The last night began like all the others. After Star Trek Voyager they clambered off the couch, threw on their coats, and shuffled out the door. Jason as usual was first, and had to wait as Paul scrounged up cash. It was just as well that the ice cream parlor didn’t accept credit cards, because Paul had misplaced his the day before. On Norwood Avenue, with the shapes of leaves on their faces, they analyzed the Star Trek episode until they broke into the light at the mailbox on Bellevue Avenue, where cars streamed, the bus from the city breezed to a stop, and men and women climbed down and checked their watches.

It was there, in the darkness by the middle school, that it happened. Turning the corner by the mailbox was a group of boys Jason’s age. When they heard the boys Paul felt his son tense, like a dog sniffing one of its own across a park.

“What’s up?” Paul asked.

“Shhhhhh!” said Jason, who never spoke harshly to his father. “But I think it’s okay. I don’t think I know them. Just go on ahead. Now! Please!”

Paul, who throughout his life had faulted himself for being passive, did as his son requested, walking a few steps ahead and humming, as if by himself. After the boys passed his son caught up, and they came into the light at the mailbox on Bellevue and waited for the bus to heave its way across.

At the ice cream parlor, Jason peeked in to scan the room.

“So,” he said, satisfied at last at what he saw, “you have enough money Dad, I hope? Remember, they don’t take credit cards.”

The door opened into a gust of sticky-sweet caramel.

“I have cash,” Paul said. “And anyway the card’s still lost.”

“He said he’d go with me again, if I walk a block behind. So if any friends see him they won’t know we’re together.”

“He’s just teasing you,” Suzanne said. “Don’t take it too seriously.”

“But he also said we could maybe watch Star Trek again later. The season finale, which I taped, a double episode. If he had time, he said.”

“Well,” Suzanne said. “That’s a big if.” She stroked her stomach, a habit she acquired while pregnant with Jason.

“It might be just another stage.”

“I don’t think it’s a stage,” she said, stroking her stomach again. “By the way, you missed your mother’s call. Everything’s completely status quo.”

“No news is good news, I suppose.”

“But we know it’s a matter of time with your father, don’t we?”

She studied his face, his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “We know.”

She stroked her stomach again. She seemed to forget that she had not been pregnant for more than a decade. It worried him, her hand roaming an arc as if she missed having a globe of life inside her.

“I meant to ask,” she said. “Did you ever find that credit card?”

 “No,” he said. “But I know I had it last when I changed upstairs.”

“You looked under the bed?”

“Of course,” Paul said. “But it’s still lost.”

In Paul and Suzanne’s marriage, the loss of the credit card was little more than the latest step in a never-ending journey of one misplaced item after another.

“Where in the world’s my scarf?” he would say, filled with dread, as if the earth had jerked an inch beneath him.

“Try the closet,” Suzanne would say.

“I tried the closet. The scarf’s not there.”

“Retrace your steps.”

“I already retraced my steps.”

“Well, really now” – Suzanne would smile as she said this, because it was not she who had lost something this time – “it’s got to be somewhere.”

“Yes. It’s definitely somewhere,” he would say. “But where in the world is it? That’s the big question.”

Because losing things was such a constant in his life, Paul had devised a strategy: instead of ransacking the house, he would deduce where the missing object should be and focus on that spot. The scarf couldn’t have left the vicinity of the closet. He remembered last seeing it when he pulled off his coat, so he looked thoroughly in the closet, even though he had gone through it twice, in the early frenzy of a loss.

And of course, in a pile of hats and gloves, he came across his scarf, clinging nonchalantly to a knitted cap. Paul peeled off the scarf; it had the odd yet glorious reality of a lost item the moment it is found – as if it could not possibly be the original, that it was a counterfeit copy, which for all eternity would now pretend to be the one that had been lost. It seemed to prove that the laws of nature do not work, when Paul knew it was actually proof that the laws do work, that the object had never disappeared, strictly speaking. The found object always seemed to be laughing as it was discovered, grinning wickedly as it shouted, “I’ve been here the whole time, you idiot!”

The next day the call came. His father had collapsed, another stroke made worse by a bad fall. This time he was in a coma. “If I were you,” his mother reported the doctor saying, “I’d have everybody on a plane and get down here.”

She added that his brother, Richard, had agreed. Richard’s opinion was granted more weight than that of the doctor, the chief of neurology at the hospital.

Paul decided to go alone, until he found out what was up. Suzanne booked his flight. She used her credit card; he still couldn’t find his.

On the Arrivals platform, Paul was enveloped in Florida’s velvet heat. He stood in the fumes of cigarette smoke and car exhaust until he spotted Richard, cruising in a bright green BMW. He waved, brought to tears, in part by the air, in part by the expression his brother had, behind the wheel of a mirror-bright car, tooling along as if he were out for a drive in the country. Paul expected a warm handshake, perhaps a hug, but Richard was his usual self, ignoring Paul and spouting off about the deal on the car. Their father was not mentioned as they sped along I-95 (Paul couldn’t remember his brother not speeding, even when they were driving their parents’ Ford) while Richard explained how renting a BMW cost more than other cars, but he was “writing it off,” so what did it matter.

“Poof, Paulie, it’s gone! Just like that,” he said.

Paul hated being called “Paulie,” and corrected everyone. He never corrected his brother, though.

“Sounds like you got a good deal, Richie,” Paul said.

Richard hated “Richie” even more than Paul hated “Paulie.” It was a ritual, to slip into this game.

Paul had to bring up the reason they were down there.

“Mom told me Dad’s in a bad way this time,” he said, disrupting Richard’s list of the features even a standard BMW had.

“Yes,” Richard said. “He is.”

“I mean it’s not exactly a total surprise,” Paul said.

“That’s for sure. Far from it. But he’s in the trauma center this time Paulie, on life support.” He tapped the window, delighting in the ting of the glass. “Looks like it’s on us to decide what to do.”

“The fall made it worse I guess. But to tell you the truth, Richie, sooner or later I knew it would come down to this.”

“It has, Paulie, it has. And it’s the first item on the agenda,” Richard said, popping a button on the CD player with a stab of his pinkie, smiling at the response, or at the strength he had, even in his little finger.

Richard steered the BMW into a spot labeled chief of cardiology with such assurance that Paul assumed he had made special arrangements. Paul slammed the door; it made a sharp, self-satisfied click.

Flaunting that he had been there first, Richard rushed ahead. Paul followed, into icy hospital air, odorless, close to the skin. The chill coursed along his arms as Richard led him through a labyrinth of hallways with pastel lines zigzagging beside them. At every turn another empty bed appeared, flush against the wall, linen fluffed and ready. Paul wondered if critically ill patients were intentionally placed as far away as possible, so one had to walk a long and confusing way to find them. At last they arrived at the trauma center. Richard barreled ahead, with his overeager, clumsy gait, leaving Paul to bang through doors built for a gurney to crash through. He felt the waist-high dents on the silver plates, with Richard three steps in front.

All Paul wanted was for his father’s bed to be in a far corner.

He was in luck, if that was what one could call anything about a visit to a trauma center. The bed stood at the back wall. From the distance, it was a white sheet and a rack of blinking electronics, with a woman on a chair who he realized with a start was his mother. Her hair had thrown him; it had become a silvery gray.

Paul felt his mother barely greet him, though she kissed both her sons. His father’s face was a map of sky-blue plastic tubes. The tubes made sucking sounds, as if gulping through a straw. Paul felt he had entered a foreign climate, where his mother and brother dwelled. A digital readout showed numbers, an urgent message with a medical meaning he did not have the skill to decipher. The machines gasped, sucking at the straw, trying to unclog it.

“Do you want to say hello?” his mother asked. “Or speak to him in private? That’s what Richard did.”

“No,” Paul said.

A sound broke free, a bit of digital phlegm that had to be spit out. Numbers flipped and came to rest with values that had significance, though not to him. Amid the rasp of tubes a new sound flew up. It screeched. It sung. It refused to fit.

Was it somehow suddenly all happening now?

It was Richard’s chest. As Paul traced it, it lilted into a merry chime.

“Shit,” Richard said.

He had always used profanity before his parents. He reached into his jacket and jerked out a cell phone. He slapped the phone open and said, “Yeah. So what’s the deal?”

Richard stormed off in his stumbling way, not excusing himself with a glance behind. He wasn’t worried about disturbing them or blatantly violating hospital rules but in need of privacy; it took precedence over the solemnity of his dying father’s bedside and the safety of patients on electronic equipment. That much was clear as he stomped through the gurney-wide door, blasting it open with a kick.

His mother said, “We have to make a decision, Paul.”

Her hair seemed more silvery every time he looked. “Richard said the doctor told him we have to decide whether to keep the machines going, or take him off and, as Richard put it , ‘let nature take its course.’”

Paul gazed down. The nozzles and transparent pipes were meticulously taped to his father’s skin. Every tube wound back into machines that told the numbers to hold, jump, hold. That this was a life, his only father’s only life, was as preposterous as that he was here, with his only mother and only brother, whose head was visible behind the doors, squirting fury into a cell phone, as in a cartoon. A nurse with a stack of towels stopped to point at Richard’s phone. When she finally got his attention, he began arguing with her.

His mother had never been one for conversation, so Paul headed out through the double doors, passing as Richard was slamming the phone into his hand.

“Are you the other son?” a genial voice behind him asked.

“Yes,” Paul said.

“Doctor Feldman,” said a kind-looking man, whose bald head caught the harshness of the fluorescent light and reflected it into Paul’s eyes.

Paul jumped at the chance. “Can we talk?” he asked.

“Certainly.”

He went with Dr. Feldman into a corner room, where the doctor wheeled out a stool tucked under an examination table. Over his glistening head was a chart of a human body ripped open to show the insides. It shocked Paul, this human being stripped down to essentials, to bulging organs and pulsating vessels. He wondered if the chart was for decoration (it was striking as a wall hanging) or reference.

“I believe we have to make a decision, don’t we?”

“I’m afraid so,” the doctor said.

“Should my brother be here? My mother? Is it okay that they’re not.”

“Quite frankly.”

Intuitive family wisdom allowed the doctor to let the sentence hang. He had seen too many dealing with death to be flustered by anything, and he refused to play games when lives were at stake. He handled troubled families as he would a diseased body: work with what you have, do what you must, keep bleeding to a minimum.

Dr. Feldman explained that if the feeding and breathing tubes were not taken away, his father might live for years in a vegetative state. Paul was introduced to a new vocabulary, which he memorized to interpret for his mother and brother, words like “trache” and “vent.” The words would be handy to explain the task ahead.

“In other words,” Paul said, “he’s brain dead.”

The phrase was too callous for Dr. Feldman. He flicked his head, flashing fluorescence. “I wouldn’t put it that way exactly,” he said.

“But there’s no hope for recovery?”

“No hope for meaningful recovery,” Dr. Feldman said, correcting him with his pleasant smile and light-bouncing forehead.

“Is he thinking?” Paul asked. “Dreaming?”

“No.”

“But I’m told he responds to pain?”

“We call that basic stimulus response. It doesn’t mean what you want it to mean.”

“I see.”

“And that he left no instructions, refused to talk about it?”

“That was my father, I’m afraid.”

“Well, in any event, talk it over, with your brother, if you can, and include your mother somehow.”

The doctor was choosing his words carefully.

“If you can decide, with them perhaps, tell us what to do. If not, we’ll talk again.”

“Yes Linda don’t worry, I’ll fix it. I wouldn’t do that to you,” Richard said.

“If this isn’t a good time, “ Paul said, as he chased his brother around a corridor.

“Good as any, Paulie.”

Richard said into the palm-size phone, “Gotta go. Buzz you later, Linnababy.”

One thing Paul knew was that Richard’s wife’s name was Marsha.

“Listen Richie. I just spoke to Dr. Feldman, and we have to make the decision now about Dad. Continuing life support. We have to decide. What we should do.”

“Now Paulie?” Richard said. “We have to decide right now?”

“Maybe not this second, Richie, but very soon.”

“You’re telling me it can’t wait?”

“Listen. He’s being kept alive by machines, things called a trache and a vent are involved, they –”

“Look, you spoke to Feldman, the bald guy? If you spoke to him, and you understand all this stuff, then why don’t you decide.”

“I don’t understand a goddamn thing Richie, to be totally honest.”

“Well I can’t deal with this now, okay? You figure it out.”

“What does Richard say?” his mother asked.

“We talked it over and agreed. We don’t think Dad would want to live this way. There’s no quality to a life like this, and Dr. Feldman told me about a hospice nearby. I toured it with him, asked a lot of questions, and I think it’s what we have to do. Take off the life support, let nature take its course.”

“Richard is very upset about this, isn’t he,” his mother said.

“Yes,” Paul said. “But he’s handling it very well.”

The staff insisted on moving his father without any family members present. It was a rule, they said. When it was done, and his father was in a hospice room freed of hissing plastic, Paul felt he had been sleepwalking up to that moment, and the sight before him should shake him awake. But it didn’t. It only made him realize how miraculous it was that human beings could process oxygen on their own, and his father’s breathing showed how arduous a task it was. Paul saw the effort it took just to stay alive, the care and cunning of muscle and blood that pulled off the trick day after day against odds that, staring at his father, were clearly astronomical.

His father lay on his back, a sheet with a ribbon of yellow up to his neck. He was in the deep sleep of a child. His eyebrows had thickened, and all his facial hair was white. The childlike expression coupled with bushy white hair made his father look young and old at the same time. His breath was also a child’s, rough, scratchy, a child with a bad cold perhaps, and in its ragged imperfection more human than the perfect breaths of the machines. Paul heard each breath as his father’s last. It brought back the night Jason came home as a newborn from the hospital and slept in Paul’s arms, inhaling as mightily as Paul’s father, as if every breath might be his last, but none of them were, though in his father’s case, one of them would be, this one, the next, or the one after that.

“Is everything okay with Richard and Marsha?” his mother asked, after Richard stumbled out to make a call.

“Of course everything’s okay,” Paul said.

“She should do more with her hair,” his mother said, as she always did.

They settled into hard chairs. Hours passed. Food was carried in on speckled cafeteria trays with upraised, rounded sides. The smell of potatoes soaked up the air. The wheeze of his father’s breathing dominated the room as his father’s anger had dominated the house. To soothe himself, Paul recalled waiting for Jason to be born, sitting on hard chairs for hours that were not ordinary hours but disjointed hospital time, a temporal version of hospital food: a world where taste and nutrition were immaterial, the way physical comfort and privacy were all subsumed into the hugeness of birth, or death.

His mind drifted. It was impossible to prevent it.

The pregnancy that came easily to others had eluded Suzanne for years, and she despaired of becoming pregnant. For the first time Paul felt the depth of her fears, with all its resonance for a woman, and hated himself for not looking outside his own needs to do a better job of comforting her.

“I’m getting some shut eye,” Richard announced.

He had pulled a hospital blanket over his face. He had the ability to sleep anywhere.

“Wonderful idea,” his mother said, complimenting Richard on his ability to sleep.

Paul twisted his wrist to see his watch, had trouble in the light, and gave up. It was not real time anyway. He closed his eyes and listened to his father’s breathing. Waiting for Jason’s birth was the only other time in decades he had stayed up all night, thinking, it’s happening now, but no, hours creep by, sinking into hospital time, quicksand, druggy; an hour is a day, boredom has no meaning, and the mind adjusts to the new reality by allowing one to sleep, nature charitable to itself, stay up if you like, or fade, drift, dream.

And somehow, thinking this, Paul slept.

His father’s rage and silent grief, his emotional distance and bursts of joy. His photographic memory of National League baseball rosters, the dirt-poor childhood he never spoke of. His anger, Paul thought, always there, seething beneath the surface. It lay under the sheet and was the force that compelled him to keep drawing breaths. Paul had been flattered when he said the right thing and his father would answer, “Exactly.” He had a way of pronouncing it. “Eggs-ZACK-ly,” he would say. “Eggs-ZACK-ly.”

A nurse came in to adjust the sheets. Hospital rules on privacy and personal hygiene, as with a birth. It did not matter what was exposed, who touched what, although Paul appreciated how the nurse shielded his father’s private parts from his family as the sheet was pulled into place.

Through it all, he could hear Richard snoring.

Eggs-ZACK-ly! Eggs-ZACK-ly! Eggs-ZACK-ly!

A bee buzzed in the room, flopped on the ceiling, and looped about before stinging him awake. Through the blur of hospital time, Paul opened his eyes to Richard lurching out of the room.

“I made a promise, Linda, and when I promise something, I do it.” Richard’s voice infiltrated through the wall. “You’re getting as bad as she is.”

Paul dreamed of the clinging weight of Jason in his arms, of Suzanne sinking into him as she breathed herself to sleep. It was nature, inescapable. Paul had always felt kindly toward nature. It forgave, it accommodated, it accepted you for what you were. Out of shape, and exercise got the body fit. If sick, medicine and proper care would prod you back to health.

In the hospice room he realized why nature was so accommodating. Because it knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in the end it would win.

And win it did. The next day (or two, he had lost track) his father’s breathing stopped. All three of them, in their separate, dreamy sleeps, awoke to hear the last breath exhaled into the room, start to return, then change its mind and stay with them, forever.

Paul gave the eulogy at the funeral; Richard was too distraught to speak. Paul felt he failed to capture the audience, who had trouble hearing as well as appreciating that this was not just another in a continuous stream of deaths. He couldn’t stop seeing his mother’s hair, its new silver shade. It was everywhere, on so many women it seemed a natural color.

Afterward the house filled with what remained of his parents’ friends. Marsha sat by herself so Paul’s mother worked nonstop to ensure that Richard was comfortable. Suzanne and Jason were there, but Paul sent them home after a decent interval. This was for him to do. There was so much forgetting among those who came to pay respects that it became abnormal to remember: thoughts were lost mid-sentence, the purpose of entering a room, not punch lines to jokes but that a joke was being told. Time reshuffled; hospital time became the norm, the past as unknowable as the future. “When I lost my husband” meant a marriage ago, “our house” went back to a small first home in a (now forgotten) town. No one got lost because no one knew where they were in the first place.

Paul drew solace from the confusion, how the mess of memory was cleaned up by a helpful sweep of forgetting. He saw the loss of memory in older people as a means to survive, given the burden of all the life they had lived. He hadn’t even seen that much yet was taken aback to see his father in several of the other men there, as if in death his father had called out a team of brothers to come and mourn him.

Paul was sitting next to Richard, who was contemplating the white tiles of the floor, tiles his mother – no matter what was happening in her life – kept spotless. Paul put his arm around his brother, and Richard leaned into him, rocking like a crying child, as even Jason had not done in years. Paul tightened his grip.

Late that night he took a walk, violating the rule of mourning to stay indoors, and headed down the street where once, on a visit, his father helped Jason learn to ride a bike. His father had stopped trotting alongside when Jason, wobbling, maintained his balance. Rendered obsolete, Paul’s father hadn’t known what to do with his hands so, turning to Paul, he clapped.

The next day Paul came home. Suzanne was asleep on the couch, her feet stretched over the cushions, her hand on her stomach. Jason was out with friends; the house felt huge and still. With the gash of a newly lost item, it came to him that he had failed everyone in Florida, by not being eloquent at the funeral or properly comforting his mother and brother. He had failed everyone at home, too, by not helping Suzanne through a crisis, or guiding Jason out into the world. As a husband and father, as a brother and son, he had let them all down, he, the one they needed above all else. Yet Paul felt at peace, accepting himself for all he had failed to do. It was the same peacefulness that he saw in the credit card, when he found it later that night propped up lengthwise against a back bedpost. It lay there, gleefully real, even a bit smug, as it gazed back with a smile.