Ceva was seventy-one and had never made anything. She had not decided this early. She had been thirty-two when the idea for the book arrived, a novel, or something like a novel, about a family and a house and the years that compress between a particular October and a particular April. She held the idea carefully for three weeks and then set it down and had not picked it up again.
Since then she had watched her friends age. Several had written things. One had raised three children. One had loved her husband with the particular extravagance that showed in the face by forty. They all looked like themselves, with the accumulated texture of what they had spent themselves on. Ceva looked, at seventy-one, like someone in early middle age who had been careful.
She had been referred to the Institute by her doctor after two years of insomnia. Not because anyone suspected a creative expenditure, but to rule it out. The reader of absence was young and methodical. She worked through the assessment slowly, without commentary, mapping the interior the way a doctor palpates for something that should not be there.
After a long time the reader set down her pen. "There's nothing here, " she said.
Ceva said she understood.
"Has anything changed recently? A move, a significant loss?"
"Nothing, " Ceva said. "Nothing has changed."
The reader nodded and made a note. Then she asked the question she apparently asked at the end of every session: "Is there anything you'd like to discuss?"
"No, " Ceva said. Then: "I had an idea once. For a book. I was thirty-two. I decided not to write it."
The reader waited.
"I thought I was saving it, " Ceva said. "I thought if I found the right --" She stopped. The idea had seemed very precise at thirty-two. It was still precise. That was the problem. It had not grown or failed or become something she no longer recognized. It was still exactly as she'd left it.
The reader wrote something in her file.
"What does that say?" Ceva asked.
"It's a standard notation, " the reader said. "It means the assessment is complete."
Ceva went home. She made tea and sat at the kitchen table. In the drawer beside the stove there was a pen and a notepad from a conference seventeen years ago. The sound of a mower came through the window with the last of the afternoon light. She did not open the drawer.