I met him the day she and I crossed from Six West to Six East, on one of our tours of the art. She knew the artists whose paintings hung in those halls. Her own work hung on other floors: abstract landscapes evoking the coast and its shifting skies, or August fields at dawn. I thought of the art as graffiti tagged by eloquent friends: Russell Was Here. Margaret. Adele. So far we had only circled Six West and the Children’s Wing, but that day we crossed the main hall into Six East. She wore the orange, red, and purple robe from L, and the glitter-topped slippers from B, as she strolled from painting to painting.

Six East was quieter than Six West: or at least I think of it that way. The step-down unit from the ICU. Neither of us had walked there in years. When we reached the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor, he was alone and occupied, attending to documents. A slender, milky-skinned man, late-twenties, his hair auburn and tousled, maybe from multitasking.

She stopped beside the desk.“I remember you,” she said. He stepped closer, smiled.“I remember you too.”

“I hope not,” she said. “I was psychotic.” She was laughing when she said it, though she rarely mentioned the days after the long surgery when, stranded by anesthesia, she could not find herself, and her room morphed into imagined landscapes, the family into strangers. The day of the art walk nothing seemed alien—and so her brief laugh, the pleasure of recognizing him, her unimpeachable clarity.

His name was Mike, he said; he’d been working as an aide in the three years since her surgery. He’d just completed nursing school, was hoping for a position here. In a few days he’d interview. Now, he was waiting. She too was waiting, on test results she did not mention. For that moment, they were happy, she and Mike, both of them smiling at their reunion, she in her brilliant robe and glitter-topped slippers and commonplace lucidity, he with his brand-new degree. “Good luck,” she said, and we moved on, past more art, and crossed back to Six West, to the room the family had decorated with poster-sized love notes.

On subsequent days, she and I took short walks on Six West or out to the glass-walled waiting room, sat in the gauzy winter light and watched the miniature cars move over the city streets, muscular clouds blowing in off the lake. The day of her hospital discharge we lounged there, as if suspended above the city, waiting for the paperwork. In the photograph with the yellow mums she’s still there, wearing a red and black striped blouse, lipstick bolstering her tentative expression.

That month, we’d lose ourselves in ’80s romantic comedies and in the new drama about British gentry and their servants in the era of my grandmother’s childhood, fantasies of the past for a few hours immediate, shaping an imagined horizon beyond which my late grandmother might walk through falling snow to her high school. In the evenings, after work, my brother visited the house, carrying sandwiches and lottery tickets, kissing my mother hello, then pacing the hallways and rooms, as if to affirm they remained themselves, the walls wholly intact. During a thaw, I cleared wet snow from the back deck and set out chairs, and one day she walked along our block, then sat blanket-wrapped in the sun. On the best day, a few of us drove to her studio, organized her collages and paintings, sorted the paint tubes and inks, arranged chairs for an upcoming interview with a local videographer.

Just before the interview date, she returned to Six West. This seemed part of an ongoing pattern—crisis, improvement, art walks through those halls. It was March. The BBC aristocrats continued to dress for dinner on their massive estate, servants secreting away private hopes and disappointments. Her pain increased. One night, her blood pressure dropped, jumped, dropped; in the early morning I found her, closely monitored, back on Six East. She lay in a room with a window looking out onto snow, with a metal door that routinely fell closed.

That same day I would turn in small circles near her bed, head down, as if outlining a porthole in the floor, while I willed myself to calm. She had named the moment aloud, though not as I had expected. What I mean is: she was stuck inside her body alone, and after and despite the surgeries/radiation/hail Mary chemo, her pain was nonetheless now spiking 10, the top of the scale, and to hold on was impossible. She was stuck inside her body alone and I was stuck uselessly outside, and that day on Six East, the way she named the moment was to ask my forgiveness. Which astonishingly people do. That morning the beautiful Dr. Satch arrived and held my mother’s hand and listened. Days, maybe. That morning my mother talked to each of us in turn, and J made the call to hospice.

But here again is the dreamless night, the calm way station of the hotel room. It’s winter; it’s always winter. It’s six a.m. when the nurse phones, and now I am in clothes, now hurrying through the connecting underground tunnels to the hospital, the elevator to Six East. Outside her room, the attending physician explains the blood pressure drops, the sudden room transfer. Then I’m beside my drawn, dozing mother. It’s still dark over the city, over the lake, the sky gray cotton from electric light. J arrives. My mother wakes, a little vague. Sucks a piece of ice. The moment is still quiet and shadowy and slow. Any movement demands effort; walking takes a staff assist. When my mother needs the restroom, we press a call button. In less than an hour, Dr. Satch will speak with her; and then she’ll ask me, and I’ll turn circles. We’ll campaign to get her home. But now she’s trying ice. Now she’s trying a sip of water. The gray cotton sky seems to bleach. J adjusts my mother’s pillow. There’s an ordinary knock on the door, which I open to find Mike.

“Hey Mom,” I say. I hold the door open and pivot to face her. “Look who’s here. It’s Mike.”

She pushes herself toward the bed railing, her face brightening, my mother. Look at her: she’s holding out her hand, offering to shake his.

“Oh Mike,” my mother says. “You got the job?”