I come Wednesdays to see Bea and I get the visitor badge. They change the color every day and Wednesdays it's blue. She doesn't ask if we've seen Artie, she tells us we missed him. She points out the window to a flick of foliage in the courtyard that looks like gabardine darting behind a tree and says He's carving our initials into that maple right now. Sometimes she has a lover's knot made from two stems in her lap. Artie made this for me. We are told to nod; we're told that correcting her could bring on another episode like the one that took Artie from us last spring.

They give us these little reminders every time we arrive; sometimes in pamphlets, other times in the slot of their hand unexpectedly around the right angle of our elbows. Postures at attention as we enter her room. They lean in and whisper Today she's been on about Artie quite a bit. As if she isn't always on about Artie. Anyway I'd never correct her the way that the nurses suppose. I imagine closing my grasp around the maple stems in Bea's lap, catching the rheumy wayward of her glance and saying Artie would not have ever made that for you. I think, in the moment when the words are dissolving back down my throat, their resistant edges offset by the reflex of my trained grin: Maybe Artie has won. Then my grin holds on for dear life and hardens against my teeth.

Bea's inhalation comes off like a stifled swoon and my eyes flood with the smack of gasoline vapor like the house that night and then I don't know what I want more: Beatrice back, so we can finally leave here forever, or Artie. So we can finally call him by the words that Bea's 1936 Artie erases every time she reminds us that he was so sad to miss us yet again. Sometimes she tells us to run down the hall so we might catch him, kiss at his neck like we were made to, reassure him he's the best daddy in the world. Though we, Lyle and me, we were fatherless before, during and after Artie.

I look out at the ancient maple, remember Artie driving us through Harwood. Down Quince street and all the other back roads during the fall, his hand on the wheel of the spotless Packard, the gold wristwatch emerging from the starched cuff of his pristine oxford. His fedora tilted with the clean line of his haircut making that angled little slice there below the hat. Bea beside him, turning the radio dial while he cleared his throat and listened to her small entreaties to stop at Guff's ice cream parlor like he'd ever stop anywhere but we didn't, ever. We just drove.

The trees would waltz past the clean windows, slow and even, like Bea's goodnight wishes when she had visited the medicine cabinet. Tapped out a few of what she called her Night Visitors. Then we'd have the warmed milk there on the pressed doily atop the nightstand and we'd start to whirr a bit and she'd lean in, the scent of detergent and violet light on her small neck and she'd say Hush, children, did you hear that? The sandman's coming. I'd see the trees in reverse then, their colors wild and violent, a thousand crazy hues bleeding out and lashing from the branches like they wanted to get done with fall and do their skeleton dance. Words would be coming from my mouth: slow, confused, milky. Bea would run a hand down our faces where we'd feel the dull cold of her wedding ring slide from temple to chin and downstairs Artie would be shouting again and Bea would say Never you worry, he's just in a row. I'd think row like pew, and wonder Where is God now? Or row like motion on a river, taking us away from Artie, Bea's slight arms working the oars with her wedding ring clanking against the wood, a terrible chastisement. Everything we brought from the orphanage in brown wool bundles there, in the rickety boat between our feet, Bea covering the strain of the vast lake against the stolen oars as she quotes from the book of Ruth.

Or row like trees all lined up for their Halloween ritual, flicking through the frame of the back window of the car that doesn't stop; film reel gone crooked in the projector so that the words and mouths are all off and I'm covering my hands and eyes and Bea is screaming for Artie to slow down, slow the Packard down, God Damnit. I hear the wiry strings of Berlioz on the old Victrola downstairs and Artie's sliding, confused footfall on the uneven floorboards and I cinch my eyes closed and think He can't make it all the way upstairs as long as you're awake, Mabel. The last thing I hear is the smash of some dish a flight below and the last thing I see is the teary opal cast of the milk skin along the inside of the empty glass tumbler and then, like now, I shudder and Bea wakes me up like every other time. I tell her I had that dream again where Artie is gone, but she's been taken away from us, and the words fall like sloppy limbs down a staircase and I say again about the Berlioz playing and again the sound of water and scripture lapping into the stiff of our bodies and Bea touches the point of her fingers to the sputtering spasm of my lip and says No, Mabel, don't let's go to the dogs. I catch the flicker of some memory behind her eyes, the tint of something that changes color a bit every day and Wednesdays it's blue.

Then Bea smiles slowly, opening her leafy arms up to make hospital corners around my body in all their brilliance like the winter won't come and strip her down to bone.