The Book of V.

But this Lily can barely take her eyes off Ruth for long enough to go find a sandwich. Something has cracked in her, a pocket of fear she didn’t know existed has burst its seams and it turns out to be infinite, an infinitely renewable resource that rages through her like fire; if in one moment it calms to coal, the next a wind comes through, reigniting the flames. She has not taken a true breath in days. What is she scared of? Adam wants to know. Other than death, of course. Her mother has had a long life. There is that. He is trying to pull her out just enough so she can see: the whole world isn’t burning. He has rubbed her shoulders and brought her tea and taken her on a long walk in Prospect Park and shown her a map in the latest National Geographic depicting the earth in 250 million years, the continents merged into one mass. He reminds her that he and the girls love her, they are here for her, they will be here for her. Gratitude cools her, then slides away, feeble compared to her fear. She is interested only in her mother’s aliveness; she wants only confirmation of it, again and again and again. She watches Ruth now, surprised once again at how undiminished she appears, despite the tube under her nose, the saline needle in her arm. Her mother’s ferning eyebrows are still dark, a hint of glamour marking an otherwise earthy face. Her gray hair is not thin; she went to Lily’s stylist recently and had it cut short. Her ears look almost elfin with the oxygen tube curled around them, her hands atop the blanket well veined and capable. She wears her own robe, of navy silk, brought by Lionel, who thinks of such things. Normally, Ruth wears some combination of jeans and a plain top, a turtleneck or pocket tee or crew-neck sweater, paired with hiking-style shoes or boots, all of it well fitting, even youthful, but still stolid, restrained. Stripped down like this, Lily thinks, to nothing but her robe and her beautiful eyebrows, she looks like a Ruth Lily has not really known. The navy sets off her tawny skin. Lily has always envied her mother’s skin color—her own she finds pasty, a mix of pallor and freckles inherited from her father—and now she finds herself willing its loveliness to be their salvation, to somehow overrule the invisible but apparently inarguable facts: that inside her mother a lung has collapsed; that cancer cells are spreading, and not slowly.

Ruth opens her eyes.

“Are you having an affair, sweetheart?”

“What?” Lily’s voice cracks. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m thinking maybe you’re sitting here because you’re having an affair and you’re waiting for the right moment to talk to me about it.” Ruth looks into her eyes as she learned to do decades ago, at a HinJewBu retreat center set into the folds of a valley in the Berkshires, so that—to Lily, at least—it seems she is silently shouting: I am looking into your eyes!

“I’m not having an affair,” Lily says.

“Okay.”

“I’m not going to have an affair.” Though it’s impossible to say this without thinking of Hal. Last night, at theater class pickup, which Lily’s sitter couldn’t do, Jace was nowhere to be seen. But Hal was there, apologizing for her. She wanted to do the pizza plan, he said, but a work thing … and Lily nodded, forcing herself not to look at his hands, or even at his wrists, which she had also noticed, because they were covered in ginger hairs and very appealing. Let’s do it anyway? Hal said, in the kind of helplessly flirtatious way that helplessly flirtatious people have, people who may mean nothing by anything, who simply exude sex by standing there. Flustered, Lily declined, telling him about her mother’s diagnosis by way of explanation, though nothing about the diagnosis explained why she and the girls couldn’t join him for pizza and though as soon as she told him she was flooded with guilt at the intimacy she had shared, for there were people she knew far better whom she had not yet told. Like that, she had crossed a line. And now, as Ruth spears her with that dogged gaze, Lily feels as though her mother can see the thoughts she has provoked, Lily’s fantasy: those hands, on her hips; a gruff altercation nowhere near a bed.

“Okee doke,” Ruth says, doubtfully.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if maybe Adam is having an affair?”

“I know Adam’s not having an affair.”

“Why?”

“I know. Your father had affairs.”

“Yet you’re asking me.”

“You’re not entirely unlike your father.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hard to satisfy. There’s a kind of engine built into your brain, always churning. Your nature is to be angry.”

“It sounds like you’ve thought about this. But I’m not angry.”

Ruth smiles. Her teeth are small and straight and pearly—another thing Lily did not inherit. “You’re not staying tonight,” she says. “I’ll call the nurses and tell them to put the cot away.”

“Mom!”

“Go home. Bring the kids tomorrow. I want to see the kids.”

“They’ll be too loud.”

“That’s life.”

Her mother flings an arm in the air, a flamboyant gesture that takes Lily’s breath away for a second. She places her hands atop the blanketed mound of her mother’s feet and squeezes.

“Are you hiding from them?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t.” Lily removes her hands from her mother’s feet.

“I don’t mind it here, is the truth,” her mother says. “At home there’s so much—so many things I need to do, and want to do, and so many, just, things. It’s peaceful—this clean, blank room.”

Lily nods before she can stop herself. Of course she knew what her mother meant. It’s impossible not to recognize that the hospital has its appeal, despite the noises and the lights and the reason they are here. Here, you can be nowhere. A kind of free. But she does not want to admit this to her mother, let