“I won’t be working all the time, I promise. And what if Lydia’s living in New York? What if you get to stay with Anna and Charlie one week a month? There are ways we can work this out so you’re not alone.”

“What if Lydia’s not in New York? What if she’s at Brandeis?”

“That’s why I think we should wait, make the decision later, when we have more information.”

“I want you to take the sabbatical year.”

“Alice, the choice for me isn’t ‘take the position at Sloan’ or ‘take a sabbatical year.’ It’s ‘take the position at Sloan’ or ‘continue here at Harvard.’ I just can’t take the next year off.”

He became blurry as her body trembled and her eyes burned with furious tears.

“I can’t do this anymore! Please! I can’t keep holding on without you! You can take the year off. If you wanted to, you could. I need you to.”

“What if I turn this down, and I take the next year off, and you don’t even know who I am?”

“What if I do, but after next year, I don’t? How can you even consider spending the time we have left squirreled away in your fucking lab? I would never do this to you.”

“I’d never ask you to.”

“You wouldn’t have to.”

“I don’t think I can do it, Alice. I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can take being home for a whole year, just sitting and watching what this disease is stealing from you. I can’t take watching you not knowing how to get dressed and not knowing how to work the television. If I’m in lab, I don’t have to watch you sticking Post-it notes on all the cabinets and doors. I can’t just stay home and watch you get worse. It kills me.”

“No, John, it’s killing me, not you. I’m getting worse, whether you’re home looking at me or hiding in your lab. You’re losing me. I’m losing me. But if you don’t take next year off with me, well, then, we lost you first. I have Alzheimer’s. What’s your fucking excuse?”

SHE PULLED OUT CANS AND boxes and bottles, glasses and dishes and bowls, pots and pans. She stacked everything on the kitchen table, and when she ran out of room there, she used the floor.

She took each coat out of the hall closet, unzipped and inverted all the pockets. She found money, ticket stubs, tissues, and nothing. After each strip search, she discarded the innocent coat to the floor.

She flipped the cushions off the couches and armchairs. She emptied her desk drawer and file cabinet. She dumped the contents of her book bag, her laptop bag, and her baby blue bag. She sifted through the piles, touching each object with her fingers to register its name in her head. Nothing.

Her search didn’t require her to remember where she’d already looked. The heaps of unearthed stuff evidenced her previous excavation sites. From the looks of things, she’d covered the entire first floor. She was sweating, manic. She wasn’t giving up. She raced upstairs.

She ransacked the laundry basket, the bedside tables, the dresser drawers, the bedroom closets, her jewelry box, the linen closet, the medicine cabinet. The downstairs bathroom. She ran back down the stairs, sweating, manic.

John stood in the hallway, ankle-deep in coats.

“What the hell happened in here?” he asked.

“I’m looking for something.”

“What?”

She couldn’t name it, but she trusted that somewhere in her head, she remembered and knew.

“I’ll know when I find it.”

“It’s a complete disaster in here. It looks like we’ve been robbed.”

She hadn’t thought of that. It would explain why she couldn’t find it.

“Oh my god, maybe someone stole it.”

“We haven’t been robbed. You’ve torn the house apart.”

She spotted an untouched basket of magazines next to the couch in the living room. She left John and the theft theory in the hallway, lifted the heavy basket, poured the magazines onto the floor, fanned through them, and then walked away. John followed her.

“Stop it, Alice, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

“Yes, I do.”

“What then?”

“I can’t say.”

“What does it look like, what’s it used for?”

“I don’t know, I told you, I’ll know when I find it. I have to find it, or I’ll die.”

She thought about what she’d just said.

“Where’s my medication?”

They walked into the kitchen, kicking through boxes of cereal and cans of soup and tuna. John found her many prescription and vitamin bottles on the floor and the days-of-the-week dispenser in a bowl on the kitchen table.

“Here they are,” he said.

The urge, the life-and-death need, didn’t dissipate.

“No, that’s not it.”

“This is insane. You have to stop this. The house is trashed.”

Trash.

She opened the compactor, pulled out the plastic bag, and dumped it.

“Alice!”

She ran her fingers through avocado skins, slimy chicken fat, balled tissues and napkins, empty cartons and wrappers, and other trash thingies. She saw the Alice Howland DVD. She held the wet case in her hands and studied it. Huh, I didn’t mean to throw this out.

“There it is, that must be it,” said John. “I’m glad you found it.”

“No, this isn’t it.”

“All right, please, there’s trash all over the floor. Just stop, go sit, and relax. You’re frenzied. Maybe if you stop and relax, it’ll come to you.”

“Okay.”

Maybe, if she sat still, she’d remember what it was and where she’d put it. Or maybe, she’d forget she was ever even looking for something.

THE SNOW THAT HAD BEGUN falling the day before and deposited about two feet over much of New England had just stopped. She might not have noticed but for the screeching sound of the wipers swinging back and forth across the newly dry windshield. John turned them off. The streets were plowed, but theirs was the only car on the road. Alice had always liked the serene quiet and stillness that followed a walloping snowstorm, but today it unnerved her.

John drove the car into the Mount Auburn Cemetery lot. A modest space for parking had been shoveled out, but the cemetery itself, the walking paths and gravestones, hadn’t yet been uncovered.

“I was afraid it might still be like this. We’ll have to come back another day,” he said.

“No, wait. Let me just look at it for a minute.”

The ancient black trees with their knuckled, varicose branches frosted in white ruled this winter wonderland. She could see a few of what were presumably the gray tops of the very tall, elaborate headstones that belonged to the once wealthy and prominent peaking above the surface of the snow, but that was it. Everything else was buried. Decomposed bodies in coffins buried under dirt and stone, dirt and stone buried under snow. Everything was black and white and frozen and dead.

“John?”

“What?”

She’d said his name too loudly, breaking the silence too suddenly, startling him.

“Nothing. We can go. I don’t want to be here.”

“WE CAN TRY GOING BACK later in the week if you want,” said John.

“Back where?” asked Alice.

“To the cemetery.”

“Oh.”

She sat at the kitchen table. John poured red wine into two glasses and gave one to her. She swirled the goblet out of habit. She was regularly forgetting the name of her daughter, the actress one, but she could remember how to swirl her wineglass, and that she liked to. Crazy disease. She appreciated the wine’s dizzying motion in the glass, its blood red color, its intense flavors of grape, oak, and earth, and the warmth she felt as it landed in her belly.

John stood in front of the opened refrigerator door and removed a block of cheese, a lemon, a spicy liquid thing, and a couple of red vegetables.

“How do chicken enchiladas sound?” he asked.

“Fine.”

He opened the freezer and rummaged inside.

“Do we have any chicken?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Oh no, Alice.”

He turned to show her something in his hands. It wasn’t chicken.