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But she’d never met a pressure like the one now, measurably tiny, insidious, deadly, and taking over her life. An infinitesimal buildup of the aqueous humor inside her eyeballs, a slight malfunction in the drainage that led to an increase in pressure, and a degeneration in the sensitive nerves. Glaucoma. A pressure she’d been forced to meet, not with fury, but with patience and humility.

Suze was forty-eight years old, a woman who’d lived with desert nomads and jungle rebels, who’d fought free of robbers in three countries, who’d lost a toe to Everest; a woman now sitting in a cabin in the woods, waiting for a half-known lover to die or to recover. Suze was really bad at patience and humility.

She lay in the bed that had been hers for ten short weeks, remembering the power-moments in her life: the time the chute lines had tangled and she’d felt the Arizona desert rushing up at her; the sensation of looking down the barrel of an Ethiopian rebel’s gun; the incredible high when her right foot found a ledge, stopping her free fall two hundred feet from the Scottish soil below. The line between terror and exultation was so thin as to be nonexistent. And the tiny pressure in her eyes was pulling her back from that line, so far away she didn’t think she’d find it again.

Toward dawn, Suze dozed, and when she woke, the sun shining into the room made the moment of panic brief. Still, it was there, and she hated it.

Suze was coming to hate Courtney, too, although she took care not to show it. Courtney was Suze’s sixteen-and-a-half-year-old neighbor, housekeeper, and errand-runner—or more precisely, Janna’s neighbor, passed on to Suze in this peculiarly uncertain period. Janna had not lived here for five weeks, might (nearly time to face this) never live here again. But still Courtney came, and now that it was summer she was here four mornings a week to help Suze. She organized the bills, did the shopping, drove Suze to appointments in town, performed those daily functions that required the service of eyes that could do more than distinguish white from black. She was, Suze had to admit, sensible for a girl her age, though oddly conservative, and possessed a priceless knack for putting everything back precisely as she had found it, so that when Suze was prowling up and down the unlit house at night she didn’t trip over a stray lamp cord or bark her shins on a misplaced chair. Suze was glad for the girl’s compulsiveness, overlooked her complete lack of humor, and tried her best not to snap at the child too often.

Today was Tuesday, so they went through the week’s mail. Bills came first.

“The mortgage is here, and Andy’s account, and the insurance,” Courtney told her.

“House or car?”

“House.”

“Then send it all down to the bank.” If it had been the car insurance, Suze would have paid it herself, since Courtney was driving Janna’s car for Suze’s benefit.

“And the electricity. Boy, that’s sure gone down a lot,” she said, as if the savings were the result of her own work. “When I told Mom what the bill was for March, she said we ought to have the meter checked.”

Great, Suze thought; now the girl’s whole family knows how much Janna spends on her utilities. “I’ll pay that, and the phone bill.” She’d also pay for the propane, when it came—those costs she considered her responsibility. Not that she’d had any chance to talk the arrangement over with Janna: One minute they’d been sitting in Janna’s living room planning a trip to Tahoe; the next, Janna was slumped on the wood floor making terrifying noises while Suze scrambled to locate the dark telephone on the dark table. And five weeks after the stroke, Janna was still only half-conscious of the world around her. Tuesdays, Suze dictated a letter which the nurses assured her they read to their patient. Sundays and Thursdays, Courtney drove her thirty miles to visit the nursing home. It was an impossible situation, and not becoming any easier. She and Janna had only