would use. Ransacked was the appropriate word for the thievery had been random and careless, as children might do.

Missing were silver candlestick holders, silverware and crystal bowls, her husband’s laptop from his study. Drawers in her husband’s desk had been yanked open, someone had rummaged through his files and papers but carelessly, letting everything fall to the floor.

A small clock, encased in crystal, rimmed in gold, which had been awarded to her husband for one of his history books, and had been kept on the windowsill in front of her husband’s desk, was missing.

A rear door was ajar. The house was permeated with cold. In a state of shock Agnes walked through the rooms. She found herself in the same room, repeatedly. As in a troubled dream, she was being made to identify what had been taken from her.

Yet what the eye does not see, the brain can’t register. The effort of remembering was exhausting. Her head was pounding. Her eyes ached. Her throat was dry and acrid and the inside of her mouth tasted of ashes.

They hadn’t ransacked the upstairs. They hadn’t found her purse, her wallet and credit cards. They’d respected the privacy of her bedroom …

She had no reason to think that her niece had been involved.

Maybe Kelsey had tried to stop them. But Triste and Mallory had threatened her.

Agnes would never know. She could never ask. She tried to tell herself, It doesn’t mean anything—that she doesn’t love me. It means only that they were desperate for money.

Yet she called her sister to ask for Kelsey. Coolly her sister said that Kelsey didn’t live with them any longer, Agnes must know this.

Where did Kelsey live? So far as anyone knew, she lived with “friends.”

Kelsey was no longer attending the community college. Agnes must know this.

Bitterly her sister spoke. Though relenting then, realizing it was Agnes, the widowed older sister, to whom she was speaking, and asking why she wanted to speak with Kelsey.

“No reason,” Agnes said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

It was terrifying to her, she would probably never see her niece again.

Yet I still love her.

What was exhausting, when she wasn’t “high”—she had to plead for her husband’s life.

Hours of each day. And through the night pleading, No! Not ever.

Not ever give up, I beg you.

As soon as the diagnosis was made, the doctors had given up on him. So it seemed to the stricken wife.

Repeating their calm rote words: Do you want extraordinary measures taken to sustain your life, in case complications arise during or after surgery? And her husband who was the kindest of men, the most accommodating and least assertive of men, a gentle man, a thoughtful man, a reasonable man, one who would hide his own anxiety and terror in the hope of shielding his wife, had said quietly what the doctor had seemed to be urging him to say: No, of course not, doctor. Use your own judgment please. For this was the brave response. This was the noble response. This was the manly common sense response. In mounting disbelief and horror Agnes had listened to this exchange and dared to interrupt, No—we’re not going to give up. We do want “extraordinary measures”—I want “extraordinary measures” for my husband! Please! Anything you can do, doctor.