while they walked to the guest bedroom. Dennis’s spine had never looked more prominent, his knees never so knobby. But once he was dressed—Stuart helped, but as long as he was sitting down in a chair with arms, Dennis was still able to pull on his own clothes—that malnourished figure disappeared, and he was himself again. Skinny and weakened, yes, but himself.
I took Dennis and Margo—Stuart had a meeting—out on the boat that night, and we anchored in the spot where the stilt house had stood and ate stone crabs at the stern. I’d cracked all the claws into bite-size pieces before we’d left, and Dennis was able to dip each morsel in the mayonnaise sauce and eat it without too much trouble. Margo and I ate the same way. When we finished, I cut a piece of key lime pie into little squares and put the plate on Dennis’s lap. We all ate from it. The downtown skyline, which had doubled in height in the thirty years since I’d come to Miami, resembled a foggy lineup of many-sized blue bottles. The buildings gave off faint stars of light. “From here,” Dennis said very slowly into his voice box, taking a deep breath, “it looks like nothing changes.”
The first time I’d been on Biscayne Bay, the only tall downtown building was Freedom Tower, where immigrants were processed when they first reached the country. It had changed slowly, yes, but it had changed.
“I miss Stiltsville,” said Margo.
“Me too,” I said, though I had the thought that with Dennis so sick, we wouldn’t have used the stilt house much even if it still existed. It had collapsed before becoming a sad, abandoned treasure.
“Me too,” Dennis said. The antidepressants were working: he didn’t cry, and neither did I.
That second year after the diagnosis went by in a bright, blinding flash, blanketing us in doctor’s appointments, symptoms, and steady decline. Dennis woke almost every night coughing violently to rid his throat of phlegm, which he was no longer able to do naturally. We finally got around to having the house tented in January, during which time Dennis and I stayed at Marse’s condo, as she’d offered. We spent evenings drinking wine in the chaise lounges on her balcony, watching the lights of the cruise ships making their way up Government Cut. “We could go on a cruise,” I said one night to Dennis, thinking that surely cruise ships had handicap access.
“Why?” he said softly.
“Because it would be relaxing and fun. People would cook for us.”
“People—already—cook—for us,” he said.
It was a cool night and I’d spread a blanket over our legs and moved our lounges next to each other so I could hold his hand. Being at Marse’s was a little like a vacation in itself. She had good crystal wineglasses and a big-screen television with more cable channels than I knew existed, and her bed was as high and wide as a boat, with a view of the bay. We used an ottoman to help Dennis climb into it. Lola had the week off, and every morning Dennis and I used the pool at Marse’s condo for his exercises, but more often than not we ended up floating around with foam noodles laced under our arms, talking idly. “That’s true,” I said. “I guess we don’t really need to get away.”
“I—don’t,” he said. “My life is—vacation.”
I looked over at him. His hair was disheveled from the breeze. I’d taken to cutting it myself, on the back deck with a sheet tied around his neck like an apron. In the moonlight, I could see the lines around his eyes and his sweet, soft half smile. He was happy. He was deteriorating and wheelchair-bound, and with anyone besides me he was more comfortable writing than speaking, and we were short on cash (a cruise was out of the question financially, anyway)—but still, in these and other moments, I saw his happiness. The illness takes the body, not the mind or the spirit.
In February, Dr. Auerbach offered us a twig of hope: a clinical trial. He mentioned it offhandedly, as an afterthought at the end of a checkup, saying that it was unlikely to work but he didn’t think it would hurt. Dennis shrugged and wrote on his board, LET’S GO FOR IT. Later that week, we went to a clinic at the University of Miami and picked up a box full of needles and vials, a chart to mark each time the shots were given, and