"I tried not to think anything. But yes."
"Come here where I can see you. My eyes aren't any good past the foot of the bed anymore."
He came. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hat, and then, when she kept looking at him, he came around the side opposite Daria and stood beside the rail, and she looked up at him from very close.
"Sit," she said. "You're making my neck hurt."
There was a second chair, a hard plastic one by the window. He brought it over and sat on the front edge of it with his knees almost touching the bed rail. Up close she smelled of hospital soap and, under it, faintly, of some kind of hand lotion with roses in it.
"Ludie gave you my note," she said.
He hesitated, and looked at Daria, and Daria said, "I told her. She was going to find out the page was gone."
"I've been writing myself notes for two years," Ondine said. "I'm used to them being where I put them. And this morning I wrote one and I put it on the tray and I went to sleep and when I woke up it was gone, and I couldn't remember what it said. I could remember that it was important. I could remember it was about you. I couldn't remember what it said. Do you know what that's like? To know you wrote yourself something you needed, and not know what it was?" She closed her eyes briefly. "Daria showed it to me after supper. I didn't remember writing it. But I knew it was true."
"It said you kept them," Bonner said.
"I did."
"It said you read them."
"Every one. Most of them more than once." She opened her eyes. "The one about the crabapple, I've read maybe fifty times. Did it ever fruit?"