A nurse confirmed that Sarah had been moved to a ward. She no longer needed a private room because there was no private self, nothing that could be infringed upon, thought James.

Outside the correct door at last, he stopped a moment, took a breath, and then regretted it, the cold black coating of hospital chemicals settling over his lungs.

The curtain around Sarah’s bed was undrawn, and she lay on her back. Of the three other beds in the room, only one contained a person he could see, a middle-aged woman with dark hair, sitting up and watching television with headphones on. Another had the curtain drawn, but a murmur came from the slit, and feet passed below. An orderly gathered food trays. Because of this normal pulse of movement, Sarah looked a little out of place, entirely still in a room of movement, the last little house on a city street of skyscrapers.

Flowers sat on her bedside table. James picked up the card, both sides of the interior covered in the signatures of her colleagues in neat, teacher handwriting: “We are thinking of you.” “We’ll see you soon, Sarah!” The water in the vase was murky gray, the stems covered in slime.

James had been to visit three times, and each time, he left his coat on. He stood above Sarah, careful not to bump into the churning machines. The bruising had cleared, and she looked more like herself, except for the long black lines of stitches crisscrossing her face. Today, her head was flung back, mouth open, crusted with white. She might have been a woman talking, frozen in midsentence. The tracheal tube running from the moist, gauze-covered hole in her throat was held in place by a white plastic collar (Like something worn by a priest, or a cat, thought James). Her hair was slightly matted, the roots grown out. James had never thought about Sarah’s hair, about the number of small decisions she made that led her to dye it so black. What was coming in, forming a slab along the side part, was gray, wiry.

“Finn’s doing great,” James said quietly, glancing back at the woman watching television. He crouched down and spoke directly into her ear. “We’re taking care of him. I don’t want you to worry.” He saw her hand, bonded to tubes and tape, and placed his own hand on it. Her fingers were warm, soft. It had been years since he had held another woman’s hand. He had become used to Ana’s poor circulation, her corpse fingers yellow-tipped from November to April.

“What would you like to know?” he said. On his last visit, the nurse had told him to talk to her, that it might fire up her brain, shake her to life. Online he had read of a teenage boy who woke up after months in a coma and said: “I hate that doctor. He called me a vegetable.”

“Finn’s funny. I bought him Pull-Ups, and we’re working on that. He has this dance he’s doing, pretty hilarious. He’s all—” James waved his free arm. The breathing machine whirred. “Bruce at the daycare says he’s doing really well. They went on a neighborhood walk and picked up fall leaves. They made these elaborate collages. You should see Finn’s. It’s clearly the best one. He’s a master gluer.”

James straightened the card on the bedside table.

“The Leafs suck, as usual. The economy—it’s not good. You picked a good time to check out,” he said, laughed, then cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He thought a moment. “We took Finn to my brother’s. He seemed to really like it there. They have an entire floor devoted to toys, so you can guess why he likes it. They also have four cars. Four!” James shook his head. “The parking downtown is still bullshit. There’s a systemic bias on Sundays, when the church people take up all the spaces on the block and the cops never ticket them. So last week I parked across the street, which is always no parking, right? And the parking guy was coming along and was about to write me a ticket. I couldn’t believe it. I ran outside—and hey, don’t worry, Ana was with Finn in the house, we wouldn’t leave him alone in the house—and I said: ‘Look, those church people don’t have permits, they park here for hours on Sunday, taking up all the permit spaces. Why don’t you ticket them?’ And you know what he said?” James dropped Sarah’s hand, which landed hard. He was pointing and poking the air. “He said: ‘We make exceptions for religious observation.’ What the fuck? Is this Iran or something? Aren’t we a secular state? I wanted to kill the guy, just smash him—” The woman with the headphones cleared her throat loudly. James turned and saw that she’d taken off her headphones and was exaggeratedly flipping through a magazine.

He lowered his voice. “Anyway, that’s not so interesting.” He glanced at the woman’s bedside table, which looked as if it might buckle under the weight of photographs: two little girls dressed up like Easter bunnies; two little girls in matching red dresses. James realized there was no photo of Finn by Sarah’s bed. He would have to bring one in.

“I saw your lawyer today, and he said you guys had very clear directives around guardianship. You were protecting him from Marcus’s parents, I guess. I wish I knew more about that. I wish I could …” Could what? As the possibility burst at the seams of this sentence, James croaked a little, then silenced himself.

“You’re a good mother, Sarah,” he said, again touching her hand. “You and Marcus were such good parents. You have this beautiful child.…” He didn’t continue, embarrassed that he’d immediately transformed a thought about her to one about himself, and all he hadn’t made.

James stopped talking and stood again in his coat, looking at Sarah’s affectless face, listening to the machines.

“Are you family?” asked a nurse, one he hadn’t met before, a small black woman in cornrows punctuated with glass beads. Her hair clicked as she checked numbers on a screen by Sarah’s bed, jotting them down on a chart.

“We’re guardians to her son. We have power of attorney.” James used “we” even when Ana wasn’t with him.

“Have you spoken to the doctor lately?”

“No. Why?”

“She’s stable, and we’re continuing with therapy. But you need to talk to Dr. Nasir about your plans for her.”

James heard a different kind of question. How could there be plans when she hadn’t come back yet? Or died? James couldn’t imagine any movement between those two possibilities. “What do you mean? Plans for what?” And as he spoke, it came to him: He worked on a documentary about this once, a woman who had been in a coma for a decade; her husband’s wish to divorce her; her family’s outrage. Would they move Sarah into their home, would James wash her body with a sea sponge, change feeding tubes, bedpans? Would Ana pluck stray hairs from Sarah’s chin? He remembered the mother of this woman, her mouth tight from worry, insisting that the strapping young brother wheel her bed into the living room for Christmas. And there she was, year after year, a wedge of person growing older at the side of the room while the tree lights twinkled and grandchildren scattered the trash of their opened gifts.

“Long-term care is one option,” said the nurse, her pen scratching: kstch, kstch, kstch. Such music in this woman, thought James, listening to her hair clicking, her pen. “You have to talk to the doctor about a DNR. Emergency measures. We have counselors here—”

The size of his circumstances came upon James suddenly, an encyclopedia dropped from a top bunk.

“This is fucked,” he said out loud, rubbing his hands through his hair until it stood in a forest of tufts at different furious angles. The woman reading her magazine froze. “We didn’t even know them that well.”

The nurse ceased her scratching and looked at him firmly. “Well, this must be very difficult for you, then.”

James deflated a little. It wasn’t compassion, really; there was a tinge of mockery in it, as if this nurse had seen much worse than James ever could. He nodded.