Still, he suspects he is losing more ground every day. Everything is so much more work than he ever imagined. Fritzie dances around the kitchen, teasing Bedford while Patrick is trying to get dinner ready. She goes on binges of asking him “Why?” after everything he says, until he’s so exasperated he can barely think. And then she laughs at him. “Patrick, I’m just trying to see how many questions it takes until you get back to the whole creation of the universe as the reason,” she says.

Then occasionally she’ll declare it’s Opposite Day, and with everything he says, she pretends he means just the reverse. “Oh, so you don’t want me to take a bath then!” she’ll crow. And, “Oh, you hope I’ll stay awake all night and talk to you!”

And then there are the clingy times. She doesn’t want to do her homework unless he agrees to sit there at the table with her the entire time. She says she shouldn’t have to do it because it’s boring unless he stays with her, and what if she started working on it and fell asleep and slid off the chair, hitting her head on the floor and dying of brain stuff?

All this companionship makes him crazy. He doesn’t remember needing his parents to hang out with him for every little chore. She requires him to sing some nonsense song while she brushes her teeth. Sometimes he has to put a hand towel on his head—no, not that one, the blue one—and then he has to pretend to chase her down the hall to her room where he must pick out three stories to read to her before bed. And to sing her a song. And to tell her a story from his own life.

By the time he staggers back to the living room, he is exhausted, and then nine times out of ten, she’s popped up again, saying she needs a glass of water, or she needs a new pillowcase because hers smells bad. Or she needs to talk about whether cats and dogs speak each other’s languages. Something. Anything!

He doesn’t get it. Why can’t he just be allowed to be his old sad and incompetent self? Why does he have to talk to her all the time? He feels like his brain is being poked by sharp sticks about three-quarters of the time.

But worse—far, far worse—is that by the time February comes to an end, and Marnie has been gone for six weeks, Fritzie has neglected on five separate occasions to mention to him that she made other plans after school. He has been left standing at the bus stop while the bus discharges its non-Fritzie passengers.

Why, he wants to know, does she do this?

“Oh, I forgot. Sorry!” she’ll say, looking surprised that he’s mad, or maybe she’ll come out with, “What difference does it make? I know where I am and how to get home!” And lately there’s the more effective, “Well, Ricky, I did tell you where I was going, but you weren’t listening to me! You never listen!”

Ricky?

Yes. Another baffling thing is that she has taken to giving him nicknames. Ricky! That one took him a bit to figure out. Then, of course: it’s the last syllable in Patrick. Besides Ricky, she calls him Dude, Sad Guy, Art Man, Bio-Dad, and Spaceshot. He almost can’t stand it.

“I was listening. I am always paying attention to when and where I’m supposed to pick you up,” he says. “I know you didn’t tell me.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “The problem is, I need a phone,” she says. “That way you won’t have to worry that you lost me or that I died like that lady you loved, the one that was in the fire. Because you can’t take it if anybody else dies, can you, Ricky?”

He must look shocked, because she comes over and stands next to him, breathing on him, and touching his face.

“If I have a phone, I will always be where you know I am,” she says.

He pulls away and rubs his face. A phone! Ay yi yi. What universe is he living in where an eight-year-old should have a phone? But Emily Turner says they all have phones, and so he knows he is doomed.

One evening they go out and get her a phone. It’s like a little rectangular insurance policy. Maybe now he can keep from waking up in the middle of the night terrified that somehow he has lost her.

This is no way to live. A phone is a small price to pay.

Tessa calls to FaceTime, as she does very occasionally, on Sunday morning. Patrick puts her on speakerphone because he’s making pancakes. Behind her, he can see a café and some old-looking buildings, and all around her people are talking, which makes her have to lean into the phone at times. Suddenly her face fills the whole screen, scrunched up, trying to hear him.

He calls Fritzie, who comes charging in, bouncing around in excitement, spilling out all the news. “Mama! Hi, Mama! Listen, I got a phone! And Patrick bought me some new leggings with stars on them, and—oh, I got a sweatshirt and guess how they spell girls on it! Mama, it’s G-R-R-R-L-S. And Marnie’s gone because her dad got sick so it’s just me and Patrick, and it’s been sleeting here, even though it should be snowing instead. And did you know that sleet is like rain but it’s ice at the same time? Kind of like when we had hail that time in England, remember, Mama?”

Patrick flips the pancakes over. He can’t hear what Tessa said, but now Fritzie is demonstrating some incredibly complex gymnastic move on the floor, something involving spinning around on her butt and throwing her arms and legs in the air and then jumping up into place. “I’m practicing doing a headstand flip, do you want to see me try to do that? Come on, watch me try to do that. Sometimes I can’t do it, so it’s suspense.”

He sees in the phone that Tessa is looking elsewhere, gesturing to somebody. Not so interested apparently in the gymnastics displays or the breathless news from Brooklyn. Her eyes swerve back to the camera. She says, “Patrick? Are you still there?”

“Yes!” he calls.

“How’s fatherhood treating you?” she says, and she smiles at the camera.

“Fine,” he says. “You should watch Fritzie do this trick!” he says.

But Fritzie is shaking her head at him. She oozes her way along the wall, humming some tuneless thing, and then plops down on her back on the kitchen floor and puts her arm over her eyes. Bedford comes over to lick her face. Roy shows up, too, and Fritzie manages to pet both of them at the same time, still humming.

“Is she being good?” Tessa’s voice rings out on the speaker. “Because—well, Richard and I were sort of interested in taking a bit more time when the semester’s over, you know? Just feeling this out preliminarily . . . maybe . . . ?”

The phone signal glitches, but then Tessa starts talking again, midsentence, about a trip to Greece. Until the fall semester, he hears. And can they talk? Would he and Marnie be amenable to—

Fritzie scrambles to her feet and leaves the kitchen.

“Tessa,” he says. There’s a taste of iron in his mouth. How could she have this conversation in front of Fritzie like this? “I have to go. We’ll talk soon.”

And when he clicks the phone off, he goes off to fetch Fritzie, jolly her up, tell her funny jokes until he can get her to come back and eat her pancakes. He promises her a trip to ice-skate in Prospect Park. He feels like he’s wearing his heart on the outside of his body, and every little breeze stuns it and makes it ache more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

MARNIE

My father has gotten to the depressed stage of heart attack recovery. The internet thought that might happen.