“Did Dad carry you across the sand?”

Lise laughed. “Oh, no. I waited in the shallow part of the sea until the sun set. We both did. We sat down on our bums in the water and waited for the sand to cool.”

Ana squeezed her mother’s hand. Lise looked at her, and Ana could see the memory vanishing.

“I’m having a good day,” said Lise.

“Yes, I think you are.”

“Who are you?” The question would never cease to take away Ana’s breath.

“I’m your daughter. I’m Ana. You’re my mother.”

“I know that,” said Lise, snappishly. Then she sighed: “But not a very good mother.”

“You did the best you could.”

Lise looked over Ana’s head, toward the window, which was open, letting a warm breeze move across them both.

“I loved Conrad,” said Lise.

She looked back at Ana. “Oh my,” she said, as if startled by what she saw. Ana knew that she was always being seen anew by her mother, which might have been liberating, but somehow felt exactly the opposite.

Lise searched her daughter’s face and said, finally: “What are you so afraid of?”

Ana didn’t know how much meaning to ascribe to this question and suppressed the sensation that she was being had, searching for profundity where there was none. Any revelations were just the brain seizing and releasing, and not her mother at all. She tried to believe this.

“Do I seem afraid, Mom?”

“I loved being your mother,” said Lise. Ana nodded, bracing herself.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Lise, loosening her grip on her daughter’s hand. “Don’t be so afraid.”

James finished with the sunscreen and stood back to admire his handiwork. It was one of the first days hot enough to require lotion. James was now learning about Finn in spring, and what he needed: hats and sunscreen, water bottles and sandals.

Finn smiled up at him. James reached out and rubbed a white splotch from the boy’s nose.

“Ready, Freddy,” said Finn.

Sarah was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. The day she came home from the hospital, six weeks earlier, James sat in the back of the medical van with her while Mike and Jennifer looked after Finn. Under the rim of her baseball hat, Sarah frowned at the fuss, but when they hit a speed bump and her wheelchair shifted lightly in its locks on the floor, she looked terrified. James moved into the house that day, without any discussion.

He had a few things in the spare room. During the day, he took Sarah to her appointments and Finn to daycare. Then he met with Doug at his offices, polishing a script for a new documentary about the politics of traffic.

The cat, returned from the house next door, lay on the pillow beside him while he slept. James was constantly rubbing fur from his mouth. When Finn and Sarah were asleep, James stayed up late with his laptop and the cat, fiddling with footage of Finn on the new editing software he’d bought.

His own house, his house with Ana, sat empty several blocks away. He was glad not to be there. For the first weeks that Ana was gone, friends had come by, not knowing what to say about the split. James fielded many calls, and a lasagna. People were sympathetic, but no one really knew what he had lost. He was now carrying sadness, the man who had never tasted of it, whose parents were alive, whose mother had survived carnage and spared him its description, refusing to burden him with even a single image. He knew now why she would die with that war inside her. He knew what it was to pretend anything for a child.

Sarah was like a dimmer switch slowly being turned to maximum, getting brighter every day. But there were ugly moments, too, bursts of anger followed by tears, and collapse. James took over then, cleaning the kitchen and bathing Finn, putting him to bed. But most nights, Sarah tucked him in alone, and James could hear her, singing: “ ‘You are the light in my dark world …’ ” The great mystery of the light song was solved—it turned out to be a song by an obscure eighties cow-punk band that even James had never heard of.

James brought his guitar over from the house and learned the song in a few minutes from the Internet. But Finn was indifferent to James’s performance. It turned out he cared about the singer, not the song.

When she was recovered, James would have to go. He couldn’t imagine returning to the house. Maybe Ana would come back from Montreal and want to live there. She had revealed no plans. The e-mails between them were polite; unadorned information traveling between machines.

“Ready, Freddy,” said James, picking up the bag containing a Mexican blanket and plastic containers of snacks. Finn put his hat on without a fight.

James was anxious to get Finn to the park and catch the good early afternoon light for his filming. The night before, Sarah had invited some former colleagues over for dinner. James had done the cooking so Sarah could rest and be ready. It was a gentle evening (everyone was afraid to be raucous, afraid of Sarah’s new softness), but after Finn went to sleep, James, Sarah, and the two high school teachers drank a glass of wine in the living room, and Sarah told the story of Finn’s birth.

James was determined to take this story back to Finn.

James locked the door behind him, and they headed down the street.

“You lead the way to the park,” said James, and Finn ran ahead. He was three now and had a good sense of direction.

In the distance, James saw a woman clutching a large bouquet of pink flowers. Finn stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, pulling him toward her. James picked up speed, his heart pounding. Since Halloween, he was prepared at any moment for rescue—and then he saw the woman rise. Finn turned and came running back toward him.

“Ana! James! It’s Ana!”

James felt short of breath. She got closer. Her blond hair was longer and her face a little rounder. My Ana, he thought. My wife of a different substance. My vapor wife. But she was really there, watching him. He ran his fingers rapidly across the raised scar on his knuckles.

She stopped, across from him but still far away. “Hi,” she said.

“You’re here,” said James.

“I’m sorry. I should have called. It was spontaneous. I wanted to see Sarah, but I didn’t know—”

“Let’s go to the park now!” said Finn, tugging on James’s sleeve. “Come! James! Come to the park! Ana!”

Ana stared at James. Bats flapped inside her torso.

Ana gestured at Finn, running ahead again. “You’re going out.”

“I promised him. We’re working on this movie and …” James rubbed his face, fumbling in Ana’s presence.

“Should I go to the house? Is Sarah there?” asked Ana.

“She is, but she’s sleeping. She won’t get up for another couple of hours.”

“Oh,” said Ana, looking down at the flowers in her hand. They seemed suddenly ridiculous.

“Do you—you could come to the park with us, and then, you know—come back after …” James had wondered how he would feel at such a meeting, and now he knew: He was famished for her. He didn’t want her to go yet. He needed to show her that he was not the bleeding mess she’d left in November, and that even then, he hadn’t been the mess she’d presumed. He wanted a chance.

Ana smiled. “I’ll come,” she said.

Finn reappeared and chatted as the three walked to the park. He and James had banter: “Tell Ana about the goose at the farm.” “It had a bad foot!” said Finn. “Tell Ana about your favorite color.” “Green!” “What things are green?”

Ana was impressed. He had found his gift. For the first time, she didn’t feel excluded. It wasn’t her failure; it was their victory.

She thought suddenly how in all their time together, there must have been a moment where that other life would have been possible. If they had been able to have a child easily, or accidentally, then maybe the propulsion would have kept them aloft. They would have been like everybody else, never looking down because they wouldn’t have had to. But without either of them noticing, that moment had passed. Motherhood had passed. They got this instead.