Page 9 I followed his gaze to the New York City street, where nothing appeared out of the ordinary: people, pigeons, bags of trash. Holding the bagel steady, the father’s mind traveled elsewhere. It was a look I remembered my mother wearing when I was a child—one I resented. How dare she think of anything but me?
Page 9 On the four blocks to the office I dodged tourists wearing backpacks and bucket hats, holding red bags from the discount designer store. They moved slowly, their faces stupid with awe. I walked fast, with purpose, gripping the cup of coffee, which burned through its cardboard sleeve, proud to be inured to a cityscape that instilled marvel in everyone else.
Page 28 We were halfway through our second bottle of wine, a Napa cabernet, and I washed the venison down with it. The wine felt drying on my tongue, perfect to chase the butter and meat, making me want more of both.
Page 36 Both were geneticists. But to my father, science was a job. He had friends and other interests. Whereas my mother was a scientist like someone might be a painter—wholly, and obsessively. It was her entire life.
Page 45 I wasn’t not drunk. The world around me was fuzzy and golden. It was a new year. That always made me a little bit sad. As though something were wrong with the old one.
Page 47 “I hate that I need to sell it. I would paint for nothing, you know? But I have to live. In art as a product there is no longer patience, or presence—only commodity.”
Page 92 When we tried to catch up there was oddly little to say. He could summarize the past two years, and I could do the same, in a matter of sentences. It should have required more—recounting the time—and yet I could have said more about my day than I could two years.
Page 96 She took me to her lab when I was nine, I told Matthew. I realized I’d never shared this story with anyone. I was still ashamed. It had happened so long ago and should have been absorbed into the comprehensible past—a tellable anecdote, like any other story from my childhood—as distant as myth. And yet, perhaps because I hadn’t aired it, it felt recent, and painful. She’d hoped that I’d fall in love with the work of becoming a research scientist, the way she once had. She’d hoped I might be seduced, as she had. But to me, the fact that everything was invisible rendered it nonexistent. It was terribly simple of me. All I saw were hands in blue gloves, pipetting clear liquids into petri dishes—I couldn’t make sense of it. I must have seemed bored. I must not have asked the questions she wished I would ask. Afterward, when I begged to get ice cream, she said no, that we were going home. She was like a child who had been refused, and was lashing out. And like that, we were both upset. I knew, then, that I had disappointed her irrevocably. I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naïve of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything. I remembered so clearly the disappointment on her face, the fear that I would never amount to anything—anything significant, anyway. And to date, she was right: I hadn’t. I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her. She had always longed for more. She had always wanted more than one life could contain.
Page 103 When the other Lily said brunch I had pictured a crowded, shared table, elbow to elbow with hungover New Yorkers wearing sunglasses, prattling in an attempt to keep night-before regrets at bay. This wasn’t that. We met at a hotel—her suggestion. She was in the lounge area when I arrived. She stood and gave me a bony, floral hug.
Page 108 At the bottom of the staircase, two women greeted us, beaming—our stewardesses. They looked cold, with their thin-stockinged legs. I’d always thought gams was an odd word to mean “legs,” but their legs—long like arms—looked exactly like gams.
Page 112 Somehow, though of course all this had been finely calibrated by people doing invisible work. The steel refrigerator was without smudges, the beds tautly made. The fridge was bare but for glass bottles of sparkling water, inert as bowling pins.
Page 112 “Is this what you expected?” he asked, and I had to laugh. How could I have known to imagine this?
Page 113 His Florida was so different from the one I had known. Gleaming and polished, not mossy and mildewing. The condo was too high for the mosquitoes to reach us.
Page 119 Hans stuck his slobbery goatee into one of my hands, and I petted him with the other. I liked meeting dogs and children, with their low expectations.
Page 127 Matthew’s brother, Thomas, should have been the one to take over. He’d planned to study medicine. But he was gone—forever nineteen, younger than Matthew was now. Matthew’s eyes grew wet.
Page 130 On the Fourth, the family’s fisherman friend stopped by with a cooler of seafood and a box of live lobsters, who scratched at the cardboard from inside with rubber-banded claws. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to be in a box. They had no idea that death was even on the table.
Page 210 In the mornings, John and I watched the sky shift, to pink, then blue, or more often gray, which was how it stayed most days, beyond the trees, silver as a shell. The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.
Page 222 This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.
Page 225 “Just do your best,” my mother had said in the morning. Even college was optional, she insisted. “You don’t have to go to college just because everyone else is.” Often she said this when she noticed how late I stayed up to study. What mattered was that I found what I loved to do, she said. At some point. There was no rush when it came to that, either. I appreciated what she was trying to do—other kids’ parents pressured them to fulfill their own forfeited childhood dreams—at the same time it annoyed me. It did matter to me. I wanted to do well in the conventional ways—having no other metrics, not knowing how else to measure myself.
Page 244 Slow down, I said to my heart. In biology we’d watched an animation of the organ: It looked tortured, writhing with every beat. It was so weird, that a heart could just go on beating—the same one—for years, until it stopped.
Page 262 From my seat, I refreshed my email. It was embarrassing, to feel the hope rise up and then, immediately, evaporate. A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.
Page 272 It was only after seeing the trees here, I realized, that I could describe what home was like.
Page 280 “You’re being a fucking idiot,” he said. “Be hurt if you want to. Sometimes I think you like it, being sad. It gives you, like, a personality.
Page 298 As a child I had learned the names of trees and birds and reptiles from paperback field guides. Now I could take a photo of anything—a beetle, a shrub—and be informed, within seconds, what it was. There was no need to wait or write down a question for later. It was a paradox: Though the results came quickly, hours passed easily this way.
Page 303 Campus was eerie, empty. Snow began to fall. I remembered, as a kid, seeing snow for the first time—my surprise that snowflakes actually looked as advertised. I’d expected they would be like the sun: drawn one way in childish pictures but more boring in real life.
Page 310 I’d seen her at Commons on occasion, eating with her friends. She never noticed me. Rarely in groups did you notice those who were alone. It only worked the other way around.
Page 316 I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled: friends’ vacations and dinners, graphics about police brutality, raccoons joyfully eating watermelon. I could feel her eyes on me, judging my phone use. It was irritating.
Page 318 My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.
Page 340 “Earth to Nick,” she sometimes said to me. “You’re not here. You’re in your head.” “Where should I be?” I’d ask. And she would take my hand in hers: warm, physical, alive. “Be here,” she’d say. “With me.”
Page 391 It’s sad that I’m dying, but why doesn’t it work in reverse? Do you ever think, how sad it is that when I was alive, you weren’t yet born? All those interesting years you missed out on.
Page 395 Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.
Page 359 I wonder if you can understand this: that the way I loved her was different from the way she wanted to be loved. Every day of my life – and there are not many more now – I will regret this.
Page 363 She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn't. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable. Her life was small, and rich, and entirely hers. She had Nick. She had the women friends she played mahjong with and fellow swimmers from the pool. Children from the day care, where she worked; patients at the hospice center, where she volunteered. Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable —more remarkable-for the fact of differences. Friendship didn't require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.
Page 370 Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another's lives – that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up living like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.
Page 371 At times I feel like a bird, trailing in the wake of the younger and faster. I feel my bones losing their density, becoming hollow and avian.
