I stared at him and could only repeat what he had said, because it was true. “I’m all right.” We looked at each other and I had nothing to say. I understood nothing but I was all right.

“You’re not allowed to kill yourself. When you burned the wood, you could only give them back what was theirs. Now you have the rest of your life. That belongs to you.”

I looked at him. I nodded. All right. Anything was all right.

“Thank you, Miranda. You did an incredible thing.”

I looked at him and I was empty as death, empty as an old heart that’s just biding its time.

Somehow, from some place I didn’t know I had, I was able to whisper, “What now?”

“Now you live, my sweetheart.” He smiled and it was the saddest smile I had ever seen.

“All right.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out something. He offered it to me. Another piece of wood. A small long silvery piece that looked like driftwood. Wood that had been floating in some unimaginable sea for a thousand years. I turned it over in my hand, examining it carefully. Shapeless, silvery, soft, old. Yes, it must have been driftwood.

When I looked up again Hugh was gone.

There was a nice song on the radio years ago. They played it too much but I didn’t mind because it kept me company and I’m always grateful for that, I often found myself humming it without realizing. The title was “How Do I Live Without You?”

I have come to realize this is an essential lesson: In order to survive, you must learn to live without everything. Optimism dies first, then love, and finally hope. But still you must continue. If you were to ask me why, I would say that even without those fundamental things, the great things, the hot-blood-in-the-veins things, there is still enough in a day, in a life, to be precious, important, sometimes even fulfilling. How do I live without you? I put you in the museum of my heart where I often go, absorbing as much as I can bear before closing time.

What more can I tell you that you need to know beyond what I already have? I had a life. I never married, had no children, met two good men I might have loved, but after what I had experienced, it was impossible. I was proud of myself though, because I honestly tried with real hope and an open heart to fall in love again. No good.

I went back to selling books and I did well. Sometimes I was even able to lose myself in what I was doing, and that was when I was happiest. All the time I thought of Frances Hatch and how she had done it—lived a full and interesting life after she had cut the thread. So many times I wished I could have spoken with her, but she died three days after we last met.

Zoe married Doug Auerbach and they were happy for a long time. When he died ten years ago, I moved out to California to live with her. We became quintessential L.A. old ladies. We ate only free-range chicken and took too many vitamins. We spent too much time in malls, went to aerobics classes for seniors, wore thicker and thicker eyeglasses as the visual world became foggier and surrounded by increasingly soft edges. We made a life and watched the sun set over it.

I always woke earlier than she and made the coffee. But she was punctual, and by nine every morning she joined me in the backyard to read the newspaper and talk about what needed doing that day. We had a garden, there were a few friends, and we reminisced unendingly. Of course I never told her any of my real story.

For my birthday one year she bought me a pocket telephone. On the package was a note she had written that said, “Now you’ll really be a California gal!” When I opened the box and saw what it was, I asked who on earth would ever call me? Zoe said sexily, “You never know!” And I loved her for her optimism and I loved her for the lie. I knew she had given it to me because she was worried. I had been having fainting spells, swoons she liked to call them, and they were getting worse. My doctor, an Irishman named Keane, joked that I had the blood pressure of an iguana. Sometimes I pretended I wasn’t feeling well just so I could visit him.

But death winds the clock and one morning Zoe didn’t show up for coffee. She was a robust woman and I don’t think she was ever sick the whole time we lived together. When I went into her room at ten-thirty that morning and saw her lying peacefully on her side in bed, I knew. Her children, neither of whom had even the slightest trace of her goodwill and energy, came to the funeral but left on the first plane out.

12. Stories Written in the Snow

The doorbell rang. The old woman looked up quickly from the notebook and frowned. She did not want to be interrupted, especially not now when she was so very close to finishing. What an amazing notion—soon she would be done.

No one ever rang her doorbell anyway, that was a given. Once in a great while someone wearing a brown United Parcel Service uniform brought her a package from Lands’ End or another of the mail-order companies that supplied her with sturdy practical clothes made out of warm materials like Polartec or goose down. She needed all the warmth she could get because her body felt cold almost constantly now, despite the fact that she was living in the desert heat of Los Angeles. Sometimes at night she even wore a pair of electric blue Polartec gloves while watching television. If someone had seen her they would have thought she was crazy, but she was only cold. More than wisdom, irony, grace, or peace, old age had brought cold, and she was never really able to escape it.

Pausing a moment, she remembered she had ordered nothing, so whoever was at her door now could only be mistaken or a nuisance. Would you like to subscribe to this magazine? Would you like to believe in my God? Would you happen to have a dollar for a guy down on his luck?

The bell rang again—so loud and annoying – ding-dong ding-dong! There was no way to avoid it. Grimacing, she put down Hugh’s fountain pen and reached for the cane leaning against her desk.

She was fat now. Recently she had even begun calling herself that, although she’d known it for a long time. She was an old woman who had grown much too fat. She liked to sit. After Zoe died she had stopped going to exercise class. She liked cookies. Hugh once said, “Eating is sex for old people.” Now it was true for her.

Her knees were weak. And her hips and God knows what else. It was an effort getting up or sitting down. When you were as old as she was, everything was an effort, and when you weighed twenty-five pounds too much you did a lot more with a groan than ever before. The year she died, Zoe had given Miranda the cane for Christmas. It was a very nice one too—made of oak and slightly crooked, so that it had a kind of jaunty character. It reminded her of something an Irishman would use. Ireland. Hugh always said he was going to take her to Ireland—

The doorbell rang again. Damn! She was sure she was almost finished writing her story, but now this interruption would disturb her train of thought. She didn’t know if she’d be able to get back into it later. Writing demanded her full attention. More and more, her memory played hide-and-seek with her. She felt compelled to get everything down on paper as soon as she could before something inevitable and dreadful like a stroke or Alzheimer’s disease roared into her brain and like a vacuum cleaner sucked it empty.

Leaning hard on the cane with one hand and pushing down on the desk with the other, she raised herself out of the chair. After a few small, unsteady, dangerous steps, she moved slowly across the shadowy room.

The room never got full sunlight. She liked it that way. She kept two lamps burning in there almost all the time. At night when she was exhausted and going to bed she would walk out and leave them on on purpose. She liked thinking her workroom was always lit. As if some kind of bright spirit was in there guarding the important things like the diary and her thoughts. Yes, she felt she left her most important thoughts in that room because it was where she did all of her diary writing. How silly. The silly thoughts of a silly old woman.