She stood for a long time in the snow that made equal the sidewalks and the shrubs, shrouding the skyscrapers. She listened to the strangers’ voices calling glory, glory through the trees of the city where she now lived.

* * *

Finn had a candy cane in one hand. A crowd of people waited outside Sarah’s door. Suspense bounced back and forth between all of them.

Finn stood on James’s feet, clutching James’s pant leg with his free hand, looking up at him.

“Let’s dance!” said Finn.

“Shh,” said James, reaching down to rub Finn’s head.

The young doctor with her hair tightly pulled back was speaking. The content of her speech mattered less than the way she was saying it, which was hot and breathless. She had not learned to mask that yet. She was thrilled.

“MRI indicates complete brain function,” she said.

“Complete?” asked James.

“Extensive therapy will be required. Hers is a serious brain injury, but she’s extraordinarily lucky.” James tried not to roll his eyes at the word “lucky.”

“James! Dance!” said Finn, hopping up and down on James’s feet. James put Finn’s candy cane in his coat pocket so they could hold hands.

“Has he been in to see her yet?” asked the doctor.

James shook his head. “We were waiting. I was waiting to talk to you guys.…”

With both of Finn’s feet on his, and their hands clasped, James began to waltz Finn around the corridor, singing: “Dance me to the end of love. La la, la la, la la …” Finn laughed. The doctors watched and waited. Finally, the routine was done, and they went inside.

Sarah looked as she had looked for the past fifteen weeks, but her eyes were open. It startled James, as though the glass eyeballs of an animal in a museum diorama had moistened. A patch of white gauze on her neck covered the hole where the tube had been. She had been liberated from the machines and brought back to a private room, which was suddenly quiet. She didn’t move her head to look at anyone in the crowd that had gathered.

His hand in James’s, Finn walked slowly toward his mother. A doctor moved a chair to the bed’s edge. Halfway there, Finn stopped, looking up at James with an expression of great concern.

“It’s okay, Finny,” he said. “She’s sick, but she’s going to get better. Do you want to say hello?”

“Yes,” he said.

James lifted him and put him on the stool. He looked down at Sarah. The marks of the stitches of her face had faded to pale shadows. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, pink and black, a gesture for Finn, James noted to himself; someone tried to cover her trauma so Finn wouldn’t be frightened.

Finn was silent, staring down.

“Say something, Finny,” said James quietly.

After a long pause, in his small voice, Finn said: “Mommy, hello.”

Sarah remained unmoving.

“Lean right over her,” instructed the doctor.

James tried to show the boy how to lean over the bar’s edge, and in helping him, James was close to Sarah, too, with Finn at her face and James at her torso, when the flicker happened. Sarah turned her head slightly, and the mother and son saw each other. It was palpable, this act of seeing. The moment of recognition consumed the room like a back draft of fire bursting through a doorway.

She opened her mouth, and the voice was rough and wooden: “Hi, love,” she said.

“Mommy,” said Finn, and he dropped his head onto her chest. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears.

James began laughing. Even as he pulled back and leaned against the wall, watching the two of them hold on to each other in disbelief, he could not stop laughing.

Late Spring

ANA STOOD BY the open door of Charlie’s office. She could see him, bent over his computer, his dress shirt untucked. She knocked lightly.

Charlie looked up and, at the moment of recognition, beamed.

“Ana,” he said. They went toward each other, extending hands, then fell into an awkward hug. Ana let herself be enfolded, breathing in the scent of Charlie’s neck.

“How are you?” she asked, pulling back. They stood close together in the small room.

“I’m okay.” He smiled. “Are you back for good?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“James has been in to see Lise a few times,” said Charlie. In their e-mail exchanges, Ana had given no details about why she had left. But it was clear that Charlie knew. She realized he was telling her about James’s visits for a reason; he was counseling her like a chaplain, nudging her toward her husband. “He brought Finn.”

Ana raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

Looking at Charlie, hands in his pockets, grinning and blushing before her, Ana realized that whatever live current had been between them was snuffed out now. Ana saw Charlie’s youth, which had seemed at that last meeting in the bedroom such a thrilling unknown, as a liability. Her age was the same. The simple fact of time apart had broken their pull. He was the smart young man taking care of her mother, ushering her through these last years, to the upcoming. That was all, and comforting in itself. She was another daughter of a patient, shackled by duty and love.

“How is she?” Ana asked, but the answer didn’t really matter. It was always the same: a little worse.

Ana asked after Charlie’s lethargic roommate and was pleased to hear he’d found work and had been separated at last from his couch. Charlie was going home soon, he said, to be with his parents for a week, out west. Ana described Montreal, the mountain in the middle of it, and the spring changing the trees.

She hugged him again quickly and turned to leave. She was almost out the door when he said her name.

Charlie went to his desk and pulled a CD from a drawer.

“I’ve been hanging on to this for you. It has the original of that song you liked, from that night at the bar.” Ana looked at the cover: Lone Justice. Lots of eyeliner on a pretty face framed by tendrils of blond hair.

“I got it used. No one’s really buying CDs anymore. You can get anything,” said Charlie. “It’s the last song.”

“Thank you. That’s very sweet,” said Ana, slipping the disc in her purse. She was grateful for the reminder of that beautiful song, and that evening she had needed so much, during the autumn of Finn.

In her room, Lise sat in a chair. Someone had placed plastic flowers on the dresser, of no determinate type, which had accumulated a thin layer of dust. Ana wiped the leaves with a Kleenex.

Lise’s recognition seemed to be moving in and out today, like a kaleidoscope brought to full length, then collapsed, then back again, over and over. “How is James?” said Lise, pushing her hair (slightly dirty, Ana observed) behind her ears.

“He’s all right,” said Ana, sitting on the edge of the bed. “We’re not together right now.”

Lise nodded. Ana tried to interpret the nod: Maybe James had told her mother of their breakup, or perhaps she was remembering Ana’s explanation in the fall, or at Christmas. She wondered what James’s version of events would sound like, but her mother would never be able to recount that conversation to her, if it had happened at all.

“How’s your father? What’s his name?”

Ana laughed. “Mom, I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Yes, I know. But what’s his name?”

“Conrad.”

“Yes, Conrad,” said her mother. “Conrad.” A wide look of pleasure came over Lise’s face, and she grinned. “Oh, Ana. We were at the beach. It was a very white beach, so hot that when I came out of the water, I couldn’t walk on the sand because it burned my feet.” Ana didn’t know where her mother was in this memory. Perhaps somewhere in Greece or Italy, years before Ana was born, when her parents were skimming the globe together.