As Eddie began his official career as a doctor, all these years after finishing medical school, I went back to the house to confront the dramas that I was sure would have progressed in my absence to a nice, steamy boiling point.

“I’m in love with my husband’s brother,” Caroline said, as if she were on an American talk show and I didn’t know the names of the people involved. She straightened the chair I had unsuccessfully used to barricade the door.

“I know it’s hard, Caroline. But can you hold out a little longer?”

“Until your father’s dead? I’m so guilty. I’m counting the days. I want him to die.”

This explained her feverish efforts to prolong his life: guilt. I had a feeling that when Dad did finally die, she would mourn him more than all of us. In fact, my father’s death was likely to ruin this woman. I thought I should speak to him about it, cautiously of course, and entreat him to give her to Terry while he was still alive. The death of her husband could send her over the edge for wishing it. I knew this would be a sore point with him, but for Caroline’s sake, for the image of her sad crazy eyes, I had to broach the subject.

Dad was in bed with the lights out. The darkness helped me find the courage to go about my unenviable task. I launched right into it. I pretended that Caroline had said nothing to me and I had just deduced this all on my own. “Look,” I said, “I know this must be painful, and I know how you are- the last thing you want to do on the eve of your death is something noble- but the fact of the matter is, Caroline will be destroyed by your death if, as you die, she secretly wishes it. If you really love her, you must make a present of her to your brother. You must bequeath her, while you’re still alive.”

Dad didn’t say a word. As I made this appalling speech, I thought that if someone said this to me, I would probably stick a butter knife through his tongue.

“Leave me alone,” he said finally, in the dark.

The next day Terry decided Dad must look at a dead bird he had seen on an early morning walk, and he dragged me along. He thought Dad would look at the still bird and be glad to be moving. It was a childish idea. My father had already seen many dead things, and they’d never made him glad to be alive. They wordlessly invited him to join them in death. This I knew. I wondered why Terry didn’t.

“I think you should take Caroline off my hands,” Dad said, crouched over the unmoving bird.

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think she can maintain this farce any longer than I can,” Dad said wearily. “We might have gotten away with it had you remained dead, like a good boy, but you had to resurrect yourself, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what I have to do with it.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You take her, OK?”

Terry’s body made an unexpected jolt, as if he’d rested his hand upon a high-voltage fence.

“For argument’s sake, let’s say I agree to this bit of nonsense. What makes you think she’ll go along with it?”

“Cut it out, Terry. You’ve always been a self-serving bastard, so why not just continue the tradition and serve yourself again- a helping of the woman you love, who, incomprehensibly, loves you back. You know, I always put my failure with women down to the lack of symmetry in my facial features, and yet here you are, the fattest man alive, and you get her again!”

“So what do you want?”

“Just take care of her, OK?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Terry said, and his mouth made several odd shapes, though no sound came out. He looked as if he were trying to commit a long and difficult equation to memory.

Caroline was sitting under a tree in the rain when Dad and I approached. I knew she was quietly tormenting herself. I thought I could hear her thoughts, fully articulated in my head. She was thinking of evil, whether she possessed evil herself or was possessed by it. She wanted to be good. She didn’t think she was good. She thought she was a victim of circumstance and that maybe all people who do evil are also victims of circumstance. She thought not only that Dad had cancer but that he was cancer. She wished he would fall in love with someone else and then die peacefully in his sleep. She felt Dad had taken over the story of her life and was rewriting it with messy handwriting so it became illegible. She thought her life had become illegible and incoherent.

This is what I was certain I heard her thinking. I felt so sympathetic, I wished the ground would open up and swallow her.

Dad strode up and laid it on the line. I should have guessed his first foray into noble deeds would blow up in his face. The truth is, his generosity of spirit extended only so far, and while magnanimously sacrificing himself on the altar of their love, he was unable to wipe the hurt look off his face, which killed the point of the whole exercise. It was this hurt look that made her explode.

“No! How can you say that? I love you! You! I love YOU!”

Dad pushed on. “Look. Terry was your first love, and I know you’ve never stopped loving him. It’s nobody’s fault. When you agreed to marry me, you thought he’d been dead for twenty years. We all did. So why pretend?”

Dad put forth a convincing case and got all worked up as he laid it out. He was so convincing that what seemed inconceivable suddenly became conceivable- and that threw Caroline into confusion.

“I don’t know. What do you want me to do? Is it that you don’t love me anymore? Yes, maybe it’s that.” And before Dad could answer, she said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I love you, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.”

Dad’s resolve was tested here. Why did she keep tormenting him like this? How could he keep it up?

“I want you to admit it,” he said.

“Admit what?”

“That you’re in love with him.”

“Martin, it’s-”

“Admit it!”

“OK! I admit it! First I started thinking, why does he have to be alive? Why couldn’t he have just stayed dead? And the more time I spent with Terry, the more I realized I was still in love with him. Then I started thinking, why do you have to be alive? Why are you dying so slowly? How unjust that someone who loved life, like my son, had to die so suddenly when someone who wants to die, like you, gets to live unendingly. Every time you talk about suicide my hopes jump up. But you never do it. You’re all talk! Why do you keep promising suicide if you won’t do it? You’re driving me crazy with all these promises of killing yourself! Do it or shut up about it, but stop getting my hopes up like that!” Suddenly Caroline stopped and covered her mouth with her hand, doubled over, and vomited. The vomit came through her fingers. When she straightened up, her face was twisted in shame. Every part of her face was magnified by it- her eyes were too round, her mouth too wide, her nostrils the same size as her mouth had been. Before anyone could say anything, she ran off into the jungle.

Dad swayed on his thin legs, and his complexion became what I can only describe as grainy. My life has been an unfair and humiliating series of losing propositions, his face lamented. Love was my noble suicide bid.

Just then Terry came out of the house. “Did I hear shouting?” he asked.

“She’s all yours,” Dad said.

“What do you mean?”

“Caroline- she’s all yours. We’re finished.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. You can be together now. I don’t mind.”

All the blood drained from Terry’s face, and he looked as if he’d just been told the plane he was on was making an emergency landing nose first in a volcano.

“Well…but…I can’t give up my prostitutes. I told you, love doesn’t work without possessiveness. No. No way. I can’t turn my back on my life now, after so long. No, I can’t be with Caroline.”