Chapter 1

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The first patient of her first morning in Nine Pines was a farmer named Erik Lundgren, and he had wrapped his left hand in what looked like a dish towel stamped with chickens. He sat on the paper-covered exam table as though he had been sent there by someone else against his wishes, his shoulders pulled down by the weight of his coat, his boots leaving half-moons of mud and black pine needles on the linoleum.

Dr. Imani Adeyemo had been in the clinic for forty minutes. She had not yet made coffee. She had not yet found the box that held her stethoscope — her own stethoscope, the one with her name in small enamel letters where the tubing joined the bell — and was using a loaner from the drawer, a cheap one that smelled faintly of disinfectant and someone else's neck. Outside the exam room window, the light was the color of an unripe peach, thin and carrying the first true chill of October. She could hear the furnace kick on in the basement beneath her feet, a low animal sigh she had already begun to take comfort from.

"Mr. Lundgren," she said.

"Erik."

"Erik. I'm Dr. Adeyemo. Let's have a look."

He unwrapped the towel slowly, as if the towel were part of him, and the hand that appeared was a bad hand — not dangerous bad, not the kind of bad that meant an ambulance or a helicopter, but the kind of bad that would need cleaning and closing and a lecture he would not want. A long, ragged laceration ran across the meaty base of his thumb, past the wrist, up along the inside of his forearm. Dried blood had crusted the edges. Fresh blood welled in a slow, patient line when he moved his fingers. Barbed wire, she thought before he said it.

"Barbed wire," he said.

"How long ago?"

"Dawn." He considered the fluorescent light above her head. "Little before."

It was nearly nine now. She did not remark on the gap between dawn and her clinic. She had learned, over fifteen years in Chicago emergency rooms and then in the clinics that fed those emergency rooms, that men who worked outdoors arrived when they arrived, and the thing to do was not to scold.

"Any chance the wire was rusted?"

"All my wire is rusted."

"Tetanus?"

He looked at her for the first time. His eyes were very pale, the color of the sky over a frozen lake in January, and she saw him take her in — her skin, her hair tied back in a silk scarf of deep blue, her accent that was almost but not quite Chicago, almost but not quite something else — and she saw him decide, in the small quick way of people who have spent their lives making fast decisions about weather and animals, to simply accept her.

"Had one," he said. "Couple years ago. Maybe three. Dr. Petersen gave it to me. When I stepped on the nail."

"I'd like to update it, if that's all right. You're due."

"All right."

She turned to the cabinet. Whoever had been running the clinic before her — Dr. Petersen, she understood, who had retired at seventy-nine and was now, Margaret Halvorsen would tell her on Friday, playing poorly at golf in a place called Mesa — had left the cabinets in a state of perfect small-town tidiness. Everything where it ought to be, nothing where it ought not to be, and a faint smell of pipe tobacco lingering like a ghost among the lidocaine and gauze.

She drew up the tetanus, injected it in his good shoulder, and then returned to the bad hand. She brought over the irrigation and the suture kit. She pulled a stool close, sat, and arranged the hand on a sterile pad under the goose-necked lamp.

"This is going to sting," she said.

"All right."

She began to irrigate, the saline sluicing the wound in a long slow stream the color of diluted wine, and she watched his face carefully. He did not flinch. He kept his jaw at a careful angle, watching the far corner of the room where the wall met the ceiling, and she understood that this was what he would do for the whole procedure — that he would fix on that corner and go there, the way another man might close his eyes.

She worked quietly. She had learned, over the years, that there was a certain kind of patient for whom the best bedside manner was not talk but competence expressed as silence. Not coldness. Not absence. She was present — her hands moving steadily, her breathing even, her full attention on the wound — but she did not fill the air with chatter. There was a quality of attention, she believed, that settled around a body like a blanket, and that this quality was a more genuine comfort than words. Erik Lundgren, whoever he was, would not want to be told that he was brave.

The lidocaine went in in three small pillars along the wound's edges, and she waited, counting in her head the slow count she had always used — forty seconds was enough for most of it, sixty for deep — and then she tested the edges with the forceps. He did not move.

"Can you feel that?"

"Pressure. Not sharp."

"Good."

She began to debride. The tissue at the outermost edge had gone the pale gray of old meat, and she trimmed it with small, precise snips of the scissors, pausing every few seconds to check the bleeding. The wound bed beneath was clean and healthy, the pink of living things, and when she was satisfied she reached for the suture. Four-oh nylon, she thought. Enough for the skin. The deeper layer would take three-oh vicryl. She began.

"You from Chicago," he said.

"Yes."

"My brother lives in Naperville."

"Ah."

"He doesn't like it."

"No?"

"He says everyone's in a hurry."

"He's not wrong."

A small silence, the kind she had come to recognize as the Wisconsin kind — not awkward, not empty, simply a pause in which the people in the room considered one another and the weather and whatever small thing had just been said. She placed a suture, tied it, cut it. Placed another.

"Why here?" he said. Not hostile. Curious, in the simple, unembarrassed way of a man who had asked about the weather and the weather had answered.

She did not look up from the hand. "A friend of mine knew Dr. Petersen. They went to medical school together, a long time ago. When he retired, he asked around. I was looking." She paused, choosing. "I wanted a quieter place."

"Chicago's loud."

"Chicago's loud."

He considered this. She placed another suture. Outside, she could hear a truck pass on the road, the long diesel exhale of its brakes, and then the peculiar silence of a small town in which you could hear a truck from half a mile away as distinctly as one at your elbow.

"There's a feed store up the road," he said. "If you need anything. Laursen runs it."

"Thank you."

"He's got dog food. If you got a dog."

"I don't have a dog."

"Might want one," Erik said. "Winter."

She looked up then, and she smiled, the first smile she had allowed herself to give fully since she had crossed the town limit three days before. It felt like a muscle she had not used in a while. "I'll consider it."

It took twenty-three sutures in all, seven in the deep layer and sixteen on the skin, and when she had finished she dressed the wound in layers — nonadherent pad, gauze, self-adherent wrap — and pressed tape along the edges in the neat way her residency director had taught her, years and years ago, in a basement ER in Hyde Park at three in the morning.

"Keep it dry for forty-eight hours," she said. "Then you can get it wet in the shower, but don't soak it. No barn water. No machine oil. Come back in ten days for removal, or sooner if it gets red or hot or starts to weep anything that isn't clear. If you get a fever, call. My number is on the card."

She gave him a card. It said DR. IMANI ADEYEMO, FAMILY MEDICINE in a font that she had chosen — not because she loved it but because it was honest and unfussy — and below it the clinic's phone number, which was the same phone number it had been for forty-three years. Erik turned the card over in his good hand, looked at the back as though it might say something different, then tucked it into his shirt pocket.

"Thank you, Doctor."

"You're welcome."

He paused at the door of the exam room. He was a large man, not tall but wide, built on the scale of work, and the doorway narrowed when he filled it. "Welcome to Nine Pines."

"Thank you, Erik."

When he had gone, she sat on the rolling stool for a moment, looking at the mud his boots had left, and the bloody gauze in the basin, and the cheap loaner stethoscope around her neck. She could hear him start a truck outside, the engine catching on the second turn, and then the slow roll of the tires on gravel as he pulled out of the small lot.

Then she stood, and pulled on fresh gloves, and cleaned up the room. She disposed of the sharps. She wiped down the table. She put the basin in the autoclave tray. She washed her hands twice — once with the pink surgical soap, once with the plain hospital soap, as she had done for fifteen years — and she dried them on a paper towel and dropped the towel in the bin, and then she stood at the small window and looked out at the road.

A thin haze hung at the base of the trees. The leaves on the maple across the road had begun their turn; some had already fallen, and lay in the yellow grass like small burnt hands. The sign at the end of the clinic drive read LUNDGREN-PETERSEN CLINIC, and she had not yet changed it, and would not, she thought, for a while. Let the name stand. Let the town have its landmarks. She was the one who had come here. She could be the one to arrive slowly.

She made coffee then, in the small staff room at the back. The coffee pot was older than she was. The filter was the old-fashioned kind, a basket, and there were three varieties of sugar on a shelf above the sink — white, brown, and a small jar of honey that had crystallized entirely into a glass brick. She used none of them. She drank the coffee black at a chipped green Formica table, and she said, softly, to the small humming refrigerator and the coffee pot and the window that looked onto a field of rusted machinery, "Bismilláh."

Not a prayer. Just a beginning. A way of marking a threshold. The coffee was bad and the morning was cold and her hand, still faintly scented with soap, rested on the table as though it belonged there.

The clinic phone rang. She answered it. A woman named Janet wanted to reschedule her husband's blood pressure check. That was fine. That was easy. The morning went on.

By noon she had seen four patients — Erik; an elderly woman with a chronic cough who wanted Imani to listen to her lungs and tell her honestly whether she was dying, and who was not; a toddler whose mother thought he had swallowed a penny, who had not; and a man in his fifties who had come in to meet her, not for a complaint, but to look at her face and decide, in the way of small towns, whether she would do. She had let him. She had asked him how his wife was, and his grandchildren, and whether the corn had been good this year, and he had told her, in some detail, and then he had said, rising, "Well, you'll do."

"Thank you," she had said.

"Welcome to Nine Pines."

She had closed the door behind him and stood a long moment in the hallway, listening to the small building settle around her, and then she had gone back to work.

By three the waiting room was empty, and the receptionist, Darla — a woman in her early sixties who had worked for Dr. Petersen for thirty-one years and who had introduced herself that morning by saying, firmly and kindly, "I don't know you yet, but I'm going to" — was tidying her desk in the front. At four, Darla went home. At five, Imani locked the door of the clinic, turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, and walked across the gravel lot to her car, her breath visible in the deepening cold.

The sky over Nine Pines at five in October was the color of a bruise beginning to yellow at its edges, and the pines that gave the town its name stood in a dark row along the ridge above the old church, their tops cut sharp against the last light. She stood by her car for a moment and looked at them. She did not know yet which trees were the nine. She would learn.

She got in the car, and she drove home.

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The town had been called Nine Pines since 1871, when a Finnish carpenter named Jakob Heikkinen, newly arrived from Ashtabula and newly sober, had counted the tall white pines along the ridge above the first Lutheran meeting-house and, for reasons his descendants had never been able to agree on, had written the number nine on a board in charcoal and nailed the board to the first post of the first store. The store had burned twice. The meeting-house had burned once. The pines had never burned. They were still there, a hundred and fifty-five years later, and the town had counted them more often than it could say. There were, depending on who was counting and whether you were including the smaller one at the west end that leaned, either nine or ten or eleven pines on the ridge. Children were sent to count them every autumn by a schoolteacher who was now dead, and the count varied. What mattered was that there were enough.

Imani had arrived at the town in the last week of September, driving a U-Haul whose side mirror she had broken on a gatepost somewhere in western Illinois and then not gotten around to fixing. She had driven the last forty miles alone, following the two-lane road north out of the river valley and up through a country she had seen only in photographs — flat at first, then folded, then rising in small wooded ridges into what the map promised would be Wisconsin. The land was not what she had expected. She had thought of Wisconsin as a cartoon of cheese and dairies, and when she had been given the images in her mind by her ex-husband, years before, in a voice that had become steadily more contemptuous of every place that was not Chicago, she had absorbed them without examining them. What she saw instead was a country of small, dense forests broken by fields, of ponds that appeared where the road bent, of the astonishing richness of its October color — maples gone to crimson, birches gone to gold, oaks still holding their deep bronze, and the pines and spruces standing dark green through all of it, as though to anchor the whole blaze to something.

Nine Pines appeared at the end of a slow descent. She came around a curve marked by a sign that read ENTERING NINE PINES — POP. 2,841 — FOUNDED 1871 and saw, below her and to the right, the town itself, arranged along a single main street that curved gently with the curve of a creek she would later learn was called Millers' Creek. There was a water tower at the far end, painted white with the town's name in green. There was a grain elevator, a feed store, a small brick school with an American flag moving lazily on its pole. There was a single stoplight, blinking amber, at the intersection of the main street and the cross street. There was a Lutheran church with a white steeple. There was a second, smaller church — Catholic, she would learn — at the edge of town. There was a diner with BERTHA'S painted on its window in gold leaf that had started to peel. There was a park with a bandshell. There was a library, low and brick. There was a gas station with two pumps.

She had driven the length of the main street slowly, once, and then turned around in the parking lot of the grain elevator and driven it slowly again. Nothing she saw was remarkable. Everything she saw was particular. A dog sat in the bed of a parked pickup truck, watching her drive by with the settled expression of a dog who had watched many things drive by and had found them acceptable. An old man stood outside the post office with his mail in his hand, reading a piece of it, not moving. Two boys rode bicycles on the sidewalk, ignoring her. A woman with gray hair under a red knit hat pushed a stroller past the library, and the child in the stroller was asleep with its mouth open.

It had not looked like a place where anything had ever happened. This was its beauty and also, she had thought, driving through on that first afternoon, its danger for her. She had come here to stop the thing that had been happening to her in Chicago. She had needed a place where the days would come toward her slowly, and she would have time to meet them.

Now, three weeks later, driving home from the clinic on a Tuesday evening in October, she took the same road through town more slowly still, because she had begun — without planning to, without noting it — to look for particular things. The stoplight was amber as always. Bertha's was lit, the front windows fogged at the edges. Two men in Carhartts came out of the feed store with a sack of what she guessed was corn, and one of them lifted his chin at her as she passed. She lifted her chin back. She was not sure whether she had been seen clearly or whether he was simply a person who lifted his chin at cars. Either was fine.

The pines were up on her left as she left the center of town. They stood on the ridge above the old Lutheran meeting-house, which was no longer the Lutheran church — the Lutheran church was newer, bigger, on the other side of town, with its clean white steeple — but a sort of small museum now, opened twice a year for festivals. The old meeting-house was a squat dark-wood building with a graveyard beside it, and the pines stood between the graveyard and the road. In the dusk their tops were very black against the sky. She counted them as she drove. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten, if you counted a smaller one that had leaned a little to the south.

She let herself smile. The light was falling. She took the turn onto the county road that led to her rented house, a small yellow farmhouse set back from the road behind a windbreak of old spruces, and as she turned she saw, quite clearly, three deer standing still in the far field. They did not move as she passed. They watched her. She watched them back, as much as she could while driving. She was not a good enough driver to watch deer.

The house was still mostly unfurnished. She had a bed, she had a kitchen table she had bought from the previous tenant for forty dollars, she had two chairs, and she had the boxes. The boxes were from Chicago. She had not yet opened most of them. She had promised herself she would open one a day, and then she had not opened one for four days. Some of them she was afraid to open. One of them, marked ALBUMS in her own handwriting, she was particularly afraid to open.

She pulled the car into the gravel drive and stopped. She turned off the engine. She sat for a moment with her hands on the steering wheel.

It was very quiet. The engine ticked. Somewhere far off a dog barked twice, and stopped. The wind moved in the spruces, a long slow sound like a long slow breath.

She had, that morning, sewn a man's hand. She had drunk bad coffee. She had been welcomed by a man she had never met before. She had been asked, mildly, why she was here. She had not answered fully and had not needed to. The town did not yet know her. It would, in its way. She would let it.

She got out of the car. The cold had deepened. Her breath showed. She fetched the mail from the box at the end of the drive — three things, all of them for the previous tenant, which she would carry back to the post office tomorrow because that was the kind of town it was — and she went into the house.

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The kitchen of the yellow farmhouse was small, and it was yellow also, inside, the walls painted a cheerful butter color that must have been fashionable in 1972 and had not been changed. There was a linoleum floor. There was a refrigerator that hummed in two distinct pitches, one of them unpleasant. There was a gas stove with four burners, of which only three worked — the fourth, the small front one, had been labeled broken with a piece of masking tape by the previous tenant, in a handwriting that Imani liked. There was a window above the sink that looked out into the spruces.

She put a pot of water on the working back burner and set it to boil. She opened a cabinet and took down a jar of crushed tomatoes, a tin of tomato paste, a jar of ground crayfish she had brought from a Nigerian grocery in Chicago and had meant not to open until she had settled more deeply, and a small packet of bay leaves. She set them on the counter.

She had decided, driving home, that she would make jollof rice. She had not planned it; she had simply found herself, half a mile from the house, wanting it. This had surprised her. She had not cooked jollof rice for herself in nearly a year. She had cooked it for David once, early in their marriage, and he had eaten it and praised it, and then he had said, gently, that she did not need to make food like that for his benefit, because he knew she did not enjoy it herself — and she had, in that moment, not corrected him, though he had been wrong on both counts, both that he had known her and that she had not enjoyed it herself. She had simply, over the years, stopped making it. And now, driving past the feed store in an unfamiliar state, at forty-two, alone, she had wanted it.

She diced an onion. She diced two red peppers. She minced a piece of ginger and three cloves of garlic, and she scraped all of it into the bottom of a pot with oil that had begun to shimmer, and she let it go. The smell filled the kitchen almost at once, and the sharp edge of it — the onion, the pepper — made her eyes water, which she had forgotten could happen, and she stood at the stove and cried a little from the onion and a little from something that was not the onion, and she stirred the pot with a wooden spoon and did not do anything about the tears, because there was no one there to see them and they would pass.

She added the tomato paste. She let it darken in the oil, the way her mother had taught her, until it went from the orange-red of tomato paste from the tin to the deeper, rustier color of tomato paste that had been properly cooked. She added the crushed tomatoes. She added two cups of water from the tap — the water here was well water, cold and faintly mineral — and she added the bay leaves and the crayfish and a scoop of the pepper blend in the small Ziploc bag that was the last of what her aunt Folake had pressed into her hands the last time they had seen each other, eighteen months ago at a wedding in Maryland. The bag was almost empty. She did not think about this now.

She brought the sauce to a simmer. She washed the rice — long-grain, rinsed three times in cold water until the water ran clear — and added it, and she stirred it gently, and she covered it, and she set the heat low, and she let it be.

She turned then, and she looked at the kitchen.

There was a photograph on the windowsill above the sink, the only photograph she had yet put out anywhere in the house. Her mother, taken in 1979, at the age Imani was now almost exactly. Her mother in a green dress, standing in front of a plumeria tree in Ibadan, holding an infant — Imani's older brother Tunde, who was now a banker in London and a stranger to her in most of the ways that mattered. Her mother was looking not at the camera but at the baby, with an expression so particular, so full of a specific tenderness for a specific person, that it had always made Imani understand, when she looked at it, what love in its ordinary daily form actually was. Not an event. Not a statement. An attention.

Her mother had been dead for nine years. She had died in Lagos, in the house she had returned to after Imani's father's death, of a stroke that had taken three days to finish what it began. Imani had flown. Imani had arrived. Imani had held her mother's hand for the last thirty-six hours and had not let go, and had whispered to her in the two languages they had shared, and had said prayers, and had said the Greatest Name, and her mother had died at four in the morning with the ceiling fan going.

Imani turned from the photograph. The rice was cooking. The house was warm. The house smelled like her grandmother's kitchen and like her mother's kitchen and like no kitchen that had ever existed in a yellow farmhouse in Wisconsin, and she found that she was not sad, or not only sad. She was also something else. She was paying attention.

Someone knocked at the door.

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. She went to the door. She opened it.

On the porch stood a small round woman in her early seventies, wearing a dark wool coat over a blue cotton dress, a knit hat of an ambiguous green, and a pair of boots that were clearly her good ones, polished to a shine. She was holding a glass casserole dish covered in aluminum foil. The dish was, Imani could tell from the heat rising off it, still warm. The woman had white hair cut short around her face and eyes that were the color of a copper kettle.

"Hello," the woman said. "I'm Margaret Halvorsen. I live up the road. I brought you this. You don't have to eat it tonight."

Imani held the door open. "Please come in."

Margaret Halvorsen considered the doorway. She considered the fact of coming in. She seemed to weigh the complication of her own presence against whatever she had been prepared to do — which had been, Imani understood, leaving the casserole on the step and walking away — and she decided, with a small movement of her mouth, to enter.

"Just for a minute," Margaret said. "I won't keep you."

"You aren't keeping me. I was cooking."

"I can smell that."

"It's jollof rice. From Nigeria. Where my parents are from."

"Oh," Margaret said. She stood in the small entryway, the casserole in her hands, her eyes moving over the front room — the bare walls, the boxes, the single armchair — without commentary. "It smells wonderful."

"Would you like to eat with me?"

The question surprised them both. Imani had not known she was going to ask it. Margaret had clearly not planned to be asked. She stood for a long moment with the casserole still in her hands, as though she had forgotten it was there, and then she laughed, a short dry laugh with real surprise in it.

"Well," she said. "I wasn't going to. I was going to leave this and go home. But if you would have me, I would like to."

"I would have you."

"Then yes," said Margaret Halvorsen. "Thank you."

They stood for a moment. Margaret looked at the casserole in her own hands as though it had appeared there. "This is chicken and wild rice. It's — it was my husband's favorite. I haven't made it in a year or two. I made it today because I heard you had moved in, and I thought — I thought maybe chicken and wild rice is what you give a new doctor. It's what someone gave me, when I was new. Fifty years ago." She laughed again. "Fifty-one."

"That's a long time."

"It is."

"Come into the kitchen."

Margaret followed her into the kitchen. She set the casserole on the table. She took off her hat and coat, and Imani took them from her and hung them on the hook by the back door. Margaret stood for a moment in the kitchen's light, looking around, and Imani saw her take in the photograph on the windowsill and, just perceptibly, nod to herself, as if the photograph had been a piece of information she had been glad to be given.

They ate the jollof rice and the chicken and wild rice together, side by side on the small table, in the small kitchen of a small house that had become for the first time since Imani had moved in a place where two people were eating.

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They ate slowly. Margaret was not a fast eater. She took small bites and chewed them fully, and then she paused for long intervals with her fork on her plate, and she looked out the window at the spruces, and she returned to the food as though she had just remembered it. Imani had known many old women in Chicago who ate like this, and she had known many old women who did not, and she understood that the way a person ate at seventy-two had in it a great deal of information about how they had lived at forty.

"The rice is very good," Margaret said. "I have never eaten anything like it."

"Thank you. I haven't made it in a while."

"Why not?"

Imani paused. She had expected a more polite question — do you make it often — and was not sure how to answer this one. She tried. "Because I was married to a man who didn't like it, and it didn't seem worth making for one person."

"Ah."

"And now I'm making it for one person."

"Two, tonight."

"Yes."

Margaret took another small bite. She considered the windowsill photograph. "Your mother?"

"Yes."

"She was beautiful."

"She was."

"Is she still living?"

"No. She died nine years ago."

"I am sorry."

"Thank you."

Margaret was quiet for a moment. Then she said, without any change in her tone, "My husband died six years ago next month. It was a long illness. At the end it was not a long illness. It was quick. Five days. I think of him every day."

"I am sorry."

"Yes." Margaret set her fork down. "I don't bring him up to people I have just met, as a rule. I don't want to be that old woman who talks about her dead husband. But I find, tonight, that I want to tell you about him, and I'm trying to decide whether that is because I want to tell you, or because I have not talked to anyone properly in four days, and you are the first person I have sat down with in that time."

"Both are good reasons."

Margaret laughed. It was a real laugh this time, quick and pleased. "You're kind."

"I was his wife for forty-eight years," Margaret said. "We were married in 1975, in the Lutheran church, the new one. I wore my mother's dress and he wore a borrowed suit. He was a forester. He worked for the county for thirty-nine years. He retired at sixty-five and took up clock repair in the garage, and I taught elementary school for forty-one years and retired when I was sixty-seven. He died three years after I retired. He was at home. I was with him. I have a son who is a schoolteacher in Madison, and I had another son, and —" she paused, and her face shifted only very slightly, and Imani understood that the paused-at thing was the hard thing — "and I had another son, whose name was Daniel, who died when he was nineteen. That was nineteen eighty-eight. He was in the Marines. Not overseas. A training accident. There has not been a day since then when I have not thought about him. My husband, Arne, thought about him also, every day, but we did not talk about him very often with each other. When we did, it was in the car. I don't know why the car. Something about looking at the road instead of at each other, maybe. So now, when I drive, I still sometimes say something out loud, as if Arne were there. And sometimes Daniel. I think it is not a sign of madness. I think it is just what you do, when you have loved people for a long time and they go away."

She stopped. She picked up her fork. She took another bite of chicken and wild rice.

"I don't think it is a sign of madness," Imani said.

"Thank you."

They ate for a while in silence. Outside, the last gray light was falling off the world, and the kitchen had become an island of yellow lamp inside the deeper dusk of the country evening. The refrigerator hummed its two-note hum.

"You are Bahá'í," Margaret said, not as a question.

Imani looked up. "Yes. How did you — "

"Darla told Georgia, who told me. Georgia works at the post office. I hope you don't mind. I asked about you when I heard there was a new doctor coming. I was curious."

"I don't mind."

"I did not know what Bahá'í was. I am a Lutheran. I looked it up."

"What did you find?"

Margaret smiled. "That it is newer than I am, and older than I expected. And that it seems — from the little I read — to be very serious about being kind to strangers."

"That is a generous summary."

"I do not know if it is an accurate one."

"It is not inaccurate."

"I thought I would tell you," Margaret said, "so that we would not have to not talk about it. I have been in a number of conversations in my life in which people have very carefully not talked about the thing they actually wanted to talk about, and I have not been able to bear them. I am seventy-two. I have decided not to bear them anymore."

Imani felt a laugh rise through her, a surprised one, and she did not suppress it. "Good. I have also decided not to bear them."

"Then we will get along."

"Yes."

Margaret lifted her water glass. Imani lifted hers. They did not clink them — that would have been too much — but they raised them slightly, in an acknowledgment, and they drank.

"I play Scrabble with some people on Fridays," Margaret said. "A pastor. A farmer. The librarian. We meet at my house at seven. We play two games. We eat something — someone always brings something — and we talk about nothing of importance. It has been going on for eleven years. I would like you to come, if you would like to. You do not have to be good at Scrabble. I am not very good, and the pastor is too good. The farmer cheats. The librarian knows every word."

"I would like to come."

"This Friday?"

"This Friday."

"Seven."

"Seven."

Margaret finished her water. She set the glass down. She looked at the jollof rice on her plate, which she had nearly finished, and she said, "I have never had anything like this. It is very good. I would like to try to make it."

"I will write you out the recipe."

"I will try not to ruin it."

"You won't ruin it."

"I may."

"Then you will try again."

Margaret smiled, small and private. She folded her napkin and set it beside her plate.

"I should go," she said. "I have kept you."

"You have not kept me."

"I have kept myself."

"Yes."

They stood. Imani walked her to the door. The porch light made a small yellow circle on the wooden floor of the porch, and beyond it the country dark was complete. Margaret put on her hat and coat and said, at the door, "Thank you for dinner."

"Thank you for bringing the casserole."

"I'll leave it here. Eat it tomorrow. You'll be tired tomorrow. New doctors are always tired the first week."

"How do you know?"

"Dr. Petersen was my student. A long time ago."

"He was your student?"

"Fifth grade. I taught him fractions. He did not like them."

"I will tell him, if I see him."

"You will not see him. He is in Arizona, playing golf."

"Ah."

Margaret paused, her hand on the door. She looked at Imani for a moment as though she were going to say something more, and then she decided not to, and she said only, "Good night, Doctor."

"Good night, Margaret."

Margaret went down the porch steps into the dark, and Imani heard her boots on the gravel as she walked the quarter mile up the road to her own house, and she stood at the door, looking out, until she could no longer hear them.

Then she closed the door. She returned to the kitchen. She put the leftovers away. She washed the two plates and the two forks and the two glasses. She dried them. She put them in the cabinet. She turned out the kitchen light, and she stood for a moment in the dark, and she said, softly, so softly that it was almost only a movement of her lips — "Alláh-u-Abhá" — and then she went to bed.

============================================================

Margaret's house was a white two-story set behind a hedge of ancient lilacs, and it sat on a corner where the county road met a smaller gravel road that led out toward a lake called Silver. Imani walked. It was less than a quarter mile, and she had wanted the walk, had wanted the air, had wanted the particular darkness of the rural Friday evening with its cold and its stars and its one far-off porch light. She carried a plate of date cookies in her hands. She had baked them that afternoon. She had baked them with her mother's recipe, which used semolina flour and which she had not made since her mother died. She did not know what she expected to happen when she handed them over. Nothing, probably. That was fine. Nothing was a kind of something.

She knocked on the door. She heard voices inside, not loud, warm. A man's voice laughing at something. Margaret opening the door.

"You came."

"I said I would."

"People say many things."

"I came."

"Come in. Please. Everyone's here."

The living room was small and beautifully kept, in the way of small rooms belonging to people who had lived in them for fifty years and had nothing left to prove. A braided rug in rust and green. A piano against one wall with a stack of sheet music on it and a photograph on top — Arne Halvorsen, Imani saw at once, in his forester's uniform, smiling. A fireplace with a real fire in it. A coffee table with a Scrabble board, folded at the moment, and a blue velvet bag of tiles, and four mugs, and a plate of what looked like sliced pound cake.

Three people stood or sat around the table.

The man who rose first was tall and thin, sixty or so, with the kind of slightly messy gray hair that belonged to a man who still ran his hands through it, and he wore a gray wool cardigan over a blue shirt, and he smiled at her with a careful warmth that she understood at once to be professional — a pastor's warmth, the kind practiced on strangers until it became nearly sincere, and then, occasionally, entirely so.

"Dr. Adeyemo. I'm Tom Rhodes. I'm the pastor up at Trinity. Margaret has told me about you. Don't hold it against her."

"Pastor Rhodes."

"Tom, please. I only wear the title on Sunday."

"Tom."

The man who did not rise was shorter, square-built, wearing a heavy flannel shirt tucked into jeans and boots he had not taken off. His hair was the wiry gray of a man who had once been blond. His face was weathered, the color of an old barn board. He was perhaps sixty-five. He was sitting on the sofa with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded between them, and when he saw her he stood — awkwardly, quickly, as if he had remembered that he ought to — and put out his hand.

"Wendell. Wendell Knutson."

"Imani Adeyemo."

His hand was enormous and hard. He shook hers carefully.

"I farm," he said, as though it were necessary to add.

"I understand."

Wendell did not know, in that moment, what to say next. Imani could see him trying. She could see him noting her, taking her in, the full fact of her — her skin, her hair tonight wound in a pattern that her cousin had taught her when they were twelve, her voice that held Chicago and held also something else that did not belong in Wisconsin in his experience — and she could see him registering his own small surprise. This was not, she understood, hostility. It was the startle of a man who had not planned on having to work out anything new at the end of a Friday, and he was a man, she also understood, who did not lie to himself about his own reactions. He had registered the surprise. He had not pretended not to. He had, in the second second, registered it as unimportant, and had moved past it to the next thing, which was figuring out what to say.

"You all right with flannel?" he said.

It was such an odd question that she laughed. "I'm all right with flannel."

"Good. Because I'm it, all the way down."

The third person, who had been sitting in the chair by the fire, rose now. She was a small thin woman in her late fifties, with a gray bob and reading glasses on a chain, and she wore a long cardigan in the color of a winter moon. "Lillian Kreutz. I work at the library."

"Lillian. I'll be in soon. I need a card."

"You can have one. I'll bring one on Monday. You don't have to come in."

"That's a courtesy."

"It's a library."

Margaret laughed from the kitchen doorway. "Sit down, all of you. Imani, give me those — are those cookies? Oh. Oh, good. Tom, you go first. You always go first. Wendell, you're going second because you cheated last week and we've all decided you go second now as a punishment."

"I didn't cheat," Wendell said. "I don't cheat."

"You played 'QI' without an apology."

"'QI' is a word."

"It's a word in one dictionary. Not in this house."

"Margaret."

"Second, Wendell."

Wendell shook his head at Imani with a slow, patient look, as though asking her to witness this injustice, and then he sat down again. "You see what I contend with. Every week."

"I see."

They played. Imani sat on the end of the sofa. Margaret brought her a cup of tea, and she accepted it, and she held it in both hands to warm them — the walk had cooled her more than she had realized — and she watched. The Scrabble board was opened. The blue velvet bag was passed. Tiles were drawn.

Tom Rhodes was a fast and accurate player. He placed small words that opened the board and then capitalized on them the next turn; he played like a man who was not in a hurry, who enjoyed the slow unfolding. Wendell was a player of small pieces and blunt force — three-letter words, most of them, placed stubbornly where the points were. Lillian, as Margaret had said, knew every word. She played ZORIL at one point, and when challenged produced the definition of an African weasel without looking up. Margaret played steadily and unimpressively and seemed, by the middle of the first game, not to be trying to win.

"You're next, Imani," Margaret said, halfway through.

"I haven't played in a long time."

"It'll come back."

"Who did you play with?" Tom asked.

"My mother. When I was a child. She would beat me, and then she would pretend she hadn't meant to, and I would pretend I hadn't noticed. We did this for twenty years."

Tom laughed. "A fine tradition."

"It was."

She played. Her first word was SEAM, placed across a double word. Her second was HELIX, diagonal, which was not legal, and they all laughed gently and let her try again. Her third was ALOE. By the end of the first game she had settled in. She did not win. Tom won. Wendell accused him of being a pastor and therefore having an unfair relationship to the alphabet, and Tom accepted this accusation with good humor.

Between games they ate the cake Lillian had brought — a brown sugar pound cake, dense and moist, the crumb fine — and they ate Imani's date cookies, which Margaret had arranged on a plate, and they drank more tea. Tom asked Imani about Chicago, carefully. She answered carefully. She said she had worked mostly in emergency medicine, and had transitioned to primary care four years ago. She said that she had needed a change. She did not say what the change had been. Tom did not press. Nobody pressed. Wendell asked her, at one point, with perfect seriousness, whether she had ever treated a hog bite, and she said that she had not; and he told her, without any sense that he might be boring her, about the one his uncle had sustained in 1958, which had ended in amputation above the elbow. The story was awful, and he told it with the absolute calm of a man for whom it was simply a fact that hogs sometimes bit people, and Imani listened to the whole thing, and then she said, "I will keep that in mind."

"You're going to meet some hog farmers."

"I expect so."

"Be careful."

"I will be."

Halfway through the second game, during a pause while Lillian considered a seven-letter play that would have put her out of reach, Wendell cleared his throat.

"Doctor," he said.

"Yes."

He was looking at his tiles. He did not look up. "I want to say — I did not expect you."

The room went quiet. Imani had expected, in this moment, to feel herself go on guard. She had expected the small internal motion of a woman who has been at the beginning of such sentences many times and has learned what they often become. She did not feel that motion. She felt, instead, a kind of listening.

"You didn't expect a woman," she said, carefully.

"No, I — well, yes, that too. But I mean. I did not expect a — " he stopped. He lifted his eyes finally, and he looked at her, fully. "I did not expect someone who looked like you. Or talked like you. In Nine Pines. And when I came in tonight I thought — I thought a number of things very fast. And then I thought, well, all right, Wendell, you're going to play Scrabble. And I am. And I want to say to you, because it seems like the kind of thing a person ought to say — I'm sorry for thinking whatever I thought. And I am glad you are here."

Tom Rhodes had gone very still, his hand halfway to his tea. Lillian was looking at the board. Margaret was looking at Wendell with an expression that was entirely unreadable except for the fact that she was, Imani thought, proud of him.

"Thank you, Wendell," Imani said.

"That's — " he started, and then he did not know how to finish, and he did not try. He looked at his tiles again.

"It's your turn," Lillian said gently.

"I know it's my turn. I just can't find anything."

"You have ten letters."

"I have ten bad letters."

"There's an O open on the right side."

"Don't help him," Margaret said. "He cheats."

"I do not cheat."

"'QI,' Wendell."

"Margaret."

The game went on.

When Imani walked home at ten, the stars were out. The Milky Way was visible in a way she had not seen since she was a child on a trip to her grandfather's village, and she stood for a minute at the corner of the county road and looked up, her breath rising white, and she said, so quietly that it was only the shape of the words — Yá Bahá'u'l-Abhá — and then she walked the rest of the way home in the dark, and did not stumble once.

============================================================

On Monday morning a young man named Tyler Pratt came into the clinic complaining of stomach pain.

Darla had put him in the second exam room, the one with the window that looked out on the parking lot, and when Imani opened the door she found him sitting on the exam table in the way that certain young men sit when they have not wanted to come, which is to say he was sitting very straight, and his hands were on his thighs, and his jaw was set, and he was looking not at her when she entered but at his own boots. He was perhaps twenty-six. He wore jeans and a Carhartt jacket over a gray T-shirt, and he had a baseball cap in his hand, which he had evidently taken off when he sat on the table and then not known what to do with, so that it rested on his knee.

"Mr. Pratt."

"Tyler."

"Tyler. I'm Dr. Adeyemo. How are you today."

"I've had a stomachache."

"How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Constant, or comes and goes?"

"Mostly constant. Worse at night."

"Describe the pain."

He paused. He thought. "Like a fist. In the middle. Up high, sort of. Underneath the ribs." He pointed, his finger at the point between his sternum and his navel. "It's not sharp. It's just. There."

"Does food make it better, or worse?"

"I haven't been eating much."

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "Not hungry."

"Bowel movements normal?"

"I guess."

"Blood, dark stool?"

"No."

"Any weight loss?"

"I don't know. A little."

"Nausea?"

"Sometimes."

"Vomiting?"

"No."

"Alcohol?"

He looked at her for the first time, briefly. "Some."

"More than before?"

"Yes."

"How much more?"

He looked down again. "A lot more."

She nodded. She did not write this down. She said, "Tyler, I'd like to examine your abdomen. Will you lie back for me?"

"All right."

He lay back. She palpated. She listened. His belly was soft, mildly tender in the epigastric region, no rebound, no guarding. His bowel sounds were normal. His liver was normal to percussion. There were no masses. There was nothing, medically, wrong with his abdomen that a week of a proton pump inhibitor and not drinking would not handle, and she had, in her first three minutes with him, already written that prescription in her head. She completed the exam. She had him sit up. She rolled the stool closer, so that they were more or less at eye level. She folded her hands in her lap.

"Tyler."

"Yes."

"I'm going to prescribe you something for the stomach. It's likely this is gastritis, probably irritated by the drinking. The medicine will help with the acid. The medicine will not help with what's underneath the drinking. I don't think you drank like this a year ago. Am I right?"

He did not answer.

"Tyler."

He did not answer.

"I'd like to ask you, if it's all right, whether you are depressed."

He was looking at his boots again. A long second went by. Then he said, in a flat voice that was almost angry, "What does that matter."

"It matters a great deal, actually. For the stomach, among other things."

"I'm not depressed."

"All right."

He looked up. "I'm not."

"All right."

A longer second. She did not fill it. She had learned, a long time ago, in a different kind of clinic in a different kind of city, that the thing to do with this sort of silence was to stay inside it. Not to rescue the patient from it. Not to perform interest. Simply to be there, hands folded, eyes on him when he looked up, gaze soft when he looked down.

"My wife —" he said. And then he stopped.

She waited.

"My wife had a baby."

She waited.

"We had a baby."

She waited.

"She was twenty weeks along," Tyler Pratt said, and his voice broke on the word twenty, and he began to cry. He did not make a sound at first. His face simply changed. It contracted, the mouth going down at the corners, the eyes closing. His hand, still holding the baseball cap, tightened on the cap so that the brim bent. He made a single sound, a low in-drawn thing that was not a sob but a kind of caught breath, and then he said, "She was twenty weeks along. They told us at the ultrasound there was no heartbeat. They induced her. Two days later. It was a boy. He — we got to hold him. We named him Caleb."

Imani did not say anything. She was not thinking of what to say. She was with him.

"That was in August. It was August sixteenth. And I — I can't —" he stopped, shook his head, started again. "Bryn — that's my wife — Bryn is not — she doesn't — she's not eating either. She cries. She cries all the time. I don't know what to do. I come home and she's on the couch and she hasn't moved. Her mother comes over and sits with her. Her mother's been coming every day. I can't fix her. I can't fix me. I've been — I've been going to Kelsey's, after work. Just to — I don't know. To not go home for a little while. And then I come home and I'm worse than when I left, and she's worse than when I left, and the house is — the house is just —"

He stopped. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. His face was wet.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"For this. For crying."

"There is nothing here to apologize for."

"I came in for my stomach."

"You came in for your stomach. Your stomach is part of you. You are here. All of you."

He put his face in his hands.

She let him. She sat, her hands folded in her lap, her feet flat on the floor, and she let him cry. She did not reach out. She did not say the things that people said at such moments — that she was so sorry, that it would get better, that he was not alone — not because the things were untrue, but because he did not need them just yet. He needed the room to cry in. He had, she understood, not cried in front of another person in a long time, perhaps since the hospital itself, and the permission to cry in a warm bright room with another human being five feet from him was, in that moment, more valuable than any sentence.

After what was perhaps two minutes, although it was hard to say, he lifted his head. His eyes were red. His face was stiff from crying. His hands were trembling slightly.

"I don't know what to do," he said.

"I know."

"Bryn. I don't know what to do for Bryn."

"I know."

"I don't know what to do for me."

"I do, a little. Will you let me help?"

He nodded.

She took a breath. She was aware, distantly, that the clinic door in the front had opened and closed, and that there was a patient in the waiting room, and that Darla was handling whatever it was. She was aware also that what she did in this room in the next ten minutes mattered more than anything else she would do all day.

"Tyler. First. What happened to you and Bryn is a terrible thing. It is a grief that is very particular, and it is one of the hardest griefs there is, because the world doesn't know how to help you with it. People will say things that are wrong. Some people will say nothing at all, because they don't know what to say, and their silence will feel like abandonment but it mostly isn't. You and Bryn have been walking around inside something that nobody else can really see. It is not your fault. It is not your stomach's fault, either. Your stomach is doing what a body does when it has been carrying grief for two months. It is shouting."

He was listening. He was very still.

"Second. The drinking is not going to work. You know that. I don't need to tell you that. I'm telling you because I need to say it out loud, so that we can both agree that I said it. The drinking is making the stomach worse, and it is making the grief worse, although I understand completely why you are doing it. I am not going to scold you. I am going to ask you to try, for two weeks, to do something different instead. Can we talk about what something different might look like?"

"All right."

"Third. I would like to make you an appointment with someone who is not me. A counselor. A person whose whole job is to sit with people in grief. There is a woman up in Rhinelander named Dr. Wheeler. She has worked with couples after a loss like yours. I can call her office today. I can make the appointment for you. You do not have to make it yourself. You and Bryn can go together, or you can go separately, or you can go first and Bryn can come later when she's ready. Any of those is all right."

"All right."

"Fourth. Bryn. Is Bryn seeing anyone? A doctor?"

"She saw Dr. Petersen once. Before he left. He gave her something to sleep. She won't take it."

"I would like to see Bryn. Not as a patient, necessarily. Just to meet her. If she will come in. Will you ask her?"

"I'll ask her."

"If she won't come, I will come to her. That is not the usual thing, but it is a thing I can do, and in this case it is the thing I would like to do. Tell her I said that."

"I'll tell her."

"Fifth. You. The stomach. I am going to give you a two-week course of a medicine that will help the acid. I want you to take it every morning before breakfast. I want you to eat breakfast. Even if it is only a piece of toast. I want to see you in two weeks, and we will see how the stomach is doing, and we will also see how you are doing. All right?"

"All right."

"Sixth. The appointment with Dr. Wheeler. I am going to write her number on this card, and I am going to call her now, during this appointment, so that we can set it up together. Is that all right?"

He nodded.

"I want to see you in two weeks," she said. "If it gets worse before then — the stomach or anything else — you call. I gave Darla your number. She'll have it in the chart. You can call me after hours."

"Thank you."

"Thank you for coming in."

He stood. He put on his cap. He paused at the door.

"Doctor."

"Yes."

"I haven't — I haven't said his name out loud in a while. Not to anyone."

"Caleb."

"Yes."

"It is a good name."

"It was — Bryn picked it."

"Tell her I said it's a good name."

He nodded. He left.

Imani sat in the exam room for a moment after he had gone. The fluorescent light buzzed faintly overhead. She did not know Bryn Pratt. She did not know what Tyler had come home to every night in August and September and now into October. She could imagine. She could imagine it very well — better, perhaps, than she wished she could — because she had, in her own life, sat on a couch without moving once, three years ago, for the better part of a week, when she had finally understood that her marriage was over. She had not lost a child. She had lost a thing that was not a child. She did not conflate them. But she knew, from the inside, the shape of a body that had stopped.

She took a breath. She stood. She wiped down the exam table. She went back out into the hall, and she greeted her next patient, an elderly woman with a knee.

She closed the journal. She said the Greatest Name in her heart three times. She went to bed.

============================================================

The nearest Bahá'í community to Nine Pines was a town called Wausau, ninety miles to the south. Imani had known this before she moved. She had looked at the map, and she had counted the miles, and she had decided that ninety miles four times a month — the Feast came every nineteen days — was not too far. She had done longer drives in Chicago, to worse destinations, for less reason.

The first Feast since her move fell on a Sunday in mid-October. She drove down in the early afternoon, leaving the yellow farmhouse at two, arriving a little after three-thirty. The drive south was beautiful. The ridges had been at their height of color the week before and were now beginning to go past it — the reds going to rust, the yellows going to beige — but there was still enough fire in the maples along the river road to make her catch her breath twice. The road followed the Wisconsin River for much of the way, and the river that afternoon was slate-gray and smooth under a high pale sky, and eagles sat in the dead trees along the bank at intervals, watching the water.

She had arranged, by email, to arrive at the home of a woman named Farideh Golzar, who was the secretary of the Wausau Bahá'í community. Farideh lived in a two-story brick house on a quiet street three blocks from a small college, and when Imani pulled up she was standing on the porch — a small woman of perhaps sixty, in a long purple cardigan, with silver hair and an enormous warm smile — and the smile came forward down the steps and the smile became an embrace, and Imani, who had not been hugged in nineteen days, was briefly surprised by how much she had missed it.

"Imani-jan," said Farideh. "Come in. The others are here already. You are our guest."

Inside, the house smelled of saffron and rosewater. There was a samovar on the dining room table, hot, ticking quietly, and next to it a tray of tea glasses and a plate of sugar cubes and a plate of cardamom cookies and a plate of something Imani recognized after a moment as sohan asali, the brittle honey-and-almond candy her mother had made at Naw-Rúz. The smell of it brought her up short. She had not eaten it in nine years.

The community of Wausau, that afternoon, was six people. Farideh and her husband, Kaveh, a soft-spoken architect in his sixties who had the quiet alert expression of a man who had spent a great deal of his life listening to his wife with affection. A woman named Deborah, perhaps fifty, a white woman with short red hair and round glasses, who was a social worker at the hospital. A man named James, African American, in his late forties, who taught math at the community college and who greeted Imani with a grave courtesy that felt, after the previous week, like a specific kind of homecoming — the recognition of someone who knew a few things she knew. A woman named Sarah, younger, perhaps thirty-five, who had driven down from Rhinelander with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Hannah. Hannah was tall, awkward in the way of fourteen-year-olds, dressed in a black hoodie and black jeans, with a small silver ring in one nostril. She shook Imani's hand politely and then retreated to the corner of the sofa with a book.

"We are small today," Farideh said, as they took their places in the living room. “The feeling of ownership of the process has been manifested in, among other ways, greater contributions to the Fund.”

They began the Feast. Kaveh read from the Writings in a gentle voice, his English softly accented, and then James read a second passage in a voice that was slow and clear, and then Sarah read a third, and then Hannah, surprisingly, read a fourth — a short verse, which she read cleanly, and Imani saw Sarah's face soften with pride. Imani had brought nothing prepared to read. Farideh had told her not to, this first time. She sat and listened, and the words settled into her the way the first rain of a long dry season settles into the ground. She had not realized how thirsty she had been for this particular water.

After the devotional portion they moved, at Farideh's invitation, to the consultative portion. Farideh, as secretary, had a notebook. She read through a short list of items the community was considering. A children's class that Sarah was hoping to start in Rhinelander. A Naw-Rúz celebration being planned jointly with a community further south. A letter from a visitor asking about the Faith who had been in the library in Wausau. The children's class was discussed carefully — who would help, what curriculum, how often, who was available. Sarah said she was willing but uncertain whether there were enough children nearby to justify a class. James suggested inviting two children of a neighbor, non-Bahá'ís, whose mother had expressed interest. Deborah suggested beginning with just Hannah and the neighbor's two children and seeing what happened.

"Hannah," Sarah said, "would you be willing to help?"

Hannah looked up from her book. "Okay."

"Are you sure?"

"I said okay, Mom."

"All right."

The discussion moved on. The Naw-Rúz celebration was considered briefly, and a date was set for further discussion. The letter was discussed. Farideh would reply.

"Any other items," Farideh said. "Anything else on anyone's mind."

There was a pause. Imani had not planned to speak. She had not thought of herself as having an item. She had come to the Feast, she had thought, to receive. Not to offer. But the pause lasted, and Farideh looked at her, with kindness, with patience, with an invitation, and Imani found that she wanted to speak.

"I have moved," she said. "I moved to Nine Pines. It is a very small town. There are no other Bahá'ís. I knew this when I moved. But I find, three weeks in, that I did not fully understand, before, what it would be like to be the only one. I am not unhappy. I am not in distress. I love the town. I have started to love the town. I have a friend — an older woman, a Lutheran, who has been very kind — and I have patients who are becoming, already, people to me. I am not lonely in the way I thought I might be. But I am — " She paused. She did not want to overstate. "I am something else. I am — I miss the conversation. The kind of conversation we just had. The conversation in which people talk about what we ought to do and mean it, and talk about the Writings and mean them, and do not have to explain themselves first. I did not know how much I relied on that conversation until I did not have it. And I came down here today mostly to have it again."

She stopped. She looked at her hands.

It was Farideh who spoke first. "You are welcome here every nineteen days. You are welcome between the nineteen days, also, if you want to come up for a cup of tea."

“Consider, for instance, the revelation of the light of the Name of God, the Educator.”

"It is a comfort."

"I would like to hear them."

"I will write you an email."

Imani nodded. She could not speak for a moment. It was a small thing. It was not a small thing.

"Yes," she said. "I would like that."

"Good," Farideh said. "Then we will do that. Sunday evenings. After dinner. I will send the number."

"Thank you."

"It is what we are for," Farideh said, simply. "This is what the community is for. Not only the children's class. Not only the letters. Also this."

Hannah, in the corner of the sofa, looked up from her book again. Her expression was, for a moment, entirely unguarded. Then she looked down again, and turned a page.

They ate together afterward. Saffron rice. Kabob. A stew Imani had not had since her mother's funeral, which was ghormeh sabzi; she had cried, at her mother's funeral, over a pot of it that an Iranian Bahá'í had brought, and she cried now a little into the bowl, and Farideh put a hand on her shoulder without saying anything and moved on to the next person.

At seven, Imani said she had to go; she had a ninety-minute drive, and the morning would begin early. They embraced her at the door, each of them, one after another, and Hannah, who had retreated again to her book for the meal, came over and said, without quite looking at her, "I liked what you said. About the conversation."

"Thank you, Hannah."

"I have to say things at school. Sometimes. And people — people don't get it. Even when they're nice."

"I understand."

"Anyway." Hannah shrugged. "See you at next Feast."

"See you at next Feast."

Imani drove home in the dark. The road was empty for most of it. The stars were very bright. She did not play music. She did not want to. She wanted only the hum of the engine and the straight empty road and the dark hills on either side, and she wanted, more than anything else, to think about what it was going to be to live here. She had come to Wausau to be filled. She had been filled. And she had understood, driving home, that she had also been reminded — not unkindly — that she was going to be the filling for Nine Pines, and that this was a kind of work, and that it was the work that was now hers.

She arrived home a little after ten. She let herself into the dark house. She did not turn on the lights for a long minute. She stood in the entryway and she let her eyes adjust to the shapes of the rooms she had begun to know.

Then she went to the kitchen, and she made tea, and she drank it standing at the window, and she looked out at the spruces.

============================================================

The last Saturday of October was the kind of day the northern hardwood country gives sometimes in the middle of its slow surrender to winter, a day of such unreasonable beauty that it felt almost embarrassing, as though the country had dressed too formally for an occasion that did not, in fact, require it. The sky was the pure deep blue of a glazed bowl. The air was cold but not bitter. The leaves that remained on the maples were at their brightest — the reds almost violet, the yellows almost white — and the leaves that had fallen lay in drifts along the ditches and at the feet of fences, not yet crushed, not yet wet, dry and loud underfoot.

Imani had not gone to the clinic. The clinic was closed on Saturdays, although she had been on call the week before and would be again the week after. She had slept until eight, which was late for her. She had made strong coffee. She had sat at the kitchen table and written three letters — one to her brother Tunde in London, which he would not answer but which she wrote anyway, once a month, because it was a practice; one to her friend Anna in Chicago; and one to Farideh, thanking her for the Feast. She had addressed the letters. She had stamped them. She had set them beside the door to take to the post office on Monday. She had eaten breakfast — two eggs, toast, a slice of the chicken and wild rice casserole that was still in the refrigerator and that she was finishing slowly, with gratitude, throughout the week — and then, at ten, she had put on a warm sweater and her boots, and she had walked into town.

She had not taken the car. The distance was a little under two miles. She had wanted to walk. She wanted to understand the distance with her legs and her lungs, the way a person understands a thing when they have walked it. The county road was quiet. One pickup truck passed her, going the other way, and the driver lifted his hand and she lifted hers, and then she was alone again with the road and the yellow grass and the far-off sound of a tractor in a field she could not see.

She walked to the old Lutheran meeting-house. She did not walk to Bertha's. She did not walk to the post office. She walked to the old meeting-house, because she had wanted, on this particular day, to stand under the nine pines.

The old meeting-house stood at a bend in the road where the ridge came down to meet a meadow, and the graveyard lay on its south side, behind a low stone wall, and the pines stood above the graveyard on the ridge. She had driven past them every day for a month. She had not yet stopped. She had wanted to wait for the right moment, not because she thought moments needed to be right but because she had wanted to give this particular moment the dignity of being chosen.

She went through the graveyard gate. The graveyard was old — the oldest stones went back to the 1870s — and it was cared for. Someone had been there recently. The grass had been cut short. The leaves had been raked from the plots, though fresh leaves had fallen since. She walked slowly among the stones. She read names — Heikkinen, Olsen, Knutson, Pratt, Lundgren, Kreutz, Petersen, Halvorsen, Rhodes — and she saw that the town she had come to had been here for a long time and would be here for a long time yet, and that she was not the first stranger to walk these paths, and that the stones were not judging her.

She stopped at one stone in particular, without meaning to. A small gray marker, set low in the grass. DANIEL ARNE HALVORSEN, 1969-1988. BELOVED SON. Below the dates, a line from Psalms, which she read. She stood for a moment in front of the stone. She had not known, until this moment, that she would find this stone, and she did not know, now that she had found it, exactly what she wanted to do. She did not know the young man. She had not known him. She had, however, known his mother for a month, and she had sat at his mother's table and eaten his mother's chicken and wild rice, and she understood that the quiet woman in the warm kitchen came in part from the weight of this small stone, and she understood also that her own being there was not a coincidence but a small gift of coincidence, and she said, softly, because it seemed wrong not to say something — "Alláh'u'Abhá, Daniel" — and then she moved on.

She walked to the back of the graveyard, where a path led up the ridge to the pines.

She climbed the path slowly. It was steeper than it had looked from the road. The pines grew taller as she approached them, as though the climb were revealing them. At the top of the ridge she came out among them, and she stopped.

They were enormous. She had not understood, from the road, how tall they actually were. They stood in a loose line along the ridge, not precisely nine — she counted, and she got ten, and then she counted again and got eleven, depending on which small ones she included — and their trunks were straight and silver-brown, and their branches began high above her head, and the air among them was the still, resinous air of old trees. The ground beneath her boots was a deep soft bed of brown needles, fragrant where she pressed into them. She could hear, far below, a car passing on the road, and she could hear, more nearly, the wind moving in the tops of the pines, a long slow sound that was both exactly like and exactly unlike the sound of wind in any other kind of tree.

She stood under the pines.

She did not pray. She had, over the past month, prayed in the mornings and the evenings, in the ways she had been taught, saying the Obligatory Prayer and others, and she had sat in silence with the Writings open on her lap, and she had read, and she had meditated, and she had done these things with the imperfect regularity of a person who was trying, in the middle of a large change, to keep a practice alive. But she did not pray under the pines. She had not climbed the ridge to pray. She had climbed the ridge to stand, and to let the trees be the trees, and to be the person standing among them.

She closed her eyes. She breathed. She smelled the resin and the cold earth and, faintly, a woodsmoke from some far-off chimney. She felt the cold move along her face, not sharp, not bitter, just there. She heard the wind in the tops. She felt her feet on the needles. She felt, behind her closed eyelids, the ordinary light of a bright October afternoon. She felt, for the first time in three years — truly for the first time — a small, distinct sense that she was in her own life.

When she opened her eyes, there was a deer.

It stood perhaps twenty yards from her, between two of the pines, a young doe, not a fawn but not full-grown. Its ears were wide and alert. Its eyes were enormous. It did not run. It stood, and it looked at her, and she looked at it, and neither of them moved.

She had seen deer many times since she had moved here. She had seen them from the car, from the kitchen window, along the county road in the dawn. She had not been closer than fifty yards to one. This one was twenty.

It stood. She stood. The wind moved high above them both. A leaf fell somewhere behind her, a dry clattering fall, and neither of them turned to it. The doe tilted its head slightly, as though considering her more carefully. Imani did not breathe. Or she breathed, but she did not breathe deliberately. She felt her heart in her chest, not racing, simply present.

After what might have been a minute or might have been thirty seconds, the doe moved. It did not bolt. It took one step, and then another, and then a third, in no hurry, not looking away from her, and then at the fourth step it was out from among the pines and past the last of them, and then it was gone into the trees on the far side, and she could hear, for a moment, the soft deliberate sound of its hooves on the needles, and then she could not hear it, and it was not there.

She stood for a long moment after it was gone. Her eyes had filled with tears without her noticing. She did not wipe them. She let them stand.

"Alláh'u'Abhá," she said, softly, not to the deer, which was no longer there, and not, exactly, as a prayer. She said it as a breath. She said it as an exhale. She said it because it was the phrase that had risen in her, as it often did in particular moments — moments of surprise, moments of gratitude, moments in which she had understood something she had not understood a minute before — and she said it because she was here.

She was here. She was in Nine Pines. She had a clinic with a tetanus-smelling cabinet and a bad coffee pot. She had a friend named Margaret who had a dead son and a laugh and a recipe for chicken and wild rice. She had a pastor who read Merton, and a librarian who knew every word, and a farmer named Wendell who had had the grace to apologize to her without being asked, over a Scrabble board, for a thought he had not fully thought yet when he caught it. She had a young man named Tyler who had said his son's name out loud to her, perhaps for the first time since the hospital, and a patient named Bryn whom she had not yet met but who she would, and a teenage girl named Hannah ninety miles away who had liked what she said about conversation. She had three deer in a field at dusk. She had eleven pines along a ridge, or nine, depending on how you counted.

She had a country that had not asked her to explain herself.

She stood under the pines for a while longer. Then she walked back down the path, through the graveyard, out the gate, and home. The walk took an hour. The light lowered as she walked. By the time she came to the yellow farmhouse the sun was low in the spruces and the kitchen window was a small gold rectangle in the dusk.

She let herself in. She hung her coat. She put the kettle on.

She would have dinner, and she would read for an hour, and then she would pray — properly, kneeling, in the way she had been praying since she was fifteen — and then she would sleep, and tomorrow would be Sunday, and she would call Wausau, and next week would be the beginning of November, and winter was coming, and she was ready for winter, or as ready as she could be.

She was here.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PARTS 2-4]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The snow came on a Tuesday, the eleventh of November, and Imani Adeyemo watched it fall from the window of her examination room between patients. At first she thought it was ash. That was foolish; there had been no fire, no reason for ash, and yet her mind went there, to the Chicago of a different life, where she had once stood in a hospital parking lot at three in the morning and watched flakes of something drift down from a sky turned orange by city light, and had stood there long enough to understand that it was only snow, only water, only weather.

Here it was weather again. The flakes were the size of moth wings. They did not seem to fall so much as settle, as though the air itself were tired and was laying itself down. Beyond the glass, the white pine across the street had already begun to take on the look of a woman in a shawl. The maple at the corner of the clinic lot had lost most of its leaves in October, and the bare branches caught the snow and held it up as if for examination.

She had never watched snow this way before. In Chicago it had been an inconvenience, a thing that fouled the hem of her coat and ruined the timing of the L train and made the streets between her apartment and the hospital a slush of salt and refuse. In Lagos, where she had been born and where she had lived until she was seven, snow had been a word in books, an abstract and suspect substance associated with Englishmen and their melancholy. She had gone to Minnesota for her residency and had learned to hate snow there too, the practical, professional, trudging hatred of a young woman who could not afford to be late.

But here, in Nine Pines, at forty-two, looking out the clinic window on a Tuesday morning with a lull between patients and a cold mug of tea beside her elbow, she watched the snow fall and felt nothing but a slow and wondering attention. As if she had forgotten the nature of the substance and were being reintroduced.

The nurse, Dorothy Kincaid, knocked and entered holding a clipboard.

"Mrs. Ostergaard is here for her B12," Dorothy said. "And I put Mr. Dahl in three. The wrist."

"The wrist?"

"The wrist. Slipped on the steps of the post office. He's mad about it."

Imani turned from the window. "How mad?"

"Medium mad. Not the worst I've seen from him. He's sixty-one and it's November; he expects this from himself. It's his own steps next time that'll make him properly furious."

Imani smiled. She had learned, in her eight months at this clinic, that Dorothy's estimations of patient mood were as reliable as any diagnostic tool she carried. Dorothy had been the clinic nurse for twenty-six years; she had seen three doctors come and go before Imani, and she remembered the wrists and ankles and kidneys of everyone in the town. She was seventy years old and had the posture of a woman half her age, and her hair, which had been red once, was now the color of a pewter spoon.

"I'll do Mrs. Ostergaard first," Imani said. "Start Mr. Dahl on ice and the films."

"Already done."

"Of course."

Dorothy paused at the door. "First real snow," she said. "You'll want to leave early today. The salt trucks come out around four but the back roads are the back roads. And put the kettle on the stove at home before you go to bed. If it freezes, you'll thank me."

"The kettle?"

"The kettle on the pilot light. Keeps the kitchen pipes. Your old furnace in that rental house won't be enough once we get into January. I'll come by and show you." Dorothy said this in the tone of a woman making an appointment with herself, and Imani understood that Dorothy had simply, invisibly, decided to take her on.

"Thank you, Dorothy."

"Don't thank me yet. Wait till you see my casseroles."

Dorothy left. Imani took one more look at the snow. She thought of the nine pines at the edge of town, which she had walked to in the long October evenings and under which she had whispered, alone, the words that belonged to her. She wondered what the pines looked like under snow. She suspected that they looked, at this moment, like what they were — tall, patient, older than anyone in the town, gathering a new coat without complaint.

Mrs. Ostergaard was ninety-one years old and had the skin of an onion. She offered Imani her upper arm with the old, dignified indifference of a woman who had been giving her upper arm to various authorities for the better part of a century. Imani administered the vitamin and asked about her son, who lived in Eau Claire and did not visit often.

"He came last weekend," Mrs. Ostergaard said. "Brought the grandchildren."

"That's lovely."

"They left a sock. I don't know whose. It's a small sock. I'm waiting for him to call and ask about it."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then I'll wash it and keep it. A sock is a sock."

Mrs. Ostergaard put her sleeve down with the same efficiency she had used to roll it up.

"Doctor," she said.

"Yes?"

"You drive that little red car, don't you."

"I do."

"Put a bag of sand in the trunk. Over the back axle. It's front-wheel drive?"

"It is."

"Then over the front. I forget. My husband used to do this for me." Mrs. Ostergaard considered. "Ask Wendell. He'll know. And don't use the cruise control in snow. Young people like the cruise control. It'll kill you."

"I'm not that young," Imani said.

"You're young to me," Mrs. Ostergaard said, and stood up without using the arm of the chair, and made her way to the coat rack as if she had no intention of dying for another twenty years.

Mr. Dahl was less dignified. He sat in examination room three with his left arm cradled against his chest and a grim expression that was somehow performed and genuine at once, the way certain men of a certain age wear pain. The films were already clipped to the light box. A clean, transverse fracture of the distal radius. No displacement. He had landed well, if such a thing can be said of landing on concrete.

"Mr. Dahl," Imani said, sitting down across from him. "I'm sorry for the pain. The good news is this is a clean break and we can cast it here."

"How long?"

"Six weeks. Probably five if you behave."

"I'm sixty-one years old. I don't behave."

"Then six."

He made a sound in his throat that was not quite a laugh.

"Doc," he said.

"Yes."

"You ever set a cast before?"

She looked at him steadily. This was not the first time she had been asked some version of this question since coming to Nine Pines, and she had learned that the honest answer was always better than the proud one.

"I've set more casts than I can count," she said. "I worked in an emergency department in Chicago for twelve years. Children fall. Old men fall. Drunks fall. Dancers fall. I have set them all."

"Dancers."

"Dancers."

"All right," Mr. Dahl said. "Cast me."

She cast him. Dorothy assisted. The plaster went on cleanly, the fiberglass over it, and Mr. Dahl watched with the resigned attention of a man watching someone else fix something he had broken. When it was done he flexed his fingers experimentally, winced, and nodded.

"Thank you, Doc," he said. "My wife'll come get me. She's in the library."

"Give her my regards," Imani said. She was thinking of Lillian, the librarian, who would be at Scrabble on Friday, and she was making a small mental note to ask after Mr. Dahl.

"Oh, it's not Lillian," Mr. Dahl said, as if reading her. "My wife's in the library because my wife is always in the library. She's reading her way through the mystery section. She's on the W's."

"Ambitious."

"Tell that to her. Tell her the V's have better sentences." He paused. "She won't listen. She's been on a Wendell tear. You know the Dutch detective ones."

"Is that a series?"

"Ma'am," Mr. Dahl said, gently shocked, "you have got to go see Lillian. She'll sort you out."

"Doctor," Dorothy said. "Go home. I'll close up. There's no one else on the book till three, and Linda called to cancel. Go drive in it while there's still light."

"You're sending me out into the snow to practice."

"I'm sending you out to practice. There's a difference."

Imani drove home slowly.

Home was a rented two-bedroom with a screened porch on Linden Street, six blocks from the clinic. In Chicago six blocks had been a five-minute walk; here six blocks was most of town. She had bought the car, a used red Subaru, from the dealership in Wausau the week she had moved. She had been assured that it would be adequate in snow. She had never driven a Subaru in snow. She had driven a Prius in slush. She had driven a borrowed Corolla in a freak October flurry on the interstate, sixteen years ago. That was all her experience.

She took the long way home, the way that wound past the lake. The lake was not yet frozen; it was the gray of a pewter plate, and the snow was falling into it and vanishing, which seemed to her a private astonishment. She had never seen snow disappear into water before. She slowed the car, then slowed it more, then eased to a stop at the turnout by the boat launch, and sat for a minute with the wipers running and watched the snow meet the water and become the water.

She thought of her mother. Her mother had come from Lagos to London in 1969 and had seen snow for the first time in Hampstead, at twenty-two, and had told Imani once that the thing that had surprised her most was not the cold but the silence. "Snow eats noise," her mother had said. Imani had not understood this as a child. She understood it now. The turnout was silent in a way the lake was not silent in June. The boat launch, the parked car, the firs at the edge of the lot — everything was muffled, listening.

She drove home without turning on the radio.

Linden Street in snow was a Christmas card. Wendell had told her this would happen and she had smiled and not believed him. Every house on the street had a porch and every porch had some accessory of evening life — a rocking chair, a metal plant stand, a pair of rubber boots turned upside down on a boot tree — and the snow had begun to drape itself over all of these, softening and simplifying. The houses took on the aspect of loaves of bread.

Her own house was the smallest on the block, a single-story bungalow with cream siding and a porch the previous tenant had painted a surprising, cheerful red. Imani had thought she would repaint it. She had not. She liked, now, the way the red showed through the snow.

She got out and stood a moment in her driveway. The cold was dry and serious and entered her immediately through the cuffs of her coat. She tipped her face up. The flakes fell against her cheeks and held for an instant before melting. Her breath made a small weather of its own in front of her. She had the sense, standing there, of being briefly outside of her own story — of being only a body, only an animal, in a landscape that did not know her.

She had thought this before, in various ways, in the eight months since she had come. But she had thought it each time about a thing — the clinic, the house, the Scrabble on Fridays, Margaret Halvorsen's kitchen. She had not thought it, before, about the whole. She had not thought it about the snow.

She went inside. She turned up the thermostat. She remembered Dorothy's instruction about the kettle. She put the kettle on the stove and left the pilot on low. She stood at her kitchen window for a long time and watched the snow fall on the red porch.

In the evening Margaret Halvorsen called.

"Are you in?"

"I'm in."

"Good. Don't go out again tonight. And when you do go out tomorrow, go slow. The county plows Highway 51 first and then the rest of us after. Our street won't be touched till Thursday. I'll have Arne bring his tractor through at dawn. He does the block."

"He does the block."

"He has done the block for twenty-eight years. My Harold did it before him. It's what the block does."

"Thank you, Margaret."

"Nothing to thank. Come over tomorrow evening if you like. I made bread. I always make too much bread when it snows."

Imani said she would. She hung up and stood with the phone warm in her palm and thought about her mother again, and about the word block, which in Chicago had meant a geographical unit, and here, evidently, meant something more like a mutual covenant, a handshake renewed by snow.

That night she could not read. She sat with a book open on her lap and watched the living-room window instead. The snow had stopped falling around eight and the cold had deepened and the stars had come out, visible in a way they never were in the city, and she could see through the branches of her neighbor's spruce the faintest drift of a Milky Way.

"Alláh-u-Abhá."

The words were small in the quiet house. They hung in the air like the breath of her own in the driveway, brief, personal, real. She did not say them again. She did not need to. She had said them once.

She slept well, for the first time in a week.

In the morning Arne's tractor went down the block at a quarter to six. She heard the clean mechanical growl, the scrape of the blade, the irregular thud as it met the end of each driveway. She got up. She made tea. She looked out at a Linden Street that had been neatened overnight.

The drive to the clinic took her twelve minutes instead of six. She made the turns carefully. The Subaru held. At a four-way stop on Main she found herself behind a pickup truck that had stopped too short and was slipping slightly sideways on its own momentum. She eased her foot off the brake. She did not panic. She noted, with the detached curiosity she brought to a new clinical instrument, that her body did not want to panic. Her hands were steady on the wheel. Something in her had received the information of the snow and had adjusted.

At the clinic Dorothy took her coat.

"How was it?"

"It was fine."

"First time driving in real snow, wasn't it."

"First real time."

"Fine," Dorothy said. "That's all you need to say. Now come do your morning."

They had a heavy day. Two wrists, not counting Mr. Dahl's from the day before; a child with a fever; a woman with a new lump in her breast that Imani thought, on careful examination, was a cyst, and about which she was going to order an ultrasound in Wausau that afternoon, not because she was worried but because she did not want to be careless. She worked through the morning without looking at the window. At lunchtime she ate a sandwich Dorothy had made her — Dorothy had started making her sandwiches in September, unasked, and Imani had stopped protesting in October — and stood, finally, at the back door of the clinic, and looked out at the alley, and saw the snow on the dumpster and the old brick wall of the insurance office next door, and felt a thing she could not name.

The afternoon brought a young woman named Kelsey Obermann, twenty-three, four months pregnant with her first, and her husband, who was twenty-five and had the fine dust of a day's carpentry still on his sleeves. Kelsey had come for her standard prenatal visit. She had had an ultrasound in Wausau two weeks ago. The baby was fine. Kelsey was fine. Blood pressure fine, heartbeat fine, weight fine. Imani went through the visit with the particular patience she had always brought to young pregnancies, and which, these last months in Nine Pines, had come to feel like a kind of homage, as if she were offering each first-time mother in the town a counterweight to the losses she could not undo.

"Any questions?" Imani said.

"I have one," Kelsey said. She glanced at her husband. "If I — if something happens, if I go early, if something's wrong, do I come here or do I go to Wausau?"

"Depending on what it is. For something that's clearly labor, day or night, call me first. Here's my number." Imani wrote it on the back of her card. "I will tell you whether to come in or drive. For anything serious, if you feel you cannot wait, go straight to Wausau. You have time. Most things take longer than you think."

"And if the road is bad."

"If the road is bad we will figure it out," Imani said. "That is what I am here for."

When they had gone she sat at her desk for a moment and looked at her hand on the pen. In Chicago she had delivered three babies in her life, all of them emergencies, none of them planned. She was a family practice physician; obstetrics was not her specialty. She had made it clear when she was hired at Nine Pines that she would manage prenatals and transfer deliveries to Wausau. The arrangement had been agreed. The hospital in Wausau was ninety minutes away on good roads.

Ninety minutes on good roads.

She wrote the word GOOD in her margin and then, slowly, crossed it out.

She closed the chart. She went on with her day.

"It's me."

"I know it's you," Margaret said from the kitchen. "No one else would be knocking snow off on my mat. I have bread and I have soup. Take your coat off."

The kitchen smelled of yeast and tomatoes. Margaret had made a dark tomato soup with basil from the plants she kept on her sill in winter, and a round loaf of oat bread that she had cut into thick slices. She had set the table for two. She poured Imani a glass of water from a pitcher she kept in the refrigerator.

"How was the drive?" Margaret said.

"It was fine."

"First snow."

"First real snow."

"Good. You'll be all right. You're paying attention. That's most of it." Margaret sat. She had not lit candles; she was not that kind of host; but she had put down placemats and cloth napkins, and she had taken off her apron and hung it on its hook, and the kitchen had the quiet formality of a woman who believed that dinner, even dinner alone with a friend in a snowstorm, deserved its courtesies. "Sit," she said. "Eat. Tell me about your day."

Imani told her about Kelsey Obermann.

"You'll do whatever you have to do. You're not alone up here. Sarah in Wausau is a good Ob. Hap at the fire hall has done three babies himself in the back of an ambulance and he doesn't even like to talk about it. We'll get through a baby if a baby comes in the middle of the night."

"We."

"We. You thought we meant the clinic?"

"I thought we meant the royal we."

Margaret laughed. She had a deep, surprised laugh, as if each joke took her aback. "Eat your soup," she said. "Tomorrow is Friday. Pastor Rhodes is bringing a Bananagrams to see if we can be persuaded. I told him we could not. But he is stubborn."

"I am not playing Bananagrams with Pastor Rhodes."

"Of course not. We will crush him. Eat."

Imani ate. The soup was hot and dark and faintly sweet, and the bread was dense and warm, and she realized, halfway through, that she was very hungry, and that she had been hungry for a long time without noticing.

She walked home at eight o'clock under a sky cleared of all its afternoon weather. The stars were astonishing. Orion had come up over the oaks. She stood for a moment in the middle of Linden Street, which was unlit and deserted at that hour, and looked up at Orion, and thought, without any particular reason, of her brother in Lagos, whom she had not spoken to in six months, and to whom she resolved to write a letter the next day.

She did not write the letter the next day. She wrote it in December, after many things, and she wrote it after the pines had changed, and after the pastor had asked her about her faith, and after a baby had come screaming into the world in her small clinic at three-seventeen in the morning. But she did not know any of this yet. She knew, that night, only the silence, and the stars, and the sound of her own boots on the unshoveled walk, and the yellow square of her own living-room window at the end of the block, waiting for her to come home.

[END OF CHAPTER 9]

The call came at two forty-one in the morning on a Saturday, the twenty-ninth of November, eighteen days after the first snow. Imani had been asleep. She had gone to bed early, at ten, after a Friday at the clinic that had ended with a boy named Jacob Willems, aged six, who had stuck a dried bean up his nose and presented to her office with a beatific expression of curiosity. She had removed the bean. She had sent him home. She had eaten a late supper of rice and a poached egg. She had read for twenty minutes. She had slept.

The phone woke her out of a dream in which her mother had been braiding her hair. She sat up. She found the phone on the second ring.

"Doctor Adeyemo."

"Doctor — it's Kelsey. Kelsey Obermann. I'm — my water broke. I think my water broke. I'm bleeding. It's not a lot but it's more than — I don't know what to do."

"How long ago did your water break?"

"Twenty minutes? Maybe thirty. I didn't — I didn't want to call. I thought it would stop."

"Kelsey. You did the right thing. Listen to me. You're four and a half months along, is that right?"

"Eighteen weeks. Nineteen tomorrow."

"All right. I need you to stay very calm. I need you to lie down on your left side. Do not get up. Is Pete with you?"

"He's here. He's — he's getting the car."

"Tell Pete to put the car in the driveway but not to drive anywhere yet. I am coming to you. I am leaving my house now. I will be there in six minutes. Do not go anywhere. If the bleeding gets heavier, if you soak a pad all the way through in ten minutes, tell Pete to call 911 — not me, 911 — and they will send Hap from the fire hall. Otherwise you stay there and I will come to you."

"Okay. Okay."

"Breathe. Slow breaths. You are going to be all right. I am coming."

Imani hung up. She was already standing. She had begun standing without being aware of it, the way a body that has done this before will stand.

She dressed in what she had laid out the night before. She had been laying out her clothes at night since her second week in Nine Pines; she had learned that this was a town where a phone could ring. She pulled on the sweater, the thick socks, the jeans. She pulled on the coat. She grabbed her bag, which lived by the door, and which contained the things she had decided the bag should contain on a day in September when she had driven home from the clinic and thought, and pulled over, and made a list on a receipt from the gas station.

She did not fill the thermos now. There was no time. She put the bag in the passenger seat of the Subaru. She started the car. The windshield had frosted in the night. She ran the defroster. She scraped the windshield with the back of a business card she had in her pocket because she could not find the scraper. She started driving before the glass was fully clear.

The streets were not yet plowed. It had snowed again in the evening, a brief dry flurry, and the streets of Nine Pines looked like a child's drawing of streets, pale and unmarked. Imani drove at twenty miles an hour. She did not use the cruise control. Mrs. Ostergaard had been right about that; she had not used it all winter. The Subaru held. The car made a small grinding sound at the turn onto Birch and she did not know whether this was a problem and resolved to ignore it for the next six minutes.

Kelsey and Pete lived on the east edge of town in a small ranch house Pete had inherited from his grandmother and that he had been slowly fixing up all year. Imani had been to the house once, in October, for a birthday party Pete's mother had insisted on. She knew the address. She knew the driveway sloped. She pulled up beside the truck Pete had already started and left running, and she saw through the living-room window the light of a single lamp and the silhouette of a man walking back and forth with a phone pressed to his ear.

Pete opened the door before she knocked.

"She's in the bedroom," he said. His voice was high. "She's — she says the bleeding is worse."

"Pete. Look at me. You are doing very well. I need you to do two more things. First, I need you to open the door to the bedroom and stay out of the way while I look at her. Second, I need you to start a list on a piece of paper of the times — write down every time I tell you — and the amount of anything I tell you. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Good. Go get paper."

He went. She went to the bedroom.

Kelsey was on the bed on her left side. Her eyes were very wide. The comforter was pulled up to her waist. There was a darker patch beneath her. Imani could see, without touching anything, that the bleeding was real but not yet catastrophic.

"Kelsey. Hi."

"Hi."

"I am going to put my bag down and wash my hands in your bathroom and come back and examine you. While I do that, you keep breathing. Pete is going to stand in the doorway and write down times. I am going to touch your belly and feel the baby's heart. All right?"

“Today throughout the five continents of the globe it is Europe and most sections of America that are renowned for law and order, government and commerce, art and industry, science, philosophy and education.”

Imani washed. The sink was pink and cold and had a small rubber ducky on the rim, and she thought, inanely, that this ducky had been put on this sink in readiness for a baby that was still twenty-one weeks away and might not come. She washed to the elbow. She dried with a towel from her own bag, not the family's towel. She came back in.

She pulled the comforter down gently. The bleeding was moderate. There was no gush, no clotting of the sort she most feared; there was a steady dark seep. She pressed on Kelsey's abdomen with a professional lightness. It was not rigid. It was soft. She placed the fetal doppler, warmed it against her own forearm first, and pressed it into the cool jelly of the belly and listened.

The heartbeat came. A hundred and forty-four. Steady. Strong.

"Baby is fine," Imani said, quietly. "I hear the heartbeat. It is a hundred and forty-four and steady. Pete, write that down. Two fifty-three a.m., fetal heart rate one forty-four, strong."

She heard Pete say, behind her, "Fetal heart rate one forty-four, strong." She heard him writing.

"Kelsey, I am going to do an internal exam. I need to see where the bleeding is coming from. It will be a little uncomfortable. Tell me if anything hurts."

"Okay.“To pierce such veils is the mightiest of all acts, and to rend them asunder the most meritorious of all deeds!” “On their tongue,” He moreover has written, “the mention of God hath become an empty name; in their midst His holy Word a dead letter.”Kelsey. Pete. I want to tell you what I think. I could be wrong. But I want you to know what I think. The baby's heartbeat is strong. The cervix is closed. The bleeding is moderate but not heavy. You are not miscarrying right now. But something has happened and I need to know what. You need an ultrasound. You need it tonight. We have two choices."

"Okay."

"Choice one. I take you to the clinic. I have an old ultrasound there. It is not as good as the one in Wausau but it can tell me if there is a placental problem. I can monitor you there for a few hours. If things are stable by morning I call Sarah in Wausau and she tells me what to do next."

"Okay."

"Choice two. We drive to Wausau now. Ninety minutes on roads that are not all plowed. You would be in a hospital by four thirty. It is the safer choice if anything changes. But the drive itself carries risk. If you started to bleed heavily on Highway 51 I would not have what I need."

Pete said, "What would you do?"

"I would take her to my clinic."

"Okay," Pete said.

"I want Kelsey to say."

Kelsey's eyes had filled. She did not look afraid anymore. She looked, to Imani, like a woman deciding.

"Take me to the clinic," Kelsey said. "If you say I need to go to Wausau later, I'll go."

"Good."

Imani called Dorothy from Pete's kitchen phone while Pete was putting his wife in the truck. Dorothy answered on the second ring, in the voice of a woman who had been expecting a phone call since the age of thirty.

"Go ahead."

"Kelsey Obermann. Eighteen weeks. Bleeding, moderate. Fetal heart rate one forty-four and stable. I am bringing her to the clinic. I need you."

"I'm dressed."

"The road on Birch —"

"Arne is already up. He heard you drive by. He's bringing the tractor."

"How does he know —"

"He doesn't. He heard you drive by and he knows you and he got up. Go. I will see you at the clinic in fifteen minutes."

Imani hung up. She stood at Pete's counter for a second with the phone in her hand. She thought of nothing. She was breathing. She had done this before, under different names, in different rooms — she had done this in the ER in Chicago at forty-eight hours into a shift, she had done this once at a friend's wedding where the groom's grandfather had collapsed during the toast. But she had not done it in a kitchen on the east edge of Nine Pines at two fifty-seven in the morning with a tractor starting up somewhere in the dark.

She went out.

Pete drove slowly. Imani sat in the back with Kelsey, whose head was on a pillow Pete had grabbed from the bedroom. Imani had her fingers on Kelsey's wrist. She was counting the pulse. It was ninety-six. Elevated but not dangerous. She watched Kelsey's face and she watched the dark road ahead and she kept talking, a low steady narration, about nothing, about the cold, about the shape of the Christmas lights on the Matheson house that they were about to pass. Kelsey listened and kept breathing.

Dorothy was already at the clinic. The lights were on. The heat had been turned up. The ultrasound machine had been wheeled into the exam room that had the big table, and Dorothy had covered the table with clean sheets and had laid out what Imani would need. Pete carried his wife in. Dorothy took one look at Kelsey and said, "Kelsey honey, you're going to be all right. We've got you. Pete, you come with me," and she took Pete by the elbow and led him to the little sitting area and sat him down, and came back and said, in a voice only Imani heard, "Pressure was a hundred ten over seventy when I did it just now in the doorway."

"Thank you, Dorothy."

"What do you need."

"I need the ultrasound. And I need you to call Sarah Connolly in Wausau. Tell her what we have. Tell her I will call her in twenty minutes with an ultrasound finding."

"On it."

Imani did the ultrasound. The machine was old and the image was not as crisp as she would have liked. But the placenta was where it should be. There was no previa. There was what looked like a small subchorionic hematoma at the edge of the placenta — a bruise, essentially, a pocket of blood between the placenta and the uterine wall. It was not large. The fetus, in the grainy image, was moving. Its tiny hand was near its face. Its heartbeat came through the speaker, a thudding four-hundred-year rhythm.

Imani stared at the screen a long moment.

"Dorothy," she called quietly.

Dorothy came.

"Subchorionic hematoma. Small. Placenta is fundal and intact. Fetus is active. Heart rate one forty-four."

"Oh thank God."

"Yes."

"What do you want."

"I want to call Sarah. I want to keep Kelsey on her side for two hours and watch the bleeding. If it reduces I will send her home in the morning on strict bed rest and call Sarah in Wausau to see her in forty-eight hours."

"And if it doesn't reduce."

"Then we go."

"Then we go."

Dorothy put her hand on Imani's shoulder briefly, a touch so brief Imani almost missed it, and went to call Sarah.

The next two hours were the longest of Imani's winter. She sat on a stool at the foot of Kelsey's bed. She did not sit in a chair against the wall. She sat where Kelsey could see her. She kept one hand on Kelsey's ankle. She checked the fetal heart rate every fifteen minutes. She checked the maternal pulse. She checked the bleeding. At four a.m. the bleeding had slowed to a dark trickle. At four-thirty it had nearly stopped. By five the pad Dorothy had put under Kelsey was showing only a faint stain at the edges, and the fetal heart rate was one thirty-eight, and Kelsey was asleep.

Imani stood. She went to the waiting area. Pete was sitting with his hands between his knees. He looked up.

“The International Teaching Centre was established in June 1973.” Imani said. "The bleeding has nearly stopped. The baby is fine. The baby has been fine for the last three hours."

Pete made a sound that was not a word.

“All will admit, therefore, that the divine religions are intended to be the means of true human cooperation, that they are united in the purpose of making humanity one family, for they rest upon the universal foundation of love, and love is the first effulgence of Divinity.”

“Now since this person was wont to pass the greater portion of his time in a state of intoxication and was devoid of foresight, he became the accomplice and confederate of those Shaykhs in ‘Iráq, and girded up his loins stoutly to destroy and demolish.”

Pete put his face in his hands. He did not sob. He made a small, wrung-out sound. Imani stood and did not move. She had learned, years ago, that there is a moment in this work when the best thing a doctor can do is to be a body in the room. She was a body in the room for about a minute and a half. Then Pete wiped his face and said, "I'll go home. Thank you, Doc. Thank you."

"Go home, Pete. Drive slowly."

He went. The door opened and closed and the cold air came in and went away. Dorothy came and stood beside her.

"Subchorionic hematoma," Dorothy said. "I learned that word when I was thirty-two. I've seen maybe twelve in my life."

"They usually resolve."

"They usually do."

"She'll carry to term."

"Probably."

They stood a minute at the window. The sky to the east was not yet light but it had lost its absolute black. The streetlamp over the clinic sign had a halo of moisture in it; the air had warmed slightly with the snow.

"Dorothy," Imani said. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Go get the other table bed made up and catch an hour. I'll watch her."

"I can't sleep."

"Then go walk."

Imani looked at her.

"Doctor," Dorothy said. "Go walk. I've seen you after nights like this. It won't hurt you to walk. I'll sit with her and she won't wake up for another hour, and if she does, I'll call you, and you can be back here in four minutes. Go walk. It's the kind of cold that won't kill you. Put on your coat."

Imani put on her coat. She took her scarf from the hook. She put on her hat and her gloves. She walked out of the clinic into the streets of Nine Pines at a quarter past five on a Saturday morning in late November, and she walked.

She did not walk to the lake. She did not walk to Margaret's. She walked, without having planned it, to the nine pines.

The nine pines stood in a loose half-circle on a low rise at the north edge of town, where the road out of Nine Pines began to climb toward the county line. They had been there, someone had told her in September, since before the town had been platted. They had not been planted; they had simply been. The town had organized itself around them, more or less — the oldest street ran toward them, the first church had been built in line with them, and the town had taken its name from them after a town meeting in 1901 at which nobody had wanted to name it after any of the families who had first settled there.

They were very tall. Even with snow on them they were very tall. The bark was dark and deeply grooved and in the pre-dawn it looked almost black. The branches held great silent weight.

She walked to the foot of the tallest. She stood with her back to it. She did not know why she chose to stand with her back to it; she only knew that she did not want to face it. She wanted to look the other way, out over the field that stretched beyond, and feel the tree behind her. Her bag was still at the clinic. Her hands were in her pockets. Her breath came out of her in a white column.

"Alláh-u-Abhá."

She said it once and did not say it again. She had not said it, out loud, since the October evening. She had thought it. She had felt it. She had not said it. She said it now because she had carried a life through a night and the life had held and she did not know whom else to tell.

She thought of Mr. Walters.

She had not thought of Mr. Walters in three weeks. He came to her now, unbidden, as he came to her in the worst hours — the square shoulders, the careful mustache, the voice with its Alabama quiet, the chart she had closed and reopened four times on the last day. He had been sixty-seven. He had come in with chest pain. She had ordered the tests. She had made the call, on the balance of the evidence, to send him home with a next-day cardiology follow-up. He had gone home. He had not made the follow-up. He had died on his kitchen floor at five in the morning, in front of his wife, of a myocardial infarction she had not caught. She had read the autopsy. She had read it twice. She had read it, in some sense, for the next fourteen months. She had left Chicago.

She thought of him now not to punish herself. She had, in the last eight months, slowly come to believe that she had not been negligent. The review board had said so. The cardiology consultant had said so. Her own mentor had said so. She had, in Chicago, not been able to believe any of them. She had left. She had come here. She had thought, coming here, that she would be a safer doctor, because she would be a doctor with so much less to lose.

She stood with her back to the tree in the snow and understood that this had been, to some extent, a lie.

She had more to lose here than she had had in Chicago.

She had Kelsey. She had Pete. She had the small boy with the bean in his nose. She had Mrs. Ostergaard and her sock from the grandchild. She had Mr. Dahl's wrist. She had Jacob Willems's fever and Margaret's bread and Dorothy's silent morning hand on her shoulder.

She had more.

The sky began, very slowly, to silver at the edge. The eastern horizon went from black to that particular pre-dawn gray which is not quite blue and not quite white and has no color anyone has ever named.

Her breath came out of her. Her breath went back in.

"Thank You."

She walked back to the clinic. The sky had begun in earnest to lighten by the time she reached the door. Dorothy was at Kelsey's side, reading a paperback. The heartbeat monitor was quiet; Dorothy had turned the sound off so Kelsey could sleep. Imani hung her coat. She sat at her desk. She put her forehead in her hand.

"Go home in an hour," Dorothy said, not looking up from her book. "I'll stay until Pete comes."

"I won't be able to sleep."

"I know. But you'll lie down."

"Dorothy."

"I know. You're welcome."

Imani did go home at seven. She did not sleep. She lay on her bed in her clothes with her eyes open. She watched the ceiling and she watched the light change against her curtains and she thought about the nine pines and the weight of snow they carried without complaint.

At nine she got up. She called Sarah Connolly in Wausau. She gave the full report. Sarah listened and said, at the end, "You did beautifully. Bring her down to me Monday. And Imani — call me any night. I mean that."

"I will."

"You did beautifully."

"Thank you."

"Sleep."

Imani did not sleep. She made tea. She ate a piece of bread with butter. She went back to the clinic at ten. Pete came at eleven with flowers he had bought at the gas station — carnations, dyed pink — and a thermos of coffee that he pressed into her hands as if it were a small and entirely inadequate offering. She accepted it. She drank it. She could not remember afterward what kind of coffee it had been.

She drove Kelsey and Pete home at noon. She helped Kelsey into bed. She gave Pete a sheet of instructions written out by hand. She said she would come by in the morning. She said she would come by every day for the next week. She said this before Pete could ask it. Pete's eyes filled again and he nodded. Imani did not touch him; he was not a man to be touched by a stranger; but she said, carefully, "Your wife is going to be fine, and your baby is going to be fine, and you did well last night," and he nodded again and turned away.

She drove home. She slept, at last, from one in the afternoon until six at night. She woke in the dark. She had the particular disoriented shame of a person who had slept through the day, and she lay in her bed for five minutes and felt it, and then let it go.

She got up. She drove, slowly, across the town, to the north edge, to the nine pines, and she stood at the foot of them again in the four-p.m. dusk that had already settled into night. She did not say anything this time. She did not need to. She stood, and she thought of nothing, and she walked back.

[END OF CHAPTER 10]

The conversation that would matter took place in the first week of December, on a Wednesday afternoon, in the small study at the back of First Lutheran Church, because Pastor Emil Rhodes had called Imani at the clinic on Tuesday and asked, with the brief formal courtesy that was his habit, whether she would have half an hour to look at his hand.

"Your hand?"

"My hand. It's nothing. I wanted an excuse to see you outside of Scrabble."

"Pastor, we see each other every Friday."

"We see each other at Scrabble. That is not the same thing." He paused. "I will bring my hand. It is a real hand. It does have a real thing. A burn from the furnace. My wife would have made me go to the clinic three days ago."

"I will come," Imani said. "Wednesday afternoon. Four o'clock. Is the church the right place to look at a hand?"

"The church is where I am."

"Then the church."

She went on Wednesday at four. The church was white clapboard on the outside and plain wood on the inside, with a single stained-glass window at the back which had been a gift from a family in 1947 and which depicted a shepherd whose face looked, to Imani, remarkably like the face of a man she had once known in a seminar in Minneapolis. The sanctuary was empty. The pews were polished. The hymnals were stacked on a small table near the door. The air smelled of old wood and of a candle someone had let burn out half an hour ago.

The study was behind the sanctuary, down a short corridor. The door was open. Pastor Rhodes was sitting at his desk with his left hand bandaged in what appeared to be a dish towel.

"Ah," he said. "Come in. Forgive the bandage. I was not certain what to use."

"A dish towel is fine for certain burns. It depends on the burn."

"Sit. I will show you."

He unwrapped the towel. The burn was on the back of his left hand, near the knuckle of the third finger, and it was about the size of a quarter. It was a second-degree burn — blistered, tender, but not extensive, not the sort of thing she would have to worry over. She had seen worse on toddlers who had grabbed saucepans.

"Pastor. How did you do this?"

"The pilot of the boiler. I was trying to relight it. I passed my hand over a piece of metal I did not expect to be hot."

"When?"

"Sunday."

"It is now Wednesday."

"I am aware."

She cleaned it. She applied silver sulfadiazine cream. She wrapped it properly, with gauze, not with a dish towel. She did this in a slow, unhurried way, the way she did dressings for older patients who seemed to benefit from being attended to with a certain deliberateness. He watched her work. He had long fingers. His hand was freckled at the knuckles. He wore a simple silver wedding ring on his left hand still, four years on. She did not comment on this. She would not have.

"There," she said. "Keep it clean. Change the dressing tomorrow and the next day. I will look at it again at Scrabble. Do not relight any boilers this week."

"I will not."

"Tea?" he said.

"Tea."

He went to the small kitchenette attached to the study and made two cups of tea from a kettle he had already boiled. He brought them back on a tray. The tray was old lacquered wood; the cups were heavy white china with a small blue band around the rim; there was a small white pitcher of milk and a small white sugar bowl, and two spoons, and two linen napkins folded in quarters. He set the tray on the low table between them. He sat in his chair. She sat in hers. She had declined many offers of tea in her life. She had declined them in hospital break rooms and in the houses of lonely elderly men who had meant nothing of consequence by the offer. She took this one.

"Doctor," he said, after a moment. "May I ask you something."

"Yes."

"You may decline."

"I understand."

"You have come a few times to church events, the potlucks, the thing at the square in October. You have not come to a Sunday service."

"No."

"Thank you."

"That is not my question."

"I know."

Imani sat with her tea in her lap.

The question was not unfamiliar. She had been asked some version of it many times in her life, in Chicago and in Minneapolis and in London and in New York. She had developed, over years, a range of answers. She had a short answer, which was a single sentence and a nod. She had a medium answer, which was a paragraph about the founder of her faith, the year it had been founded, the number of its adherents, the general outlines of its teaching. She had a long answer, which she had almost never given, and which was for people she trusted and for circumstances that seemed to call for it.

She looked at Pastor Rhodes. He was seventy-one years old. He had been a pastor for forty-four years. He had buried his wife. He had a bandaged hand. He had made her tea, and the tea was good.

"I am Bahá'í. The Bahá'í Faith. I was raised in it. My parents were Bahá'ís and my grandparents on my mother's side were Bahá'ís, and I have been in it my whole life, though I have not always been good at it, and I am still not always good at it."

"Bahá'í," he said. "I know the word."

"Most people know the word. They often do not know more."

"I know a little more. I have read — not much. I have a book in the church library that I bought when I was in seminary, a book on comparative religions, and there is a chapter. I could not tell you now what is in the chapter. I know there is a chapter. I know the religion began in Persia, and that it is not Islam, but that it came from a part of the world where Islam was the neighbor. I know its founder is a man I cannot pronounce the name of properly."

"Bahá'u'lláh."

“If he fails to do so, they say, “We cannot accept your words because they emanate from you only and return to you.”

“What deviation can be greater than calumniating the Centre of the Covenant himself!”

“They were to be delivered over to the Persian Government and crucified, and the guards were threatened with terrible punishments should they once relax their vigilance and let the prisoners escape.” he said. “Attaining Unity in Spirit and Action 397.4 People are in many different conditions, come from many different backgrounds, and face many different problems in attaining unity in spirit and practice.”

She looked down at her tea. The steam was coming up out of it in a small clean column.

She thought for a moment.

"It is hard for me to answer without a text," she said. "I am used to — when I talk about my faith, if I talk about it, I am used to reaching for the words that have been written. The words that were given to us. I find those words very beautiful. I have read them my whole life. They are like — they are like a river I have been swimming in since I was a girl. I forget, sometimes, that other people do not have the river."

"Tell me without the river. Tell me yourself."

She was quiet a moment.

"What it is to me," she said. "What it is to me — it is the sense that all of the prophets of God have been one light. The same light, in different lamps. That Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and Zoroaster and Buddha and Krishna and Bahá'u'lláh are not competitors. They are the same teacher, sent in different centuries, speaking the language the people of that century could understand. I was taught this as a child. I believed it as a child. I have not found, in forty-two years, any reason to stop believing it."

"Go on."

"It is the sense that the world is one. That humanity is one. That the divisions we have made — of nation, of tribe, of color, of wealth — are made divisions. That they are not fundamental. That under them, or within them, or behind them, the human race is one race, and has always been. This is not — this is not a sentiment. It is a fact to me. I feel it. I have always felt it. I felt it when I was seven and my family moved from Lagos to London and I met a Scottish child and she and I could not understand each other's English, and we played anyway, and I felt in the playing that we were — that there was something under the language that did not need language. That has never gone away for me."

"Go on."

"It is — and this is harder — it is the sense that I am being asked, by whatever I mean when I say God, to become a better person. Not in a grand way. In small ways. To be more patient than I would naturally be. To say less than I would naturally say. To be kind to someone who has been unkind to me. To work. To work hard. To work on my own soul, if that word makes sense, which I think it does — to work on my own soul as a person works on a garden. Weeding. Watering. Noticing what has come up in the night."

Pastor Rhodes was very still.

"And it is the sense," she said, "that I am not alone when I do this. That there is a — I do not like the word presence. Presence is the word people reach for. But it is something like that. Something that is aware of me when I pray and that is, in some way I cannot explain, aware of me when I do not pray. I have been aware of it in hospitals and I have been aware of it in a Chicago apartment at three in the morning and I have been aware of it in this town, many times, since I came. I was aware of it last Saturday morning at five o'clock under the pines at the edge of town when I had spent a night trying to save a woman and her baby and the night had worked."

She was quiet.

"I do not know if any of that is an answer," she said. "It is not from a text. It is not even especially articulate. It is what I feel."

Pastor Rhodes did not speak for some time.

He looked at his hand — the bandaged hand, lying on the arm of his chair. He looked at his tea. He looked at her, carefully, as a man looks who is trying to choose his next sentence.

"I have not heard faith put like that in a long time."

"I am not sure I have heard it put like that either."

"It is very close to what I would say. Not identical. I am a Christian and I am not — I would say some of it differently. But it is very close. You used the word 'lamps.' I have used the word 'vessels.' It is very close."

"Yes."

"Thank you for telling me."

"Thank you for asking. Most people do not ask like that. They ask in a way that expects a pamphlet. I have a pamphlet. I can send you a pamphlet. I give people pamphlets sometimes. I would not have given you a pamphlet."

"I am relieved."

"I am relieved also."

They sat in silence. It was the sort of silence that is not awkward, that is held by two people together rather than endured by two people who have run out of things to say. Through the small window of the study Imani could see the white steeple of the neighboring Catholic church across the street, and the gray December sky, and a solitary crow on a telephone wire.

"Pastor," she said after a moment.

"Yes."

"May I ask you something in return."

"Yes."

"What is it to you."

He smiled a small, sad, pleased smile.

"That is a better question than I deserve," he said.

"Answer it anyway."

"I will try."

He put his tea on the tray. He crossed his legs. He was a tall man and he took a moment to arrange himself.

"I became a pastor," he said, "because my father was a pastor. I want to be honest with you about that. I did not become a pastor because I had a vision or a calling. I became a pastor because my father was a pastor and because my mother hoped I would. I was — I was a serious boy. Serious in a literal way. I read theology at university because I thought it would make me wise. I think it did not make me wise. I think it made me precise, which is a different thing. I married Inge. Inge — Inge was not religious the way I was religious. Inge was religious the way a tree is religious, if that makes sense. She was religious without thinking about it. She was religious as a condition rather than a conclusion. She prayed each night. I do not know that she had theological opinions. I do not know if she cared. She baked bread. She kept her accounts carefully. She was generous. She was kind. She was, I think, in a way I have never been, a person of God."

He paused.

"When she died," he said, "I stopped knowing what my faith was. I knew what it had said. I knew what I had said from the pulpit for forty years. I knew the catechism. I knew the liturgy. I did not know what was mine. It is — it is perhaps an embarrassing thing to say at seventy-one to the town's doctor. But I did not know what was mine. I had been reciting someone else's faith. I had not — I had not examined my own. I had assumed. I had rested on the assumption. Inge's death took the assumption away. I have been, these four years, trying to find out what is mine."

"And."

"And I do not know yet. I suspect — I suspect that it is quieter than I was taught. I suspect that it is less interested in being correct than I was taught. I suspect that it is much more interested in being present. I suspect that when I stand at the pulpit on Sunday morning and look at fifty-two faces of the people of this town and say to them 'Peace be with you,' the peace is the point, and not the doctrine about the peace. I suspect — "

He stopped.

"Go on," she said.

"I suspect, doctor, that I have been a pastor for forty-four years and have only been a Christian for four. And that even the four is uncertain."

"Pastor Rhodes."

"Yes."

"I think that is a very good place to be."

"You think so."

"I think so. I think — I think the faith that is not examined is not really faith. It is habit. I think, if I am honest, that the faith that is not examined is a pamphlet. You are not a pamphlet."

He laughed. It was a surprised laugh. It was the laugh, she realized, of a man who had not been given a compliment he had not expected for some time.

"Thank you," he said.

"I mean it."

"I believe you."

They finished their tea. Outside the window the sky had darkened a notch. She noticed. He noticed.

"You should drive home before it is fully dark," he said. "The stretch past the Peterson farm is unlit."

"I will."

"I will see you Friday. At Scrabble. I will not bring Bananagrams."

"Margaret told me you would."

"Margaret is a prophet."

"Yes."

He stood. He walked her to the church door. She put on her coat. He opened the door for her with his good hand.

"Imani."

"Yes."

"Thank you for my hand."

"Thank you for my tea."

"We will have to do this again."

"Yes."

"Not too often."

"No."

"Often enough."

"Yes."

She walked to her car. She drove home in the grey last hour of daylight. She did not listen to the radio. She thought about lamps, and vessels, and about the fact that she had, for the first time in perhaps seven years, said aloud to another human being what her faith actually was. She had felt, saying it, that she had not been emptied by the saying but filled. She had thought she would be emptied. She had thought she would feel exposed, or deflated, as if her inward life had been a currency of which she had now spent some. Instead she felt like a jug that had been tipped and set upright again, and the pouring had been a kind of refilling.

She drove home. She put water on for more tea. She sat at her kitchen table. She called, with the phone in her hand for a minute before she dialed, her sister in London.

"Doyin."

"Imani. At this hour."

"It is the afternoon here. It is not that late for you."

"It is late enough. What is it. Are you all right."

"I am all right. I wanted to tell you something."

"Yes."

"I told someone about the Faith today. Really told them."

"Who."

"The pastor. The Lutheran pastor. The widower. I told you about him. We play Scrabble."

"Him."

"Him."

"And."

"And he listened. He listened the way I have always hoped someone would listen. And he told me about himself. And I am — I do not know. I am sitting in my kitchen and I am smiling about it."

"Imani."

"Yes."

"Do not fall in love with a Lutheran pastor."

"Doyin."

"I am saying this as your sister. Do not."

"I am not."

"I am preemptively saying this. Because I know you. Because I was worried when you went to that town. Do not."

"I am not in love with a Lutheran pastor. He is seventy-one. He is a kind man. I had tea with him. He asked me about the Faith and I told him. That is all."

"All right. All right. I am being terrible. Tell me about the tea."

She told her sister about the tea. She told her about the bandaged hand. She told her about the phrase 'lamps.' Doyin listened. Doyin was eight years older than Imani and had raised Imani for three years when their mother had been dying, and had remained, all her life, the voice that Imani reached for when she had something to say that she wanted to be heard. They talked for forty minutes. They laughed. They hung up. Imani stood in her kitchen and felt the residue of laughter in her chest, a buoyant residue, and went to bed.

She slept with the deep sleep of a woman who had been understood.

[END OF CHAPTER 11]

Tyler Pratt came back to the clinic in the second week of December, on a Thursday afternoon, with his wife Bryn. Imani had not seen Bryn since the previous April, which had been a different town and, in a sense, a different life for the Pratts. Imani had seen Tyler in September, after the late-term loss, and she had given him what she had to give at the time, which had been her full attention for twenty minutes and a card with her number on it. He had not used the card.

He used it the first week of December. He called on a Wednesday morning, early, before the clinic opened, when Dorothy happened to be in already and put the call through. Imani was at her desk with a cup of coffee she had not yet begun to drink.

"Dr. Adeyemo."

"Tyler."

"Yeah."

"How are you."

"I'm all right. Listen, I was — I wanted to ask you. About Bryn. She hasn't — she's not eating. She's not — she hasn't left the house in three weeks. She hasn't cried. I mean, she hasn't cried about — about what happened. She hasn't cried at all. She — I don't — "

"Tyler."

"Yeah."

"Bring her here. Tomorrow if she will come. Friday if she will not. The end of the day on either day. Four-thirty. Tell her I am not going to do anything to her. Tell her I want to sit with her. Tell her I am not going to prescribe her anything yet. Tell her I am not going to refer her anywhere. Tell her she can stay in the waiting room if she wants. She does not have to come into the exam room. Tell her all of that."

"Okay."

"She can bring anything she wants. A book. A blanket. She can bring her knitting if she knits."

"She doesn't knit. She used to bead."

"She can bring her beads. Tell her."

"Okay. Dr. Adeyemo — "

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"You have not done anything yet. Thank me after."

Tyler brought her on Thursday.

They came in at four-twenty, ten minutes early. Bryn was twenty-eight years old. She was pale, and her hair, which had been a long dark chestnut when Imani had seen her last, was now cut shorter, bluntly, at the level of her jaw. Bryn was wearing a large grey sweater that was too large for her and a pair of jeans and the boots of a woman who had dressed without thinking about dressing. She did not meet Imani's eyes when they came in. She held Tyler's hand with her left hand and a small cloth bag with her right.

"Bryn. Tyler. Come in. Or come to the waiting area, if you'd rather. Whatever feels better."

"The waiting area," Bryn said, quietly, her first words, addressed to the floor.

"Of course."

Imani took them to the waiting area, which was not the public waiting area by the front door — that was too exposed — but a small secondary waiting area she had set up in the back of the clinic, near the staff kitchen, over the summer, when she had begun to understand that this town needed quieter rooms. There were two armchairs. There was a small round table. There was a window that looked out onto the back yard, where a bird feeder she had put up in September still hung from the maple.

"Sit wherever you like," Imani said. "I will bring water. Would you like tea."

"No thank you," Tyler said.

"Yes," Bryn said, surprising him. Imani saw Tyler register, in a small flicker of his eyes, that his wife had said yes to a thing.

"What kind."

"Anything."

"I have a black tea and I have a chamomile."

"Chamomile."

Imani made the tea. She brought it. She brought Tyler a glass of water, which she set on the table beside him. She did not bring herself anything. She sat in the third chair, which she had placed a year ago to the side rather than across, so that it would not feel like an interview.

"Bryn," she said.

Bryn looked up. Briefly. Not at Imani's face. At Imani's shoulder.

"I want to tell you what I know and what I don't know," Imani said, "so that you are not waiting to find out. I know that you lost a baby in August. I know that Tyler has been worried about you. I know that you have not been eating much and you have not been leaving the house. I do not know anything else. I do not know what happened in the hospital. I do not know what you have been thinking. I do not know what would help. I am not going to ask you any of those things. I am going to sit here with you and you do not have to talk. You can drink your tea and you can look out the window and you can close your eyes and you can go to sleep for half an hour if that is what your body wants to do. All right."

Bryn did not answer. She nodded, a small nod, and held her cup in both hands.

"Tyler. I would like you to stay for a bit if Bryn wants you to. If Bryn would rather I sit with her alone, that is also fine. Bryn?"

"Tyler can stay," Bryn said.

"Good. All right."

Imani sat.

She did not look at Bryn. She looked, herself, at the window. At the bird feeder. There were three small birds — juncos, she thought, she was still learning Wisconsin birds — pecking at the seed. The feeder swung slightly in a wind that was not quite visible from inside the room. The sky was a flat lead-grey.

She had promised herself, during the phone call with Tyler, that she would do this. That she would not rush. That she would not — and this had taken her many years to learn — take the silence as a problem to be solved. She had learned in Chicago, eventually, that the worst thing you could do with a woman like Bryn was to fill her silence. The worst thing you could do was to offer her words. She had seen too many doctors — and had been, herself, in her first years — offer words. A grieving woman did not need words. She did not need the sentences about stages of grief, or the pamphlet about support groups, or the kindly encouraging speech about the resilience of the human spirit. She needed, more than anything else, another human being who was willing to sit in the room without making the room be about anything.

The clock on the wall ticked. Imani had left the clock because she had thought, in August, that patients liked to know the time. She realized now, with Bryn in the room, that she should have taken it down. She would take it down after this session.

Ten minutes passed.

Twenty minutes passed.

The junco at the feeder was replaced by a chickadee. The chickadee pecked once, flew, came back, pecked, flew. The wind moved the feeder. The sky did not change.

Bryn had finished her tea. She was holding the empty cup in her lap.

"Would you like more tea," Imani said, quietly.

"Yes please."

Imani made more tea. She brought it. She sat back down.

Thirty minutes had passed now. The clinic was quiet; Dorothy had sent the last patient home at four, and the only sound was the tick of the clock and, very faintly, the hum of the heating. The light in the room had begun to go. It was December; the days ended at four-thirty. Imani had not turned on the lamp. She would not turn on the lamp. She would let the room darken.

Bryn spoke.

"I wasn't — " she said.

She did not finish. Imani waited.

"I wasn't going to come."

"I know."

"I came because Tyler — " She stopped.

"Yes."

Bryn put the cup down on the table. Her hands were shaking slightly. Not from grief. From something closer to the physical effort of a woman who had not eaten in the way she should.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to say."

"You are not supposed to say anything. You do not have to say anything. I am glad you came. That is enough for today."

"Everyone wants me to say something."

"I know."

"Everyone wants me to — everyone wants me to explain. Or to cry. Or to — everyone has a thing they want me to do. My mother wants me to go to a — she wants me to go to a group. Tyler's mother wants me to go back to church. My sister wants me to — wants me to see a therapist in Madison and drive down once a week. Everyone has a plan. And I cannot — I cannot — "

She stopped.

"I cannot make myself do any of them."

"Of course you cannot."

"My mother says I am being selfish."

"You are not being selfish."

"Tyler has not said that. Tyler has not said anything like that. But I know he is — I know he is waiting for me to — "

"Bryn," Imani said. She said this very gently. "Tyler is not waiting for you to do anything. I have talked to Tyler. Tyler is not — Tyler is not holding a clock over you. Tyler is frightened. Tyler is a man whose wife is hurting. He wants to know how to help you. He does not know. He has asked me to help him know. He is not angry at you. He is not impatient with you. He is afraid."

She saw Bryn take this in.

Bryn, for the first time, looked at her husband.

Tyler was crying.

He was crying very quietly, with his face turned partly away, his hand over his mouth. He had not been crying, Imani was fairly sure, for the first thirty minutes. He had started now. He was not making any sound. The tears were simply coming down his face and he was letting them come and he was not trying to hide them from his wife.

Bryn looked at him a long moment.

Then Bryn also began to cry.

She did not cry loudly. She cried the way a woman cries who has been holding something in for a hundred and twelve days. It came out of her in small, choked sobs, with long pauses between them, as if each sob had to be considered and released separately. She did not cover her face. She put her hands flat on her lap and she cried with her face up and her eyes nearly closed.

Imani did not move.

She did not offer tissues. She did not reach toward them. She did not stand. She sat in her chair and she watched the window and the feeder and the darkening sky and she let them be, in the room, together, for what was happening.

Eventually — she did not know how long it had been; perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten — Bryn took a breath. Tyler reached across the table and took her hand. Bryn let him.

"I haven't cried," Bryn said.

"No."

"I didn't know if I could."

"Yes."

"I thought — I thought if I started I wouldn't — "

"Yes."

"But I didn't."

"No. You did not. You cried and you stopped. You can do it again if you need to. You can do it tomorrow. You can do it tonight. You do not have to do it all at once."

Bryn nodded.

"Bryn."

"Yes."

"I am not going to prescribe anything today. I am not going to refer you anywhere today. I am going to ask that you come back next Thursday at this same time, and that we do this again, and that we see how you are. And that between now and next Thursday you eat a small thing three times a day. A piece of toast. A bowl of soup. Not a meal. A thing. And you go outside once a day for five minutes. Into your own yard. It does not have to be further than that. Five minutes. You can stand on your porch. Will you do those two things for me."

"Yes."

"If you cannot, that is also all right. Tell me Thursday. We will figure it out. I am not going to be angry with you. I am not going to be disappointed in you. I am here next Thursday at four-thirty regardless of what you have been able to do. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"Tyler."

"Yes."

"I want to see you Monday. Just you. Fifteen minutes. I want to check in with you."

"Okay."

"Bryn. One more thing."

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Say it back."

"There is nothing wrong with me."

"Yes."

"I am grieving correctly."

"Yes."

Bryn began to cry again. Less this time. Shorter. Tyler held her hand. Imani watched the bird feeder, and saw that the juncos had returned.

After another few minutes Bryn stopped. She wiped her face with the sleeve of the grey sweater. Imani stood, and went to the staff kitchen, and came back with a warm wet cloth and a small plate of apple slices and a few crackers. She put them on the table. She did not make a show of it. She said, "Eat what you can. Even one. Then Tyler will drive you home."

Bryn ate two apple slices and one cracker.

Imani considered this a victory.

They left at six. It was fully dark. Tyler helped Bryn into the truck. Tyler came back, briefly, alone, to the clinic door, where Imani was standing.

"Doctor."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

"I did not know that she would — I did not know that the way to help her would be — "

"It is the only way. With some people. You are a good husband. She is lucky to have you."

"I did not know if I was a good husband. I have not — I have not known what to do."

"You do not have to know what to do. You have to stay. Staying is the thing. You have stayed. That is everything."

He nodded. He did not, in the bright quick moment of the opened clinic door, quite meet her eyes, because he was a young man and his eyes had been wet and he did not want her to see them any more than she had. But he nodded, and he went.

Imani locked up the clinic. She drove home. She did not turn on the radio. She thought about Bryn. She thought about the hundred and twelve days. She thought about her own mother's grief, which had taken the form, for twenty years, of an active and public cheer that had broken at last, in private, late in the mother's life, over a burned pan of okra in a kitchen in London when Imani had been sixteen. She thought about how grief was an underground river, and about how you did not always know when it would surface.

At home she made herself a bowl of soup from the pot she had left simmering on the back burner. She ate it slowly. She read ten pages of a novel she had been working her way through since October. She went to bed.

She said a prayer for Bryn before she slept. She said it silently. She said a prayer for Tyler. She said a prayer for the baby, the one who had not lived, whose name Bryn had not yet said aloud in her presence and who might or might not have a name. She let herself lie in the dark with those prayers and did not ask them to do anything in particular. She only offered them.

The juncos at the feeder, she thought, falling asleep. The juncos had come back.

[END OF CHAPTER 12]

Thanksgiving had fallen early that year, on the twenty-first of November, and Imani had, of course, missed the holiday entirely in the usual sense; she had been three days past the first snow and six days before Kelsey Obermann's crisis and had spent the day on call at the clinic. She had eaten a turkey sandwich Dorothy had left in the fridge. She had seen three patients. She had driven home and slept.

The American Thanksgiving had never been her holiday. She had immigrated at seven; she had grown up in London and Lagos, and her family's autumn holiday had been Eid when they had been Muslims, and, later, after her parents' conversion, the Birth of Bahá'u'lláh in November and the commemorations of the Twin Holy Birthdays that fell close to it. Her mother had made, yearly, a chicken stew with ata rodo and tomatoes and palm oil that had been the center of the household's autumn; she had served it with rice and fried plantain and a dark green spinach dish called efo riro, and her family had sat at a long table in Hampstead and eaten and laughed, and her father had told the same three jokes he had been telling for decades.

Imani's mother had died in the spring when Imani was seventeen. The jokes had died too, in a way, after that — her father had continued telling them for a few years, and then had stopped, and then had died himself, of the quiet disappointing cancer that had taken his lungs at sixty-four. The stew, however, had persisted. Imani made it once a year. She had made it, sometimes, for her husband Samuel, who had found it too spicy and had eaten it anyway, carefully, out of love. She had made it in the first autumn after the divorce, alone, in her Chicago apartment, with the kitchen window open for the heat of it, and had sat at her small kitchen table and had cried over the first bite and then eaten the rest of it without crying. She had made it every year since.

She made it this year on the fourth Thursday of November, which was the American Thanksgiving proper — the twenty-eighth this year, though they had moved the holiday to the twenty-first for a reason that had to do with the calendar and which Imani had not investigated. She made it on a Thursday because she had the day off. She had declined invitations — four of them. Margaret had invited her. Pastor Rhodes had invited her, with the shy formality of a man who expected to be turned down and would not be offended. Wendell had invited her; Wendell did not host but his niece in Rhinelander did, and Wendell had said, in his way, that the niece had extra chairs and would have extra turkey and would be glad to feed the doctor. Lillian had invited her, with a firmness that had approached a summons.

Imani had said no to all of them. She had said no kindly. She had said yes to Margaret for Friday Scrabble the next day, and she had said yes to Pastor Rhodes for coffee the following Wednesday, and she had said yes to Wendell for help with the sand bag in the trunk of her car, and she had said yes to Lillian for a book recommendation Lillian wanted to make, which was a mystery series by an author Imani had never heard of and which Lillian had said, with the severe confidence of a librarian, that Imani would love.

But to Thanksgiving, she had said no.

She had said no because she had understood, several weeks ahead, that she would need the day alone.

Not a sad day. A reflective day. There was a difference, and she had made this distinction to herself clearly, because she had spent several years of her Chicago life confusing the two.

She woke at seven. She did not set an alarm. She woke of her own accord, which had become, in Nine Pines, a quiet daily surprise. In Chicago she had not woken of her own accord in eleven years. She lay in bed for a few minutes and listened to the silence of the house, the low thrum of the old furnace, the click of the kitchen clock down the hall.

She got up. She put on the wool socks her sister had sent her in October. She made tea. She stood at her kitchen window and drank it and watched the sun come up over the neighbor's garage.

The sun did not so much come up as arrive laterally. In late November in Wisconsin the sun did not ascend in the sky; it approached the horizon and then crawled along it, hand over hand, as if looking for a handhold. By eight it had cleared the garage. By eight-thirty it had laid a thin yellow light across the back yard. The light was cold; it did not warm the house; but it lay on the white of the snow in a way that made the yard look washed, prepared, expectant.

She made breakfast. She made two slices of toast from the bread Margaret had sent her home with on Tuesday, and a soft-boiled egg, and a second cup of tea. She ate at the kitchen table with a book. The book was a volume of poems by Czesław Miłosz. She had had it for fourteen years. She read five poems, slowly, not trying to understand all of them, trying to let them be what they were.

She had, by nine, begun to feel the shape of the day.

She put on a warm sweater and went into the second bedroom, which she had converted, in August, into a small study. There was a desk and a chair and a bookshelf and a window that looked out at the neighbor's spruce. She sat at the desk. She wrote, for forty minutes, in a journal she had been keeping on and off for seven years. She did not write about her patients. She wrote about her mother. She wrote about a memory of her mother that had surfaced in the past week — her mother standing in the kitchen in Hampstead, a Tuesday evening, making the chicken stew, and her mother's hands, which had been small and brown and quick, moving with a kind of professional grace over the pot. She wrote the memory down. She wrote down what her mother had been wearing. She wrote down the radio, which had been playing the World Service. She wrote down what her mother had said to her — that she should marry a man who could laugh at himself. She wrote down that she had not, as a rule, followed the advice.

She closed the journal at ten.

She went to the kitchen.

The chicken stew was not difficult; it was only long. She laid out the ingredients on her counter. The chicken, which she had butchered last night. The tomatoes, three tins, because she could not get fresh tomatoes in Wisconsin in November of the quality her mother had insisted on; she had learned, years ago, that tinned Italian plum tomatoes were, for this recipe, better than whatever sad winter grocery-store tomato she might otherwise procure. The onions. The ata rodo — the Scotch bonnets she had driven two hours to Madison in October to buy, where she had found them at a West African grocery that had also been selling cassava and dried fish and jollof seasoning mixes in small plastic bags tied shut with twist ties, and where she had stood in the narrow aisle for twenty minutes and had simply looked at things, had looked at the names of things that had been the names of her childhood. She had bought the ata rodo and three pounds of plantains and a bottle of palm oil and the dried crayfish her mother had used and which she had not used herself in seven years. She had driven home with the groceries in the passenger seat and had pulled over, once, on Highway 51, to adjust the bag so that the palm oil would not tip.

She started the stew at ten-thirty.

She did it slowly. She had the whole day. She washed the chicken. She salted the chicken. She put the chicken in a pot with water and an onion and a whole ata rodo and a bay leaf and let it simmer. She chopped the rest of the onions. She peeled the tomatoes from the can and crushed them with her hands, which was how her mother had done it; it had driven Samuel mad; it was messy and splattered and it was, in her hand, right. She fried the onions in palm oil. She added the tomatoes. She stirred. She let it cook down.

The kitchen grew hot. The stew spattered. The tomatoes darkened. She added the crayfish. She added the chopped ata rodo. She added a bouillon cube, which her mother had insisted upon and which Imani suspected was probably not strictly necessary, and which she used because it was her mother's recipe.

By noon the stew was what her mother had called 'coming together.'

She turned it down low. She went into the living room. She sat on the sofa with the book of poems and a second tea and she read, and she dozed, and she got up and stirred the stew and went back, and she dozed again, and the house smelled the way her childhood had smelled, and she was — there was no other word for it — content.

Content, she thought. Not happy. That was not the word. Content, which was a word she had not often applied to herself in her forty-two years.

She made rice. She made fried plantain. She made efo riro, though with frozen spinach instead of the dark green West African leaf she had not been able to find in Wisconsin. She set the table for one. She set the table properly — a placemat, a napkin, a real fork and knife, a water glass, a glass of the lime cordial she had bought in October because it had reminded her of her father. She put the stew in a bowl. She put the rice on a plate. She put the plantains beside the rice. She sat down at her table, alone, at one-fifteen in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day in Nine Pines, Wisconsin, and she ate.

She ate slowly. She thought of her mother. She thought of her father. She thought of her brother in Lagos and her sister in London. She thought of Samuel. She thought of her mentor in Chicago, a woman named Dr. Eileen Cho, who had written her once a month since she had come to Nine Pines and who had said in the last letter that she was proud of Imani, which Imani had read three times and folded carefully and put in a drawer. She thought of Mr. Walters. She thought of Kelsey Obermann, who was still on bed rest and whose pregnancy was, a week after the crisis, stable.

She did not think of these people sadly. She thought of them with a full, specific attention, the way you think of people at a table when the table is set for you and the food is hot and you have eaten what you have made. She thought of them as if she were having a meal with them, though they were not there.

At three-thirty she called her sister in London.

It was eight-thirty in London. Doyin had just put the children to bed. Doyin answered on the fourth ring.

"Imani."

"Doyin."

"Happy Thanksgiving, if that is what you are doing."

"I am doing it in the Nigerian style."

"The stew."

"The stew."

"You always make too much."

"I have always made too much. I made too much today."

"Good. Freeze some. You will eat it in February."

"I will."

"What else."

"I am well, Doyin."

"Are you. Tell me."

Imani told her. She told her about the snow. She told her about Dorothy's hand on her shoulder at five in the morning. She told her about Pastor Rhodes, again, and Doyin made a sound in the back of her throat and did not comment. She told her about Bryn. She told her, briefly, about the tea and the thirty minutes of silence and the juncos. She told her that she had cried herself, in the car, driving home, not heavily, but a few tears, and had not been embarrassed by them.

Doyin listened.

"Imani."

"Yes."

"You are happy."

Imani thought about this.

"I am content," she said. "I think I am working my way toward happy. I think I will get there."

"I am glad."

"Doyin, how are you."

"I am tired. Emeka is being Emeka. His school is being ridiculous about a fundraiser. Femi has a cold. Kayode is trying to grow a mustache."

"Kayode is fourteen."

"He is an ambitious fourteen. It is — it is a faint mustache. It is more of a suggestion. He is very proud."

"Send me a photograph."

"I will send you a photograph. I will send you many photographs. I have — Imani, I have to tell you — I have been meaning to tell you — I am going to try to come this spring. For a week. I want to see your town."

Imani did not speak immediately.

"Say yes."

"Yes," Imani said. "Yes, of course yes. Come. Come as long as you can come. Come in May. The ice goes out in April. Come in May."

"May. I will tell Chuka."

"Doyin."

"Yes."

"Thank you for calling."

"I did not call. You called."

"Thank you for calling anyway."

"Imani."

"Yes."

"I am proud of you."

"Do not make me cry again today. I have only cried a little today and I was doing well."

"Forgive me."

"I love you."

"I love you."

They laughed, toward the end. They laughed about Kayode's mustache. They laughed about a story Doyin told her from the Chuka's family Christmas plans, in which Chuka's aunt had become obsessed with a Welsh cheese. They laughed about nothing, about everything, about the way two sisters laugh who know each other the way they know their own hands.

Imani hung up at four-thirty. The light had begun to go.

She did not do any more cooking. She put the stew in jars to freeze. She washed her dishes. She put on her coat and her boots and she walked, alone, in the falling light, to the end of Linden Street, to the corner where the town thinned into field and from which, on a clear day, you could see all the way to the nine pines at the north edge. She stood there for a few minutes. She did not walk further. She had been to the pines. She did not need to go again today.

She turned around. She walked back to her house, which was lit, because she had turned on the porch light and the kitchen light before she left, because she had wanted to come back to a lit house. The red porch glowed in the blue dusk. She climbed the steps. She went inside.

She made more tea. She finished the Miłosz. She read a novel for an hour. She called no one else. She sat with herself.

At ten she went to bed. She had been awake for fifteen hours. She had not spoken to more than one person. She had eaten twice and cooked for four hours. She had written in her journal. She had walked to the end of the street. She had laughed with her sister. She had thought of her mother. She had not cried. She had not been lonely.

She slept deeply. She did not dream.

[END OF CHAPTER 13]

December in Nine Pines was a dark month. Imani had been warned. Margaret had warned her in October, and Wendell had warned her in a single sentence at Scrabble one Friday in November — "December gets long, Doc. Don't forget to turn on your lamps." — and Dorothy had simply, by way of warning, bought Imani a full-spectrum lightbox with a note that had said KEEP IT ON YOUR DESK, and had placed it on Imani's desk, and had not spoken further.

The light began to go, in earnest, after the first week of December. By the tenth, the sun was rising at seven-twenty and setting at four-twenty. By the sixteenth, the sun was setting at four-eighteen. By the twentieth it would set at four-sixteen and would not rise again over the Lutheran steeple until seven-twenty-four.

Imani had never lived so far north. She had read, theoretically, about seasonal affective disorder. She had prescribed — in her Chicago years — bupropion and lightboxes and vitamin D supplementation to a great many patients. She had not, herself, experienced the effect. She knew it now. She knew it in her bones, which became heavier; in her eyes, which took longer to adjust in the mornings; in a certain flatness of affect she noticed in herself on Sunday afternoons, when she would sit with a book and find that she was looking at the same page she had been looking at forty minutes before.

She managed it carefully. She kept Dorothy's lightbox on her desk and sat under it for twenty minutes each morning while reviewing charts. She took vitamin D. She walked. She walked every day, even when the walk had to be short. She walked to the post office, which was seven minutes away, and bought stamps she did not need. She walked to the library, where Lillian had started keeping back for her the mysteries of a Belgian author whose name Imani could not pronounce and whom she had come to enjoy. She walked, once, to the Pratt house, because she had been told Bryn had been outside for ten minutes in the last week and she had wanted to see with her own eyes the path Bryn's boots had made through the snow in the back yard. The path was not long. The path was there.

On the tenth of December the town began to put up its lights.

The town square in Nine Pines was not a square properly; it was a roughly triangular open area where Main Street met First and Birch, with a small gazebo at its center and an old iron bandstand to one side. The gazebo was painted white. The bandstand was painted dark green. There were park benches, and an old drinking fountain that had been shut off since Labor Day, and a bronze plaque dedicated to a young man from Nine Pines who had died in Normandy in 1944. The square was not much. But in December the town put strings of clear bulbs from the rafters of the gazebo down to stakes at the corners of the grass, and ran more strings from the bandstand to the telephone pole across the road, and put a single long string up the length of the town Christmas tree, which was a live tree, a large blue spruce that had stood at the north edge of the square for decades and that had been, by all accounts, planted by a farmer whose name Imani could not recall.

The lights came on the evening of the sixteenth. There was a brief ceremony. Imani attended. She attended alone. She wore the heavy wool coat she had bought in Madison in October and the scarf her sister had sent her and the gloves she had bought at the hardware store the first week of December, which were the first pair of gloves she had ever owned that were rated for below-zero temperatures. She stood at the back of the small crowd. The crowd was perhaps a hundred and twenty people. There was hot cider. There was a small tin-ware band — two trumpets, a tuba, a clarinet — who played 'Silent Night' and 'O Come All Ye Faithful' and, with only slightly less confidence, 'Jingle Bells.' Pastor Rhodes was there. He was not leading the ceremony; he was a face in the crowd. The mayor was leading it, a woman named Janet Hoyer who owned the pharmacy and who read, from a piece of paper she had been handed, a brief paragraph about the history of the tree, about the farmer who had planted it, about what the town hoped its lights would mean for the coming weeks. Janet Hoyer was not a practiced public speaker. She read from her piece of paper. She blushed. She finished. She pressed the switch.

The tree came on.

Imani did not know what she had expected. Perhaps she had expected nothing. She had seen Christmas trees all her life. She had seen the Rockefeller Center tree, once, as a tourist, twenty years ago, with Samuel. She had seen the tree at Trafalgar Square with her mother.

This tree was not large. This tree was perhaps thirty feet tall. The lights on it were simple white incandescents in, maybe, six strings. It was not a spectacle.

She had not expected to cry.

She did not cry, in fact. She did not cry. She felt, instead, a small tight pressure in her throat, a small warning of a cry that she did not release, and she stood with it for a minute in the back of the crowd and watched the tree, and the tin-ware band started 'O Come All Ye Faithful,' and she felt that her eyes were wet, and she noticed, and she noticed herself noticing, and she let the noticing itself become the thing she held.

Pastor Rhodes appeared at her elbow.

"Doctor."

"Pastor."

"It is good, isn't it."

"It is."

"It gets us through."

"I understand now."

"Yes."

They did not say more. They stood side by side for the duration of the carol. At the end he nodded to her and moved off, to speak to someone else — he was, she thought, a man who kept his conversations brief in public, having understood that a pastor in a small town is a figure of a certain kind and that it is not always useful for him to be seen to pay particular attention to any one person. She did not mind. She understood. He had nodded. The nod had been a full sentence.

She walked home. She walked the long way home, past the pharmacy and the post office, so that she could see the lights from the street. They were not many. They were not grand. They were a small cheerful human insistence against the dark. They were — she thought, walking — a very particular kind of prayer.

On the Sunday after the lighting, Pastor Rhodes invited her to the Christmas Eve service.

He invited her on the Friday, at Scrabble. He invited her the way he invited her to things, which was without weight.

"Christmas Eve is a Thursday this year," he said. "Service at six. It is a short service. Carols. A reading. A short homily. I have been writing the homily for a week. I am not sure it is any good. You are welcome if you wish. No obligation."

"I will come."

He looked surprised.

"Pastor," she said. "I will come. I want to come. I am not coming out of politeness. I want to hear the carols."

"All right."

"Do not lean too hard on the homily."

"I will not."

"Put in only one joke."

"I will put in one joke. A small joke. I have been told before that I write homilies like footnotes."

"Who told you that."

"My wife."

"Then it is true."

"Yes."

She came to the service at ten to six on Christmas Eve. The church was half full. The sanctuary had been decorated with pine boughs along the altar rail and a wreath on each of the four plain windows, and the single stained-glass window at the back had been lit from behind with a small lamp in such a way that the shepherd, with his Minneapolis face, glowed faintly gold. There were candles on the ends of the pews. The candles were held in small brass sconces. A pianist was playing, quietly, a prelude Imani did not recognize.

She sat in a pew near the back. She had worn a long dark dress and the grey wool coat over it, and her hair up, and her mother's small gold earrings which she had not worn since Samuel had left. She had not thought about the earrings when she had put them in. She had seen them in the dish on her dresser and had put them in and had not thought further about it until she had been in the car, on the way, and had reached up to touch her ear and had found them.

Then the carols began.

The congregation sang. They sang slowly. They sang without a choir; they sang as ordinary people who had sung these carols every year since childhood and who did not need the score. They sang 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' first. Then 'Away in a Manger.' Then 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.'

Imani did not know all the words. She knew some of the carols; she had sung them at school in Hampstead; she had sung them at a Christmas Eve service once with Samuel, in the first year of their marriage, at a Methodist church in a Chicago neighborhood they had been visiting her colleague in. She knew the first verses. She stood when the congregation stood. She opened the hymnal. She read along where she did not know.

Something unlocked in her during 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.'

And ye, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful steps and slow — look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing; oh, rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.

She read the words as the congregation sang them. She read them once, and then again. The congregation's voices were rough and untrained and the piano was slightly out of tune and the words were beautiful. The words were nearly unbearably beautiful. Beneath life's crushing load. Whose forms are bending low. She thought of Bryn. She thought of Mr. Walters's wife, whom she had not met but whose face she imagined. She thought of Kelsey, on her bed rest, who was doing well, and of Pete, who was not. She thought of her father in the last months of his lung cancer. She thought of herself, bending low, for years, under a load she had finally set down by driving three hundred miles north of a life she could not continue.

She did not cry. She had not cried at the tree lighting and she did not cry now. But she felt, sitting in that pew, a specific and inward warming, the sensation of a person who had walked a long distance in the cold and had been, without asking to be, let into a lit room.

Rest beside the weary road.

She had not rested. She had not rested in Chicago and she had not, properly, rested in Nine Pines. She had moved, and arrived, and started a new clinic, and learned a new town, and begun a set of new relationships, and handled the snow, and managed a crisis, and sat with a grieving woman, and cooked her mother's stew. She had not rested.

The carol ended. The congregation sat. Pastor Rhodes climbed the three steps of the pulpit. He had a paper in his hands. He had, as he had promised, written the homily like a footnote.

He spoke for seven minutes. He spoke about the shepherds, who were, he said, the people in the story who had been paying attention at night. He spoke about night as a kind of listening. He spoke about the small mercy of a town that lit its tree because the dark was long. He spoke, once, about his wife, who had liked this service above all others and who had always complained, gently, that he overwrote his homilies. He put his joke in, which was small and was about a mouse that had once lived in the Christmas candles. The congregation laughed politely. He finished.

Imani had listened to the whole homily. She had not drifted. She had heard each sentence.

The final carol was 'Silent Night.' They sang it, as was the custom, by candle. The pianist played a single long chord. The ushers came down the aisle with lit tapers and lit the candles at the ends of the pews, and the congregants turned and lit their neighbors' candles from those, and in less than two minutes the sanctuary was full of small flames. Imani had her candle lit by a boy of about nine whose face she had seen once in the clinic for an ear infection and who did not appear to recognize her. She lit the candle of the elderly woman behind her. The woman nodded. The piano began the carol. The congregation sang.

She knew this one. She knew all three verses. She sang. She sang in a voice she had not used in public for a long time, a low alto that had been her mother's voice, and she was not embarrassed that she could hear herself among the others. The sanctuary was warm. The candles were steady. The stained-glass shepherd glowed at the back of the room. At the phrase 'sleep in heavenly peace' — at the repetition of it, at the third verse — she felt the second unlocking, a thing she would not have been able to name, a thing that had to do with the word peace and the word heavenly and the word sleep, and the word rest, and the long list of people she had carried in her head through the autumn who were, all of them, asking in their various ways for one or another of those four words. She sang. She let her voice go into the room. She let the room hold her voice.

The carol ended. The piano chord died. The congregation stood in the candlelight. Pastor Rhodes said the final benediction. The candles were blown out, one by one, in the quiet that followed; there was a small collective sound of extinguished wicks, and the smell of warm wax, and the faint haze of smoke in the upper air.

She did not stay for the reception in the fellowship hall. She had intended to. She had changed her mind during the final hymn. She wanted to go home with what she had been given. She wanted not to dilute it. She slipped out of her pew during the recessional and went out the side door into the night.

It was snowing. Not heavily. Large clean flakes coming down through the streetlamp light. The church steps were dusted. She went down them carefully. She walked to her car. She did not start it immediately. She sat in the driver's seat with her gloves on her lap and watched the snow fall on the hood of the Subaru.

But something has been added.

She could not name it. She did not try. She sat with it and let it be.

She drove home. She did not turn the radio on. She went into her house. She did not turn on the lamps; she let the Christmas lights of her neighbors' houses, which were visible through her windows, be the light of the room. She sat on her sofa. She took off her coat. She took off her boots. She left her earrings in.

She sat for a long time. She thought of her mother. She thought of the carol. She thought of Pastor Rhodes climbing back down the three steps of the pulpit with his paper in his hand. She thought of the word witness.

She went to bed at eleven. She said, before sleep, a prayer from her own tradition — a short prayer of 'Abdu'l-Bahá which she had known since she was fourteen — and she said it in Persian, which she knew imperfectly, and she said it slowly, and she offered it out into the dark of her bedroom for the people she had been carrying. She offered it for Bryn. She offered it for Kelsey and Pete. She offered it for Pastor Rhodes. She offered it for the boy who had lit her candle. She offered it for her sister. She offered it for Mr. Walters. She offered it, at the end, for herself, because she had spent many years not offering prayers for herself and because tonight, for reasons she did not entirely understand, she felt that she could.

She slept.

In the morning — Christmas Day — she woke late. The town was quiet. She made coffee. She made eggs. She called her brother in Lagos, which she had been meaning to do for months, and spoke to him for half an hour about nothing in particular. She read. She walked. She did not go to anyone's house. She had declined, again, invitations. She was resting. She had promised herself she would rest, and she was keeping her promise.

At four in the afternoon Margaret knocked on her door with a small tin of cookies.

"I am not staying," Margaret said. "I am not coming in. I am bringing cookies. I am leaving. Merry Christmas."

"Margaret — "

"I am not staying. I have Pastor Rhodes and his son at my house in an hour and I have to be back to not burn my roast. Merry Christmas. Eat a cookie. I will see you Sunday."

She handed Imani the tin. She turned and went back to her car. She drove away.

Imani took the cookies inside. She sat with the tin in her lap. She opened it. The cookies were Margaret's sugar cookies, cut into stars and trees, frosted precisely. There were, Imani counted, exactly twelve.

Twelve cookies. Twelve days of Christmas. Margaret had been careful.

She ate one.

She ate a second cookie. She ate it slowly.

Outside her window the snow had begun again.

[END OF CHAPTER 14]

The letter came on the seventh of January, three days after the new year, in a long white envelope with a Chicago return address and Samuel's narrow careful handwriting on the front.

Imani did not see it at first. She had driven to the post office on the Tuesday after the holiday, after not checking her mail for four days, because she had been resting. She had promised herself a week of rest and she had kept the promise to the best of her ability; she had gone to the clinic only for three morning shifts; she had not driven out of town; she had read two novels; she had slept for ten hours a night. When she walked into the post office the postmistress, a woman named Ardeth Gorman, looked up from her counter.

"Doctor. Been wondering when you'd come. You've got a stack."

"A stack."

"You went AWOL over the holidays. Have you been buying things on the internet."

"No."

"Then it's Christmas cards. Come round."

Imani went round. Ardeth handed her a rubber-banded stack, perhaps twenty envelopes. Cards. Christmas cards from the clinic's former Chicago colleagues, from her cousins in Lagos, from Dr. Cho, from her former roommate in Minneapolis, from various people at various distances in her life. She took them under her arm.

The long white envelope was at the bottom of the stack.

She did not notice it at the post office. She did not notice it, in fact, until she got home, sat at her kitchen table with a cup of tea, took the rubber band off, and began to open cards in the order they had come to her hand.

The long white envelope was the fourth card. Except it was not a card. She recognized the handwriting before she recognized the name. She sat with the envelope in her lap for half a minute. She had not heard from Samuel in almost two years. She had last heard from him in February of the year she had moved to Nine Pines. He had called her then to tell her that his mother had died. She had said she was sorry. She had sent flowers. She had not heard from him since.

She opened the envelope.

The letter was on a piece of plain white printer paper, folded into thirds. Samuel had always written his personal letters on plain printer paper; he had found stationery pretentious. He had written this one by hand in blue ink, the careful narrow hand he had used since he had been a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the early 2000s.

Dear Imani,

I am writing this on the third of January. I am sorry to arrive without warning. I have had your Wisconsin address for a year; I have not used it; I did not feel I had a right to. I am using it now because I have something to tell you that I would not want you to hear from anyone else.

I got married in November. Her name is Hannah. She is a journalist. She is thirty-seven. We met at a dinner party in July. We were married at the courthouse on the tenth of November, quietly. There was no ceremony. Her parents were there. Her sister was there. It was small.

Hannah knows I am writing this letter. She asked me to. She said I should. She said that if I did not write it I would carry it around for a year and it would sour on me. I think she is right. Hannah is often right. You would like her, I think, though you will not meet her, or at least not for a long time, and that is right too.

I think about your mother sometimes. I am sorry I was not a better support to you when she was dying. I was young. I was also young when we were divorcing and I made, in the way that young men make them, a series of choices that I now see more clearly. I am not asking your forgiveness for any of them. You gave me, at the end, a kindness I did not entirely deserve, and I have held onto it.

I heard, through Eileen Cho, who I ran into in the fall at a conference, that you have moved to a small town in Wisconsin and are the doctor there. She said you seemed well. She said the town had been good for you. I was very glad to hear it.

I am not asking you to write back. You owe me nothing. If you wish to write, of course write. But do not feel obliged.

With affection and with wishes for every good thing — Samuel

Imani read the letter once. Then she read it again. Then she folded it back into its thirds and put it on the kitchen table and looked at the wall.

She was not crying. She had not cried in reading the letter. She was not, to her own surprise, immediately angry. She was not, to her own surprise, heartbroken. She was, instead, held very still by a feeling she could not name. The feeling had the texture of a fish in a hand. It moved. She could not set it down.

She got up. She walked into her living room. She sat on the sofa. She picked up a book. She put it down. She picked up her phone. She put it down. She walked back into the kitchen. The letter was where she had left it.

She read it a third time.

The third reading was different. The third reading she was able to notice the things she had not noticed the first two times. She noticed that Samuel had written 'to whom I had been married.' Not 'who I was married to.' He had written with his precise careful grammar even in a letter like this. She noticed that he had mentioned her mother, which he had always been afraid to mention, because her mother's death had been the great unsettling event of their early marriage and Samuel had never known what to do with it. She noticed that he had named Hannah three times. He had been careful to name her. He had not said 'my wife' and let Hannah remain faceless. He had said Hannah. He had wanted Imani to see Hannah as a person and not as a usurper.

She noticed, on the third reading, that Samuel was clearly happy.

She had not registered this on the first two readings because she had been reading for the news and the news was what had held her. She registered it now. Samuel, who had, through the last two years of their marriage, been a man of deep and private unhappiness that he had hidden from her only imperfectly, sounded in this letter like a man at some kind of rest. He sounded — she searched for the word — he sounded relieved. Not relieved of her. Relieved in himself. Relieved, as a house is relieved when an old and faulty furnace is finally replaced.

She sat with this.

She was glad. She was, to her own surprise, glad. She had thought, during the worst months after the divorce, that she would never be glad for Samuel again, and she had been wrong about that, as it turned out. She had, in coming to Nine Pines, stopped carrying him around every day; she had stopped having an opinion about him; she had, in some quiet way she had not quite noticed, put him down.

She had not realized, until the letter arrived, that she had put him down. She realized it now.

But the realization did not save her from the feeling that had started half an hour earlier and that continued to work in her through the afternoon. The feeling was not sadness. It was more like a — like an echo. The letter had been a bell struck in a room where the bell had not been struck in a long time. The sound was not loud. The sound was moving through her nevertheless, rearranging the dust.

She did not call her sister. She wanted to. She could not. She knew Doyin would come at the letter with a set of sharp loyal opinions that would be good for Imani and that Imani did not, today, want. She wanted, instead, to sit with this herself.

She did not call Margaret. She did not call Pastor Rhodes. She did not call anyone.

At four o'clock she went for a walk.

She did not walk to the nine pines. She walked to the lake. The lake was frozen now, a broad flat white plain stretched between the two headlands, with the dark line of the county road running past on the far side. She walked to the turnout by the boat launch where she had stopped, on the day of the first snow, to watch the snow meet the water. The water was not there now. The ice was. She walked past the turnout and down onto the snow-covered sand of the small beach. She did not walk out onto the ice. She did not trust it. She walked along the edge.

She thought, walking, about Samuel.

She thought about their wedding. She had been twenty-nine, he thirty-one. They had married at her aunt's house in London, in the garden, in July, under a wrought-iron arbor that her aunt had draped in white fabric and small pink roses. Her father had given her away. Her father had been alive. Her mother had not been alive; her mother had been twelve years gone; but her aunt, her mother's older sister, had stood in for her mother, and had said, at the small reception, the things a mother would have said, and Imani had cried at the saying of them. Samuel had cried too. Samuel had cried at their wedding because he had cried easily at such things, and because he had, she knew now, loved her very much at that time, though he was also a man who was not entirely sure how to be a husband and who was, in some way neither of them had yet seen, going to discover over the next dozen years that he had certain patterns of unhappiness that did not go away in a marriage, and might indeed be made worse by it.

She thought about the first apartment they had lived in together in Chicago, which had been a third-floor walk-up with bad plumbing and a radiator that had hissed like a disapproving aunt. She thought about the second apartment. She thought about the house they had bought, in their fifth year, a narrow brick row house in a Chicago neighborhood which they had together loved and which they had together, slowly, painted and repaired and furnished, and in which, in the end, she had packed her life into boxes and loaded the boxes into a moving truck and driven three hundred miles north.

She thought about Mr. Walters.

She had not thought of Samuel and Mr. Walters in the same train of thought before. It came to her now, walking along the lake edge, that the two losses had been linked in time. Samuel had left in the January of the year Mr. Walters had died. Samuel had not left because of Mr. Walters; it was not that simple; but Samuel had left during the months when Imani had been worst after Mr. Walters, and Samuel had not been able to be present for her during those months, and she had not been able to ask him to be, and the marriage had come apart under the weight of what neither of them had known how to say.

She reached the far end of the beach and turned around. The sun was going. The light on the ice had turned pink at the edges. A crow flew overhead, low, unhurried.

She walked home. She took the long way, past the elementary school and the fire hall and the old feed store which had been converted, in some previous decade, into an antique shop that had been closed now for years. Her house, when she reached it, was dark, because she had not left the lights on when she had left. She turned on the porch light from inside. She stood in her kitchen with her coat still on. The letter was on the table.

She picked it up. She folded it into its envelope. She considered throwing it away. She did not throw it away. She walked into the second bedroom, to the desk, and put the envelope in the top drawer. She closed the drawer.

She would not answer immediately. She might not answer at all. Samuel had said she did not have to. She believed him that she did not have to. But she thought that she would, eventually, answer. She thought she would write him one short letter, in a week or two, that said she had received his letter and that she wished him well and that she hoped for him every good thing. She thought she would write it as briefly and as kindly as he had written.

She did not sleep well that night.

She did not sleep badly in the old way, the way she had slept badly in Chicago in the year after the divorce, the way she had slept badly in the month after Mr. Walters's autopsy had come back. She slept badly in the way a person sleeps badly who has been given news they are still processing, who wakes once at two and lies for thirty minutes before drifting off again, who wakes again at four and lies for another twenty, who has dreams that do not become nightmares but that do not let her rest either.

She dreamed, once, of Samuel at their kitchen table, looking at her across it, saying nothing. In the dream he was wearing a shirt she had bought him in their third year of marriage. He was not angry. He was not sad. He was only present. She was looking back at him. They were not saying anything. The dream was silent. The dream did not resolve. She woke from it and looked at the ceiling and said, into the dark, "All right, Samuel. All right."

She said it as a dismissal, she thought, but as she said it she heard a different tone in her own voice. She heard, in her own voice, a blessing. She was, to her own surprise, blessing him. She was blessing the picture of him she had held in her dream, which was the picture of him at a kitchen table in a shirt she had once bought him, saying nothing, looking at her without anger or sadness. She was blessing that picture. She was letting it go.

She slept then. She slept until six-thirty.

In the morning she did not tell Dorothy. She did not tell Margaret. She did not tell Pastor Rhodes. She did not tell anyone. She carried the news inside herself through Wednesday and through Thursday and through Friday. At Friday Scrabble she was quieter than usual but not silent; she played her tiles; she drew a Q she did not know what to do with and she waited three rounds before playing QI, which Margaret permitted though Wendell objected; she laughed at Wendell's protest. She had a second glass of wine. She did not mention the letter.

On the Saturday, a full week after the letter had come, she wrote her reply.

Dear Samuel,

I received your letter. Thank you for sending it, and for the care with which it was written.

I am glad that you are married. I am glad Hannah is who you describe. You sound, in the letter, at rest, and I have hoped for that for you for a long time. I hope for her every good thing also.

You are right that we parted badly, and you are right that we were both hurting. I have thought about that often, and thought about it again this week. I do not think either of us needs to apologize further. I think what was is what was, and I am — this week in particular — letting it be what it was.

I am well, in Nine Pines. The town is very small and very cold. My patients are kind. My neighbors are good. I have friends here, which surprised me. I had not expected friends.

Thank you for thinking of my mother. I have been thinking of her this year as I had not for a long time.

Please thank Hannah for asking you to write. It was a kind instinct. I would have hated not to know.

With my best wishes, always — Imani

She read the letter over once. She did not change anything. She put it in an envelope. She addressed it to the return address on Samuel's letter. She put a stamp on it. She walked it to the post office that afternoon, where Ardeth Gorman took it from her without comment.

She walked back. The afternoon was bright and the snow was bluish in the shadow of the post office awning. Her breath made its usual weather.

She went home. She made soup. She ate it. She read. She slept, that night, well.

[END OF CHAPTER 15]

The winter solstice in the year Imani came to Nine Pines had fallen on the twenty-first of December, three days before Christmas Eve, and in the usual course of the calendar she would have marked it if she had marked it at all on that day. She had not. She had been, on the twenty-first of December, driving home from the clinic at four-eighteen in the afternoon as the last of the daylight faded, and had noticed only vaguely, as one notices a birthday one has half-forgotten, that this was the longest night.

She had told herself, that evening, that she would walk the nine pines on the solstice next year. She had, through the unfolding of the winter, forgotten that she had told herself this. She remembered it now, in the last week of January, in a way that belonged not to the calendar but to some internal counting. The calendar solstice was over. The astronomical longest night had passed a month ago. But she had, in the week after Samuel's letter, come into a quiet she had not had before, and she had understood, with the understanding of a person who has been told something by her own life, that what she had meant by marking the solstice had not been a date. What she had meant was a walk that she needed to take.

She took the walk on a Sunday evening in the last week of January. She took it at four o'clock, just before full dark. She told no one. She did not tell Margaret. She did not tell Pastor Rhodes, with whom she had had coffee on Wednesday and who had not asked her anything she had not wanted to answer. She did not tell Dorothy. She packed a small canvas bag. She packed a thermos of tea — strong black tea with a great deal of milk and honey, the way her father had taken it — and one of Margaret's remaining Christmas cookies, which had grown slightly stale but were still the best sugar cookies in the county, and a small woollen blanket that had been her mother's.

She dressed carefully. She wore two pairs of wool socks. She wore the warm gloves. She wore the heavy coat. She wore a hat her sister had sent her for Christmas, which had arrived in a package with many other items and which Imani had not worn yet because she had been saving it for a walk that would be worth the first wearing. This, she thought, is the walk.

She drove to the north edge of town. She parked on the shoulder of the road that climbed out toward the county line, near the low rise. She had walked to the pines all autumn; she had walked to them, once, at five on the morning after Kelsey's crisis; she had stood under them on the evening of that same day in the early dusk; but she had not, in these eight months, driven to them. She drove now because the temperature was seven below zero and she did not want to spend the end of the walk getting frostbite in her toes on the walk home.

She got out of the car. She slung the canvas bag over her shoulder. She walked the short path up to the pines.

The nine pines stood as they had always stood. The snow lay heavy in their branches. Above them the sky was clearing from a long grey afternoon into the thin blue-black of a winter dusk, with the first stars already visible over the eastern horizon and the last cold pink of the set sun still on the western.

She walked to the tallest. She did not stand with her back to it this time. She walked around the half-circle of the nine, in order, from the tallest at the east end to the smallest at the west. She walked slowly. She looked up at each tree. She did not speak. She did not pray aloud. She touched each trunk with her gloved hand. The bark was cold through the glove.

She stopped at the smallest, at the west end, and stood. The sun had gone. The horizon there was the pink-gray of an old rose pressed in a book. Below the pink the field stretched flat and white to the line of a distant woods. A single crow, somewhere far out in the field, called once, twice, and was silent.

She set the blanket down. She spread it at the foot of the smallest pine. She sat on it. She took out the thermos. She poured the tea into its small plastic cup. She drank.

The tea was very hot. It was the first thing that had been hot in the air around her for the last twenty minutes. The heat of it went down her throat and into her chest and made a small interior sun of itself in the region of her heart. She held the cup in both gloved hands and looked out over the field.

She thought, then, of her mother.

Her mother had died on a March afternoon in London, at five past four, in a hospice room with yellow curtains. Imani had been seventeen. She had been holding her mother's left hand. Her sister had been holding her mother's right. Her father had been in the hallway because he had not been able to be in the room. Her mother had died quietly, over many hours; her death had not been violent, it had not been sudden; it had been, in its long unfolding, nearly gentle, if such a thing can be said of a death. Her mother had not spoken in the last forty-five minutes. She had opened her eyes twice in that span, and looked at each daughter, and then closed them. She had breathed more and more lightly, and the time between breaths had grown longer, and at some point the breaths had stopped and Doyin had looked across the bed at Imani and said, very quietly, 'She is gone.'

Imani had not cried for a long time after her mother had died. She had cried briefly in the hospice room, once, when the nurse had come in. She had not cried at the funeral. She had cried, finally, three weeks later, sitting on the stairs of her father's house in Hampstead, a Wednesday evening, and she had cried for forty minutes, and then she had got up and gone to make supper, and she had cried only rarely after that in the following years, with the occasional intensity of a person whose grief had, for whatever reason, chosen to live as a steady companion rather than as a storm.

She thought of her mother now under the smallest of the nine pines. She did not cry. She thought, with a kind of warmth, of specific things. Of her mother's hands making the chicken stew. Of her mother laughing at a Yoruba pun a cousin had made at Eid. Of her mother, in the last good year, wearing a blue headwrap her grandmother had sent from Lagos. Of her mother, teaching her at nine years old to write her name in cursive, correcting her grip on the pen. Of her mother walking to the Bahá'í Center on a Sunday afternoon when the London sky had been the color of pewter.

She drank another sip of tea.

She thought of Mr. Walters.

Mr. Walters she thought of with less warmth and more attention. She thought of him as she had thought of him under the tallest pine at five in the morning in November. She thought of the specific failure of her clinical judgment that had lost him. She thought of his wife, whom she had met only once, in the ER waiting room, and whom she had not dared to contact after the autopsy because she had not known what to say and had been too afraid of what the wife would say to her.

She sat.

She thought of Samuel.

She thought of his letter. She thought of Hannah, whom she would never meet, whom she had, over the last two weeks, begun to imagine as a real and specific person — short, perhaps, with dark curly hair, with a laugh that she imagined was sharper than Samuel's and more ready. She thought of Hannah asking Samuel to write the letter. She thought of Samuel writing it. She thought of her own letter back. She had dropped it in the post office on a Saturday, and she had imagined it, every day since, making its way south — sitting in a mail truck, sitting in a sorting facility in Minneapolis, sitting in a Chicago post office, sitting in Samuel's mail slot, sitting on Samuel's kitchen counter where Hannah might see it first and might open it herself or might not. She had pictured all of this. She had pictured it without distress. She had pictured it with the particular attention of a person sending a letter who had wanted the letter to arrive well.

She thought of Margaret.

She thought of Margaret's kitchen. Of the bread Margaret had made the first day of snow. Of the twelve cookies Margaret had brought her on Christmas Day, which had been careful, and which she had eaten through the following week, saving the last one, as she had, for tonight. Of Margaret's face at Scrabble, frowning over her tiles. Of Margaret's laugh, surprised, deep. Of the way Margaret had said 'we' about the town and the clinic and the block, and had said it without self-consciousness, because Margaret had been making a 'we' all her life in this place and did not know how to stop.

She thought of Pastor Rhodes.

She thought of his bandaged hand. Of his question. Of his own answer. Of his homily. Of the phrase 'I have been a pastor for forty-four years and have only been a Christian for four.' Of the way he had nodded to her at the tree lighting and then moved off. Of the Christmas Eve service. Of 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.' Of the three steps of the pulpit, which he had climbed and descended with the particular quiet economy of a tall man who had been climbing them for his whole adult life.

She thought of Bryn.

She thought of the hundred and twelve days Bryn had not cried and the thirty minutes Bryn had sat in the little waiting area in silence and the five minutes she had cried at last and the two apple slices and the one cracker. She thought of the session the next week, at which Bryn had cried again, less, and had eaten a bowl of soup at her request. She thought of the session after that, at which Bryn had spoken, for the first time, the name she and Tyler had chosen for the baby, a name which Imani had heard once and would not forget. She thought of Bryn, on the last visit before Christmas, standing up from the chair on her own, without assistance, and of saying, at the door, 'Same time, next week, Doctor,' in the voice of a woman who had decided she was going to live.

She thought of Kelsey.

She thought of Kelsey, on bed rest through the month of December, whose subchorionic hematoma had by mid-January nearly resolved. Of the ultrasound Sarah Connolly had done in Wausau on Monday, which had shown the placenta normal, the baby vigorous, the pregnancy fully stable. Of Pete, at the last visit, who had been wearing a new sweater his mother had bought him and who had asked her, shyly, whether she would be their baby's first doctor when the baby was born. She had said yes. She would. She would be there in April when the baby came — not for the delivery, which would be in Wausau, but for the first visit home, and the first month, and the first year. She would be the baby's doctor. She had said so.

She thought of Mrs. Ostergaard and her sock. Of Mr. Dahl and his wrist, which had come out of the cast clean in the first week of January, and who had shaken her hand with his good hand and said 'You're all right, Doc' in the voice of a man issuing a final verdict, and she had thanked him. Of Jacob Willems, whose bean had not reappeared. Of the small boy who had lit her candle at Christmas Eve. Of Hap at the fire hall. Of Arne with his tractor. Of Ardeth at the post office. Of Lillian at the library and her Belgian mysteries. Of Dorothy — Dorothy, who had sat up all night with Kelsey and who had made her sandwiches for eight months without being asked and who had bought her a lightbox without permission — Dorothy, who was, she understood now, the reason she had been able to be the doctor in this town at all.

She reached into her bag. She took out the last of Margaret's cookies. She ate it slowly. It was stale. It was wonderful. She brushed the crumbs from her glove onto the snow, where the juncos, in the morning, would find them.

She thought of her Faith.

She had not, in the last several weeks, thought of her Faith the way she often had. She had not reached for a text, or a prayer, or a formal practice. She had lived what she had lived. She thought of it now with the same warmth and specific attention. She thought of a short passage from 'Abdu'l-Bahá that she had loved since she was a girl — a passage about a lamp, and a light, and the fact that all the lamps of the world are one light, when they are properly lit. She had read that passage in many moods. She had read it as a teenager, as a student, as a young doctor, as a wife, as a divorcée, as a woman who had lost a patient, as a woman who had come to Nine Pines and had stood under the trees alone. She read it now, in her head, not the Persian but the English of a translation she had long loved, and she felt, reading it, the particular peace that had come over her in the pew at Christmas Eve during 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.'

She sat a while longer. The cold began to reach her, through the layers. She knew it was time to go. She did not want to leave. She stayed, with discipline, another ten minutes, because she had wanted to be here on the longest night and she was here, and it was her night, and it did not owe her a length other than the one she gave it.

She finished the tea. She capped the thermos. She stood. She picked up the blanket and folded it. She put the thermos and the blanket in the canvas bag. She looked up.

The stars were out in earnest now. Orion was over the field. The Pleiades were in the southeastern sky. The Milky Way, which at this latitude in January was visible on a clear night to anyone who knew to look for it, was a soft brush stroke across the zenith. She had never, in Chicago, seen the Milky Way. She had seen it in Minneapolis once, outside of town, camping with a friend. She saw it here, now, in January, at seven below, a few miles north of a town where she was the only doctor and in which she had lived, as of tomorrow, exactly ten months.

She walked the length of the nine pines back, east to west, reversing the order in which she had entered. She touched each trunk. She said nothing. At the tallest she stopped longer. She pressed her gloved hand flat against the trunk. She closed her eyes.

"Alláh-u-Abhá."

She said it once. She opened her eyes. She walked down the rise to the road, and to her car, and she got in, and she started the engine, and she let it warm for a minute before putting it into gear.

She drove back toward town slowly. The road was empty. The lit windows of Nine Pines were visible from the curve of the road where she crested the last hill — a scatter of yellow and white dots, a town, a place, a gathering of lights against the dark. She slowed the car. She stopped on the shoulder. She looked.

There was Margaret's window, which would be the front porch light of the yellow house on the corner of Linden and Maple. There was the clinic sign, on a tall post on Main, lit so that drivers coming into town at night would see it. There was the blue spruce at the square, which she could just make out at this distance because the lights were still up, and would be until Epiphany. There was the small lit cross at the top of Pastor Rhodes's church, which was a modest cross, not ostentatious, but which at night in the winter was a steady fact at the west edge of the square. There were the homes of her patients. There were the lit bedroom windows of the Obermann house on the east edge. There were the streetlamps along Main. There was the porch light of the Pratt house, where Tyler and Bryn would be sitting together in the living room, probably, watching something on television with the sound low. There was, a few blocks further on, her own porch — a red porch with a porch light — which she had left on before she had driven out.

She put the car into gear. She drove the last mile into Nine Pines. The streets were nearly empty; it was, by now, past five; full dark; the cold air was clean and windless; her tires crunched on the snow.

She parked in her own driveway. She got out. She stood in the cold a moment. She looked at her red porch, with its yellow light, with the snow on the railings, with the small mat that said WELCOME in wooden letters. Her kitchen window, through the front of the house, was faintly visible, a square of lamp-lit warmth beyond the porch glass.

She went up the steps. She opened the door. She went inside. She hung her coat on the hook. She took off her boots. She set the canvas bag on the kitchen table and took out the thermos and rinsed it in the sink. She put on the kettle. She stood at the kitchen window and watched her own dim reflection in the glass. She was smiling, she noticed. She had not known, in the car, in the dark, that she was smiling.

She thought, briefly, of the winter remaining — of February, which she had been told was the longest month of a Wisconsin winter, and of March, which would tease with thaws and then freeze again, and of April, when Kelsey's baby would come and Doyin would write from London with her plans, and of May, when her sister would come at last. She thought of the work ahead. She thought of the people who would, in the coming weeks, walk into the clinic, expected and unexpected. She thought of the patients she did not yet know. She thought of the person, whoever it would be, whose crisis would come next.

She was not afraid of any of it.

She made her tea. She sat at her kitchen table. She took out her journal. She wrote, for half an hour, about the walk she had just taken — about the pines, and the cookie crumbs, and the Milky Way, and the lit windows of the town visible from the last hill. She did not write about her mother, or about Samuel, or about Mr. Walters, or about Bryn, or about any of the others. She had already held them. She did not need to hold them twice.

She closed the journal. She put it on the shelf above her desk. She finished her tea. She washed her cup. She turned off the kitchen light. She went down the short hall to her bedroom. She changed into her nightclothes. She brushed her teeth. She sat on the edge of her bed for a moment in the dark and listened to the silence of the house and to the even deeper silence of the town outside it.

"I am here. I am well. Thank You."

She got into bed. She turned out the lamp. The snow began, again, faintly, against the bedroom window. She did not see it. Her eyes were closed.

She slept.

[END OF PART 2 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 3]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 2]

The thaw came in the second week of February, a false spring that fooled no one and everyone. For three days the temperature climbed into the forties and the ice on the eaves began to drip and the snow along the county road turned to a gray slush that splashed up the wheel wells of every truck in Nine Pines. Imani left the clinic one evening and stood for a moment in the parking lot with her coat unbuttoned, feeling the air on her throat. It smelled like wet wood and gasoline and, faintly, like mud. Mud. She had forgotten mud. She had forgotten that the earth beneath all this whiteness was still earth, still capable of producing a smell.

The next morning it froze again. The dripping eaves became daggers. The slush on the road became a washboard of ice that the plows could not quite scrape off. And the flu came, as it always comes in February, not in a wave but in a steady and exhausting rain.

By Wednesday she had seen thirty-one patients. By Friday, forty-four. Denise, at the front desk, started bringing in soup for the staff because nobody had time to eat, and then Denise herself was out three days with it, and Imani answered the phone between appointments and ran the autoclave herself in the back and forgot, twice, to sign her own charts before going home.

On the eleventh day of this she stood at the sink in the exam room at six-forty in the evening, washing her hands for the ninetieth time that day, and found that she could not remember the name of the patient she had just seen. A man. Older. Chest cold. She had prescribed something. She could not remember what. She stood with her hands under the water and watched the soap run off her knuckles and for a long moment did not move.

Then she went back to the chart and looked. Henrik Voss. Azithromycin. She had written it correctly. She had done it right. She had just, for a moment, not been able to hold it in her head.

She drove home in the dark. The radio was on some station she never listened to, playing a country song about a woman who missed a man. She did not change it. She let the song unspool. She did not pull into her own driveway for a full thirty seconds after reaching it, only sat with the engine idling and her hands on the wheel, watching the porch light through the windshield.

Inside, she ate a bowl of cereal standing up at the counter. The milk was a day past its date but still tasted fine. She read a single page of a book she had been reading since October, realized she had read it before and did not remember, and set the book down. She went to bed in her scrubs because she could not summon the energy to change. She told herself she would shower in the morning.

The thought was not catastrophic. It did not come with tears or a racing heart. It was simply a piece of information, offered by some part of her that had been keeping quiet. She turned it over the way a physician turns over a symptom, without panic, looking for its referents.

She got up. She made tea. She sat at her kitchen table in her scrubs with her hair wrapped in the blue silk scarf she had started wearing to bed again, the one her mother had given her when she was sixteen. She drank the tea slowly. She said the short Obligatory Prayer, the one for people in a hurry, which she had not been saying in a hurry but rather in a particular quiet. *I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee.*

The words did not fix anything. They did not make her less tired. They were not a pill. But they were a shape she could fit herself into for the span of their saying, and when she was done she felt, not better, but more accurately located. She was a woman of a certain age, in a small town, in the middle of a February night, praying. That was a real thing. That was something she was actually doing.

She went back to bed. She slept until seven. She showered. She went to work. She saw, that day, thirty-nine patients, and at lunch she ate a turkey sandwich that Margaret had left on her desk with a note that said, *Eat this. Margaret.* She ate it. She did not cry over it, though she thought about it later and wondered if she should have.

That was the first week of February, and the second, and into the third. The cracks were small. A pharmacist in Eagle River miscounted a prescription and she had to call back to correct him and her voice was sharper than she meant it. A child she had been treating for weeks for ear infections came in again with the same complaint and she thought, before she could stop herself, *Your mother is not following directions*, and the thought surprised her in its heat. She apologized to no one, because no one had heard the thought, but she noted it.

She wrote in a small notebook she had started keeping in her desk. Just a line, at the end of each day. *Forty-one today. Ran out of amoxicillin suspension. Denise back. Tired.* The notebook was not a diary exactly. It was a ledger. She was keeping track of what she could not yet name.

On the twenty-first of February, a Sunday, she slept until ten. When she woke, the sun was coming through the curtains and the light was different. It was not spring. But it was not the dead white light of January either. It was a light with something forward in it. She lay in bed for a long while and looked at the ceiling and listened to the furnace tick and thought about her father, who had died when she was thirty-one, and her mother, who was seventy-eight and in Atlanta and called her every Sunday at noon.

She got up. She made coffee. She waited for the phone to ring. When it did, she picked up on the second ring and said, in Yoruba first and English second, as she always did with her mother, *Ẹ káàárọ̀, Mama. Good morning.*

Her mother told her about church. About a cousin who had lost his job. About a nephew who had gotten into a university in Lagos. About the weather, which was warm. Imani told her about the flu season, briefly, and about Margaret, whom her mother had begun to ask about by name, and about a woman named Bryn who had lost a baby in January and was, Imani thought, slowly coming back to herself.

Then her mother said, without any particular weight, *You sound tired, Imani.*

*I am tired, Mama.*

*Are you eating?*

*Yes.*

*Praying?*

*Yes. Mostly.*

*Good. It is February. February is hard for everybody. Your father used to say February was the month God forgot to finish.*

Imani laughed. She had not heard this one before. *Did he really say that?*

*He said it every year. Every February. He would come in from the car and stomp his feet and say, God forgot to finish February. And I would say, God did not forget, you just want an extra week of vacation. And he would laugh.*

They stayed on the line. They did not say anything important. Imani listened to her mother's breathing, the small clock of it, and felt, for the first time in weeks, that she was not alone in her body. That there was another body somewhere, a thousand miles away, breathing in the same rhythm she was breathing. When her mother said she had to go — church potluck — Imani held the phone for a second after the line went dead.

Then she put on her coat and walked. She walked past Margaret's house, where the porch light was on, and past the library, which was closed, and all the way to the edge of town where the nine pines stood on their small rise. She did not go up to them. She stood at the foot of the rise and looked. They were ragged with snow. Their tops moved in a wind she could not feel at ground level.

*February,* she said, to no one. *February.*

She walked back. She made soup. She went to bed early. She did not know it, but she was preparing, in some quiet way, for what came next.

*

March second. The date had sat in her calendar since the day she had gotten this calendar, and before that in the previous calendar, and before that in the calendar before that. She did not write it down as a reminder. She wrote it down because she could not stand to have the day pass without her having acknowledged it, even privately, even in a square of paper she would fold and throw away.

Mr. Walters had died on March second, two years ago. He had been sixty-eight. He had come in with chest pain on a Tuesday and she had missed it, or rather, she had not missed it so much as she had not caught it at the right angle. The EKG had been ambiguous. The troponin had been borderline. She had admitted him and she had planned to cath him in the morning and in the morning he was dead. A second, larger infarct. It had killed him in the space of three minutes while a nurse was changing his IV.

She had reviewed the case a thousand times. She had been reviewed for it, formally, by two committees, both of which had cleared her. The family had not sued. The family, in fact, had sent her a card at Christmas that first year, a card with a picture of a snowman on the front and inside the words, *Dr. Adeyemo, we want you to know we never blamed you. Walter loved you. He called you his good doctor. Please take care of yourself. The Walters family.*

She had kept the card. It was in the top drawer of her desk in Nine Pines. She took it out sometimes and read it and it never once made her feel better.

On the morning of March second she left Nine Pines at five. It was still dark. She drove south on Highway 45 with the heat on high and a thermos of coffee in the passenger seat and a small prayer book in her bag. Margaret knew she was going, though Imani had not told her why; Margaret had only nodded, when Imani said she would be gone for the day, and said, *Drive safe, doctor.*

Four hours to Chicago. She had done the drive many times, but never like this, never with this destination. She went straight to the cemetery in the suburbs, a large old cemetery with a wrought-iron gate and a map posted near the office. The map was inadequate. She drove the little paved lanes for twenty minutes before she found the right section. She had looked up the plot number before leaving. Section 14, plot 87B.

She parked and got out. The wind was sharp. Chicago wind, which was a different animal from Wisconsin wind — drier, somehow, more urban, carrying the faint chemical tang of the city even here, twenty miles out. She walked down a row of stones with her hands in her coat pockets, reading the names. Szymanski. Foster. O'Brien. Cohen. Walters.

There he was. A small granite stone, nothing fancy. *Walter James Walters, 1955-2024. Beloved husband, father, grandfather. Rest in peace.*

She stood at the foot of the stone. She had practiced what she was going to say, over the eight-hour drive that was now only four hours done, and she had not settled on anything. She had thought she would be crying by now, and she was not. She was only standing, in the wind, in front of a stone, with her hands in her pockets.

*Mr. Walters,* she said.

The name in the air. Her own voice strange to her. No one answered, of course. No one was going to answer. But the saying of it was something.

*Mr. Walters, I came to say I'm sorry.*

She swallowed. The wind caught her scarf and she let it flap.

*I have been saying it in my head for two years. I have been saying it to other patients, in a way. I have been saying it to myself in the mirror. I came here to say it to you.*

She paused. A car started somewhere at the far end of the cemetery, a long low sound.

*I don't know if I missed it. I don't know if a better doctor would have caught it. The committees said I didn't. Your family said I didn't. But you were my patient, and you died, and that is something I have to carry whether or not I missed it.*

She crouched. The ground was hard but not frozen; in Chicago the thaw had come and stayed. She put a hand, briefly, on the top of the stone. The granite was cold. She had not known what she would feel, touching it. She felt the cold and the slight roughness of the stone and nothing else.

*You called me your good doctor. Your family told me. I didn't know you'd said that. I wish I had known. I wish — I wish I had been.*

Now the tears. They came without warning, the way they always did, not from her eyes first but from her throat, a thickening, and then from her eyes, which had decided without consulting her. She did not sob. She just wept, standing there with her hand on his stone, the wind taking the tears off her cheeks before they could fall.

*I moved,* she said. *I moved to a small town. I am a country doctor now. I thought I was running away. Maybe I was. But I want you to know — I want you to know I did not quit. I am still doing the work. I am doing it differently. I am trying to do it better. I don't know if you would have liked the person I am now. I don't know if you would know her.*

She stood up. She wiped her face with her glove.

*Alláh'u'abhá,* she said, softly. *God is most glorious. Rest, Mr. Walters. I hope you are at rest.*

She stood a minute more. Then she walked back to her car.

In the driver's seat, with the engine off, she took the prayer book out of her bag. It was small and blue and the cover was worn. She opened it to the prayers for the departed. She had marked the page with a pale green ribbon, years ago, for another death, her father's.

She read aloud, quietly, though there was no one to hear.

*O my God! O Thou forgiver of sins, bestower of gifts, dispeller of afflictions! Verily, I beseech Thee to forgive the sins of such as have abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spiritual world.*

She had to stop. The words, which she had read many times before, were new now. They were for this man. They were for the man whose stone was a hundred yards behind her, his granite waiting in the wind.

*O my Lord! Purify them from trespasses, dispel their sorrows, and change their darkness into light. Cause them to enter the garden of happiness, cleanse them with the most pure water, and grant them to behold Thy splendors on the loftiest mount.*

She finished the prayer. She closed the book. She sat a long time with her hands on the book in her lap.

She did not drive to the hospital. She had thought, on the way down, that she might go by the old hospital, just to see it, just to touch the lobby. But now she did not want to. Not today. Today was for the stone and the prayer. The hospital could wait.

Imani stood on the porch and laughed once, a soft surprised sound, and picked up the casserole and took it inside.

*

It was the third week of March when Margaret did not answer her door.

Imani had gotten into the habit of walking by Margaret's house on Wednesday evenings after clinic, because Wednesday was Scrabble night and they often walked together to the community room. The light was getting longer; by six-thirty there was still a wash of blue over the rooftops. Imani walked up Margaret's steps and knocked and waited and knocked again.

She had a key. Margaret had given her one in December, apropos of nothing, pressing it into her palm with the words, *In case I fall down the stairs and lie there for three days. You would want to know.*

Imani used the key now. She called out as she opened the door. *Margaret? It's Imani.*

Margaret was in her bed, propped against three pillows, her white hair loose and damp on her temples. Her cheeks were high with color, not the healthy color of a woman who has been walking, but the bright patchy color of fever. Her eyes were bright too. She gave Imani a rueful smile.

*I think I overdid it,* she said.

Imani put down her bag. *How long?*

*Since Monday. It was just a cold. I thought I'd rest it out.*

*You didn't call me.*

*I didn't want to make a fuss. It's just a cold, Imani.*

Imani sat on the edge of the bed and took Margaret's wrist. The pulse was too fast. She put the back of her hand against Margaret's forehead. She laid her stethoscope, which she carried in her bag always, against Margaret's back through the thin cotton of her nightgown and said, *Breathe.* Margaret breathed, and the wet crackle of it came up through the bell of the stethoscope like ice breaking on a pond.

Pneumonia. Obvious. The left lower lobe, by the sound of it.

*Margaret,* Imani said, and kept her voice even, *this is not a cold.*

*It isn't?*

*It's pneumonia. We need to start antibiotics tonight. And I want to give you some fluids.*

Margaret's face did a brief thing that Imani had seen on other patients, a flicker of fear instantly overridden by the long-practiced muscle of composure. Margaret had been a teacher for forty-one years; she did not show fear in front of people, not even Imani. She nodded.

*All right,* she said. *You're the doctor.*

Imani did not want to move her. The drive to the hospital in Rhinelander was forty minutes, and Margaret was eighty-one, and the decision to hospitalize an eighty-one-year-old with pneumonia was not nothing. They could do this at home if Margaret was stable. She did not sound unstable. Her oxygen saturation, when Imani clipped the pulse oximeter on her finger, was ninety-three, which was low but not dangerous. Her blood pressure was fine. Her heart was beating fast because of the fever.

*Margaret,* Imani said, *I would like to treat you here if we can. But you have to promise me that if you get worse in the night, you will call me. Not tomorrow. The moment. Do you understand?*

*I understand.*

*Promise me.*

*I promise.*

Imani went to the clinic and came back with what she needed. She hung a bag of fluids from the brass lamp that stood by Margaret's bed — the lamp's scrollwork held the IV pole perfectly, as if it had been designed for this, and Imani felt a brief absurd gratitude toward the blacksmith who had made the lamp. She started the IV in the back of Margaret's hand, carefully, the veins thin and rolling the way the veins of eighty-year-olds do. She gave the first dose of antibiotic. She listened to the lungs again. She made Margaret drink half a glass of water.

Then she went to the kitchen and made tea and found, in the pantry, a can of chicken soup, which she heated and brought back to the bedroom. Margaret ate three spoonfuls and put down the spoon.

*That's all I can do,* she said.

*That's fine. Sleep.*

*Are you staying?*

*Yes. I'm staying.*

Margaret closed her eyes and was asleep within a minute. Imani sat in the chair by the bed and watched her breathe. The breathing was labored but regular. After half an hour Imani got up and walked around the house quietly, because she had never been alone in it before, and she wanted to know it.

Margaret's house was full of small organized things. A shelf of teaching awards, most of them small plaques from school districts. A row of photographs along the mantel — Margaret and her husband Hank, who had died in 2014, at various ages; Margaret with students; Margaret on a beach somewhere, squinting; Margaret with a young man in a camouflage uniform. Imani paused at this last one. The young man looked like Margaret around the eyes. He was laughing. His hand was on her shoulder.

Imani stood a long time looking at this picture. Then she went back to the bedroom.

She slept in the chair for four hours. At two in the morning she woke and checked Margaret's pulse and oxygen, both stable, and dozed again. At six she made coffee and ate a piece of toast standing at the counter. Margaret woke at six-thirty and was, visibly, a degree better. Her eyes were less bright. Her cheeks were still flushed but not mottled.

*You stayed,* Margaret said.

*I told you I would.*

*You said you would. You didn't say you'd sleep in the chair.*

*I didn't want to leave you.*

Margaret looked at her. Her eyes filled. She looked away quickly, the old instinct. Then she looked back.

*Thank you, Imani.*

*Of course.*

Imani canceled her morning appointments. She sat with Margaret through the day. She ran out at noon to the clinic for a fresh bag of fluids and some magazines. In the late afternoon, when Margaret was eating a cracker without enthusiasm but eating, Imani said, *Who was the young man in the picture? The one in uniform?*

Margaret's hand, with the cracker in it, stopped halfway to her mouth. For a moment Imani thought she had made a mistake, that this was a door she had opened too soon. Then Margaret put the cracker down on the saucer.

*That was David.*

*Your son?*

*My son.*

Margaret looked toward the window. The afternoon light came through the curtains in a pale yellow way.

*He was killed in Afghanistan. Two thousand and twelve. He was twenty-two.*

*Margaret, I'm sorry.*

*Thank you, doctor.*

A long silence. Imani did not push. She had learned a long time ago that you do not push a silence in which a mother is visiting her dead son.

*He had enlisted,* Margaret said at last. *His father and I were not happy. We were not unhappy — we were proud, that is the strange thing, we were proud of him, but we were not happy. We knew. You know. You know, even before. You do not know, but you know.*

Imani nodded.

*He was in Helmand Province. An IED. He was in the lead vehicle. They say he did not suffer. I have never known whether to believe that or not. Maybe it is true. Maybe they say it to all of us, and sometimes it is true and sometimes not. It does not matter so much.*

She took up the cracker again, absently, and broke it in half, and did not eat it.

*What I learned, Imani, is that grief does not go away. People will tell you that it does. They will tell you about stages, about healing, about closure, about all the vocabulary of the grief industry, which has grown since David. Closure is the word I hate most. There is no closure. There is only — it becomes a house you live in. At first it is a house you cannot stand to be in, a house on fire. Then it is a house you have gotten used to. Then it is simply your house. You do not think about its walls because they are the walls. But they are always there.*

Imani sat very still.

*I taught school for twenty-eight years after David,* Margaret said. *Twenty-eight years. I loved my students. I loved my husband. I loved my mornings with coffee and the Sunday paper. All of that was real. And David was always in the next room. Always. If you see an old woman who seems cheerful, Imani, and you wonder how — that is how. There is always the next room.*

She looked at Imani. Her eyes were dry now.

*I am telling you this because you are tired,* she said. *I can see. And I want you to know that whatever is in your next room, you can live with it. Not past it. With it. That is the only honest word.*

Imani felt, surprisingly, her eyes fill. She did not look away.

*Mr. Walters,* she said. *My patient in Chicago.*

*The one who died?*

*Yes.*

*Ah.*

*I went to his grave two weeks ago. On the anniversary.*

*Did it help?*

*I don't know. A little, maybe.*

*A little is something. A little is often all we get.*

They sat together until the light in the window began to go. Then Imani hung a new bag of fluids and checked Margaret's lungs again — less crackle now, a little more air moving — and made them both dinner. She slept in the chair a second night.

Margaret was substantially better by the fourth day and back on her feet, gingerly, by the seventh. But something had changed. Margaret, when she walked now, walked a little more slowly. She used the bannister on her porch steps, which she had not used before. She took naps in the afternoon, and she said so without apology, which was a kind of apology all its own; Margaret had never before needed to say she was going to nap.

*I am eighty-one, Imani,* she said one evening, when Imani had commented, mildly, that she should not lift the heavy bag of birdseed by herself. *I am eighty-one and I am tired. I am not sick anymore. I am only old. You cannot fix old.*

*I know.*

*I do not want you to fix it. I want you to notice it, and then I want you to have a cup of tea with me.*

*All right.*

They had the cup of tea. They played Scrabble, very slowly, at Margaret's kitchen table. Margaret beat her by nineteen points. Her mind was still quick. Her body had moved one step closer to the door.

*

The call came on a Thursday afternoon.

Imani was eating a salad at her desk, reviewing lab results from the morning, when Denise buzzed her and said, *There's a Dr. Prakash on line two. Says she knows you.*

*Prakash,* Imani said, and the name clicked. Ayesha Prakash. A cardiologist. A friend of a friend from the old hospital. Imani had liked her. They had shared a cab once to a conference in Denver and talked about their mothers the whole way.

*Hello?*

*Imani. It's Ayesha. Do you have a minute?*

*Of course. How are you? How is — is Sunil still at Northwestern?*

*He is. He is. Listen, I'm calling for a work reason. I hope that's okay.*

Imani set down her fork. *Okay.*

*We have an opening. A big one. You know Petrakis left — no, you wouldn't know, he went on leave and then didn't come back, he's on a farm in Wisconsin now, ironically. We have been trying to fill his position for eight months. I was on the search committee last round and we — well, we did not do well. The candidate we offered took Rush instead.*

*I'm sorry to hear that.*

*I am calling to ask you if you would consider coming back.*

Imani did not answer immediately. She looked at her salad.

*Ayesha —*

*Before you say anything. Let me just say what the offer is. Because I know it's been — I know why you left. And I'm not saying that didn't matter. I'm saying a lot has changed and we've changed how we do things and I would not be calling if I didn't think you would thrive here now.*

*All right. Tell me.*

Ayesha told her. Director of internal medicine for the inpatient service. A full research line, fifteen percent protected time, a modest grant already in hand for a project on rural/urban healthcare disparities that Ayesha had cannily cited in her pitch. A team of forty-two. A salary that was, when Ayesha named it, nearly three times what Imani made in Nine Pines. An office with a window. A lab. Graduate students.

*We would want you here in September,* Ayesha said. *We know that is fast. We know you have — obligations where you are. Commitments. We're flexible on the start date within reason. But we want you, Imani. I want you.*

*Ayesha, I — I have to think.*

*Of course. Of course you do.*

*Can I call you back in two weeks?*

*Take three. Take a month. Take whatever you need. I'm serious.*

*Thank you.*

*Imani. One more thing.*

*Yes?*

*I was not on the committee that reviewed Walters. I want you to know that. I heard about it. I heard they cleared you. I heard, also, that you did not feel cleared. I cannot speak to that. I can only say — we have a different chief now. A different culture. I think you would find it different. I am not saying this to flatter you. I am saying it because I think it is true.*

Imani did not trust her voice. *Thank you, Ayesha. I'll call.*

She hung up. She sat with her hand on the phone for a minute and then another minute. Then she ate her salad, slowly, without tasting it, until it was done.

*Money. Research. Team. Mother closer (4 hours vs 14). Medicine at the edge. The Walters debt paid, maybe, by doing better. Ayesha. A gym. Restaurants. A concert hall.*

*Margaret.*

*The clinic. The drive home. The pines. Tyler. Bryn. Pastor Rhodes. The woman who brought the pie. Denise. The Wednesday Scrabble. The Feast. Mrs. Osterhout's cat Henrietta. My porch.*

The list went longer than she had expected. But it was smaller, in its way. It had no research. It had no team of forty-two. It had no gym. It had a cat named Henrietta, who did not even live with Imani, who only came over sometimes to be fed.

She looked at the two lists a long time.

Then she put the pad away in a drawer and did not look at it again for four days.

*

It had started at the library in November. Imani had not seen the beginning, but Margaret had seen it, and Margaret had told Imani in a series of reports over the winter that amounted to a running serial.

Wendell Halberg was sixty-seven. He farmed a hundred and forty acres on the other side of Nine Pines, dairy mostly, with a small patch of corn and a greenhouse operation he had started after his wife Ellen had died in 2019. The greenhouse was Ellen's idea, a way to grow tomatoes into December, and after she died he kept it up because he could not bear to let something she had started die a second time. He drove into town on Tuesdays for groceries and on Fridays for the library.

Lillian Park was sixty-four. She had been the head librarian in Nine Pines since 2008, when she had moved up from Milwaukee after a divorce that Margaret told Imani was, quote, *not her fault but not nobody's either.* Lillian wore glasses on a chain, though she did not need to; she said she just liked the chain. She had two grown sons in Minneapolis, neither of whom called often enough.

Wendell took hers. He came back two weeks later and said, *You were right.* And then, because he was a man who had been married to the same woman for thirty-nine years and had no practice with anything else, he said, abruptly, *Would you like to get coffee sometime.*

Lillian, who had also had no practice with anything else since 2008, said, *Yes.*

They had been getting coffee, according to Margaret, every Tuesday for four months. On Fridays Wendell still took out a book; sometimes on bee-keeping, sometimes on other subjects, sometimes — once — a slim volume of poetry by a poet Margaret had never heard of, whose name Wendell pronounced in the library at a volume slightly lower than his usual.

*They are not yet lovers,* Margaret had reported, in January, with the clinical seriousness of a census taker. *They are something more dignified than that. They are companions.*

By March they had advanced to dinner at the Pine Haven Supper Club, on Saturdays, in the small booth at the back. By April Wendell had taken Lillian to see the greenhouse. And one afternoon in the second week of April, Imani found herself sitting at a sticky booth in the Nine Pines Bakery across from both of them, drinking bad coffee and watching them be shy with each other over a plate of bismarcks.

Lillian had asked her to come. *I want a friendly witness,* she had said to Imani two days before, grinning. *He's nervous. I'm nervous. Bring your doctor manner.*

Imani came. She did not bring the doctor manner; she brought, instead, her own gentleness, which was different. Wendell shook her hand with the dry leathery hand of a man who had done work with it for forty years. He was a tall man, with hair gone mostly white and a face that had been made by wind. He wore a clean plaid shirt tucked into jeans that still bore the crease from their fold, and he smelled very slightly of hay even though he had clearly bathed.

*Dr. Adeyemo,* he said.

*Please. Imani.*

*Imani. Lillian has spoken about you.*

*Has she?*

*Only good things,* Lillian said, lifting her coffee. *Don't worry.*

They sat. Wendell was shy, but he was not speechless. He asked Imani about Nigeria, which he had apparently been reading about; he wanted to know if she had been to Lagos, which she had, and to Ibadan, which she had. He wanted to know what was grown there. He nodded at her answers with the serious nodding of a man who files away information in case he needs it later. Lillian watched him ask these questions and her face softened in a way that Imani tried not to be obvious about watching.

*We are trying to figure out,* Lillian said, at some point, *what people our age do.*

*Do?*

*Well. I've never done this before. He has, but with one woman, for thirty-nine years. So we are both — we are both out of practice.*

Wendell reddened. *Lillian, the woman is having her coffee.*

*She's fine. Aren't you, Imani?*

*I'm fine.*

*We don't want to live together,* Lillian continued, matter-of-factly. *We are both very set in our ways. He gets up at four-thirty, which I will never do, and I stay up until eleven, which he will never do. We don't want to get married. That is not — we are not trying to replace anything. We are just. We are in the company of each other.*

*That sounds lovely,* Imani said, and meant it.

Wendell looked at her, and she saw, behind the weathered face, something that surprised her. A wariness. A carefulness that had been very hard-won.

*I worried,* he said slowly, *that it was not right. To Ellen. To do this.*

Lillian reached across the table and touched his wrist, lightly. *Tell her,* she said. *You can tell her.*

*I thought, for a long time after Ellen died, that I would be alone. That I had had my marriage. That I had had what was given. I did not feel sad about this, exactly. I felt — contented. I felt I had been lucky. A man who has had a good marriage does not need another one. He has already been given more than most.*

*Yes,* Imani said.

*And then Lillian handed me a book about bees, and told me the first book was no good. And I went home and read the book she gave me and on the third page I was — I was laughing. The woman in Iowa is very funny. And I realized I had not laughed, in that particular way, in four years. And I thought, is it wrong to want to laugh like that again?*

*What did you decide?*

*I decided,* Wendell said, *that Ellen would have said no. Ellen would have said, go laugh. Ellen would have said, do not sit in this house being a monument. She would have said it very bluntly. She was a blunt woman. So I — I asked Lillian to coffee.*

Lillian's hand stayed on his wrist.

*I think,* Imani said, carefully, *that what you're doing is the opposite of wrong. I think it's, in fact — I don't have the word.*

*Lovely,* Lillian said.

*Lovely.*

They stayed another hour. They talked about the greenhouse, about the sort of tomatoes Wendell was starting now, about the library's summer reading program, about a book Lillian had been trying to get Wendell to read — a novel, not a poem, he was ready for a novel now — and about the weather, which was warmer and wetter, and about the road down to the greenhouse, which had frost-heaved again and would need grading. The talk was domestic and small and Imani sat inside it as one sits inside a warm kitchen in the evening.

When she stood up to go she put her hand briefly on Lillian's shoulder. Lillian covered Imani's hand with her own.

*Thank you for coming,* Lillian said.

*Thank you for having me.*

Imani walked home in the soft wet early-spring light. She passed the drugstore and the post office and Wendell's truck, which she recognized by the bumper sticker, *Mary's Dairy* in faded green. She thought of Ellen, whom she had never met. She thought, incongruously, of Samuel, who was remarried, whose name had come to her in a letter three months ago and then gone quiet again.

She put the kettle on when she got home and stood at the window watching the light go.

*

She took the legal pad out of the drawer on the first of May.

It was after dinner. The windows were open for the first time since October. The evening was soft, and some early insect, not a mosquito yet but something smaller, drifted in through the screen and landed on her sleeve, and she brushed it off absently and kept writing.

She started a new page. She did not want to look at the old one yet. She wrote, at the top of the new page, *WHAT DO I WANT.*

The question surprised her even as she wrote it. She had not often, in her life, asked herself that question in those exact words. She had asked herself, *What should I do,* and *What is best for the patient,* and *What would Samuel want,* and *What would my mother say,* and all the thousand daughterly and wifely and professional versions of the question. But *What do I want* was a question she had let go quiet a long time ago.

She looked at the page for a long time.

*To do good work.* *To be in a place that knows me.* *To not be afraid of my own kitchen in the mornings.* *To be near people who are getting old, who will get old, whom I will watch get old.* *To be known as a doctor and also, separately, as a woman.* *To not be a name on a roster.* *To see the pines.* *To be tired at the end of a day and know why.*

She stopped. She read what she had written. She had not written *research.* She had not written *team.* She had not written *money.*

She got up and poured herself a glass of water. She came back and sat down.

*Chicago answers some of these. Nine Pines answers others. Chicago pays me more. Chicago advances my career. Chicago puts me closer to my mother. Chicago is the kind of work I was trained for. Chicago is the life my parents wanted me to have.*

She stopped at that last line. She looked at it. She crossed it out.

She looked at that line for a while too.

*Nine Pines is the life I am actually having.*

She put down the pen.

She sat at the table in the deepening blue of the evening and did not move for a long time. The house ticked around her. A neighbor's dog barked twice and stopped. The refrigerator hummed. She thought about Mr. Walters. She thought about Ayesha Prakash, whose voice on the phone had been so careful, so hopeful. She thought about the forty-two-member team, which she had, to her surprise, pictured only once in the whole time since the call, and had pictured without feeling much, as if looking at a photograph of someone else's wedding.

She thought about Margaret. About Margaret's lungs, which would never be quite what they had been, even if they recovered fully. About Margaret's bannister, and the new small slowness, and the way Margaret had said, *You cannot fix old.*

She thought about the way you owe a person who has been sick in your presence.

She thought about David. She thought about how strange it was that she now knew David's name, that the name was, after Margaret had said it once, always in the next room.

*A person can matter in a small place.*

She put the pad away.

She went out on the back steps and sat with her mug of tea that had gone cold. The stars were coming out. She did not know the names of most of them; she had never learned. She could identify Orion in winter and the Big Dipper always, and the rest were a general mass of light. She looked at the general mass.

*Bahá'u'lláh,* she said, under her breath, *is my guide. O Thou kind Lord.* The words began a prayer that she did not finish aloud. She finished it inside. She sat until the cold made her go in.

*

She had missed Naw-Rúz by six weeks. The Bahá'í New Year falls at the spring equinox, on or about the twentieth of March, and in March she had been in Margaret's spare bedroom changing an IV bag and then in her own bed catching up on the sleep she had lost doing it. She had marked the day in her notebook — *Naw-Rúz* — and nothing else. She had said no prayer, had eaten no particular meal, had not put on the pale yellow dress she had worn at past Naw-Rúz feasts in Chicago.

On the first Saturday of May, though, she took the day off. She blocked it out on the schedule two weeks in advance. She told Denise to reschedule anything that came up. She told Margaret she would not be available that day.

*A day off?* Margaret said. *The doctor is taking a day off?*

*Yes.*

*Good. I was going to suggest it.*

She woke at six. She made coffee and drank it on her back steps in her robe. The morning was cool but not cold. The grass was green. Her neighbor's lilac bush, which had been a brown stick for seven months, had put out tiny pale buds. She looked at the buds a long time.

She showered. She put on the yellow dress, which she had brought from Chicago and had not worn since leaving. It was a plain cotton sundress, not new, a dress her mother would have called *a sensible yellow.* She put on silver earrings.

She cooked jollof rice. Her mother's recipe, which she had made a hundred times in her life and maybe a dozen times since coming to Nine Pines. She had bought the right rice in Wausau on her last supply run, a particular long-grain variety that made her mother happy when she brought a bag home. She had bought tomato paste and the Scotch bonnet peppers that had surprised the grocer in Wausau and made him say, *I don't usually stock these, but I'll get you a crate if you want.*

The kitchen filled with the smell of it. Onions softening. Tomato paste turning dark. The hot pepper. Chicken stock. Bay leaves. Thyme. She stirred with a wooden spoon and listened to an album of West African highlife music that her father had loved, and she sang along with the bits she knew, and where she did not know the words she hummed.

She thought of her father. He had been dead eleven years. He would have loved the jollof. He would have stood over the pan and reached around her with his long arm and stolen a grain of rice and burned his fingers, as he always had. He would have said, *Wife, our girl makes the rice almost as well as you.* He had been a man of great humor and deep silences. She missed him.

When the rice was done she covered it and let it steam. She took down her mother's good plate, which had arrived in the mail at Christmas — her mother had sent it and three other plates in bubble wrap with a note that said, *You will want these.* She put a little rice on the plate. She sat at the kitchen table.

Before she ate, she said the prayer. Not the long one; one of the smaller ones, the one that ends *All existence is but a feeble reflection of the mighty garden of Thine eternal Reality.*

She ate slowly. The rice was good. She had, at some point, learned to cook it well enough that eating it was not a comparison to her mother's. It was her own jollof now. It tasted like her mother's kitchen and also like her own. Both were true.

After breakfast she went to the small garden center in Rhinelander and bought seed packets — basil, parsley, a cherry tomato, a small zinnia, a small marigold. She bought five terra cotta pots of different sizes. She bought a bag of potting soil. She drove home with the bags in the back seat and spread newspaper on her kitchen table and planted them.

She sat at the table when she was done and looked at the pots. Five small mounds of dark earth, five little sticks.

*Naw-Rúz,* she said aloud. *Happy New Year.*

The words went into her kitchen and hung there.

*Naw-Rúz, observed late. May the fourth.*

Then she wrote a long entry. She wrote about Ayesha's call. She wrote about the legal pad. She wrote about Margaret, and about David, whose name she still turned over in her mind as if it were a stone she had found. She wrote about Wendell and Lillian at the bakery. She wrote about Mr. Walters's stone in the wind. She wrote about the dress, and the rice, and her father's laughter.

*What is a new year for. It is for saying the old year is done. It is for saying, this is what I have become. It is for laying the old thing down, not because the old thing is not real, but because it is real and can therefore be laid down. I have lost a marriage. I have lost a patient. I have lost a self I thought I would be. I have been given, in exchange, a clinic in a town of two thousand people. I have been given Margaret. I have been given an evening in which I cooked my mother's rice and sat alone at a table and was not lonely. I have been given, also, a decision. I have been given the question of whether to leave this place. I see now that I have already answered. I have been answering since February. I did not know I had answered.*

She closed the journal. She wrapped the rubber band around it. She sat for a while.

In the evening she walked to the edge of town. She did this every few weeks now; the walk was a ritual. She went past Margaret's house, where the porch light was on, and past the library, which was closed, and all the way to the rise with the pines. Tonight she went up the rise. She did not always go up; sometimes she stopped at the foot. Tonight she climbed.

The pines were enormous when you stood beneath them. The sound of the wind in them was different from the sound of any other wind. She tipped her head back. The tops of the pines made a small inward circle against the darkening sky, nine dark points. She counted them, as she always did. Nine.

*Alláh'u'abhá,* she said.

The word floated up. The pines moved.

She walked home as the first stars came out.

*

She told Margaret on a Sunday, two weeks after Naw-Rúz. She had not told anyone else. She had written Ayesha an email and deleted it three times.

Margaret made them tea and they sat on Margaret's back porch, because the weather now allowed it. The porch was screened, and the screens filtered a small green light off the back yard, which Margaret had been tending for forty years and which Margaret was now going to have to let a neighbor boy help with, a change that had taken Margaret three weeks to agree to.

*I have something to tell you,* Imani said.

*All right.*

*A hospital in Chicago has offered me a position. My old hospital. They've been trying to fill it for a while. A friend of mine from the old days called me in March.*

Margaret looked at her. Her face did not change.

*Tell me,* she said.

Imani told her. She laid out the whole of it — the salary, the research line, the team, Ayesha, the rural/urban project. She was careful to be accurate. She wanted Margaret to see the thing for what it was. She did not want Margaret to know only the caricature of Chicago, the busy and soulless and distant version. She wanted Margaret to see the actual offer.

When she was done, Margaret was quiet a long moment.

*It is a very good offer,* Margaret said at last.

*It is.*

*And you called them back when?*

*I haven't. I need to call them back soon.*

*I see.*

They drank their tea. A cardinal landed on the feeder outside the screen and ate, and then another, and Margaret watched them without comment.

*Imani,* Margaret said, *may I ask you a question?*

*Of course.*

*What are you afraid of?*

Imani was going to say something about the drive, about the salary, about the — and then she stopped, because Margaret was not asking her about logistics. Margaret was asking her the question.

She let the question sit.

It took her a while to answer. Margaret did not fill the silence, because Margaret was a teacher.

*I think,* Imani said finally, slowly, *I am afraid if I stay I won't matter enough.*

Margaret set down her tea.

*Oh, honey,* she said.

*I know how that sounds.*

*Say it again.*

*I'm afraid if I stay I won't matter enough.*

Margaret looked at her with an old and gentle sharpness, the look of a woman who had taught fifth graders to read for forty-one years.

*Does mattering scale?*

It went into Imani like a small clean knife. She could feel, physically, some gathered thing in her chest coming loose.

*Does mattering,* Margaret said again, softly, *scale?*

*I — *

*I am not lecturing you. I want you to answer the question. I taught forty-one years in a school district that in its best year had six hundred students. Not six thousand. Six hundred. I taught maybe nine hundred children in all my years, most of them more than once, because I had them in fifth grade and then their younger siblings and their younger siblings. I did not matter at scale. I mattered at people. Do you see the difference?*

*Yes,* Imani said. Her voice was thin.

*Chicago would be a good job. They are not wrong to want you. You would do good work there. You would matter, there, at scale. I am not telling you not to take it. I am asking you — does mattering scale? Is the doctor who saves forty thousand lives through research better than the doctor who saves four thousand through forty years of practice? Are they even comparable? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. I am asking.*

Imani said, *No.*

*No what?*

*It doesn't scale. Or — I don't believe it scales. I don't think I've ever believed it scales. I think I have been told it scales, by the places I went to school, by the people I competed with, by the profession. But when I sit with a patient I do not think, is this the best possible use of my hour. I think, this person's hand is cold, let me warm it. I think, this person is afraid, let me sit an extra minute. I think — *

She stopped. She was crying. She had not known she was going to cry.

*I think Mr. Walters was worth the whole hospital,* she said. *And I think that is both true and not a useful thought. Because I was the whole hospital's doctor too. I was everyone's doctor. I had to be everyone's doctor. That is how the system works. But here — Margaret, here I am one woman's doctor, and then another's, and then another's. And I see them in the grocery store. And I know their children. And they bring me pie.*

Margaret was smiling, a small soft smile.

*They do bring you pie.*

*They do. And I — when I walk past Wendell's truck now I know whose truck it is, and I know who he is eating dinner with on Saturday, and I know that Lillian has been reading Wordsworth to him. That is not nothing. That is not a smaller life. That is — that is a life in which the things are visible. You can see them. You can touch them.*

*Yes.*

Imani wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Margaret, who never fussed, handed her a tissue without looking, the way a mother hands a child a tissue.

*I am afraid,* Imani said, *that choosing this is choosing less. That I will regret not being more. That when I am seventy I will look back and say, why did I not go to Chicago when I had the chance, why did I not do the research, why did I not — *

*Imani.*

*Yes.*

*Listen to me. I am seventy-one older than you. At seventy I did not look back and say, why did I not teach at a bigger school. I looked back and said, I am glad I knew their names. Every one of them. I knew their names.*

Imani nodded. She could not speak.

They sat quietly a long time.

*You do not,* Margaret said, *have to decide today.*

*I know.*

*But I think you have decided.*

*I think I have.*

Margaret reached across the little porch table and took Imani's hand and held it. Her hand was thin and warm. The skin was papery. The pulse in her wrist was steady.

*Stay,* Margaret said simply. *If you want to stay. Stay.*

*I want to stay.*

*Then stay.*

*Yes.*

They did not say anything else. The cardinals came and went. A breeze moved the screens. From somewhere down the block a lawnmower started, and the first cut grass of the year threw its green smell into the air.

*

She called Ayesha on Monday morning.

Ayesha picked up on the second ring. *Imani. Hi.*

*Ayesha. I wanted to call you before any more time passed. I am not taking the position.*

There was a small pause.

*I see.*

*I am grateful. I want you to know I am grateful. And I thought about it seriously. I made lists. I kept you up at night in my head.*

*I'm glad you didn't just dash off an email.*

*I am not going to dash off an email. I want to tell you what I decided and why. I decided I am going to stay here.*

*In Wisconsin.*

*In Nine Pines.*

Ayesha breathed out. It was not a sigh of frustration; it was the breath of a woman who had been holding it a little.

*Tell me why,* Ayesha said. *I want to understand.*

Imani told her. She told her about Mr. Walters's stone, and about Margaret, and about what Margaret had said. She told her that mattering did not scale, or, rather, that scale was not the only unit of mattering. She told her about the jollof rice. She told her about the nine pines at the edge of town.

*Ayesha,* she said, *I think if I had come to Chicago two years ago I would have gone on being the doctor I was. Which was a good doctor. But I would not have gone on being — a person who has her own kitchen, and her own prayers, and her own town. I would have gone on being a doctor who also lived somewhere. I think I have become something else now. I don't know what. I don't know if it has a name. But I don't want to trade it.*

*Imani.*

*Yes.*

*Thank you for telling me this. I am — I am a cardiologist. I am not given to sentiment. But thank you.*

*You're welcome.*

*We will find someone. We will.*

*I know you will.*

*If you ever change your mind —*

*I will not change my mind.*

*I believe you. All right. I am going to hang up and eat a donut now. It is how I process disappointment. Take care of yourself, Imani.*

*Take care of yourself, Ayesha.*

They hung up. Imani sat for a moment at her desk with the phone in front of her. She felt, not euphoric, not relieved exactly — something cleaner than relief. The thing was done. The sentence was written.

She stood up and went out to the waiting room. Denise looked at her. Imani nodded.

*Send in the next one,* she said.

The next one was Mrs. Ihlenfeldt, with her knee. The one after that was a boy named Cody with an ear infection. The one after that was an older man she had not seen before, a man with a heart murmur that had been getting louder, who had driven an hour from Crandon to see her on the recommendation of his sister, who had been treated by Imani for shingles in January.

*My sister says you listen,* the man said. *She said, you go to that Dr. Adeyemo in Nine Pines, she listens.*

*I try to,* Imani said, and took his hand, and pressed her fingers against his radial pulse, and felt the small irregularity, and heard, before she even lifted her stethoscope, the tune of his next year.

*

In June she met Tanya.

Tanya Waukau was thirty-one, Menominee, a nurse practitioner from the tribal health clinic over on the reservation. She had called Imani in May asking if Imani would precept her for a part-time preceptorship — she wanted to broaden her practice beyond the clinic she had worked at for six years, wanted to see how a solo rural doctor managed a mixed population, wanted, she said, *to work next to somebody who knows what she's doing and also knows what she doesn't know.*

Imani had said yes immediately. She had been thinking, since the spring, about succession — about what happened to Nine Pines if she ever, God willing, did not. She had not expected the answer to walk into her life.

They met in Imani's office the first week of June. Tanya was short and broad-shouldered, with long black hair in a single braid and the kind of calm eyes that Imani's mother would have called *old eyes in a young face.* She wore jeans and a plain blue shirt. She shook Imani's hand firmly.

*Dr. Adeyemo.*

*Imani.*

*Imani. Tanya.*

They sat. Tanya had brought a notebook. She had also brought, unexpectedly, a small tin of wild rice, from her family's farm, which she set on the desk between them.

*A gift,* Tanya said. *It's from this year's harvest. Cooked in broth, it's better than any rice you will ever eat.*

*I will test that claim,* Imani said. *I make jollof rice.*

*Jollof,* Tanya said, considering. *I have never had it. But my cousin went to a Nigerian wedding in Milwaukee last year and she said she cried.*

They began to work together. Tanya came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays at first, and then three days a week, and by late June she was seeing patients on her own while Imani supervised. Tanya had a gentle firm manner that Imani admired. She did not rush her patients. She asked a question and waited for the answer in full. She wrote her notes in the chart in a handwriting that was large and legible and decisive.

She also, Imani noticed, made her patients laugh. A thing Imani had always been a little shy of doing. Tanya was funny without trying, a quick dry funny that came out at the corners of her observations.

*I like her,* Margaret said, in July, when Margaret had met her. *She is the right person.*

*She is,* Imani said.

*You could be sick for a week now and the clinic would still run.*

*I could.*

*That is a gift,* Margaret said. *A rare and particular gift. Hold on to it.*

*I will.*

*

In July, Tyler and Bryn came in together, without an appointment, one early Wednesday morning. Denise buzzed Imani. *Pratts are here. They say they just want five minutes.*

Imani went out to the waiting room. They were standing, not sitting. Bryn was in a summer dress. Tyler had cut his hair. They both looked different, somehow; not suddenly, but as if the work of months had resolved into a new shape.

*Dr. Adeyemo,* Bryn said.

*Bryn. Tyler. Come in the back.*

*We just wanted —* Tyler began. *We just wanted to tell you in person.*

In Imani's office Bryn sat, and Tyler stood beside her chair with his hand on her shoulder.

*I'm pregnant,* Bryn said. *Fourteen weeks. We've seen Dr. Garriga in Rhinelander. Everything looks — everything looks good.*

Imani did not trust her face. She kept it still and let her eyes do the work.

*Bryn. Tyler. That is wonderful news.*

*We wanted to tell you first. Before anyone else. I mean — after our mothers. But before.*

Imani laughed, a small wet laugh. *I am honored to be after your mothers.*

*Dr. Adeyemo,* Tyler said. His voice was rough. *I didn't thank you. For January. For sitting with Bryn. I didn't know how to thank you.*

*You don't have to.*

*I do.*

*All right,* Imani said. *I accept.*

Bryn reached for Imani's hand. Imani gave it. Bryn held it a moment against her own cheek.

*Fourteen weeks,* Bryn said. *We had been afraid to say anything. We didn't — we didn't want to jinx it. Our doctor keeps saying there's no jinxing. But.*

*There is no jinxing,* Imani said. *And you can be careful anyway. Both at the same time.*

*Yes.*

When they left, Imani sat at her desk for a minute with her hand still warm from Bryn's. Then she got up and went to see the next patient.

*

The picnic was in late July.

It was Margaret's idea. Margaret had turned eighty-two in June, and Margaret had announced — not decided, *announced*, with the unilateral authority she reserved for certain things — that there would be a picnic on the last Saturday in July at the foot of the pines. *Everyone brings something,* she had said. *No one brings store-bought. No one takes offense if the potato salad is not mayonnaise-based.*

It was an evening picnic. Margaret did not want to be in the direct sun. They gathered at five, when the heat had begun to slacken and the light had turned gold. Imani brought a platter of jollof, wrapped in foil, still warm. Margaret brought pickles and a pan of cornbread. Pastor Rhodes brought a green bean casserole, the traditional kind; he had made it himself, he said, and was apologetic about it. Wendell brought tomatoes from the greenhouse, enormous red globes sliced with coarse salt and basil. Lillian brought a tomato pie that Imani had not known existed. Tyler brought a watermelon. Bryn, now nineteen weeks and showing, brought lemonade in a cold glass jar.

Tanya came too; Imani had asked her a week before, and Tanya had said yes with the kind of quick yes that suggested she had been waiting for the invitation. She brought the wild rice, finally, cooked in broth; Imani took a bite of it and closed her eyes.

*You were right,* she said.

*I was right,* Tanya said.

They ate at the foot of the pines. Margaret had spread a quilt on the grass and sat on a folding chair. Wendell and Lillian sat side by side on a blanket, close but not touching. Pastor Rhodes sat on a stump with a paper plate balanced on his knee. Tyler lay on the grass with his hand on Bryn's back, and Bryn leaned against him and ate slices of Wendell's tomato with her fingers. Tanya sat cross-legged with her wild rice in a bowl, and Imani sat next to her.

They did not talk at first. They ate. The light slanted through the pines. From somewhere a cicada started, the first of the season, a long dry whirring that climbed and fell and climbed. A dog barked far off. A truck went by on the county road and somebody inside it waved, though Imani could not see who, and Margaret waved back on principle.

*This is,* Tyler said, slowly, *as nice a thing as I can remember.*

*It is,* Bryn said.

Margaret said, *I will cry if you are all this sincere.*

*Cry, then,* Wendell said, and took a tomato.

They laughed. Pastor Rhodes laughed in his particular dry way. Lillian leaned her head briefly against Wendell's shoulder, and Wendell, after a moment, put his arm around her, and did not take it back.

Imani looked around. She looked at Margaret, with her cornbread and her cane, the cane she had begun to use without comment in June. She looked at Pastor Rhodes, with his careful balance of the paper plate. She looked at Wendell and Lillian, at their unashamed sixty-year-old tenderness. She looked at Tyler, who had come through something, and at Bryn, whose belly was a small new curve under her dress, and at Tanya, who had come into the clinic like an answer to a question Imani had not known she was asking.

She looked up. The pines stood above them, nine of them, their tops moving. The sky between the tops was a deep summer blue, already going toward rose. The air was warm. A mosquito landed on her forearm and she brushed it away.

*I am here,* she thought. The thought came with a clarity she had not had in years. *I am a doctor. This is enough.*

Margaret, across the quilt, caught her eye. Margaret did not say anything. Margaret only nodded, a small brief nod, as if the two of them had been having a conversation.

The sun moved a fraction lower. The cicada reached its peak and broke and started again. Bryn reached for another slice of tomato.

Imani tilted her head back and looked up at the pines. She had counted them a hundred times, standing at the foot of the rise. She counted them again now, from below. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The nine pines. The nine sides of the Bahá'í symbol, the nine-pointed star, the nine Manifestations acknowledged in her faith. She did not believe the pines were placed for her. She was not a woman who believed in small coincidences of that kind. She only noted it. It was noted.

She closed her eyes for a moment. The sun was warm on her lids. She could smell the jollof and Wendell's tomatoes and the pine needles underneath them and the faint sweet grass. She could hear Bryn laughing at something Tanya had said.

*Alláh-u-Abhá.*

The words went up into the pines. The pines moved in the small wind. Above the pines the sky was very wide.

She opened her eyes. She was here. She was a doctor. She was among her people. It was a Saturday evening in July, in a town of two thousand, eight hundred and forty-one souls, and she had come through a winter and a spring, and she had made her choice, and she would make it again tomorrow, and again the day after that, and again the day after that, for as long as she was given.

*Alláh-u-Abhá,* she said, once more, silently this time, only to herself.

She reached for a piece of cornbread.

THE END

----------

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Imani is a Bahá'í. The Bahá'í Faith, founded in the nineteenth century and now with communities in virtually every country on earth, teaches the essential oneness of humanity, the progressive nature of religion, and the indispensable role of the individual in the spiritual and material flourishing of community. Naw-Rúz, the Bahá'í New Year at the vernal equinox, is one of nine holy days in the Bahá'í calendar; it is traditionally marked by quiet devotion and the gathering of loved ones. Imani's private observance in Chapter 23 — the yellow dress, her mother's jollof, the planting of seeds — is one woman's version of a holiday that has many versions. I have taken care, in this novel and throughout the *Nine Pines* series, not to depict or fictionalize the Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith; the faith appears here only as it appears in the texture of one believer's ordinary life.

*Crimson Ark Publishing*

[ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS AND EPILOGUE — PART 4 OF 4]

The afternoon was the particular kind of October afternoon that seemed to come only to the Northwoods — a low, slanted gold that pooled on the maple floors of the clinic and made even the chipped paint on the window frames look like something a painter had chosen on purpose. Imani had stayed late to finish charting. The waiting room was empty. Tanya had gone home at four to pick up her daughter from school. The phones had fallen still. Margaret was in the back office, doing what she called her Tuesday-pile, which meant sorting receipts and insurance statements into folders with labels in her neat schoolteacher hand.

Imani heard her moving — the soft scrape of a drawer, the quiet thunk of a file cabinet — and thought, as she often did now, how the sound of Margaret working was the sound of the clinic itself breathing. She finished her last note, signed it, leaned back, and let herself sit for a moment without purpose. The light had the weight of honey. Outside, a single leaf performed its slow twist from a branch to the gravel.

"Margaret," she called. "Do you want tea?"

"I'd kill for it."

Imani laughed. She went to the little galley they called a kitchen and filled the kettle. The kettle was old and temperamental and required a person to stand near it, as if it needed witnessing. When it whistled, she poured the water over two bags of the black tea Margaret liked, added sugar to Margaret's cup the way Margaret liked it, and carried both cups back through the hall.

Margaret was sitting at the small desk under the window with a shoebox in front of her. The shoebox was ordinary — a faded gray cardboard box that had once held a pair of women's walking shoes, size seven and a half. The lid was off. Inside, Imani could see a tidy stack of envelopes, held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle and broken and been replaced by a length of brown twine.

Margaret looked up. She didn't try to hide the box. She only took her tea with both hands and said, "Thank you."

Imani set her own cup down and took the second chair, the one that had the wobble. She waited. She had learned in this last year, in this town, that waiting was itself a form of conversation.

"I was going to bring them home," Margaret said finally. "But I didn't. I keep them in my bottom drawer here. I don't know why."

"What are they?"

"David's letters," Margaret said. "My son."

Imani felt the air of the room become very particular. She nodded once.

Margaret had told her, months ago, in small bits — the boy had been twenty-two; the boy had been in Afghanistan; the boy had not come home. She had learned that David was the reason Margaret flinched whenever a news anchor said the word deployment. She had learned that Margaret's husband had died a year after David, of what the official certificate called heart disease and Margaret herself called grief. She had never asked for more, because it was not hers to ask. Margaret offered what Margaret offered.

"I've never read one aloud," Margaret said. "Not since — not since I first read them. And that was a long time ago now."

"You don't have to," Imani said.

"I know I don't have to." Margaret's hand hovered over the stack. Her fingers, Imani noticed, were long and delicate and marked with the small brown spots of a woman who had lived a long time in the sun, despite the rarity of Wisconsin sun. "But I think I want to. If you don't mind sitting with me."

"I don't mind."

Margaret slid the twine off the bundle. Her hands trembled, and Imani — who had watched a hundred hands tremble in a hundred rooms — did not reach for her. Some kinds of trembling are a person's own work.

Margaret chose a letter near the top. The envelope was thin, government issue, with the diagonal stripes that meant it had gone through a military postal service. The handwriting on the front was small and careful. Addressed to Mom and Dad. The sender line said Cpl. David R. Halvorsen.

"He was a corporal then," Margaret said, mostly to herself. "He made sergeant later. He would have. He was about to."

She slid the letter out. The paper was the kind they had given the soldiers — onionskin thin, with a faint blue line. Imani could see, even from across the desk, the way the ink had bled through, faint and ghostly, mirroring itself on the reverse. Margaret unfolded it and smoothed it on the desktop with the flat of her hand, as if she were ironing something.

"This one is about light," Margaret said.

Imani nodded.

Margaret cleared her throat. She began.

"Dear Mom and Dad. I am writing this from the top of a Humvee where I've climbed because the moon is out and I have never in my life seen a moon like this one. I know I wrote you a week ago and you probably haven't gotten that letter yet. But I wanted to write about the light because I think I will forget about this light by the time I get home, and I don't want to forget."

Margaret's voice held. It was a teacher's voice. It knew how to read aloud.

"The light here is not like Nine Pines. In Nine Pines the light comes through the trees. It is filtered and soft even when it's bright. Here there are no trees, or there are trees but they are not the trees I know. The light is — it's hard, Mom. It's a hard light. In the morning it comes up off the ground as much as it comes down from the sky. It shines up from the sand and it gets in my eyes from below. I had never thought that light could come from below."

Margaret paused. She took a small breath. Imani watched her throat move.

"But tonight," Margaret read, "the moon is so big that I think you could read by it. I mean really read, Mom, like a book. The other guys are sleeping and I'm up here on the Humvee with a pen and this paper and the moon, and I wanted to tell you something. I think about the nine pines a lot. I know you think I'm too old to think about a thing like that but I do. I think about standing under them as a kid and looking up and seeing that circle of sky through the branches. That circle of sky had a shape to it. A particular shape. I used to think it was the shape of God looking down. I don't know if I believe that now. But I think about it. I think about the fact that there is a shape of sky only the nine pines make. I like that. I like that there is a shape of sky that belongs to us."

Margaret stopped. Her hands were on the paper. She did not look up.

"Dad, tell Mom not to worry," she read. "I am doing okay here. We are careful. I keep my head on. I have good friends with me. I will be home before you know it. Mom, I love you. Don't read the news too much. Tell Coach I'm still doing my pushups. I love you both. Your son, David."

Margaret finished the letter. The room did not do anything. The clock on the wall ticked. Far off, a truck passed on the highway and was gone.

Margaret folded the letter along its original creases. Her hands were doing the work her hands did — careful, slow, economical — but her face had gone. That was the only way Imani could think of it. Her face had gone somewhere else. And then, very quietly, Margaret began to cry.

Imani did not move at first. Then she stood and crossed the small space between them and took Margaret's hand in both of hers. Margaret's hand was warm. Margaret did not look up. Margaret did not try to stop crying. The crying was small and deep and did not belong to the room, the way all true grief did not belong to a room.

"He was twenty-two," Margaret said.

"Yes."

"Twenty-two years and three months. A month past his birthday. He had told me, on the phone the week before, that he was going to come home and finally learn to make my rhubarb pie. He said, 'Mom, you have to teach me before I'm thirty, because after thirty you can't learn anything.' And I said, 'David, you have time.'"

Imani held her hand.

"He was killed on a Thursday," Margaret said. "We found out on a Friday. I remember that. Because I had baked for Saturday coffee at church. I had baked a pan of bars. I had them on the counter. When they came to the door, the officers, I was — I was looking at the bars and thinking they didn't have enough sugar. And then they were at the door. And I remember, for the rest of my life, whenever I bake bars, I am looking at them and I am thinking they don't have enough sugar and then there are officers at the door. Isn't that a strange thing to remember."

"It isn't strange."

"His father died a year later. I told you that."

"Yes."

"I was thirty-one years married. It was a long marriage. A good marriage. But I think what I never told anybody — what I didn't even tell the pastor we had then, before Pastor Rhodes — is that I had the thought, when Glen died, that it was easier. That it was almost a relief. Because Glen had been there after David, and Glen being there after David was a kind of mirror I had to look at every day. Glen never said David's name without something breaking in him. And I couldn't fix it. And when Glen died, I stopped having to try to fix it. And I was — I was ashamed of that. I have been ashamed of that for thirteen years."

"Margaret."

"I don't know if I should say it."

"You should say it."

"I have never said it."

"I know."

"It is not because I didn't love Glen."

"I know."

"I loved Glen. I loved Glen until the day he died and I love him still."

"I know."

Margaret wept. She wept into her other hand, the one Imani was not holding. She wept the way older women weep when they have held something for a long time — not loud, not operatic, just a thorough, orderly emptying, like rain at the end of a long dry season. Imani held her hand and did not speak. The light went on doing what the light did. The clock went on keeping time. Margaret wept, and when she was done, she wiped her face with the flat of her palm and looked up and said, "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For — this. I was just going to read you one letter."

"You read me the letter. And then you told me something. That's all that happened."

Margaret laughed — a small, wet laugh. "That's a doctor's way of putting it."

"I'm a doctor."

"You are." Margaret took her hand back, gently, and used it to wipe her eyes with a tissue she pulled from the sleeve of her cardigan. "You know, David would have liked you."

"I wish I had met him."

"He was — he was the kind of boy. He was funny. He was quiet in a crowd and funny one-on-one. He noticed things. He was a noticer. He used to come home from deer camp with his father, and his father would tell me about the deer they saw and the sky and the weather, and David would tell me about the man two sites over who had a dog with three legs, and how the dog had climbed onto the truck to sleep every night because the truck was warm. David saw the dog. Glen didn't even know there was a dog. They were at the same camp. David saw the dog."

"He was a noticer."

"He was."

Margaret looked at the letter in her hand. She looked at it a long time.

"I have twenty-seven of them," she said. "Twenty-seven letters. He wrote almost every week. He was a good boy about writing. He wasn't a good boy about a lot of things but he was a good boy about that."

"Do you read them?"

"Once a year. On his birthday. I sit down and read them all in order. I have never made it all the way through without crying. I have never wanted to."

"Does anyone else know you have them?"

"My pastor knows. Pastor Rhodes. I told him the first year he was here. Glen knew, when Glen was alive. Glen couldn't read them. He tried once and he had to stop. My sister knows, in Eau Claire. She has never asked to see them. I wouldn't let her, if she did. Not because I don't love her. Because they are — they are between David and me now. And Glen."

"And me," Imani said, gently. "Now."

Margaret looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed but clear. "And you."

"I'm honored."

"Don't be honored. Be a friend."

"I am both."

Margaret laughed again — that small, wet laugh. "You are a piece of work, Dr. Adeyemo."

"So I've been told."

They sat together for another minute. Margaret slid the letter back into its envelope, slid the envelope back into the stack, wrapped the stack with the twine. She put the lid back on the box and put the box into the bottom drawer of the desk and closed the drawer. Her tea was still warm. She drank it.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For sitting. For not — you know. For not saying it was going to be all right. You knew not to say that."

"It isn't going to be all right."

"No. It isn't."

"It will be what it is. Which is different."

"Yes," Margaret said. "Different is something I can do."

Outside, the leaf that had been falling when the afternoon started had landed on the gravel. Another was now turning, somewhere, preparing itself. The light had climbed halfway up the wall. Imani saw that it was nearly evening. She stood. She put her hand on Margaret's shoulder and let it rest there. Margaret reached up and covered Imani's hand with her own. They stayed like that a moment, neither of them saying anything, and then Imani took her hand back and said, "I'll close up front."

"I'll be out in a minute."

"Take your time."

In the hall, Imani stopped. She leaned her forehead against the cool of the doorframe and breathed. The shape of sky the nine pines made. She thought of it. She thought of the boy on top of the Humvee under an enormous moon writing home about a shape of sky in another country, a circle of light belonging to a family. She would go out to those pines this weekend. She would stand under them and look up.

She would say his name.

* * *

She wrote it, and she closed the book, and she turned out the light, and the night went on.

Kevin Marchetti was nineteen. His mother brought him in on a Thursday in late October, and the way she brought him in told Imani everything before Kevin said a word.

She brought him in by the elbow. Not in a rough way — in the way one guides a sleepwalker. She had one hand on the small of his back and the other on his forearm, and she steered him through the waiting room toward the desk with the look of a woman who has been steering a boat through a fog for a long time and is losing her conviction that the fog will end. Kevin was tall. He was taller than his mother by half a head. But he walked as if he were shorter than she was.

"I'm Denise Marchetti," the mother said, at the desk. "This is my son Kevin. We — I called this morning."

Margaret looked up. "Yes. Come on back when you're ready, honey. Doctor's almost free."

Denise looked at her son. "Do you want water?"

"No."

"A magazine?"

"No."

"Okay." Denise turned back to Margaret. "We'll wait."

They sat. Denise sat first, and she pulled Kevin down next to her as one pulls down a curtain. Kevin sat without objection. He did not pick up a magazine. He did not take out a phone. He looked at the floor. Imani, watching through the half-opened door of her office, saw the posture and felt her pulse slow. This was a posture she had seen before, in Chicago, in the ER at two in the morning on a Sunday. This was not depression in the general sense. This was a particular shape of it. This was a boy who was sitting because sitting was the thing he had been told to do and was not planning to do the next thing.

She called them in ten minutes later.

Denise did most of the talking, because Kevin did none. He had stopped going to classes at the tech school in Rhinelander three weeks ago. He had stopped calling his girlfriend — his ex-girlfriend; apparently they had broken up. He had stopped eating at the table and was eating in his bedroom, or not eating. He had stopped coming out of his bedroom except at night, when the house was quiet, when he would go to the kitchen and stand with the refrigerator door open for long minutes and then close it and go back upstairs. He was not sleeping. He was not showering more than twice a week. Three nights ago, Denise had found him in the garage at two in the morning, standing over his father's toolbox. She had said, Kevin. And he had said, I don't know. And she had said, Honey, come inside. And he had come inside.

The father was not at this appointment. Imani gathered, from Denise's carefulness, that the father was the kind of father who believed that a boy who could not get out of bed was a boy who needed to be yelled at. Denise had not told him about the garage.

Imani took a breath. She did what she had trained herself to do, which was to speak to Kevin directly, even when Kevin would not speak back.

"Kevin," she said. "I'm Dr. Adeyemo. I'd like to ask you some questions. Is that all right?"

Kevin nodded once.

"Do you want your mom here, or do you want to talk alone?"

Denise leaned forward as if to protest. Kevin said, not looking up, "She can stay."

"Okay."

Imani asked him the questions. She asked the questions the way they needed to be asked, which was without euphemism and without drama. She asked about sleep, appetite, weight, alcohol, marijuana, other substances. She asked about his mood. She asked about thoughts of death. She asked about thoughts of hurting himself. She asked if he had a plan.

Kevin answered in short words. His voice was very quiet. Not shaking. Flat, as if it had been pressed under something heavy for a long time. Yes, he had thoughts. No, he did not have a plan. He had thought about the toolbox. He had not taken anything out of the toolbox. He had stood there. He had gone back inside. Yes, he had had those thoughts before. Yes, they were worse. He could not say how much worse. He could not say why. He did not have a reason.

"Thank you for answering those," Imani said.

Kevin did not respond.

"Kevin, I need to be honest with you about what I think we need to do. Is that all right?"

Kevin nodded.

"I think you're in pain. I think you have been in pain for a while. I don't know yet what kind of pain, but I can tell you it's real and it's not your fault. I'm going to want us to talk to a psychiatrist — I don't have one on staff, but I have one in Madison I work with, and we can do it by video. I'm going to want to see you every week for a while. I'm going to ask your mom to lock up anything in the house that could hurt someone — the toolbox, any firearms, any medications. That's not because I think you're going to do something. That's because you told me the truth and I want to honor what you told me by giving your brain a little distance from the things that are hard to be near. Does that make sense?"

Kevin was looking at the floor. She could not tell if he was listening. Then, slowly, he nodded.

"And I want to know," Imani said, "whether you are willing to keep coming here. Because I can help you if you come. I can't help you if you don't come. I won't lie to you about that. I will not give up on you. But you have to come."

"Okay."

Denise put her hand over her mouth.

Imani called Dr. Linwood in Madison that afternoon. Linwood was the psychiatrist she had trained under for a month in residency, and who now ran a telehealth practice and who, as a personal favor, had agreed to take referrals from Nine Pines. Linwood listened. Linwood said he could see Kevin next Tuesday. Linwood said, with the gentleness that Imani remembered from her rotation, to keep holding the line.

On Tuesday, Imani drove Kevin and his mother to the clinic for the video visit, because Kevin had said he wasn't sure he could get himself there, and Denise had said she wasn't sure she could make him. Imani picked them up in her own car. Kevin sat in the back seat. The drive was seventeen minutes and no one spoke. The video visit took forty-five minutes. Linwood was good. He asked the right questions. He did not push. He prescribed a low dose of an SSRI and told Kevin what to expect and told him that the first two weeks would be harder before they were better and that this was not a sign of failure but a sign of the drug doing what drugs like this do. He asked Kevin to come back in two weeks.

In two weeks, Kevin came back. Imani drove him again.

The next month was slow. The SSRI did what SSRIs do, which is to say it did some of what it needed to do and did some other things along the way. Kevin was sleepier. Kevin was less hungry. Kevin said the thoughts had gone a little further away but were still there. Imani made the decision — with Linwood's approval — to check on Kevin once a week in person, either at the clinic or at his house. She drove to his house in early November. It was an old farmhouse off County Road M with a porch that sagged and a garage with its light on even in the afternoon because Kevin's father was a man who needed to be seen working. Imani met the father. The father shook her hand in a way that communicated that he was not a man who went to doctors for feelings. He said, Ma'am. He said, Thanks for coming. He went back to the garage. Denise said she was sorry. Imani said, You don't need to be sorry.

She sat with Kevin on the porch. The porch had two chairs and a bench. Kevin sat on the bench. Imani sat in one of the chairs. It was cold. They had blankets. Denise brought them coffee and left them alone.

"How are you," Imani said.

"I don't know."

"Is there anything worse this week?"

"No."

"Is there anything better?"

Kevin thought about it a long time. The wind moved some leaves around the porch. The dog — there was a dog, a black lab mix named Mo — came up and put his chin on Kevin's knee. Kevin's hand found Mo's head without his appearing to think about it.

"I took Mo for a walk," Kevin said.

"Yeah?"

"Last Saturday. I went down to the end of the road and back. It's a mile."

"That's something."

"I know. It's not a lot."

"It's something. You tell me when it stops being something."

Kevin almost smiled. It was not quite a smile. It was the idea of a smile, a thing that might become a smile in a different room, a different year. Imani took it.

She kept coming. Once a week, sometimes twice. Sometimes she stayed ten minutes. Sometimes an hour. In December, Kevin started helping Denise in the kitchen. In January, he enrolled in one online class through the tech school and finished, with a C, in March. In February, he went three days without a bad thought and reported it to Imani with the kind of astonishment reserved for those who had forgotten what baseline felt like. In March, Linwood adjusted the dose. In April, Kevin got a job, part time, at the hardware store where Glen Halvorsen used to work before he died. The old men at the hardware store had known his father. They treated him like a son. Kevin did not love the job, but he showed up for it, and the showing up was the medicine.

There was no miracle. Imani had not expected one. There was only the slow accumulation of small miracles that looked, up close, like an adjustment of dose, a porch conversation, a walk down the road with a dog, a C on a transcript. That was what recovery was, when it happened. Not a bright resurrection. A long tide coming back.

In late April, Kevin sat in the clinic exam room — he came by himself now; he drove himself — and said, "I think I'm going to be okay."

"I think so too."

"I don't know how to thank you."

"You don't have to."

"No. I mean it. I know what I was. I know what I almost — I know. And you came. You came out to the house. You drove me. You didn't have to."

"Kevin."

"Yeah."

"I'm your doctor."

"Yeah."

"But also. You showed up for yourself. You kept showing up. You did the thing you didn't want to do, every day. I drove a car. You walked back from someplace I have never been."

He looked at her. He nodded.

"Tell me next time the thoughts come back," she said.

"They might come back."

"They might. Tell me."

"I will."

He stood. He reached out and shook her hand. He had never shaken her hand before. His hand was warm and steady. He left. She listened to his truck start in the parking lot and heard it pull away and she sat in the exam room by herself for two minutes and then she went and washed her hands, and when she came back out, Margaret was standing at the desk with a cup of tea for her, and Margaret did not say anything about Kevin and did not need to, because Margaret knew.

Late summer came, and with it the particular exhaustion that late summer brings to small towns — a weariness of heat and mosquitoes and the mounting smallness of not enough rain. The fields north of Nine Pines had gone a bleached yellow. The crick that ran under the bridge by the post office had dropped so low you could see the stones at the bottom. At night the sky was loud with crickets who were, Imani had learned, not crickets at all but katydids, a fact Pastor Rhodes had told her one evening in a tone that suggested he considered the distinction important.

On a Saturday in early August, he called the clinic. Margaret put him through.

"Doctor," he said. "It's Rhodes."

"Hello, Pastor."

"I'm taking a walk later. The old logging road behind the Lutheran cemetery. Six miles, give or take. Would you like to come?"

Imani thought for a moment. "I would."

"Three o'clock?"

"Three o'clock."

They set out from the cemetery at three. Pastor Rhodes was in a pair of canvas pants gone soft with use and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled. He had a walking stick. He had a canvas hat of the sort that only certain men can wear without looking ridiculous, and he wore his without looking ridiculous, which Imani took as another data point in the file she kept on Pastor Rhodes — a file that grew thicker the longer she knew him and whose contents did not quite line up with any of the pastors she had known before.

The logging road ran back into the woods behind the cemetery and then north, climbing gently, following the old rail bed of a line that had carried white pine to mills a hundred years ago. The trees on either side were second-growth, seventy, eighty years old, thick enough to seem like a forest if you did not know better. The shade was a mercy. The mosquitoes were not.

They walked. They talked about small things at first. About the church roof, which was going to need replacing in a year or two; about the way the summer had gone too fast; about Tanya, who was now six months in as Imani's apprentice and who had a quality of attention Pastor Rhodes admired without quite being able to name. They walked through the first mile without saying anything consequential. That was, Imani had noticed, how conversations in Nine Pines happened — they were earned through walking.

In the second mile, Pastor Rhodes said, "I want to tell you something about my wife."

Imani said, "I'd like to hear it."

He did not look at her when he spoke. He looked ahead, at the road, which was fine. Walking and talking is best done without eyes meeting.

"Her name was Ellen," he said. "Ellen Margaret Rhodes. She was a choir director before she was a pastor's wife, and she was a pastor's wife in the sense that she was the pastor's wife, but she never liked the role. She thought the role was — she thought it was nineteenth century. She used to say she was going to get a bumper sticker that said 'I Am Not The Pastor.' She said it enough that I got her one. For her birthday. A real one. She put it on her car. For four years she drove around with that bumper sticker, and I swear to you, the number of women in my congregation who stopped asking her to do things doubled after that bumper sticker went on."

"She sounds wonderful."

"She was. She was a — she was my closest person. I don't know how else to say it. I know we're supposed to say best friend, but best friend doesn't cover it. She was the person whose thinking I thought with. You understand what I mean. When something happened in my day, the reason I brought it home was to think about it with her. She was the room I thought in. And then she got sick."

Pastor Rhodes walked a few steps. His walking stick made a soft sound on the pine needles.

"Pancreatic cancer," he said. "She found it in April. She died in October. Six months. The statistics on pancreatic cancer are not kind, and the statistics on Ellen were not kind. She was the statistical case. She did not beat the odds. She was the odds."

"I'm sorry."

"She was forty-nine. She had been talking about starting a bakery. She had wanted to retire from the choir work and open a bakery in town. She had the name picked out. She was going to call it 'Yeast of Eden.' She thought that was hilarious. I thought it was hilarious. She had ordered the oven."

"She had ordered the oven."

"Yes. The oven came in May. She was already sick by then, but we hadn't told anybody. The delivery men wheeled it into our garage and she paid them in cash and I stood there and I thought, this oven is going to sit in this garage and she is never going to use it. And I thought, I am going to have to get rid of this oven. And I thought, I do not want to get rid of this oven. And then I went upstairs and I cried for two hours, and she came up and she held me, and she said, 'Jim, I'm the one dying, you know.' And we both laughed. Oh God, we laughed."

Imani let the laugh be in the air with them a moment. She said, softly, "Did you get rid of the oven?"

"No."

"No?"

"It's still in my garage."

"Pastor."

"I know. I know. It's been three years. Three and a half. I don't use it. I don't bake. I open the garage door sometimes and I look at it. I have thought about selling it a hundred times. I've posted it on the Craigslist three different times. Each time someone offers me what I paid for it, I take the ad down."

"Why?"

"Because if I sell it, it leaves. And while it's there, it is still the oven Ellen ordered. For the bakery. Do you see."

"I see."

"I know it's not rational."

"Rational isn't the point."

"No."

They walked. Up the road, a ruffed grouse exploded out of the brush and thundered off into the trees with that particular muffled roar that made the heart leap in the chest every single time. Pastor Rhodes, without looking, said, "Grouse."

"Yes."

"I know every sound these woods make and I still jump every time a grouse goes up. It is embarrassing."

"Don't be embarrassed. It's what it's for. It's supposed to make you jump. That's the grouse's whole strategy."

"Every creature has a strategy."

"Every creature."

They walked. After a while he said, "My faith, you know. It has changed."

"Tell me how."

"I used to think. I used to think, before Ellen — I used to think I had a system. I thought the faith was a — a well-built house. I thought I had mapped the rooms. I had a theodicy. I had a theology of suffering. I had preached it for twenty years. I had a whole sermon on grief that I had given three times and each time I thought it was pretty good. And then Ellen got sick, and I got up one Sunday three weeks into her diagnosis, and I looked at my sermon notes for that Sunday, and they were the same sermon I had always given, and I could not say a word of it. I got up and I stood there and I closed the folder and I told the congregation that I did not have a sermon that day. I told them I was sorry. I asked them to sit with me in the silence. We sat for eight minutes. I was watching the clock. Then I said the benediction and I went home."

"What did they do?"

"They sat. They were wonderful. Not a person moved. An eight-minute silence is a long silence. People in a congregation usually cannot sit for two. They sat for eight. I think it was because they loved Ellen. She was — she was loved, here. And I think they knew something was wrong even though we hadn't said it yet. And they sat."

"That's a congregation."

"It is. It is a real congregation. I have never taken them for granted again."

They came to a fork in the logging road. Pastor Rhodes paused, consulted the land, turned right. The road narrowed. Above them, a vee of geese passed, their voices wild.

"After she died," he said, "I spent a year thinking I had lost my faith. I did not say so to anyone. I preached. I did weddings. I did funerals. I visited the sick. I did everything a pastor does. I felt nothing. I prayed and the prayers were words I was saying to a ceiling. I held the elements at communion and I thought, bread, wine. That is all. I thought, I have lost it. I thought, I should step down. I thought, I am a fraud."

"What changed?"

"Nothing changed. That is what changed. I waited, because I did not know what else to do, and I did the work, and one day I was at a bedside — old Ed Rasmussen, you never met him, he died before you came — and I was praying with him, and I noticed that I was not faking. I was not performing. I was praying. I did not know when I had started praying again. I had not decided to. It had just come back, the way sleep comes back after insomnia. Quietly. Without fanfare. And when I got home that night I sat on my porch and I cried, and what I understood, through the crying, was that the house I thought I had — the well-built house, the mapped rooms — had burned down. That was true. But I was living now in what was left, which was the ground. The ground the house had been built on. And the ground was still there."

"The ground."

"Yes."

"I understand that."

"I thought you might."

They walked. The silence between them was comfortable. Imani felt, as she had felt from the beginning with Pastor Rhodes, that he was one of the rare men who did not require a conversation to keep moving. Some people needed to be talked at. Some people did not. Pastor Rhodes did not.

"May I ask you something," he said, after a while.

"Yes."

"Your faith. The Bahá'í faith. How does it — how do you understand it now, after this year here? I don't mean the big questions. I mean the living of it. The daily."

Imani thought. She did not answer right away. The late afternoon sun was coming through the trees in golden bars. She stepped through one of them and felt it warm her shoulder and then she was past it.

"I used to think," she said, "that the daily practice was — you know, the prayers, the obligatory prayers, the readings, the fasting. Those are the externals, and I still do them. They are not nothing. But what I understand now, which I did not understand before I came here, is that the practice is about — it's about the specific person in front of you. It is about the fact that every person is, as we say, a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. I had said those words a hundred times. I had not thought about what they meant. I think about them now. I thought about them when I held Margaret's hand last October while she read me her son's letter. I thought about them with Kevin Marchetti. I think about them every time a patient walks in. The faith asks me to see each person as a universe. As a soul. Not as a case. Not as a diagnosis. A universe. And the strange thing is, when I try to do that — when I actually try — the practice is not something extra I do on top of my work. The practice is the work."

"That is beautiful."

"It's not mine."

"No. But the living of it is yours."

They walked a little farther. Pastor Rhodes said, "I do not know enough about your faith."

"You know some things."

"Some. Not enough. I would like to know more. Not to argue with it. Not to convince you of mine. I am past the stage of life where I want to convince people of things. I would like to know more because it is part of you, and you are — you are a person I am grateful to know."

"I will lend you a book."

"Please."

"I won't preach."

"Please don't."

"I'll lend you a book."

"Thank you."

At the turnaround of the road — a small clearing where, a century ago, loggers had staged their cut — they paused. Pastor Rhodes leaned on his stick. The clearing was quiet. The light was low. He said, "I miss her."

"I know."

"I miss her all the time. I will miss her for the rest of my life."

"Yes."

"I am all right."

"I know."

"I wanted to tell somebody about her who was not from here. Somebody who did not already know the story. I am tired of the story. I wanted to tell it fresh, to someone who had not heard it."

"I am glad you did."

"Thank you, Dr. Adeyemo."

"Imani."

"Imani."

They turned and walked back. The way back was shorter than the way out, the way the way back always is. By the time they reached the cemetery gate, the sun was nearly down, and the katydids were starting up, and Pastor Rhodes said, "The katydids are starting."

"I know."

"Not crickets."

"I remember."

He smiled. He tipped his canvas hat. They parted at the gate. Imani drove home in the blue light. On her way, she stopped at the little turnout where the nine pines stood, and she got out of her car, and she walked to the circle of pines, and she stood in the middle of them, and she looked up at the shape of sky they made, and she said, to no one and to everyone, Ellen Rhodes. She wanted to start a bakery. She was loved.

The pines said nothing. The pines had said nothing all evening. The pines would say nothing tomorrow. That was a part of the pines she had come to understand.

Chidinma arrived at the regional airport on a Wednesday afternoon in late August, coming off the small commuter plane with her carry-on in her hand and her winter coat, absurdly, folded over her arm. She had insisted on the coat. London in August was cold, she had said, and Wisconsin would be cold also, because Wisconsin was, she said with the authority of someone who had never been to Wisconsin, at the top of the country. Imani had not corrected her. She had wanted Chidinma to be surprised by how warm it was.

"Eighty-seven."

"You live in a hot place. You lied to me."

"I didn't lie. I said it gets cold in the winter. This is August."

"You told me it was Wisconsin."

"It is Wisconsin."

"Wisconsin is cold."

"In the winter."

"I brought a coat."

"You brought a coat."

They hugged. Chidinma was three years older and an inch taller, and she hugged the way their mother hugged, which was fierce and quick and included, always, one hand on the back of your head, as if to verify that your head was still attached. Imani had not been hugged like that in a year. She stood in the parking lot with her sister and let herself be hugged, and Chidinma smelled like airport and like the perfume she had worn since she was seventeen, a perfume with cedar in it, and Imani was so suddenly and ambushingly homesick for a place she had thought she had stopped being homesick for that she had to press her forehead into her sister's shoulder and breathe.

Chidinma — bless her — noticed but did not comment. She said, "Take me to this town of yours. I want to see what you have done."

They drove. Chidinma looked out the window the whole way. Chidinma was a lawyer in London, had been for fifteen years, corporate work, the kind of work that involved rooms with glass walls and people whose handshakes were exquisite. She had been skeptical about Nine Pines since the first phone call. She had been more skeptical when Imani had turned down the Chicago offer. She had said, on that phone call, "Imani. Darling. Are you all right?" And Imani had said, "Yes." And Chidinma had said, "Are you sure." And Imani had said, "I am sure." And Chidinma had said, "I will come and see for myself."

She was here.

On the drive, she said, "It is very green."

"Yes."

"It is very — it goes on."

"Yes."

"There are no people."

"There are people."

"Where are they?"

"In houses. In towns. Scattered."

"Scattered."

"Yes."

"In London you cannot go five meters without a person."

"I know."

"I don't know whether this is heaven or hell."

"We'll see."

"I didn't undersell her."

"You did. You described her as a receptionist. She is not a receptionist. She is the person the clinic would stop being the clinic without."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me."

"I did tell you."

"Not well enough."

They cooked together. Chidinma cooked like their mother, which meant aggressively and with too much pepper. She made jollof one night — Imani had the rice and the tomatoes and the scotch bonnets Chidinma had brought in her suitcase ("You brought peppers?" "Of course I brought peppers, I am not eating your Wisconsin food for seven days without peppers") — and invited Pastor Rhodes and Margaret over. Pastor Rhodes arrived with a bottle of wine and sat on Imani's back deck and held the jollof in his mouth for a long moment and said, "Dear God," in a voice that could only be a compliment, and Chidinma laughed the way she laughed when she had won.

Margaret did not stay for the whole dinner. She had to go home to her cat. But before she left she took Chidinma's hand and said, "Your sister has done something here, you know. I hope you see it."

"I am seeing it."

"Good."

On the sixth day, they hiked.

Imani had been saving the hike for last. The trail she had chosen was one she had found on her own in late spring — a trail that wound up the ridge behind the Lutheran camp, climbed steadily for two miles through birch and maple, opened onto a bluff with a view north and west that contained, on a clear day, the blue thumbprint of Chequamegon Bay twenty miles away. The day was clear. The sky had that particular late-summer blue that was already thinking about autumn. Chidinma wore Imani's spare hiking boots, which fit her almost well enough.

They started up. Chidinma complained for the first half mile. Chidinma was a woman of cities, she said. Her cardiovascular system was designed for stairs and taxis and, at most, the short sprint to a departing train. She was not designed for inclines. Imani told her to shut up and walk.

"Rude."

"Walk."

"Your bedside manner is terrible."

"I'm off duty."

"Heaven help your patients."

"Walk."

They walked. By the end of the first mile, Chidinma had stopped complaining, because she could not complain and breathe at the same time. By the end of the second mile, she had stopped talking at all. They came up the last switchback and onto the bluff, and Chidinma stopped dead, because the view stopped her dead, and Imani stopped too, and the two of them stood there, and Chidinma said, "Oh."

"Yes."

"This."

"Yes."

"This is why."

"Among other reasons."

"This is why."

They sat on a flat rock at the edge of the bluff. Chidinma took off her boots and rubbed her feet. Imani had brought sandwiches and water. They ate. They did not talk, at first. They sat and looked. The world rolled away from them in sheets of green and blue.

After a while, Chidinma said, "When you called me about Chicago. When you told me you had turned it down."

"Yes."

"I was — I was angry. Not at you. I was angry at this town. I was angry at what I thought this town had done to my sister. I thought, this place has captured her. I thought, she has lost her mind. She is hiding from her life."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Of course I know. I know you, Chi-Chi. I know what you thought."

"You should have told me."

"I did tell you."

"You should have made me see."

"I couldn't make you see. You had to come."

"Well." Chidinma looked out over the ridge. "I came."

"Yes."

"And I see."

"Tell me what you see."

"I see my sister in a place that is not a hiding. I see my sister in a place that is teaching her." Chidinma paused. "I see my sister being taught."

"By what?"

"By everything. By the silence. By the slowness. By that old woman at the desk who is in love with you, by the way. I do not think you understand how in love with you that old woman is."

"Stop."

"I am serious. She is in love with you. She is ferocious about you. She would kill someone for you. Also, by the pastor. I like the pastor. I want to steal the pastor. We should put the pastor in our pocket and take him home."

"He has a parish."

"Fine. Also, by your Mrs. Kowalczyk. Also, by the little redheaded girl you took me to see, the one with the ear thing. Also, by the trees. There are a great many trees here. I had not understood how many. I am taught by the trees also. You have — my goodness, you have such trees."

Imani laughed. "They aren't mine."

"They are in a sense yours."

"In a sense."

They sat. A hawk went over the ridge and rode the updraft and became a speck and was gone. Chidinma leaned her head against Imani's shoulder — awkwardly, because she was taller, and it was never quite a natural fit, but she did it anyway, and Imani put her head against the top of Chidinma's head.

"I miss you," Chidinma said.

"I miss you too."

"I miss you in my life. I miss you in Sunday lunches. I miss having my sister five hours' drive away instead of whatever this is."

"I know."

"But if this is where you need to be. I mean it. If this is where you need to be. I will stop being angry about it. I will come here twice a year. I will bring my peppers."

"Bring your peppers."

"I will."

"Chi-Chi."

"Yes."

"Thank you for coming."

"Don't thank me. I needed to come. Mum wants to know what I say. I will say good things."

"Good."

"I will tell her it is a real place. That it is a real thing you are doing."

"Thank you."

"I will tell her," Chidinma said, and here her voice did a thing it did, a thing Imani had not heard in years, "that my sister is happy."

Imani did not answer that. Her eyes had gone a little wet, and she did not want to answer with her voice doing the thing her voice was going to do. Chidinma knew, as sisters know. They sat. The wind moved in the birches below the bluff. In the distance, a train horn called out — one of the freight lines that ran up to the lake port — and died away.

"I'm going to fall asleep if we sit here much longer," Chidinma said.

"Don't fall asleep."

"Then entertain me."

"I have a story."

"Tell me."

Imani told her about Kevin Marchetti. About how he had showed up, how he had not spoken, how he had walked a mile with a dog and come back. She told her about Margaret's son David, not all of it, but the part about the shape of sky. She told her about Pastor Rhodes and the oven in his garage. Chidinma listened. Chidinma was a lawyer and Chidinma had listened to a million stories and had learned how not to interrupt, a skill their mother had never learned. Chidinma listened. When Imani was done, Chidinma said, simply, "Well."

"Well."

"You are a real doctor now."

"I was a real doctor before."

"You were a good doctor before. You are a real one now. There is a difference."

"Is there."

"There is."

They gathered their things and started down. The way down was harder on the knees than the way up had been on the lungs, and Chidinma said so, loudly. By the time they reached the car they were laughing. They had been laughing for an hour. It was, Imani realized, the first she had laughed like this — the full-body, can't-breathe, tears-in-your-eyes laughing — in months. Maybe longer. She had forgotten what it felt like. She had forgotten that her ribs could hurt from it.

At the car, Chidinma stopped. She turned. She put both her hands on Imani's shoulders.

"You have a life here," she said.

"I have a life here."

"I accept it."

"Thank you."

"I still think the winters are going to be a problem."

"The winters are the best part."

"You are a liar. The winters are not the best part. But I accept that you think so."

They drove home. Chidinma fell asleep in the passenger seat before they had reached the main road. Imani drove through the late afternoon light with her sister asleep beside her and thought that this was, possibly, one of the ten best days of her life. The ranking seemed strange, given that it included the day she had graduated from medical school, the day she had been accepted to her residency, the day her mother had put a scarf around her neck and kissed her forehead and said, Go. But yes. Ten best.

The Feast of Kalimát, the Feast of Words, fell on a Saturday in mid-August. Imani had not hosted Feast in more than two years. In Chicago she had attended at another believer's apartment in Rogers Park. Here in Nine Pines there was no other believer — the nearest community of any size was ninety minutes away in Wausau, and the nearest cluster east of that was nearly two hours to Green Bay. She had been attending by Zoom. She had been attending by drive-ins, when the weather allowed. This month, because the month had come to a weekend, and because she had a guest house now furnished, and because Chidinma had flown home the Tuesday before and had left her with a strange ache of hospitality, she decided to host.

She called Wausau. She called Green Bay. She called a family in Stevens Point who had been trying to visit all year. She arranged the food and the program. She sent the invitations by text. She made a pot of jollof, because she still had peppers from Chidinma's suitcase, and she made akara, and she made a green bean dish she had learned from Mrs. Kowalczyk who was not a Bahá'í but whose green bean dish had converted Imani to the concept of green beans as worthwhile. She made a cake. She bought a case of sparkling water. She put out flowers — wild asters, which she had cut along the fence line that morning.

They came in the afternoon. Ten adults. Three children. The children were ten, seven, and four, all belonging to the Stevens Point family. The seven-year-old was named Mona and had her hair in two puffs and was shy at first and then not shy at all. The four-year-old was named Ruhi and was immediately in love with Imani's couch, which he climbed and descended and climbed again, as if conducting research. The ten-year-old was a boy named Danny who had brought a book and who found the one chair in the house with the best reading light and planted himself there for the first hour of the evening.

The adults stood in Imani's small living room and embraced her and each other. They were from Nigeria, from Iran, from the Marshall Islands, from Milwaukee, from Seoul. They spoke English and, variously, Yoruba and Farsi and Marshallese and Spanish and the accent-English of certain parts of Wisconsin that was, Imani had decided, its own language. They asked after her family. They told her about their families. They complimented the house. They complimented the food before they had eaten it. Samira, from Wausau, who had been a Bahá'í for forty years and who had arrived in this country from Iran in 1982 with a child on each hand, took Imani by the shoulders and said, "My dear, you have done it. You have made a home."

"I had help."

"All homes are made with help."

At five, Margaret arrived — not for the Feast itself, but to help Imani with the food. Imani had asked. She had felt shy about asking. She had not wanted Margaret to feel dragooned into a religious event that was not her own. She had said, carefully, over tea on Wednesday, "Margaret, I'm having my community over on Saturday. It's a — it's a Feast. That's what we call it. We do some prayers and readings, and then we eat and talk. Would you be willing to come at five and help me put out food? Not for the prayers. Just — I could use a hand with the food part. If you don't mind. If you do mind, please say so."

Margaret had said, "Imani."

"Yes."

"You have been holding my son's letters in your hands. You have sat at my kitchen table."

"Yes."

"I will come at five."

She came at five. She came in a blouse she had ironed. She came with two pies — one rhubarb, one apple, both baked that morning — and a look of slight nervousness that she was trying to hide by being bossy about where the plates should go. Imani let her be bossy. Imani loved her for it.

They worked together in the kitchen. Margaret put the pies out. Margaret arranged the table. Margaret heated the jollof in the oven because, she said, any food that comes from a refrigerator is not really food yet, it is the memory of food. Samira came in and introduced herself to Margaret. Pastor Rhodes arrived — Imani had invited him; he had been delighted to be invited; he had asked, in advance, exactly what he should do, and Imani had said, sit and listen — and he introduced himself to everyone by walking around the room and shaking hands with the humility of a man who does not bring his office into rooms where it does not belong. He sat next to Danny, the ten-year-old reader, and asked him what he was reading. Danny showed him. Pastor Rhodes nodded with grave approval. They did not speak again for an hour.

At five-thirty, they began the devotional portion. Imani had asked several members to bring readings. She herself read the opening prayer in English. Samira read in Farsi, and the Farsi was like a river in the room, and Imani closed her eyes and let the river run. A man named Dayo read in Yoruba, and Imani's heart cracked open at a language she heard only at holidays, a language her father had spoken and her mother had spoken and that she, to her shame, had never quite learned. A woman named Lani read in Marshallese, a language Imani had never heard, and she listened to it the way one listens to water — without comprehension and without needing comprehension. Then Danny, shyly, read a short prayer in English — a child's prayer — and he read it carefully, as if it were made of glass.

Margaret, in the kitchen, did not enter the living room during the prayers. But Imani, glancing back once through the doorway, saw her standing at the counter with her hands folded, listening. Her head was tipped slightly. Her eyes were closed. Imani turned back to the room.

The prayers ended. The community spoke for a little while about the writings, about the work of the community, about who was coming and who was going. Imani spoke briefly about a Bahá'í writing that had come to her often in the past year — a writing about service, about the way service to one's fellow beings was itself a form of worship. She spoke without preparing. She spoke from the place in her chest the prayers had opened. When she was done, the room was quiet for a moment, and then they moved on, and she went and got more water for Ruhi, who had decided he needed more water, and the social hour began.

Margaret came in. Margaret was welcomed. Margaret met everyone. Margaret sat on the couch between Samira and Pastor Rhodes and ate a piece of her own pie — because, she said, she had to check on it — and talked to Samira about Iran. Samira had taught middle school science in Tehran before the revolution. Margaret had taught fourth grade in Nine Pines for thirty-one years. They spoke of children and of fractions and of the particular look a child gets when they have just understood a thing. Pastor Rhodes, on Samira's other side, listened with the expression of a man who was hearing something he wanted to remember.

Ruhi, the four-year-old, climbed into Imani's lap. He had been circling her all evening. He now made the commitment and settled. He put his head on her chest. His hair smelled of shampoo and of the particular outdoor smell four-year-olds accumulate by the end of a day. He sighed the sigh of a small person who has decided to be somewhere. Imani held him. She held him with one arm and ate with the other. His mother, across the room, gave her a look of apology. Imani shook her head. Keep him, she mouthed. He is a blessing.

At eight, the children began to tire. The parents began to gather coats. The guests began to leave in groups of two and three, hugging Imani at the door, promising to host the next Feast in Wausau in a month's time, promising to bring Ruhi again. The last to leave was Samira, who stood at the door with Imani's hands in both of hers and said, "You must not feel alone, my dear. You are not alone. We are a small community, but we are not nothing. You are not alone."

"I know."

"Good."

"Samira."

"Yes."

"Thank you for coming so far."

"My dear. I came from Iran. Wausau is a footstep."

She went. The door closed. The house was suddenly, enormously quiet. It was not a quiet Imani minded. Margaret was still there. Pastor Rhodes was still there. They were helping clean up. The three of them worked together in the kitchen — Margaret washing, Pastor Rhodes drying, Imani putting away — without needing to speak. After a while, Pastor Rhodes said, to no one in particular, "That was a good hour."

"It was."

"I have not been in a room with prayer in that many languages in a long time."

"Me either," Margaret said.

"Those little children."

"Those little children."

"The one with the hair."

"Mona."

"Mona. She is a wise person."

"She is seven."

"I know. Wise people start at all ages."

Margaret handed him a plate. He dried it. He put it in the cabinet. Margaret said, "Imani."

"Yes."

"I came tonight because you asked."

"I know."

"I am glad you asked."

"Thank you for coming."

"I listened. From the kitchen."

"Yes."

"It was beautiful."

"Yes."

"I did not know what they were saying."

"Some of it I didn't either."

Margaret laughed — a small laugh, not quite a laugh — and she handed Pastor Rhodes another plate. Pastor Rhodes dried it. Nobody said anything else. They finished the dishes. Margaret left at nine, with a wave and a promise to be at the clinic on Monday. Pastor Rhodes left shortly after, with a thank-you and a blessing he gave softly, the way he gave blessings when the occasion did not require the formal kind. Imani stood in her empty living room afterward and looked at the arrangement of chairs and the flowers on the table that had by now begun to droop, and she said, aloud, to the room, “But man was created to be a man—to be fair, to be just, to be merciful, to be kind to all his species, never to be willing that he himself be well off while others are in misery and distress.”

The room did not answer. It did not need to.

The baby she had saved in November came in for her six-month well visit in May, although she was, by that point, six months and two weeks old, because the mother had had trouble getting the day off work. Her name was Hope.

Imani had known the name for months. Dakota, the mother, had told her at the three-month visit, shyly, one Tuesday afternoon, standing at the reception desk with the baby in a carrier on her chest. She had said, “This comprehensive distinction includes all the posterity of Adam and constitutes one great household or human family, which may be considered the fundamental or physical unity of mankind.”

And Imani had said, "Dakota."

"I know."

“I cannot believe that those whose hearts have been touched by the regenerating influence of God’s creative Faith in His day will find it difficult to cleanse their souls from every lingering trace of racial animosity so subversive of the Faith they profess.”

"I thought — you know. Because of. And I didn't want to — I didn't want to name her after you, because that would be. You know. But I wanted her to have a name. That. You know."

"I know."

"Is it too much."

“For naught doth he behold save that he perceiveth God therein.”

“Areas that are sparsely populated owing to the natural terrain may be excluded from the clustering scheme.”

“Without doubt, the number of such regions will multiply rapidly in the months ahead, and it is crucial that teaching projects be promptly established in any region where the institute is exerting influence.”

"Yeah."

“When he wakened after his carousal, he inquired for the two friends and was given the grievous news.”

Now, in May, the baby was a person. She was a full six-month-old person with opinions and a laugh and two teeth that had surprised her and two wobbly attempts at sitting up to her credit. She sat, today, on Imani's exam table on the paper, propped up with her mother's hand behind her back, and she looked around the room with the wide, startled eyes of a person who had not yet developed the social skill of pretending she was not startled. She was wearing a pink dress with small embroidered flowers. Dakota had braided a thin pink ribbon into the tuft of hair at the top of her head.

"Oh," Imani said, when she walked in. "Oh, look at her."

"I know."

"She's enormous."

"I know."

"She's a person."

"I know. Every day she is more a person."

Imani washed her hands and warmed her stethoscope in her palm — which was an old habit of her mother's, her mother had been a nurse, her mother had warmed everything in her palm before touching a child — and she examined Hope. Hope was well. Hope was very well. Her lungs were clear. Her heart was strong. Her weight was on the curve. Her length was on the curve. Her head circumference was on the curve. Her eyes tracked. Her ears followed sounds. She laughed when Imani touched her belly. She grabbed Imani's stethoscope and put it in her mouth, and Dakota apologized, and Imani said, she's a baby, that is what babies do to stethoscopes. She's a baby. She's a baby.

When the exam was over, Dakota sat Hope on her lap and adjusted the pink dress and said, "I wanted to give you something."

"You don't need to give me anything."

"I know I don't need to. I wanted to." Dakota dug in her diaper bag. She came up with an envelope. "It's a picture. Of her. I wanted you to have it."

Imani looked at it. She looked at it a long time. Dakota watched her. Hope drooled on her mother's arm.

"Dakota."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Okay."

"I will put this — " Imani's voice did a thing. She paused. She tried again. "I will put this in my office. Where I can see it."

"Okay."

"Thank you."

"You said that."

"I am saying it again."

Dakota stood. She put the baby back in her carrier. She slung the diaper bag. At the door she turned.

"Doctor."

"Yes."

“Should it be Our wish, We would return it to the dust in less than the twinkling of an eye.”

"You do?"

“Peace be upon him who followeth the way of guidance! 91 The novel thoughts thou hast expressed as to the symbolism contained in the word “sparrow” were considered.”

Imani did not answer. She could not. Dakota saw that she could not, and Dakota — who was twenty-two, and who had been through more in those twenty-two years than most people are through in fifty — nodded, once, with a woman's understanding, and she left. Imani listened to her go. She listened to the baby carrier jostling down the hall. She listened to Margaret, at the desk, saying, “The enkindled souls being raised up through the processes of the Plan are seeking to gain an ever more profound understanding of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings—“the sovereign remedy for every disease”—and to apply them to the needs of their society.”

She went back to her office and set the photograph on the shelf above her desk, between a book of prayers and a picture of her mother and father that her sister had framed for her. She put it where she could see it when she sat down. She sat down. She looked at it. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she called the next patient in.

The letter came in early September. It was in a cream envelope with a Chicago postmark, addressed to Dr. Imani Adeyemo in a hand she did not recognize, forwarded twice — from the hospital to the clinic she had briefly considered joining, and from there to Nine Pines. The envelope had her old residency ID badge on a sticker affixed to the back, a thing someone at the hospital had done to make sure she got it. It was postmarked two weeks ago.

Margaret handed it to her on a Thursday morning with a look that said, I do not know what this is but I do not think it is bad. Margaret had developed a way of reading mail by feel.

Imani took the envelope into her office and closed the door. She sat at her desk. She turned the envelope over in her hands. The return address was on Belmont Avenue in Chicago. The sender was listed as Mrs. Helen Walters.

Imani's chest moved.

Walter Walters. Seventy-seven. Admitted on a Tuesday with a GI bleed, in her second month of attending. He had been stable. He had been laughing, actually, at a joke she had made about his name — Walter Walters — and then within three hours he had crashed, hemorrhaged massively, been transfused, coded, been brought back, coded again, and died at four-seventeen in the morning on a Wednesday. She had spoken to his wife twice — once by phone at two a.m., once in person in a waiting room at five. She had told her. She had said what she had to say. Mrs. Walters had sat with her hands flat on her knees and had not cried and had said, "Thank you, Doctor. Thank you for trying." And Imani — who had been up for thirty-six hours, who was twenty-eight years old, who had been an attending for seven weeks — had said, "I'm so sorry," and had gone into the hall and had sat on a bench and had, herself, not cried. She had saved the crying for weeks later. It had come at the wrong moments. It had come when she was grocery shopping and saw a brand of peanut butter she did not recognize. It had come when a stranger on the El had laughed a laugh that sounded, for one second, like an old man's laugh.

She had not heard from Mrs. Walters after that night. There had been no complaint. There had been no letter at the time. There had been, in the usual course of hospital events, a chart review, an M-and-M, a conversation with her attending supervisor, who had said, Imani, you did what could be done. You cannot save a man who is bleeding into his retroperitoneum that fast. You did not miss anything.

But she had carried Mr. Walters with her for a year and a half now. She had carried him into Nine Pines. She had carried him under the nine pines. She had said his name, once, when she was alone there. Walter Walters. I could not save him. I am sorry.

She opened the envelope.

Dear Dr. Adeyemo,

Imani took a breath and read on.

I do not know if this letter will reach you. I tracked your name through the hospital and was told you had moved to a small town in Wisconsin. The nurse who helped me find you was named Gloria, and she was very kind, and she said she hoped you were well, and that she missed you.

I am writing because I want you to know something.

When my husband Walter died on the morning of April the 11th, two years ago, you were the doctor. You came and told me. I remember you. I remember that you were young, and that you were tired, and that you were sorry. I remember that you put a hand on my shoulder and you did not say anything for a long time before you told me what had happened. I have thought of you often.

I want to tell you that I do not blame you. I have never blamed you. I want to say it in writing, because I do not know if I said it clearly enough at the time. I was not in a state to say anything clearly. But I want to say it now, to you, in Wisconsin, in the quiet part of my life.

My husband had been sick for a long time. We knew it. He knew it. He had refused the colonoscopy that might have caught it earlier — he had refused it three times — because, he said, he was eighty and his time was his own. I told him he was seventy-seven, and he said, close enough. That was my Walter. He was stubborn and he was funny and he was going to do what he was going to do. When he went into the hospital that Tuesday, I knew. I did not say so, but I knew.

You could not have saved him. I know that you may have carried this, because you are the kind of young woman who carries things. I want to release you from it.

I am enclosing a picture of him. It was taken in 1968, the year we were married. He was twenty-three. He had just joined the fire department. He is standing in front of a house on the South Side, in his gear, grinning like he has gotten away with something. That was my Walter. That is the Walter I want you to carry, if you are going to carry him at all. Not the Walter in the hospital bed. The Walter in the picture.

Thank you for taking care of him. Thank you for being there when I had to be told. Thank you for your kindness when you had no time for it. Young doctors do not always have kindness. You did.

Yours sincerely,

Helen Walters

Imani sat with the letter in her lap. She was at her desk. The door was closed. Margaret was in the outer office, doing whatever Margaret did. Tanya was with a patient in the front exam room. The sun was coming in the window at an angle.

She slid the picture out of the envelope.

Imani looked at the photograph.

She looked at it for a long time.

Her vision went. She was in her kitchen, she realized dimly — no, she was at her desk — no, she was fine, she was at her desk, and her vision had gone because she was crying. She was crying without sound. She was crying the way she had not cried about Walter Walters at the time, the way she had cried by pieces over eighteen months in inappropriate places, and now — now — in her office with the sun coming through the window, with Margaret just beyond the door, with a photograph of a young firefighter in 1968 in her hand — now she was crying the whole cry. The whole cry of it. The long-held, unexpressed thing.

She stood. She walked to the window. She held the photograph to her chest. She cried at the window. Outside, a robin was on the lawn. The robin tilted its head and listened, the way robins do, not for sound but for vibration, some faint pulse of worm underneath. The robin did its work. Imani watched the robin do its work. She wept.

After a time, she became aware that Margaret was standing in the doorway.

"Honey."

"Margaret."

"I knocked. You didn't answer. I thought."

"I'm all right."

"Are you."

"Yes."

"Who is it."

"A patient."

"A patient here?"

"A patient from Chicago. From — from before. His wife wrote me. She. She — "

Margaret came and took the letter from her hand. Imani let her. Margaret read it. Imani watched her read it. When Margaret was done, she folded the letter back into thirds and put it gently on the desk. She took the photograph out of Imani's hand. She looked at the young man in the photograph. She said, "What a handsome boy."

"Yes."

"What a handsome, cocky, good-looking boy."

"Yes."

"How old was he when — "

"Seventy-seven."

"A long life."

"A long life."

"She is — the wife. She is telling you she forgives you for something you did not do."

"I know. I know that."

"But you needed to hear it."

"I needed to hear it."

"Yes."

"I did not know I did."

"No. That's how it is."

Margaret set the photograph down next to the letter. She stood in the doorway for another moment. She did not try to fill the space. She looked at Imani and waited.

"I am okay, Margaret. Really. I just — I need a minute. Will you cover the front."

"I've got the front."

"Thank you."

"I'll put on tea."

"Thank you."

The young man in the photograph kept grinning.

"You could not have been saved," she said. "I know that. But I am sorry. And. I am going to — I am going to put you in a place where I can see you. And I am going to remember you. Not in the hospital bed. Here. In 1968. On Lowe Street. With your dog. All right?"

The photograph, being a photograph, said nothing.

She set it on the shelf above her desk, next to the picture of Hope. Walter Walters in 1968. Hope Marie in 2026. The shelf was filling up.

Margaret brought tea in a few minutes later. She did not mention anything about the letter. She set the cup down and went back out. Imani drank the tea. She blew her nose. She washed her face in the small sink. She went back to work.

That night, she wrote a reply to Mrs. Walters. It was short. She thanked her. She told her she had kept the photograph. She told her she carried her husband lightly now, which she had not been able to say before, and which was, she realized as she wrote it, true. She addressed the envelope. She put the letter in the mailbox at the end of her driveway and put the little red flag up. In the morning, the letter was gone, and in its place there was a faint frost on the grass — the first frost of the year, early, the turning of the season.

Autumn was coming back. A year was closing. The pines were waiting.

She woke, the morning of the anniversary, before the alarm. The room was blue. The curtains moved, a little, in the draft from the window she had left open a crack. The house was still. Out beyond the window the yard was wet with dew. Beyond the yard the woods were still dark, the kind of dark woods are just before sunrise, a dark that was made of a thousand small darknesses — each tree, each shadow under each tree, each leaf holding its own private black.

She lay for a moment looking at the ceiling. She counted. She did the small arithmetic a person does when a year has closed. She had arrived on the sixteenth of October. It was the sixteenth of October. It was the year.

She did not cry about this. She did not, to her surprise, feel much at all. She felt the way one feels when a long piece of music ends, the way one feels when the last note has been held and let go and the room is only the room again — a kind of quiet, a kind of attention, a slight disbelief that the music was really the music and was really over.

She made coffee. She drank it on the back step, in a blanket, with the dew wetting her slippers. The birds did their early-morning conference in the birches. She listened. After a time, she went inside and got dressed and did her prayers. She did not go to the clinic first this morning. The clinic would wait. Tanya would be there by eight. Tanya could open. Imani had something to do first.

She drove to the nine pines.

The turnout was empty. There were no other cars. The morning light had come up and was coming through the pines in low, slanted shafts that marked out columns in the air the way sun through a cathedral marks out columns of light in which dust can be seen slowly falling. She walked into the circle of the pines. She stood in the middle.

She looked up.

The shape of sky the nine pines made had not changed. It was the same circle it had been a year ago. The same circle it had been ten years ago. The same circle it had been when Margaret's son David had looked up at it as a child. The same circle, most likely, that had been there when the trees were saplings and the woods were other woods, though she was no forester and could not say for certain. The circle was a circle. It held the sky.

Imani thought of what she had come here to think of. She thought of Kevin Marchetti, walking a mile down a road with a dog, coming back. She thought of Margaret in the clinic office with the box of letters and her hand that had trembled and then had steadied. She thought of Pastor Rhodes's oven in his garage, that had not been sold. She thought of her sister asleep in the passenger seat, mouth slightly open, catching up on the jet lag after the bluff. She thought of Samira's Farsi in the living room. She thought of Ruhi the four-year-old asleep in her lap. She thought of Hope, six months and two weeks, with her pink ribbon. She thought of Walter Walters in 1968, grinning in a coat too big for him. She thought of Tanya, who now took Wednesday nights and had learned more in six months than Imani had thought possible to learn in six months, who had told Imani last week that she had decided to stay, that she had decided this was where she was going to practice, that she had decided she did not need to go to Milwaukee after all. Tanya had said, this is my work now. Imani had said, it is. It is your work. You are good at it. You will be better than I am. Tanya had laughed and said, Don't be ridiculous. And Imani had said, I am not being ridiculous. I am telling you what I know.

She thought of Margaret, who would be seventy-three next week. She thought of the small party they were planning — herself, Pastor Rhodes, Mrs. Kowalczyk, Tanya, a handful of old friends Margaret had named. She thought of the cake they would order from the café. She thought of Margaret's face, when she was given the cake, which would be a face of contained embarrassment and contained delight, the way Margaret received all gifts. She thought of Tyler and Bryn, whose baby was due any day — a little girl, they had said, they were going to name her Junie — a little girl who would be, in a decade, Hope's friend at school, the way children in towns like this become friends because there are not enough children not to be. She thought of the town itself. The hum of it. The small, steady, unglamorous hum.

She thought of herself, one year ago, pulling into Nine Pines in a rental car with two suitcases in the back and a feeling in her chest that the decision she had made was possibly the wrong decision, that she had maybe ruined her career, that her mother would be disappointed, that she did not know a single person in the town she was now approaching. She thought of the self she had been then. She wanted to put a hand on the shoulder of that self and say, it is going to be all right. More than all right. You are going to find a work that is yours. You are going to find a woman at a desk who will teach you what it means to have a coworker who is a witness. You are going to find a minister who will walk six miles with you in the woods. You are going to find patients whose names you will remember forever. You are going to save a baby and you are going to lose a man and you are going to be written to by a widow who will tell you what you did not know you needed to hear. You are going to host a Feast in a house that is yours. Your sister will come. She will see. Your mother will hear about it and be proud.

You are going to stay. That is the whole of it. You are going to stay.

"I am still here."

The pines, as usual, said nothing.

The pines did not need to say anything. The sky did not need to. The robin in the underbrush, who did not know she was there, did not need to. It was enough to be in the place and to say the thing and to be heard by one's own hearing. It was enough. It had, she understood with the sudden clarity that comes sometimes to people who are otherwise slow — it had always been enough.

She stayed a few minutes. She let the light come up another few degrees. Then she turned and walked back to her car. She got in. She started the engine. She drove into town.

At the clinic, Tanya was at the desk talking to Margaret, and the two of them were laughing about something. They stopped when Imani came in, and they both looked up, and Margaret said, "Happy one year."

"Margaret."

"What. I put it on my calendar."

"You put it on your calendar."

"Of course I put it on my calendar."

"Of course she put it on her calendar," Tanya said.

"There will be cake at noon," Margaret said.

"Margaret."

"You do not get to object to the cake. I have already ordered the cake. It is coming at eleven-forty-five. It is carrot cake."

"My favorite."

"Yes."

"Did I tell you it was my favorite."

"You told me once. In November. I remembered."

Imani laughed. She hugged Margaret. She hugged Margaret the way she had not hugged Margaret in all this year, because Margaret was not a person one easily hugged — and Margaret let herself be hugged, and patted her back, and pulled away and said, "All right. All right. Go to work. We have patients."

They had patients. They worked. At eleven-forty-five, the cake came. They closed the clinic for half an hour — Margaret had blocked out the schedule, without telling her — and Pastor Rhodes arrived, and Mrs. Kowalczyk arrived with a plant, and Tyler came down from the co-op for ten minutes with coffee, because Bryn was home with contractions that might or might not be the real thing, and the little clinic waiting room was full of people who loved her, and Imani cut the cake and served pieces to each of them, and when she sat down with her own piece, she looked around the room and thought, this is my congregation. This is my parish. This is the small place that I am the doctor of. I did not know, when I came, that I would be given this. I have been given this.

She ate the cake. It was good. It was carrot cake. Margaret had remembered.

EPILOGUE

A year. I write this at the kitchen table, with the window open, and a candle lit because I like the little flame, and a cup of tea cooling at my elbow. The town is quiet. It is ten o'clock. The clinic is closed. Margaret is home with her cat. Tanya is with her daughter. Pastor Rhodes is preparing his Sunday sermon, or not preparing it, depending on how the night finds him. Somewhere down the road, Tyler is on the phone with his mother about the contractions, which stopped and started twice today. Bryn is resting. The baby is coming, or not coming — it is the baby's decision, not ours.

I have been thinking, all day, about what I have learned.

I have learned that a small place teaches you by being small. In a big city you can turn your attention from any one thing because there is always another thing. In a small town you cannot turn. The same people come back. The same body comes back, weighed against itself, six months later, and asks you to notice what has changed. The same grief comes back, on a different anniversary, and asks you to sit with it once more. Smallness is a discipline. I did not know this before.

I have learned that the practice is not separate from the work. I wrote this to Pastor Rhodes on the bluff, or I said it to him, something like it. I will say it again here because I think it is true. The practice of my faith is not something I do on Fridays and Sundays and at nineteen-day intervals, although I do it then. The practice is also what I do when Kevin Marchetti is sitting in front of me in the exam room with his eyes on the floor, and I must see him as a universe. The practice is how I hold Margaret's hand when her voice breaks. The practice is the patience I bring to Mrs. Kowalczyk's hip. The practice is to treat each soul as the mine rich in gems. The practice is not apart from the world. The practice is the world, attended to.

I have learned that staying is a verb. It is not a passive state. It is something one does. I used to think staying was the opposite of going, a kind of not-going. It is not. Staying is its own motion. Every morning I wake up and I stay. I could leave. I could pack my car and be gone by noon. I choose not to. That choice is the work.

I have learned that I am not alone. I came here thinking I would be the only Bahá'í for a hundred miles, and in some sense I was, and still am. But I was not alone. Samira drove here with her grandchildren and her casserole dishes. Ruhi fell asleep in my lap. My sister came. My mother called. The small community up in Wausau and over in Stevens Point held me in their attention even when I could not see them. And this town — this town, which does not share my faith, which in many cases does not have a faith, or has a faith that looks little like mine — this town loved me anyway. Margaret. Rhodes. The Marchettis. Dakota. The Lutheran ladies who brought casseroles in December. I was not alone. I am not alone. The lesson is not to pretend to self-sufficiency. The lesson is to receive what is given.

I have learned that a doctor is a witness. More than a fixer, more than a giver of pills, more than a setter of bones. A witness. I was present at Hope's birth and at Walter's death. I was present when Kevin told me the truth about the toolbox. I was present when Margaret read me the letter about light. I did not fix any of these things. In some cases there was nothing to fix. But I was there. I saw. I held what needed to be held. That is part of the work that no one tells you about in medical school, because no one knows how to teach it. You learn it by doing it. You learn it by sitting still in a room with a suffering person and not leaving.

I have learned that I love this place. I did not expect to love it. I thought I would tolerate it. I thought I would make a contribution and move on. I was wrong. Love ambushed me. Love came in the form of a redheaded girl with an ear infection. Love came in the form of a man with a canvas hat. Love came in the form of a woman at a desk who remembered that carrot cake was my favorite.

I will stay.

Tomorrow I will go to work. Margaret will be at the desk. Tanya will come in at ten. I will see perhaps fifteen patients. I will have lunch at my desk. I will write this again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.

* * *

There is a prayer I say some nights that I did not say before I came here. I will write it now, because it belongs to the year.

O my God! Thou seest me bewildered in my lowliness, and overwhelmed by Thy might; withered without Thy dew, and thirsty without the waters of Thy reunion. Rain down, then, upon me from the clouds of Thy grace that which shall cleanse me, and give me to drink of the wine of Thy generosity, that I may turn away from all but Thee, and cling unto the hem of Thy bounteous and resplendent mercy.

That is not my prayer. It is the prayer of the Báb, and I say it with care, because it is not mine to alter. But when I say it, at night, in my kitchen, in the quiet, I say it for this place and for this year and for the small specific souls I have been given to serve.

* * *

Imani,

You are twenty-two and you are in your first year of medical school and you are afraid. You are afraid you will not be good enough. You are afraid you will be good enough only to burn out. You are afraid you will have to choose between being a daughter and being a doctor, between being a Bahá'í and being a doctor, between being yourself and being a doctor. You do not know yet that these are false choices. You do not know yet that the self is made by the practice. You do not know yet that the people who will shape you are not the ones you have already met. They are waiting for you. They are old women at desks in towns you have not heard of. They are boys on Humvees writing home about light. They are patients you have not yet failed. They are patients you have not yet saved. They are a pastor whose wife will die and who will take you on a walk. They are a sister who will come and see.

You are going to go to Chicago. You are going to be a resident. You are going to be a good resident. You are going to lose patients and carry them for years. You are going to be offered a job at a great hospital and you are going to turn it down. I know you do not believe this now. You will. You will turn it down for a town I have not told you the name of. The town will be small. It will be hard. The winters will be worse than you have imagined and the rewards will be quieter than you have dreamed.

Do not be afraid of the quiet. The quiet is the whole thing. The quiet is where the work lives. You will learn this. You will learn it by sitting in rooms with people who are not yet ready to speak. You will learn it by holding the hands of old women. You will learn it under nine pine trees that have been waiting for you a long time.

Do not worry about being exceptional. You will never be exceptional in the way you are trying to be. You will be exceptional in a different way — in the way of someone who showed up, every day, for a long time, in a small place, and became the person she needed to be. That is not the kind of exceptional that is written up in magazines. That is the kind that lets old women bring you carrot cake on an anniversary they remembered without being asked.

Take care of your body. You will forget to. You will eat standing up and sleep badly and drink too much coffee. Try to do better. I am not very good at this even now but I am trying.

Call your mother. She misses you.

Love,

Imani at thirty-two, on the sixteenth of October, at her kitchen table in a town called Nine Pines, Wisconsin, at the end of her first year.

* * *

I will close the journal now. I will blow out the candle. I will go to bed. The window will stay open a little, because I like the draft. In the morning the dew will be on the grass, the robins will do their early-morning conference, the clinic will open, Margaret will be at the desk, Tanya will come in, patients will come. The work will be waiting. The work will always be waiting.

Alláh-u-Abhá. Yá Bahá'u'l-Abhá. Good night.

THE END

----------

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Rural medicine is one of the quietest callings in American life, and one of the most consequential. Across the United States, and across the world, there are towns of a thousand people — or three hundred, or fifty — where a single clinician holds the center of what it means for a community to be cared for. That clinician is often the only one. She is often exhausted. She is often underpaid. She stays anyway. This book is a small offering to those clinicians, whose work is rarely depicted in fiction and even more rarely praised.

Nothing in this book should be read as a fictionalization of the Central Figures of the Bahá'í Faith, or of any named historical person. The characters, town, and events are invented. The prayers quoted are drawn from the authoritative Bahá'í writings and are given verbatim.

— The Author Crimson Ark Publishing [ADDITIONAL PATIENT STORIES — These chapters may be interwoven throughout the novel, representing Imani's broader medical practice during her first year in Nine Pines.]

Imani paused at the counter with a chart in her hand. "Eleven years."

"At least. Could be twelve."

"And nobody's checked on her?"

Nancy's mouth made a small, complicated shape. "Dorothy doesn't like to be checked on. She has a gun."

Imani laughed before she realized Nancy was not joking. The laugh hung awkwardly in the waiting room air, under the fluorescent hum, and Imani carried it back into her office with her like something she had meant to throw away and then forgotten.

It was a Tuesday in late October when Dorothy arrived. The maples on Main Street had gone the color of rusted iron, and a thin skin of frost lay across the grass in the mornings. The woman who brought her was named Linda Voss, a neighbor from down the road who farmed pumpkins and whose husband delivered propane. Linda half-carried, half-led Dorothy into the exam room, apologizing the whole way, speaking over her shoulder as though the apology were a length of rope she was playing out behind her.

"She wouldn't have come, Doctor. I made her. I said Dorothy, if you don't get in my truck I am calling your son in Eau Claire and I will tell him everything, and she said fine, fine, and here we are. She's been short of breath. She had to sit down in the garden two days ago and couldn't get up for an hour. She won't tell you that, but I'm telling you."

"Mrs. Klemp," Imani said. "I'm Dr. Adeyemo."

Dorothy looked at her a long moment. Her eyes were the pale, washed blue of certain September skies. "You're not from here."

"No."

"Chicago, I heard."

"That's right."

"Hm." Dorothy looked down at her hands. "My late husband hated Chicago."

"A lot of people do," Imani said mildly, and washed her own hands at the small sink.

It was during the exam, listening through the stethoscope to a heart that stuttered and paused and caught itself again like an engine in a cold garage, that Imani understood something was wrong beyond the usual wrongs of eighty-four years. She asked Dorothy about her medications. Dorothy looked at the wall.

"I take them," she said.

"May I ask what you take?"

"The blue one and the white one."

"Do you have them with you?"

Dorothy's mouth set. "At home."

Imani sat down on the rolling stool so that her eyes were lower than Dorothy's. She had learned this trick her first year of residency, from an old internist in Hyde Park who had the gentlest hands she had ever seen. You sit lower. You let them be the tall one.

"Mrs. Klemp," she said. "I'm going to ask you something, and I promise I am not here to judge you, and I am not going to tell anyone. Are you taking your heart medicine every day?"

Dorothy's jaw worked. She looked at the window, where the light had a thin autumn clarity. Outside, a sparrow hit the glass softly and flew off.

"I take it," Dorothy said, "when I feel bad."

"How often do you feel bad?"

"Not that often."

"Mrs. Klemp. How long has the bottle lasted you? The last bottle."

Dorothy was quiet for a long time. Imani waited. She had learned also to wait, which was harder than sitting lower and took more years to master.

"A year," Dorothy said, finally. "It's lasted a year."

Imani felt something tighten in her chest, not unlike the arrhythmia she had just heard through the stethoscope. "It's meant to last a month."

"I know what it's meant to last."

"Mrs. Klemp, why—"

"Because it's ninety-three dollars a bottle," Dorothy said. Her voice was very even, almost bored, as though she were reciting the price of feed corn. "And I have a hundred and forty dollars a month after the power bill and the property taxes, and I have the dog, and the dog has her own medicine, and I am not going to let the dog hurt. So I make it last. I break them in half, and I take half a day on the days I feel bad, and I make it last."

Imani sat very still. Outside the window the sparrow came back, or another sparrow, and hovered at the feeder Nancy had hung from the eave. She thought of her father, who had run a pharmacy in Lagos before they came to America, and who had once, when she was nine, given a woman a bottle of antibiotics for free and then written the cost in a ledger under his own name and paid it at the end of the month. She had not understood, then, why he did this. She understood now that he had been doing what he could, in the place he was, with the small power that he had.

"Mrs. Klemp," she said. "There are programs. Patient assistance programs. The drug company will send you the medicine for free if we file the paperwork. I can do the paperwork."

Dorothy did not look up. "I don't take charity."

"It isn't charity. You've paid into this country for eighty-four years. This is what you paid for."

Dorothy was quiet. Her hands gripped each other in her lap, one inside the other, like two old friends holding on.

"And the dog," Imani said, "we'll figure out too. There's a fund at the co-op for farm animals. Pastor Rhodes runs it. I'll call him."

"The dog is not a farm animal. The dog is a dog."

"Then I'll call him and I'll lie to him," Imani said, and Dorothy, despite herself, made a small sound that was almost a laugh, a dry crack of a sound, like a branch breaking under snow.

They filled out the paperwork together that afternoon. Imani drove it to the post office herself, after hours, and stood at the blue box and dropped it in and heard the soft whisper of the envelope going down into the dark.

She began to drive out to Dorothy's farm once a month. The farm lay seven miles west of town on a dirt road that turned to mud in April and to iron in January. The house was white once and now was the color of old paper. There was a porch that sagged at one end and a barn with no animals in it anymore, and a dog, an arthritic collie named Pearl, who slept in a square of sun on the kitchen linoleum and did not lift her head when Imani came in, only tapped her tail twice against the floor in acknowledgment.

Dorothy did not, at first, let Imani past the kitchen. They sat at the table with two cups of coffee so strong it stained the inside of the cup. Imani took her blood pressure and listened to her heart and wrote in her notebook. Dorothy watched her write.

"You have nice handwriting," Dorothy said, the third month.

"Thank you. My mother was a schoolteacher. She used to hit my knuckles with a ruler."

"Did it work?"

"You're looking at the evidence."

By the fifth month Dorothy let her into the front room, which had not, Imani suspected, been sat in for a long time. There was a photograph on the mantel of a young man in a Navy uniform, and another of a woman who must have been Dorothy sixty years ago, standing in front of this same house with a baby on her hip and a look on her face that was neither happy nor unhappy but only present, only there.

By the eighth month Dorothy talked. Not much, and never about what Imani would have guessed. She talked about the weather, and about her husband's method for splitting oak, and about a cousin who had moved to Milwaukee in 1962 and become, in Dorothy's telling, somehow lesser for it. She did not talk about her son in Eau Claire, who sent a card at Christmas, or about the daughter who had died of leukemia in 1978, whose photograph stood on the bureau in the hallway and whose name was Ruth.

Imani never asked. She only came every month, and took the blood pressure, and listened to the heart that now, on the proper medicine, beat cleaner and stronger than it had a right to. She sat with Pearl the dog and scratched behind her ears and felt Pearl's breath go slow and satisfied against her wrist.

"I don't have much," Dorothy said. "But I put these up every year."

Imani took the jar. It was heavier than she had expected, warm from Dorothy's hand.

"Thank you," Imani said.

"You come back," Dorothy said. "Not because you have to. Because I like you."

"I'll come back."

Dorothy nodded once. The dog sat down in the gravel. Dorothy put her hand on the dog's head, absently, the way a person touches a door frame they have touched every day for fifty years.

Driving back down the dirt road toward town, Imani set the jar on the passenger seat. The sun, low and orange, struck the glass and lit the apricot inside like a held flame. She thought, and not for the first time that year, of a passage from the Writings that her mother had read aloud in the kitchen in Chicago when Imani was small, about the soul that is a lamp and the body that is the glass around it. She did not know, even now, if she believed every part of it. But she knew that something in Dorothy, some small steady fuel, had nearly gone out from sheer economic cruelty, and that in the crude mechanics of a mailed envelope and a free bottle of pills the small steady fuel had been kept alive. The glass had been polished. The light had been allowed to go on being light.

She put the jar in her kitchen window when she got home. All winter it glowed there, orange in the gray light, and sometimes when she came in from a long day she looked at it and felt, unreasonably, as though Dorothy were watching out for her and not the other way around.

They arrived on a Thursday in February — the mother first, brisk, apologetic, a tall woman named Jenna Halverson with dark hair cut short for practicality and a work lanyard still looped around her neck from the insurance office in Rice Lake, and then the two girls, seven years old, matched in their winter coats, matched in the loose brown braids down their backs, matched in every visible particular except that one of them — the one on the left, who was Rowan — was thinner by a measurable degree, and her thinness was of the particular kind Imani had learned to recognize in her third year of medical school and had hoped never to see in a child this young.

The other twin was Skylar. She sat very close to her sister in the waiting-room chairs. Their coats touched. Their boots touched. Skylar held her sister's hand openly, without performance, the way a person holds a hand in the dark.

Jenna Halverson had come in, she said, because she had noticed two weeks ago that Rowan was not eating her lunches. She had been packing them every morning — peanut butter sandwich, carrot sticks, apple, granola bar — and every afternoon the bag came home with the apple core on top, half a carrot, and everything else untouched, wrapped back up as though it had never been opened.

"At first I thought she was trading," Jenna said. She was speaking very fast, with the rapid practical anger of a woman who was angry at herself for not seeing it sooner. "Kids trade at lunch, right? So I asked her. She said she wasn't trading. I asked the teacher. The teacher said Rowan sits with her sister every day and they share — except the teacher was watching, and Skylar eats Rowan's food. The teacher thought it was cute. The teacher *told me* it was cute."

Jenna put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes shone. She lowered her hand.

"She's lost seven pounds," Jenna said. "I weighed her last night. She was fifty-four in August and now she's forty-seven. I didn't see it. I didn't see it happen."

"It happens slowly," Imani said. "That's part of how it works. It hides."

"Rowan," Imani said. "Can I ask you something?"

Rowan nodded. She was a serious child. Her eyes were the color of tea.

"When you eat, does something feel wrong?"

Rowan thought about this. She took her time. Imani waited.

"My stomach hurts after," Rowan said.

"Does it hurt because it's full?"

"I don't like it when it's full."

"What does full feel like?"

Rowan looked at her hands. "Loud."

"And when you don't eat, how does that feel?"

"Quiet," Rowan said.

Imani nodded once, slowly. "Thank you for telling me. That was a very hard question and you answered it very well. You can get dressed now."

Skylar, brought in next, was round-cheeked and pink and, on the scale, in the fiftieth percentile for her age. Her heart was a normal seven-year-old heart, fast and happy. Imani sat with her for a while anyway.

"How is your sister?" Imani asked.

Skylar looked surprised. She had not, Imani thought, expected to be asked anything about herself, let alone anything she would have to think about. Adults, when they spoke to Skylar, spoke to her about Rowan — how was Rowan, had Rowan eaten today, what did Rowan do at recess. Imani knew this without being told.

"She's sad," Skylar said.

"Do you know why?"

Skylar looked at the poster on the wall, which was a cartoon of the human body with all the organs labeled. She looked at it for a long time.

"She says," Skylar said, "that she's too big for things."

"For what things?"

"Her desk. Her bed. The car seat. She says her body is too big." Skylar's lower lip went, very briefly, sideways. "It's not."

"I know it's not."

"I told her it's not. I told her she's littler than me."

"Does that make her feel better?"

"No. She says I'm little too, and that's why we should be careful."

Later, with both parents in the room — the father, Ben, was a thin man in a quilted flannel who had driven in from his job at the mill and who said almost nothing but whose hands did not stop moving, opening and closing the zipper of his coat as though the zipper were the source of some necessary soothing — Imani sat at her desk and said, in the quietest voice she could find, what she had to say.

"Rowan has what we call early-onset restrictive eating," Imani said. "The formal name is anorexia nervosa. I want to be careful about that name, because I know how it sounds, and because seven is very young for it. But this is what it is. It is a real illness. It is not a phase and it is not something she is choosing in any way she can control. It is a kind of thinking that has gotten inside her, and it is telling her things that are not true."

Jenna Halverson, across the desk, made a sound like a small injured animal and pressed both palms flat against her own face.

"Yes."

"She's seven."

"I know. I am so sorry."

Imani had prepared for this. She had, between Rowan's exam and this conversation, called a colleague in Madison, a pediatric eating disorder specialist named Dr. Alemu whom she had known in residency, and Dr. Alemu had said yes, send her, send her now, I can see her Monday. She gave the Halversons the name and the number and the address. She gave them the name of a family therapist in Eau Claire. She gave them three books and the phone number of a parents' support line.

"Your other daughter needs you too."

Jenna looked up. Her face was wet.

"Skylar is watching this. Skylar is listening. Skylar is a seven-year-old girl who is being told, without anyone meaning to tell her, that her sister is the important one and she is the easy one. She is going to carry this. She is already carrying it. Please do not let her be the healthy one alone in a quiet room while you tend to Rowan. Put her in the room too. Sit with her too. Ask her how she is."

Ben Halverson stopped moving the zipper. He looked at Imani for a long time.

"Okay," he said, finally. "Okay. Thank you."

They came back every month for the rest of the year. Dr. Alemu saw them in Madison. The family therapist saw them every two weeks. Rowan, slowly, began to eat. She did not gain the weight back quickly — it was not that kind of story — but the slow tapping of her heart began to quicken by a beat or two, and the fine dry hair on her forearms softened, and one April afternoon when Imani asked her how her stomach felt when it was full, Rowan said *less loud,* and Imani wrote that down too, in the same notebook, *less loud,* and she went home that night and sat in her kitchen and did not cook anything and did not eat, because she was too full of the small word *less,* which had arrived like a gift.

"It's strong," Imani said.

"Is it too strong? Does it beat too loud?"

Imani heard, in the question, the shape of the fear she had been watching for. She lowered the stethoscope. She sat down on the rolling stool.

"Skylar," she said. "It's exactly right. Your heart is exactly what a seven-year-old heart should be. It is not too much and it is not too little. It is you-sized. And that is the right size for it to be."

Skylar's mouth trembled. Her mother, in the corner, went very still.

"Can I come see you sometimes?" Skylar said. "Even if I'm not sick?"

"Anytime," Imani said. "Anytime at all."

Virgil Stroud came in on a morning in early March, when the snow was beginning its slow reluctant withdrawal from the shoulders of the roads and the fields had started to show their brown bones again. He was sixty-seven years old, a tall narrow man with a close-cropped beard gone entirely white, and he walked into the clinic with the particular careful gait of someone protecting his lower back from any movement that might remind it of itself.

Imani had heard of him already. She had heard of him because there were not many Black families in the county — three, perhaps four — and because Virgil and his wife Mattie had farmed the same hundred and forty acres on the south edge of town since 1974. The Strouds had come up from Mississippi in the early 1970s, when Virgil was in his teens and his father had taken a job at a dairy, and Virgil had stayed and bought his own land and married Mattie, who had come from Memphis to teach fifth grade in Rice Lake. They had one daughter, a lawyer now, who lived in Chicago. Imani had learned all of this the way one learned anything in Nine Pines — slowly, sideways, in pieces, from Nancy at the desk and from Pastor Rhodes and from Margaret over coffee.

"Lower back," Virgil said, sitting down on the exam table with a stifled grunt. "Been bothering me since fall. Got worse this winter. Shoveling."

Imani listened to the back, examined the back, pressed and asked where. It was muscular. It was not acute. It was, Imani thought, the back of a man who had been lifting things he should not have been lifting for longer than he should have been lifting them.

"How long since Mattie's been helping around the farm?" she asked.

Virgil did not answer right away. He was looking at a point on the floor about two feet in front of his left boot.

"Mr. Stroud?"

"It's been a while," he said.

Imani sat down on her stool. "Mr. Stroud, I read your intake form. It says your wife has Alzheimer's."

He nodded, still looking at the floor.

"How long?"

"Seven years since the diagnosis. She started forgetting things before that. Small things. She'd put the kettle on and walk away. Any of us might do that. But then she did it three times in a week, and then she did it and forgot she'd done it, and that's when I knew."

"Is she at home?"

"She's at home. I have a woman who comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I do the deliveries. The rest I do."

"And who helps you?"

Virgil looked up, finally. His eyes were deep brown and tired. "What do you mean, who helps me?"

"I mean who helps *you*, Mr. Stroud. With Mattie. With the farm. With the shoveling."

"I manage," Virgil said.

Imani wrote nothing in her notebook. She put the pen down. She looked at him directly across the narrow room, and she let the silence be long.

"I believe you," Imani said. "I believe you manage. But I want to tell you something, Mr. Stroud, and I want you to hear it. You cannot manage alone. It isn't that you shouldn't — it's that you cannot. The body doesn't work that way. The back you are asking me about — this back is not just a muscle. This back is the back of a man who has been carrying a whole life by himself for seven years, and the back is telling you what you will not tell yourself."

Virgil looked at her for a long time. Something moved in his face and then settled.

"What would you do, doctor," he said, "if you were me."

"I would find a room full of other people who are carrying the same thing," Imani said. "And I would sit in that room once a week. And I would not have to say anything, if I didn't want to. But I would be in the room."

"There's no such room in Nine Pines."

"There's one in Rice Lake. At the Methodist church basement. Tuesdays at seven. I've been there."

Virgil raised one eyebrow slightly. "You've been there."

"I go sometimes with a patient. Not as her doctor. As a driver."

"Mm." He looked down at his hands, which were broad and cracked and scrupulously clean. "I don't drive at night much anymore. My eyes."

"I'll drive you," Imani said.

He was quiet. He did not immediately accept and he did not immediately refuse. He was, she was learning, a man who did not squander a yes, who held the word in his mouth the way a careful man holds a nail between his lips while he works.

"Next Tuesday," he said, at last. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

She picked him up at six-fifteen on Tuesday. The farmhouse was white with dark green shutters, and there was a wheelchair ramp he had built himself running up to the porch. The Tuesday helper was there — a heavy-set woman named Angela, who was already making Mattie's dinner. Through the kitchen window Imani could see Mattie at the table, her silver head bent, her hands folded. Virgil kissed his wife's forehead before he left and told her he was going out for an hour. Mattie smiled at him with a sweetness that did not know his name anymore but knew his kindness, which was, Imani thought, the deeper recognition.

"Yes," Imani said.

"I feel like I'm that man now."

"You are that man."

He turned his head. "I wasn't trying to be."

"None of them are."

The meeting was twelve people in folding chairs in a basement that smelled of coffee and radiator steam. Nobody made Virgil speak. He sat next to Imani and held a paper cup of coffee in his two hands and listened. A woman named Edna talked about her husband's declining nights. A man named Rich talked about the guilt of feeling relief when his wife slept. Virgil did not speak, but when the hour was up he stood with the rest of them and bowed his head while an old man said a short plain prayer, and his shoulders, which had been tight against his ears for seven years, came down an inch or two and stayed there.

Driving back, he was quiet a long time.

"Thank you," he said, when they reached his driveway.

"Next Tuesday?"

"Next Tuesday."

He went every Tuesday through the spring. He began, by May, to speak in the meetings. Not much, and not for long, but his voice in that room, Imani thought, was a voice that had been waiting seven years to put certain sentences down. She drove him until June, when he said he could drive himself now, his eyes were better, or perhaps he was only tired of her kindness, or perhaps he had reached the point where a man needs the small privacy of driving himself home from the place where he has cried.

In July, he came in for a follow-up on the back. It was much better. He was sleeping. He had started sitting with Mattie on the porch in the evenings instead of doing chores until dark. He had called his daughter and had, for the first time, told her the truth about how hard it was.

"She cried," Virgil said. He shook his head. "She was angry I hadn't told her. She should have been angry. But she told me something too. She told me she'd been lonely for me. I didn't know that. I thought she had her own life and didn't need her father calling. Turns out." He cleared his throat. "Turns out."

Imani listened.

"Doctor," Virgil said. "Can I tell you something?"

"Please."

"You remind me of my daughter. The way you wait. She does that." He looked down at his hands. "She used to sit with me in the barn when she was small and just wait. She'd wait for me to say a thing. I never told her how much that meant to me. I'm trying to tell her now."

Imani nodded. She could not quite speak. She thought of her own father, in Lagos, in his pharmacy with the ledger, and how she had been his daughter sitting behind the counter on a stool, waiting for him to say a thing. How his waiting had made her a person who waited, and how her waiting, now, in this small exam room in Wisconsin, had made a room in which a tired man could tell the truth.

"Mr. Stroud," she said. "Thank you."

"For what."

"For letting me drive you."

He smiled. It was a very small smile, but it was the first one she had seen on him.

"Anytime, doctor," he said. "Anytime at all."

His name was Theo Bergstrom. He was nine years old. He had stopped speaking six weeks before his mother brought him to the clinic, and his mother, Annika, was a woman on the ragged edge of her own endurance — a nurse at the hospital in Rice Lake, recently divorced, raising Theo and a younger sister alone — and she sat in the exam-room chair with her hands clenched into fists in her lap and her jaw set against crying, which she had clearly been doing for the entire six weeks and had resolved not to do in front of a new doctor.

"He talked," Annika said. "He talked all the time. He was the chattiest kid. He narrated everything. He'd narrate breakfast. He'd narrate the cat. And then one morning — it was a Tuesday, the fourteenth of January, I remember because I had an early shift — he came downstairs and didn't say good morning. And I thought he was just sleepy. And then he didn't say anything all day. And then he didn't say anything the next day. And it's been six weeks."

Theo sat on the exam table. He was a small boy with a serious round face and his mother's very pale hair and eyes the color of river stones. He held a notebook in his lap. When Annika spoke he did not look up. He drew, small precise pencil lines, filling a corner of a page with crosshatching.

"The school called me," Annika said. "They want an evaluation. They think he's being difficult. He's not being difficult. He's gone somewhere. I don't know where he is."

Imani examined Theo carefully. She listened to his heart, his lungs. She looked in his ears, his throat. She checked his reflexes, his lymph nodes, his eyes. She asked him to squeeze her fingers. He squeezed her fingers. She asked him to stick out his tongue. He stuck out his tongue. There was nothing physically wrong with him. His vocal cords worked. His hearing worked. She tested them.

"Theo," she said. "I'm going to be your doctor. Is that all right?"

He looked at her. He nodded once, gravely.

"You don't have to talk to me. We can just sit. Is that all right?"

He nodded again.

"Do you like to draw?"

He nodded.

"Can I see what you're drawing?"

He turned the notebook around. It was a small careful drawing of a seahorse. The tail curled precisely. The gills were drawn with tiny short strokes. It was, for a nine-year-old, remarkable.

"That's beautiful," Imani said. "Do you know a lot about seahorses?"

He looked at her for a long beat and then nodded, slowly, as though confirming something to himself rather than to her.

"Three weeks," Imani said.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"No — three weeks is fine. I'll see him in the meantime."

"You'll see him?"

"I'll sit with him. I won't do anything. I just — I don't want him to be alone with it for three weeks."

Dr. Haddad was quiet a moment. "That's good," he said. "That's a good instinct. Don't pressure him to talk. Don't ask him questions he has to answer with words. Draw with him. Let him lead."

She set up a standing appointment, Thursdays at four, free of charge — she told Annika it was part of a clinic initiative, which was a lie she did not feel bad about. Theo came in the first Thursday with his notebook. Imani had bought a second notebook, a plain blue one, and a box of colored pencils. She sat across from him at the low table in the small consultation room, and she opened her notebook and began to draw, herself, badly, a tree.

Theo watched her for a while. Then he opened his notebook and drew. He drew another seahorse.

They drew like that for forty-five minutes. Imani did not speak. Theo did not speak. At the end of the session she said, "Thank you for drawing with me. Will you come back next week?"

He nodded.

The second Thursday he drew a jellyfish. Imani drew a very bad whale.

"Oh," Imani said, looking. "Oh, I see him. The seahorse."

"Seahorse."

The word came out of him small and dry and rusted. He looked surprised that it had come. He closed his mouth.

Theo looked at his drawing. He picked up the pencil again. He drew, very carefully, a second seahorse, smaller than the first, beside the first.

When Annika came to pick him up Imani walked out with them into the waiting room. She touched Annika's elbow lightly. "Can I call you tonight?" she said.

Annika's face changed. "Is he — "

"He's okay. He's okay. I just want to talk."

That evening, on the phone, Imani told Annika what had happened. Annika wept for a long time on the other end of the line. When she could speak, she said, "I don't know why seahorse. I don't know why that word."

"Is there anything — anyone — associated with seahorses? In your family?"

"His grandfather?"

"My father." Annika's voice had gone small. "My father died in November. It was — it was quick. Heart attack. Theo was very close to him. My father used to — my father had this aquarium. In his basement. Saltwater. It was his whole — he spent all his retirement money on it. And he had seahorses. He had seahorses. Theo used to spend hours down there. Just watching them."

"Did Theo go to the funeral?"

"He didn't want to. I didn't make him. I thought it would scare him. I thought — I thought he was handling it. He didn't cry. I kept waiting for him to cry and he didn't cry. And then — and then in January, the tank. My mother. My mother had to sell the tank. She couldn't take care of it. It was too big. A man came and took it. And Theo was there when the man took it. I didn't — I didn't think. I didn't think that was the moment. But it must have been the moment."

"Yes," Imani said. "It must have been."

"Annika," Imani said. "This is grief. This is what grief looks like in a child who was not allowed to grieve. He will come back. He's already coming back. The word he said — that was him coming back."

"What do I do?"

"You tell him about his grandfather. Not all at once. A little each day. A memory. A photograph. You don't ask him to talk back. You just — you pour the water back into the tank. You make a space for his grandfather in the house again, so his grandfather isn't somewhere Theo has to carry alone."

Imani had put her pencil down. She had thought, carefully, about how to answer.

"I believe," she said, "that the people we love are not ended when they die. I believe that the love keeps going, the way a light keeps going after the lamp is unplugged — that's a bad metaphor, but you know what I mean. I believe my own father is still somewhere being my father. I believe your grandfather is still somewhere being your grandfather. I can't prove it. But I believe it."

He had gone back to drawing. He drew, that day, a man in a rowboat. The man had a fishing pole. In the water, beneath the boat, rendered in careful pencil strokes, were seahorses. Dozens of them. A whole silent shining congregation of them, tethered by their tails to the waving grass, watching upward as the man and his boat passed through the light.

Imani looked at the drawing for a long time. She did not say anything about it. Some things, she had learned this year in Nine Pines, did not need to be said, only seen. She reached across the low table and set her hand, palm down, next to his drawing, and Theo, without looking up, reached across too and set his small hand next to hers, not touching, but near, the way two boats tied to the same dock are near.

Outside the window the June light was long and gold. Somewhere in the building a phone rang and was answered. Somewhere down Main Street a truck went by. In the small consultation room, two people sat drawing, and the silence between them was no longer the silence of absence but the silence of companionship, which is the oldest medicine and the one for which there is no prescription and no substitute and no price.