This is how it happened in the Portrait Gallery. A woman flat on her back, with three others crowded around her on their phones. Her eyes were closed, then open again. Someone told the guard, who radioed for a doctor. My husband and I stood back in the hallway, not staying or leaving, by the doorway to the exhibit on women writers, with an image of Susan Sontag lying supine, with Sandra Cisneros in a white fringed dress, sitting on her porch, with Anne Tyler gazing with soft blue eyes and a serious, faraway look through a wooden-framed window. That morning, I had called my parents and chatted for an hour while making pancakes, and learned of my dad’s latest bout of skin cancer. He joked about his surgery, the incisions on his nose, him looking like he’d been in a knife fight, but they had to get off the phone after that, because my mother was headed to the funeral of a friend of a friend. There was a stretcher as we exited the gallery, and an ambulance outside, and then we walked the distance to the car, shivering, driving home in the cold sun, and entered the quiet house. We headed upstairs, hands on each other, breathing in skin, the sun sinking lower in the sky. I had a novel going I was afraid I wouldn’t finish. He was contemplating a novella. It was a slow winter that seemed as if it would stretch on forever, and afterward I lay on my back, breathing in the dark, staring through the window framing the sky, pale white lilac lined with bare branches, and us, still as a photograph.