“Hope you know what you’re getting into, son,” he said.
“Oh, Skip,” my mother said. She held a hand in front of her mouth as if to contain her disappointment.
“It’s a good thing, really,” I said. “For me. For them.” I looked out the window toward the cottages, imagined Fitch reading one of my comic books.
“We hope so,” my mother said.
After ending the call with my parents, I walked to Dorrie’s cottage and found her outside gazing up at the sky with a small telescope, swirling paint on canvas, creating an imaginary wormhole just beyond the moon, a maelstrom of violet and yellow. At the wormhole’s center, perhaps millions of light-years away, she’d painted a tiny blue planet, not unlike Earth, orbiting a red star.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked, and saw that tears had stretched her mascara into tiny flames. I assumed she was upset about Fitch, since she never met the other kids at work like I do. Her job is to deliver a small wooden box of ash, with nothing but a name, photo, height, and age in her file to guide her through the process.
“I’m wondering if he’ll ever be well enough to play on that jungle gym set in the courtyard. If any of them will be.”
I stared at the swing set, the rainbow carousel, tried to imagine children playing. I had never wanted kids, but the fact that I could barely remember ever seeing one playing in the street, or on a crowded basketball court, or heading to school on a bus unnerved me.
“The park manager once told me the jungle gym was for morale,” I said. “To give the trial patients hope. I think part of him really wants to see the kids out there one day.”
We walked toward the playground. I followed Dorrie’s lead, took off my shoes to feel the cool sand under my feet before sitting on the swing. The seat was damp from the misty air. I could feel it soaking through my jeans, no doubt leaving a dark spot. The lights from the windows of the other cottages and trailers played like a dozen tiny television sets—glimpses of people washing dishes, eating dinner, having a fight. One of the guards was punching a heavy bag. Molly was playing some sort of board game with her parents. Victoria was doing yoga.
“I wish people would come out once in a while,” I said. “Apart from staring at the fire pit like zombies and getting shitfaced, I mean.”
“We’ve gotten so used to keeping to ourselves, surviving. You can’t blame them,” she said. “You know Fitch talks about this park like it’s some kind of promised land. He barely caught a glimpse of the rides when we got here, but he dreams about it. He asks me if I’ll ever take him, why we can’t go on one of his good days.”
“And what do you say?”
Dorrie pulled the chains of our swings together so we drifted right next to each other, our feet tracing parallel waves in the sand.
“I don’t know how to answer that question. I usually change the subject.”
“It’s amazing how all of this is invisible in the city,” I said after a long moment, pointing at the sky. I didn’t know how to respond to her comment. I just grabbed her hand and gazed up at the vast graveyard of long-dead stars.
We returned to the cottage and Dorrie watched Fitch toss and turn for a while. She told me the first sign of her son’s illness had been abnormal sleep patterns. His eyes would flutter no matter how much he slept. He always felt like there was a fog wrapped around his head. He only had a few happy memories from before his illness. A swimming lesson, she explained. Holding her young son in the shallows of Hanauma Bay during a family vacation as he kicked, surrounded by schools of reef fish. One shot of infected water up his nose was all it took. Most of the first-wave victims in Hawaii died within six months or they slipped into a coma. That was before doctors introduced gene therapy and drug cocktails as a means to slow the morphing of cells. Fitch had beaten the odds with three organ transplants, clinging to a sliver of his old life for nearly two years.
“Hey, let’s lighten up for a bit, if that’s okay. Wanna watch a movie?” I began searching for something fun to watch, waited for Dorrie to give me the green light.
“Nothing depressing,” she said.
“We are in the City of Laughter,” I said.
I scrolled and scrolled; she remained silent.
“Anything?”
“So far he’s been lucky,” Dorrie said. “Because of my ex, Fitch had so many chances the other kids didn’t have—a liver, a kidney, a lung. But there’s no plan B for a brain. The treatments are slowing the spread, but it’s only a matter of time.”