I could hear Fitch settling in, playing a video game. I leaned back and saw that he was on the bed with a controller. He’d already peeled the paper adhesive off the ends of the monitoring electrodes and pressed them onto his chest, hung an IV bag at his bedside, waiting for his mother to finish the rest. As she went to help her son, I arranged a folding table on the other side of the glass partition.
“There’s wine in the gift basket,” Dorrie yelled from his room. “And can you blend one of the shake cups in the freezer? It’s all he can keep down lately.”
By the time we sat down to eat, Fitch had already sucked down his Very Berry protein shake and was playing a game of Pictionary with us, holding up a frenzy of squiggles.
“Um, windmill,” I guessed.
“Nope,” Fitch said.
“Helicopter,” Dorrie guessed.
“Nope again,” Fitch said. “But close!”
“Wait, I know. Hovercraft!” Dorrie said.
“Ding, ding, ding!” Fitch said.
We played three more rounds before he threw up his shake. Dorrie explained that the pills the doctors had given him when they arrived might do this for the first few days. She sanitized her hands and entered the clean room. It was supposed to help prevent anything else from compromising Fitch’s already weak immune system. She removed his shirt and put on an audio version of A Wrinkle in Time, and rocked him in her arms. I watched the constellation of scars and welts on his chest rise and fall as he slowly drifted off to sleep.
“You don’t need to stay,” she whispered, still lying next to her son.
I took the dishes to the kitchen. Dorrie stepped out of the room and thanked me for the welcome.
“Fitch really doesn’t have friends anymore,” she said. “I think it meant a lot to him to have someone else here.”
I poured us each another glass of wine, finishing off the bottle. I took a long sip, not really knowing what else to say.
“Can I ask you why you came to the park?” Dorrie asked.
“I was the class clown in high school,” I explained. “But, you know, I came from a stereotypical Silicon Valley Asian family, which meant being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker or tech entrepreneur. I just wanted to make people laugh. I wanted to help people cut through the bullshit and see the world.”
“So, you had a gift and you didn’t want to waste it,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Not sure me making fun of my cheap parents or telling stories about going to comic book conventions to pick up women is much of a gift, even if they are one of the few public spaces in America where it feels totally fine to be Asian, especially when the girls think you look like some anime character.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“So many Sailor Moon dates.”
Dorrie took a sip of wine and tried to contain her laughter, almost dribbled some onto her shirt.
“At least here I feel like I’m helping people, even if it’s not the way I ever would have planned it,” I said.
I showed up at Dorrie’s cottage the next day and the one after that, devising a different excuse each time. I brought Fitch some of the comics I’d amassed as a kid, along with paints from the gift shop for Dorrie, since she’d mentioned attending art school before she became a mother. She immediately set about painting a solar system in Fitch’s room, complete with spaceships. In the living room, she painted glowing orbs filled with light, flowers, and scenes from ancient history that Fitch told her he sometimes sees when he dreams. After about a week, I stopped making excuses and Dorrie knew to expect me at her door or outside her work most evenings. She was a part-time office assistant in the checkout facility, where parents went to collect the ashes of their children. We never really discussed a name for our arrangement, and I told myself that I wasn’t responsible for Fitch, that the whole situation was more than I wanted in my life. Part of me worried that I was using her to feel like a decent human being.
Every time I talked to my parents, I wanted to tell them about Dorrie, but I didn’t want to jinx whatever it was I had with her. Months later, I finally told them I’d met someone.
“She’s beautiful and paints these fantastical dreamscapes. And she has a terrific son.”
“A son?” they both said in unison.
“Is he—？” my mother began.
“Yes, he’s sick,” I said.
My mother’s gaze seemed to reach across the state, through the screen. My father only shook his head.