At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

She said: “Mrs. Vanterpool. When was your last abdominal imaging?”

And I said I had not had any.

And that woman looked back down at the thin folder on her desk.

And said that according to what was in front of her, I had eleven of them. Between the March of 2002 and the November of 2013.

One a year, for eleven years, at a facility in Marren.
PART 3

Dov brought that envelope up to the ward on the Thursday afternoon.

He had it in his inside pocket and he would not hand it over until he had got a chair and sat down next to the bed.

Twelve years in the drawer of a bedside table. Under a lamp I have changed the bulb in about forty times.

Four inches from my own head, every night, for four thousand three hundred nights.

It is one page. Both sides.

My husband’s handwriting, which was never good and which had got considerably worse by the October of 2014.