When we lived on East 96th Street, our neighbor had a form of dementia, and cats. When I brought Henry home from daycare she often came to the door, and invited us in. Now let’s see, she said, every time, Where have they all gone? Here’s Snowball, and here’s Smokey, and I think that Fire has hidden under the bed again. And she called Fire, and asked us to follow us back to her bedroom, and peered under the bed for Fire, and we spent most of our visit calling to Fire and looking for Fire under things.

But Fire did not come, and even though I got down on the ground, sometimes, and looked under the bed, where there were bowls of cat food, I did not see Fire, and I suppose I imagined that Fire was dead, and that this fact had been forgotten. Sometimes, though, I worried, because things were a little unbuttoned at our neighbor’s apartment, and the smell from the cats was very great, and of course because of her dementia, that if Fire wasn’t dead, Fire was in trouble, and that one day little Henry would, while helping our neighbor search for Fire, find him, and that this would be worse than Fire having died some time ago and our neighbor, who loved Fire, having forgotten this. From our point of view, if not from hers.

But in fact Fire was alive, and under the bed, exactly where our neighbor thought he was. Fire was very shy, but one day Henry and I met him, briefly, before he yowled and ran desperately from the room. Our neighbor wasn’t mistaken about this. And our neighbor was herself, and not my grandfather, who had had Alzheimer’s, and whose body, seated loosely in a chair in his living room, was a figure of dread in my youth. She was a nice woman, someone else’s mother, and I could like her and take my son to visit her and offer her, one hot day, our fan, without feeling that something terrible was going to happen to me, and that I knew what it was.