Before she left, Nina told me a physical therapist would be coming to see me. When the therapist appeared the next morning and rang the bell, I didn’t open the door. Maybe I didn’t want to be healed. Maybe I deserved whatever I got. Maybe this was the fate I deserved. I sat on the couch with Giselle, imagining I was safe from the well-meaning and the helpful. But my brother had an extra key, which he’d handed over, and the physical therapist let herself in. She in­troduced herself as Peggy Travis. As though I cared. As though I intended to make this personal. I suppose Peggy was wearing a red striped dress, but it was gray to me. She went through the list of exercises we’d be doing to strengthen my left side. I excused myself. Fumbling with my walker, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

“It’s very common to feel sick.” My unwelcome visitor had actually come up behind me and was watching me vomit. “For some people it lasts only a short time, for others it’s different.”

She shut up then. But I got the drift. For others it’s an eternity.

I was pathetic really. I couldn’t even squeeze a rubber ball. More clumps of my hair fell out just from the stress of try­ing. But my Peggy wasn’t the type to let her charges give up. She had seen it all in working with her clients — the lame, the frail, the screwed-up, the messed-up, the chewed-up, the burnt, the sorrowful. She told me about them when we had tea — hers iced, mine steaming. I’d sweated and grunted through my workout, with my swollen face swelling even more and the clicking going on nonstop; I hardly felt up for conversation. That’s how people like Peggy got to you; they waited till you had no defenses, then talked you to death. I felt like a time bomb, as a matter of fact, but I drank my tea.