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hands.”
    “Kay!” she said, and ran off into the house.
    Deepti, in the meantime, had wheeled Pauline up to the front door.
    She looked strikingly as she had before the stroke: smooth-skinned, large-eyed, dark-haired, her almond-shaped face as beautiful as ever, save for the slight droop of the right side of her mouth and her right eyelid. Her once-animated hands, through disuse, were curled permanently into fists in her lap. But there was no doubt, in her alert gaze, of her undiminished awareness and intelligence. She returned Jasper’s greeting and kiss with a blink and a kind of twinkle that Jasper, who had known her for over fifteen years, recognized as true contentment.
    When first told by Pauline’s neurologist that her locked-in status did not necessarily mean a shortened lifespan—”Indeed, with good care, she can live as long as you or me,” Dr. Carlucci told him—Jasper had been assailed with horror. He thought of Pauline trapped, indefinitely, within her isolating paralysis. Might not death be a welcome escape? Dr. Carlucci had quickly reassured him, saying that recent long-term studies showed that locked-in patients who were well cared for and encouraged to communicate, to be engaged with their world, reported levels of contentment
equal
to those of healthy people—stunning results that, frankly, called into question the most basic assumptions about human happiness. “Of course, the patients who dobest are those who feel that there is something to live
for
,” the doctor added. “A great many are parents of young children, like your Maddy.”
    Pauline was proof of all that Carlucci had said. She had, since coming home twenty-two months ago, made remarkable strides. Increased diaphragm strength meant that she no longer breathed with a ventilator; she no longer fed through a gastrointestinal tube, and was able to swallow smooth purees and thickened liquids; improved bladder control meant that she no longer relied on a catheter—all advances that had resulted in a marked uplift in her mood, which in turn gave her doctors hope for continued improvements. So, despite what was undeniably a difficult circumstance, Jasper refused to surrender to despair. Pauline would not have allowed that, in any case.
    Deepti pushed the wheelchair through the foyer and into the kitchen, parking it by the table where the pile of mail lay. She went to fill the kettle, and Jasper sat down beside Pauline. “Today’s haul,” he said, gesturing at the stack of letters. He liked going through the fan mail each day with Pauline, soliciting her opinion on which letters to answer, which to discard. “Shall I?” he said, lifting one. She blinked.
    These blinks (once for yes, twice for no) were her sole means of communication. Pauline had tried to master the art of dictating messages to Jasper by blinking at the appropriate time as he recited the alphabet to her, picking out sentences letter by letter—some locked-in patients managed to write entire books with this method—but deficits in her short-term memory (aneffect of the stroke, Carlucci surmised) so far made it impossible for her to hold a phrase of any length or complexity in her mind while laboriously spelling it out. A retina scanner to aid her in choosing letters from a computer tablet with movements of her iris had proved little better, since this too required holding an utterance in the mind for extended periods. Much of her current physiotherapy was aimed at improving her memory and overall mental and physical stamina so that she might, one day, accomplish the task of writing by dictation. Her therapists, lately, had noted some improvements. But for the time being, she relied solely on the binary, yes-no responses of blinking. Jasper had been duly trained in how to avoid asking open-ended questions, how to start and stop conversations, and how to recognize when Pauline wished to “speak.” For all its initial cumbersomeness, the method had proved surprisingly