xcept that my daughter might not be alive by then to get it. We aren't talking about a car, where we can try a used part first and if it doesn't work, get a new one shipped in. We're talking about a human being. A human being. Do you automatons there even know what the hell that is?”

This time, I'm expecting the click when I am disconnected.

Zanne shows up the night before we are due to go to the hospital to begin Kate's preparatory transplant regimen. She lets Jesse help her set up her portable office, takes a phone call from Australia, and then comes into the kitchen so that Brian and I can catch her up on daily routines. “Anna's got gymnastics on Tuesday,” I tell her. “Three o'clock. And I expect the oil truck to come sometime this week.”

“The trash goes out on Wednesday,” Brian adds.

“Don't walk Jesse into school. Apparently, that's anathema for sixth-graders.”

She nods and listens and even takes notes, and then says she has a couple of questions. “The fish…”

“Gets fed twice a day. Jesse can do it, if you remind him.”

“Is there an official bedtime?” Zanne asks.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Do you want me to give you the real one, or the one you can use if you're going to tack on an extra hour as a special treat?”

“Anna's eight o'clock,” Brian says. “Jesse's ten. Anything else?”

“Yes.” Zanne reaches into her pocket and takes out a check made out to us, for $100,000.

“Suzanne,” I say, stunned. “We can't take that.”

“I know how much it costs. You can't cover it. I can. Let me.”

Brian picks up the check and hands it back to her. “Thank you,” he says. “But actually, we've got the transplant covered.”

This is news to me. “We do?”

“The guys at the station sent out a call to arms, nationwide, and got a bunch of donations from other firefighters.” Brian looks at me. “I just found out today.”

“Really?” Inside me a weight lifts.

He shrugs. “They're my brothers,” he explains.

I turn to Zanne and hug her. “Thank you. For even offering.”

“It's here if you need it,” she answers.

But we don't. We are able to do this, at least.

“Kate!” I call the next morning. “It's time to go!”

Anna is curled on Zanne's lap on the couch. She pulls her thumb out of her mouth but she doesn't say good-bye.

“Kate!” I yell again. “We're leaving!”

Jesse smirks over his Nintendo controls. “Like you'd really take off without her.”

“She doesn't know that. Kate!” Sighing, I swing up the stairs toward her bedroom.

The door is closed. With a soft knock, I push it open, and find Kate in the final throes of making her bed. The quilt is pulled tight enough to bounce a dime off its middle; the pillows have been fluffed and centered. Her stuffed animals, relics at this point, sit on the window seat in gradated succession, tallest to smallest. Even her shoes have been neatly arranged in her closet, and the mess on her desk has vanished.

“Okay.” I haven't even asked her to clean up. “Clearly, I'm in the wrong bedroom.”

She turns. “It's in case I don't come back,” she says.

When I first became a parent I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the most horrible succession of maladies: the bite of a jellyfish, the taste of a poisonous berry, the smile of a dangerous stranger, the dive into a shallow pool. There are so many ways a child can be harmed that it seems nearly impossible one person alone could succeed at keeping him safe. As my children got older, the hazards only changed: inhaling glue, playing with matches, small pink pills sold behind the bleachers of the middle school. You can stay up all night and still not count all the ways to lose the people you love.

It seems to me, now that this is more than just a hypothetical, that a parent falls one of two ways when told a child has a fatal disease. Either you dissolve into a puddle, or you take the blow on the cheek and force yourself to lift your face again for more. In this, we probably look a lot like the patients.

Kate is semi-conscious on her bed, her central line tubes blooming like a fountain from her chest. The chemo has made her throw up thirty-two times, and has given her mouth sores and such bad mucositis that she sounds like a cystic fibrosis patient. She turns to me and tries to speak, but coughs up phlegm instead. “Drown,” she chokes out.

Raising the suction tube she's clutching in her hands, I clear out her mouth and throat. “I'll do it while you rest,” I promise, and that is how I come to breathe for her.

An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where they've left off from the previous visit. It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants—the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor kitchens might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood and chemotherapies from clothing. The nurses know the name of your daughter’s stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.

You get to know them as they know you, because they take the place of friends you once had in a previous life, the one before diagnosis. Donna’s daughter, for example, is studying to be a vet. Ludmilla, on the graveyard shift, wears laminated pictures of Sanibel Island clipped like charms to her stethoscope, because it’s where she wants to retire. Willie, the male nurse, has a weakness for chocolate and a wife expecting triplets.

One night during Kate’s induction, which I have been awake for so long that my body has forgotten how to segue into sleep, I turn on the TV while she sleeps. I mute it, so that the volume won’t disturb her. Robin Leach is walking through the palatial home of someone Rich and Famous. There are gold-plated bidets and hand-carved teak beds, a pool in the shape of a butterfly. There are ten-car garages and red clay tennis courts and eleven roaming peacocks. It’s a world I can’t even wrap my head around—a life I would never imagine for myself.

Sort of like this one used to be.

I can't even really remember what it was like to hear a story about a mother with breast cancer or a baby born with congenital heart problems or any other medical burden, and to feel myself crack down the middle: half sympathetic, half grateful that my own family was safe. We have become that story, for everyone else.

I don't realize I'm crying until Donna kneels down in front of me and takes the TV remote out of my hand. “Sara,” the nurse says, “can I get you something?”

I shake my head, embarrassed to have broken down, even more ashamed to be caught. “I'm fine,” I insist.

“Yeah, and I'm Hillary Clinton,” she says. She reaches for my hand and tugs me upright, drags me toward the door.

“Kate—”

“—will not even miss you,” Donna finishes.

In the small kitchenette where there is coffee brewing twenty-four hours a day, she fixes a cup for each of us. “I'm sorry,” I say.

“For what? Not being made of granite?”

I shake my head. “It just doesn't end.” Donna nods, and because she completely understands, I find myself talking. And talking. And when I have spilled all my secrets, I take a deep breath and realize that I have been talking for an hour straight. “Oh my God,” I say. “I can't believe I've wasted so much of your time.”

“It wasn't a waste,” Donna replies. “And besides, my shift ended a half hour ago.”

My cheeks flame. “You ought to go. I'm sure you have somewhere else you'd much rather be.”

But instead of leaving, Donna folds me into her ample arms. “Honey,” she says, “don't we all?”

The door to the ambulatory operating suite yawns open into a small room packed with gleaming silver instruments—a mouth gilded with braces. The doctors and nurses she has met are masked and gowned, only recognizable by their eyes. Anna tugs at me until I kneel down beside her. “What if I changed my mind?” she says.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “You don't have to do this if you don't want to, but I know that Kate is counting on you. And Daddy and me.”

She nods once, then slips her hand into mine. “Don't let go,” she tells me.

A nurse shepherds her in the right direction, onto the table. “Wait'll you see what we've got for you, Anna.” She draws a heated blanket over her.

The anesthesiologist wipes a red-tinged gauze pad around an oxygen mask. “Have you ever gone to sleep in a strawberry field?” They work their way down Anna's body, applying gelled pads that will be hooked to monitors to track her heart and her breathing. They administer to her while she's lying on her back, although I know they will flip her over to draw marrow from her hipbones.

The anesthesiologist shows Anna the accordion mechanism on his equipment. “Can you blow up that balloon?” he asks, and places the mask over Anna's face.

All this time, she doesn't let go of my hand. Finally, her grip slackens. She fights at the last minute, her body already asleep but straining forward at the shoulders. One nurse holds Anna down; the other restrains me. “It's just the way the medicine affects the body,” she explains. “You can give her a kiss now.”

So I do, through my mask. I whisper a thank-you, too. I walk out of the swinging door and peel off my paper hat and booties. I watch through the postage-stamp window as Anna is rolled to her side and an impossibly long needle is lifted from a sterile tray. Then I go upstairs to wait with Kate.

Brian sticks his head into Kate's room. “Sara,” he says, exhausted, “Anna's asking for you.”

But I cannot be in two places at one time. I hold the pink erne-sis basin up to Kate's mouth as she vomits again. Beside me, Donna helps lower Kate back onto her pillow. “I'm a little busy right now,” I say.

“Anna's asking for you,” Brian repeats, that's all. Donna looks from him to me. “We'll be fine till you get back,” she promises, and after a moment, I nod.

Anna is on the pediatric floor, one that doesn't have the hermetically sealed rooms necessary for protective isolation. I hear her crying before I even enter the room. “Mommy,” she sobs. “It hurts.” I sit down on the side of the bed and fold her into my arms. “I know, sweetie.”

“Can you stay here?”

I shake my head. “Kate's sick. I'm going to have to go back.”

Anna pulls away. “But I'm in the hospital,” she says. “I'm in the hospital!”

Over her head, I glance at Brian. “What are they giving her for pain?”

“Very little. The nurse said they don't like to overmedicate kids.”

“That's ridiculous.” When I stand, Anna whimpers and grabs for me. “Be right back, honey.”

I accost the first nurse I can find. Unlike the staff in oncology, these RNs are unfamiliar. “She was given Tylenol an hour ago,” the woman explains. “I know she's a little uncomfortable—”

“Roxicet. Tylenol with codeine. Naproxen. And if it's not on the doctor's orders call and ask whether it can be put on there.”

The nurse bristles. “With all due respect, Mrs. Fitzgerald, I do this every day, and—”

“So do I.”

When I go back to Anna's room, I am carrying a pediatric dose of Roxicet, which will either relieve her aches or knock her out so that she no longer feels them. I walk in to find Brian's big hands fumbling a Lilliputian clasp on the back of a necklace, as he hangs a locket around Anna's neck. “I thought you deserved your own gift, since you were giving one to your sister,” he says.

Of course Anna should be honored for donating her bone marrow. Of course she deserves recognition. But the thought of rewarding someone for their suffering, frankly, never entered my mind. We've all been doing it for so long.

They both glance up when I come through the doorway. “Look at what Daddy got me!” Anna says.

I hold out the plastic dosage cup, a poor second-best.

Shortly after ten o'clock, Brian brings Anna to Kate's room. She moves slowly, like an old woman, leaning on Brian for support. The nurses help her into a mask and gown and gloves and booties so that she can be allowed in—a compassionate breach of protocol, as children are not usually allowed to visit protective isolation.

Dr. Chance stands beside the IV pole, holding up the bag of marrow. I turn Anna so that she can see it. “That,” I tell her, “is what you gave us.”

Anna makes a face. “It's gross. You can have it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Dr. Chance says, and the rich ruby marrow begins to feed into Kate's central line.

I place Anna on the bed. There is room for both of them, shoulder to shoulder. “Did it hurt?” Kate asks.

“Kind of.” Anna points to the blood running through the plastic tubes into the slit in Kate's chest. “Does that?”

“Not really.” She sits up a little. "Hey, Anna?”

“Yeah?"

“I'm glad it came from you.” Kate reaches for Anna's hand and places it just below the central line's catheter, a spot that falls precariously near her heart.

Twenty-one days after the bone marrow transplant, Kate's white cell counts begin to rise, proof of engraftment. To celebrate, Brian insists that he is taking me out to dinner. He arranges for a private-duty nurse for Kate, makes reservations at XO Cafe, and even brings me a black dress from my closet. He forgets pumps, so I wind up wearing my scruffy hiking clogs with it.

The restaurant is nearly full. Almost immediately after we are seated, the sommelier comes to ask if we want wine. Brian orders a Cabernet Sauvignon.

“Do you even know whether that's red or white?” I do not think, in all these years, I have seen Brian drink anything but beer.

“I know it's got alcohol in it, and I know we're celebrating.” He lifts his glass after the sommelier pours it. “To our family,” he toasts.

We click glasses and take sips. “What are you getting?” I ask.

“What do you want me to get?”

“The filet. That way I can taste it if I get the sole.” I fold my menu. “Did you hear the results of the last CBC?”

Brian looks down at the table. “I was sort of hoping that we could come here to get away from all that. You know. Just talk.”

“I'd like to talk,” I admit. But when I look at Brian, the information that leaps to my lips is about Kate, not us. I have no call to ask him about his day—he has taken three weeks off from the station. We are connected by and through sickness.

We fall back into silence. I look around XO Cafe and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

When the waiter arrives to take our order, we both turn eagerly, grateful for someone who keeps us from having to recognize the strangers we have become.

We leave the hospital with a child who is different from the one we brought in. Kate moves cautiously, checking the drawers of the nightstand for anything she might have left behind. She has lost so much weight that the jeans I brought do not fit; we have to use two bandannas knotted together as a makeshift belt.

Brian has gone down ahead of us to bring the car around. I zip the last Tiger Beat and CD into Kate's duffel bag. She pulls a fleece cap on over her smooth, bare scalp and winds a scarf tight around her neck. She puts on a mask and gloves; now that we are venturing out of the hospital, she is the one who will need protection.

We walk out the door to the applause of the nurses we have come to know so well. “Whatever you do, don't come back and see us, all right?” Willie jokes.

One by one, they walk up to say their good-byes. When they have all dispersed, I smile at Kate. “Ready?”

Kate nods, but she doesn't step forward. She stands rigid, fully aware that once she sets foot outside this doorway, everything changes. “Mom?”

I fold her hand into mine. “We'll do it together,” I promise, and side by side, we take the first step.

The mail is full of hospital bills. We have learned that the insurance company will not talk to the hospital billing department, and vice versa, but neither one thinks that the charges are accurate—which leads them to charge us for procedures we shouldn't have to cover, in the hopes that we are stupid enough to pay them. Managing the monetary aspect of Kate's care is a full-time job that neither Brian nor I can do.

I leaf through a grocery store flyer, an AAA magazine, and a long-distance rate announcement before I open the letter from the mutual fund. It's not something I really pay attention to; Brian usually manages finances that require more than basic checkbook balancing. Besides, the three funds we have are all earmarked for the kids' education. We are not the sort of family that has enough spare change to play the stock market.

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

This is to confirm your recent redemption from fund #323456, Brian D. Fitzgerald Custodian for Katherine S. Fitzgerald, in the amount of $8,369.56. This disbursement effectively closes the account.

As banking errors go, this is a pretty major one. We've been off by pennies in our checking account, but at least I've never lost eight thousand dollars. I walk out of the kitchen and into the yard, where Brian is rolling an extra garden hose. “Well, either someone at the mutual fund screwed up,” I say, handing the letter to him, “or the second wife you're supporting is no longer a secret.”

It takes him one moment too long to read it, the same moment that I realize that this is not a mistake after all. Brian wipes his forehead with the back of one wrist. “I took that money out,” he says.

“Without telling me?” I cannot imagine Brian doing such a thing. There have been times, in the past, where we dipped into the children's accounts, but only because we were having a month too tight to swing the cost of groceries and the mortgage, or because we needed the down payment for a new car when our old one had finally been put to rest. We'd lie awake in bed feeling guilt press down like an extra quilt, promising each other that we would put that money right back where it belonged as soon as humanly possible.

“The guys at the station, they tried to raise some money, like I told you. They got ten thousand dollars. With this added to it, the hospital's willing to work out some kind of payment plan for us.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, Sara.”

I shake my head, stunned. “You lied to me?”

“I didn't—”

“Zanne offered—”

“I won't let your sister take care of Kate,” Brian says. “I'm supposed to take care of Kate.” The hose falls to the ground, dribbles and spits at our feet. “Sara, she's not going to live long enough to use that money for college.”

The sun is bright; the sprinkler twitches on the grass, spraying rainbows. It is far too beautiful a day for words like these. I turn and run into the house. I lock myself in the bathroom.

A moment later, Brian bangs on the door. “Sara? Sara, I'm sorry.”

I pretend I can't hear him. I pretend I haven't heard anything he's said.

At home, we all wear masks so that Kate doesn't have to. I find myself checking her fingernails while she brushes her teeth or pours cereal, to see if the dark ridges made by the chemo have disappeared—a sure sign of the bone marrow transplant's success. Twice a day I give Kate growth factor shots in the thigh, a necessity until her neutrophil count tops one thousand. At that point, the marrow will be reseeding itself.

She can't go back to school yet, so we get her lessons sent home. Once or twice she has come with me to pick Anna up from kindergarten, but refuses to get out of the car. She will troop to the hospital for her routine CBC, but if I suggest a side trip to the video store or Dunkin' Donuts afterward, she begs off.

One Saturday morning, the door to the girls' bedroom is ajar; I knock gently. “Want to go to the mall?” Kate shrugs. “Not now.”

I lean against the doorframe. “It'll be good to get out of the house.”

“I don't want to.” Although I am sure she does not even realize she is doing it, she skims her palm over her head before tucking her hand into her back pocket.

“Kate,” I begin.

“Don't say it. Don't tell me that nobody’s going to stare at me, because they will. Don't tell me it doesn’t matter, because it does. And don't tell me I look fine because that's a lie.” Her eyes, lash-bare, fill with tears. “I'm a freak, Mom, Look at me.”

I do, and I see the spots where her brows have gone missing, and the slope of her endless brow and the small divots and bumps that are usually hidden under the cover of hair. “Well,” I say evenly. “We can fix this.”

Without another word, l walk out of her room, knowing Kate will follow. I pass Anna, who abandons her coloring book to trail behind her sister. In the basement I pull out a pair of ancient electric grooming clippers we found when we bought the house, and plug them in. Then I cut a swath right down the middle of my scalp.

“Mom!” Kate gasps.

“What?” A tumble of brown waves falls onto Anna's shoulder; she picks them up delicately “It’s only hair.”

With another swipe of the razor, Kate starts to smile. She points out a spot that I’ve missed, where a small thatch stands like a forest. I sit down on an overturned milk crate and let her shave the other side of my head herself. Anna crawls onto my lap. “Me next,” she begs.

An hour later, we walk through the mall holding hands, a trio of bald girls. We stay for hours. Everywhere we go, heads turn and voices whisper. We are beautiful, times three.

 

THE WEEKEND

There is no fire without some smoke

.—JOHN HEYWOOD, Proverbs

 

JESSE

DON'T DENY IT—you've driven by a bulldozer or front-end loader on the side of a highway, after hours, and wondered why the road crews leave the equipment out there where anyone, meaning me, could steal it. My first truck jacking was years ago; I put a cement mixer out of gear on a slope and watched it roll into a construction company's base trailer. Right now there's a dump truck a mile away from my house; I've seen it sleeping like a baby elephant next to a pile of Jersey barriers on 1-195. Not my first choice of wheels, but beggars can't be choosers; in the wake of my little run-in with the law, my father's taken my car into custody, and is keeping it at the fire station.

Driving a dump truck turns out to be a hell of a lot different than driving my car. First, you fill up the whole freaking road. Second, it handles like a tank, or at least like what I suppose a tank would handle like if you didn't have to join an army full of uptight, power-crazy assholes to drive one. Third—and least palatable—people see you coming. When I roll up to the underpass where Duracell Dan makes his cardboard home, he cowers behind his line of thirty-three-gallon drums. “Hey,” I say, swinging out of the cab of the truck. “It's just me.”

It still takes Dan a minute to peek between his hands, make sure I'm telling him the truth. “Like my rig?” I ask.

He gets up gingerly and touches the streaked side of the truck. Then he laughs. “Your Jeep been taking steroids, boy.”

I load up the rear of the cab with the materials I need. How cool would it be if I just backed the truck up to a window, dumped in several bottles of my Arsonist's Special, and drove away with the place bursting into flames? Dan stands by the driver's-side door. Wash Me, he writes across the grit.

“Hey,” I say, and for no reason except the fact that I've never done it before, I ask him if he wants to come.

“For real?”

“Yeah. But there's a rule. Whatever you see and whatever we do, you can't tell anyone about it.”

He pretends to lock up his lips and toss the key. Five minutes later, we're on our way to an old shed that used to be a boathouse for one of the colleges. Dan fiddles with the controls, raising and lowering the truck bed while we're tooling along. I tell myself that I've invited him along to add to the thrill—one more person who knows only makes it more exciting. But it's really because there are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.

When I was eleven years old I got a skateboard. I never asked for one; it was a guilt gift. Over the years I got quite a few of these big ticket items, usually in conjunction with one of Kate's episodes. My parents would shower her with all kinds of cool shit whenever she had to have something done to her; and since Anna was usually involved, she got some amazing presents, too, and then a week later my parents would feel bad about the inequality and would buy me some toy to make sure I didn't feel left out.

Anyway, I cannot even begin to tell you how amazing that skateboard was. It had a skull on the bottom that glowed in the dark, and from the teeth dripped green blood. The wheels were neon yellow and the gritty surface, when you stepped on it in your sneakers, made the sound of a rock star clearing his throat. I skimmed it up and down the driveway, around the sidewalks, learning how to pop wheelies and kickflips and ollies. There was only one rule: I wasn't supposed to take it into the street, because cars could come around at any minute; kids could get hit in an instant.

Well, I don't need to tell you that eleven-year-old budding derelicts and house rules are like oil and water. By the end of my first week with this board I thought I'd rather slide down a razor blade into alcohol than tool up and down the sidewalk yet one more time with all the toddlers on their Big Wheels.

I begged my father to take me to the Kmart parking lot, or the school basketball court, or anywhere, really, where I could play around a little. He promised me that on Friday, after Kate had a routine bone marrow aspiration, we could all go out to the school. I could bring my skateboard, Anna could bring her bike, and if Kate felt up to it, she could Rollerblade.

God, was I looking forward to that. I greased the wheels and polished up the bottom of the skateboard and practiced a double helix on the driveway ramp I'd made of old scrap plywood and a fat log. The minute I saw the car—my mom and Kate returning from the hematologist—I ran out to the porch so we wouldn't waste any time.

My mother, it turned out, was in a huge hurry, too. Because the door to the van slid open and there was Kate, covered with blood. “Get your father,” my mother ordered, holding a wad of tissues up to Kate's face.

It wasn't like she hadn't had nosebleeds before. And my mom was always telling me, when it freaked me out, that the bleeding looked way worse than it actually was. But I got my father, and the two of them hustled Kate into the bathroom and tried to keep her from crying, because it only made everything harder.

“Dad,” I said. “When are we going?”

But he was busy wadding up toilet paper, bunching it up under Kate's nose.

“Dad?” I repeated.

My father looked right at me, but he didn't answer. And his eyes were dazed and staring through me, like I was made out of smoke.

That was the first time I thought that maybe I was.

The thing about flame is that it's insidious—it sneaks, it licks, it looks over its shoulder and laughs. And fuck, it's beautiful. Like a sunset eating everything in its path. For the first time, I have someone to admire my handiwork. Beside me, Dan makes a small sound at the back of his throat—respect, no doubt. But when I look at him, proud, I see that he's got his head ducked into the greasy collar of his army-surplus coat. He's got tears running down his face.

“Dan, man, what's going on?” Granted, the guy is nuts, but still. I put my hand on his shoulder and you'd think, from his reaction, that a scorpion just landed there. “You scared of the fire, Danny? You don't have to be. We're far enough away. We're safe.” I give him what I hope is an encouraging smile. What if he freaks out and starts screaming, calls down some wandering cop?

“That shed,” Dan says.

“Yeah. No one's gonna miss it.”

“That's where the rat lives.”

“Not anymore,” I answer.

“But the rat…”

“Animals make their own way out of a fire. I'm telling you. The rat will be totally cool. Chill.”

“But what about the newspapers? He has one with President Kennedy's assassination…”

It occurs to me that the rat is most likely not a rodent, but another homeless guy. One using this shed as a shelter. “Dan, are you saying someone lives in there?”

He looks at the crowning flames and his eyes fill. Then he repeats my own words. “Not anymore,” he says.

Like I said, I was eleven, so even to this day I can't tell you how I made my way from our house in Upper Darby to the middle of downtown Providence. I suppose it took me a few hours; I suppose I believed that with my new superhero's cloak of invisibility, maybe I could just disappear and reappear somewhere else entirely.

I tested myself. I walked through the business district, and sure enough, people passed right by me, their eyes on the cracks of the pavement or staring straight ahead like corporate zombies. I walked by a long wall of mirrored glass on the side of a building, where I could see myself. But no matter how many faces I made, no matter how long I stood there, none of the people funneling around me had anything to say.

I wound up that day at the middle of an intersection, smack under the traffic light, with taxis honking and a car swerving off to the left and a pair of cops running to keep me from getting killed. At the police station, when my dad came to get me, he asked what the hell I'd been thinking.

I hadn't been thinking, actually. I was just trying to get to a place where I'd be noticed.

First I take off my shirt and dunk it into a puddle on the side of the road; then wrap it around my head and face. The smoke is already billowing, angry black clouds. In the hollow of my ear Is the sound of sirens. But I have made a promise to Dan.

What hits me first is the heat, a wall that's way more solid than it looks. The frame of the shed stands out, an orange X ray. Inside, I can't see a foot in front of me.

“Rat,” I yell out, already regretting the smoke that leaves me raw-throated and hoarse. “Rat!”

No answer. But the shed isn't all that big. I get down on my hands and knees and begin to feel my way around.

I only have one really bad moment, when I put my hand down by accident on something that was made of metal before it became a searing brand. My skin sticks to it, blisters immediately. By the time I fall over a booted foot I'm sobbing, sure I will never get out. I feel my way up Rat, haul his limp body over my shoulder, stagger back the way I came.

Through some little joke of God, we make it outside. By now, the engines are pulling up, charging their lines. Maybe my father is even here. I stay under the screen of smoke; I dump Rat on the ground. With my heart racing, I run in the other direction; leaving the rest of this rescue to people who actually want to be heroes.

 

ANNA

Did you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.

Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates . . . which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.

The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.

More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still manage to screw it up.

On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us doing our best to pretend that two days from now, my trial won't begin. You'd think this is hard, but actually, it's much easier than the alternative. My family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don't talk about it, then—presto!—there's no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no worries at all.

I'm watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunninghams, they're not so different from us. All they ever seem to worry about is whether Richie's band will be hired at Al's place, or if Fonzie will win the kissing contest, when even I know that in the '50s Joanie should have been having air raid drills at school and Marion was probably popping Valium and Howard would have been freaking out about commie attacks. Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. “What's a four-letter word for vessel?” she asks.

Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for borrowing two of her CDs without asking (for God's sake, she was practically comatose; it isn't like she would have been able to give her permission); she feels up to trying this crossword.

“Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”

“Four letters.”

“Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they're thinking of that kind.”

“Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.

“That's five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that's much more pleasant than the one she used with me, I might add.

We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our family.

“Give me a number.” He means on the pain scale. “Five?”

“Three.”

Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. “It may be a five in an hour,” he cautions. “It may be a nine.”

My mother's face has gone the color of an eggplant. “But Kate's feeling great right now!” she cheerleads.

“I know. But the lucid moments, they're going to get briefer and further apart,” Dr. Chance explains. “This isn't the APL. This is renal failure.”

“But after a transplant—” my mother says.

All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You'd be able to hear a hummingbird's wings, that's how quiet it gets. I want to slink out of the room like mist; I don't want this to be my fault.

Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. “As I understand it, Sara, the availability of an organ is under debate.”

“But—”

“Mom,” Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. “How long are we talking about?”

“A week, maybe.”

“Wow,” she says softly. “Wow.” She touches the edge of the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at its edge. “Will it hurt?”

“No,” Dr. Chance promises. “I will make sure of that.”

Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. “Thanks. For the truth, I mean.”

When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. “Don't thank me.” He gets up so heavily that I think he must be made of stone, and leaves the room without speaking another word.

My mother, she folds into herself, that's the only way to explain it. Like paper, when you put it deep into the fireplace, and instead of burning, it simply seems to vanish.

Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed. So I get up and walk toward my mother. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” I say. “Stop.”

She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. “No, Anna. You stop.”

It takes me a little while, but I break away. “Anna,” I murmur.

My mother turns. “What?”

“A four-letter word for vessel,” I say, and I walk out of Kate's room.

Later that afternoon, I'm turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad's office at the fire station, with Julia sitting across from me. On the desk are a half-dozen pictures of my family. There's one with Kate as a baby, wearing a knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just as wide as the bluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.

Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.

I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and younger than I can ever remember them being. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask Julia.

“No!” she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of shrugs. “Do you?”

“There's this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I'm not sure.” I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark on anything you wanted.

“What happened?”

“I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and we stood up he was—” I turn bright red. “Well, you know.” I wave in the general vicinity of my lap.

“Ah,” Julia says.

“He asked me whether I'd ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood shop?—and I go to tell him no and bam, I'm staring right there.” I put the decapitated pen down on my dad's blotter. “When I see him now around town it's all I can think about.” I stare up at her, a thought coming at me. “Am I a pervert?”

“No, you're thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn't help it happening any more than you can help thinking about it when you see him. My brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guy could get excited: during the day, and during the night.”

“Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?”

She laughs. “I guess so. Why, wouldn't Jesse?”

I snort. “If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he'd laugh so hard he'd bust a rib, and then he'd give me a stash of Playboys and tell me to do research.”

“How about your parents?”

I shake my head. My dad is out of the question—because he's my dad. My mom's too distracted. And Kate is in the same clueless boat I'm in. “Did you and your sister ever fight over the same guy?”

“Actually, we don't go for the same type.”

“What's your type?"

She thinks about it. “I don't know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing.”

“Do you think Campbell's cute?”

Julia nearly falls out of her chair. “What?”

“Well, I mean, for an older guy.”

“I could see where some women… might find him attractive,” she says.

“He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes.” I run my thumbnail into the groove of wood on the desk. “It's weird. That I get to grow up and kiss someone and get married.”

And Kate doesn't.

Julia leans forward. “What's going to happen if your sister dies, Anna?”

One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little—maybe five and two. It is before her first relapse, but after her hair grew back. We're standing on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits, playing patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror image—Kate small for her age and me tall; Kate's hair a different color but with the same natural part and flip at the bottom; Kate's hands pressed up against mine. Until now, I don't think I've really realized how much alike we are.

The phone rings just before ten o'clock that night, and to my surprise it's my name that's paged throughout the firehouse. I pick up the extension in the kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night. “Hello?”

“Anna,” my mother says.

Immediately, I assume she's calling about Kate. There isn't much else for her to say to me, given the way we left things earlier at the hospital. “Is everything okay?”

“Kate's asleep.”

“That's good,” I reply, and then wonder if it really is.

“I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I'm sorry about this morning.”

I feel very small. “Me too,” I admit. In that minute, I remember how she used to tuck me in at night. She'd go to Kate's bed first, and lean down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she'd come to my bed and say she'd come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She'd turn off the light, and for long moments after she left, the room still smelled of the lotion she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of a flannel pillowcase.

“The second reason I called,” my mother says, “was just to say good night.”

“That's all?”

In her voice, I can hear a smile. “Isn't that enough?”

“Sure,” I tell her, although it isn't.

Because I can't fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past my father, who's snoring. I steal the Guinness Book of World Records from the men's room and lie down on the roof of the station to read by moonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches from the window of his parents' apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, of Virginia, survived seven lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned by a lover. A cat was found in rubble eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000, and made a full recovery. I find myself reading and rereading the section called “Survivors and Lifesavers,” adding listings in my head. Longest surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.

My father finds me when I have put the book aside and started searching for Vega. “Can't see much tonight, huh?” he asks, taking a seat beside me. It is a night wrapped in clouds; even the moon seems covered with cotton.

“Nope,” I say. “Everything's fuzzy.”

“You try the telescope?”

I watch him fiddle with the scope for a while, and then decide that it's just not worth it tonight. I suddenly remember being about seven, riding beside him in the car, and asking him how grown-ups found their way to places. After all, I had never seen him pull out a map.

“I guess we just get used to taking the same turns,” he said, but I wasn't satisfied.

“Then what about the first time you go somewhere?”

“Well,” he said, “we get directions.”

But what I want to know is who got them the very first time? What if no one's ever been where you're going? “Dad?” I ask, “is it true that you can use stars like a map?”

“Yeah, if you understand celestial navigation.”

“Is it hard?” I'm thinking maybe I should learn. A backup plan, for all those times I feel like I'm just wandering in circles.

“It's pretty jazzy math—you have to measure the altitude of a star, figure out its position using a nautical almanac, figure out what you think the altitude should be and what direction the star should be in based on where you think you are, and compare the altitude you measured with the one you calculated. Then you plot this on a chart, as a (line of position. You get several lines of position to cross, and that's where you go.” My father takes one look at my face and smiles. “Exactly,” he laughs. “Never leave home without your GPS.”

But I bet I could figure it out; it isn't really all that confusing. You head toward the place where all those different positions cross, and you hope for the best.

If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: in the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left.

 

BRIAN

JUST BEFORE SEVEN A.M. on Sunday, an octopus walks into the station. Well, it is actually a woman dressed like an octopus, but when you see something like that, distinctions hardly matter. She has tears running down her face and holds a Pekingese dog in her multiple arms. “You have to help me,” she says, and that's when I remember: this is Mrs. Zegna, whose house was gutted by a kitchen fire a few days ago.

She plucks at her tentacles. 'This is the only clothing I have left. A Halloween costume. Ursula. It's been rotting in a U-Store-lt locker in Taunton with my Peter Paul and Mary album collection."

I gently sit her down in the chair across from my desk. “Mrs. Zegna, I know your house is uninhabitable-”

“Uninhabitable? It's wrecked!”

“I can put you in touch with a shelter. And if you like, I can speak to your insurance company to expedite things.”

She lifts one arm to wipe her eyes, and eight others, drawn by strings, rise in unison. “I don't have home insurance. I don't believe in living my life expecting the worst.”

I stare at her for a moment. I try to remember what it is like to be taken aback by the very possibility of disaster.

When I get to the hospital, Kate is lying on her back, holding tight to a stuffed bear she's had since she was seven. She's hooked up to one of those patient-managed morphine drips, and her thumb pushes down on the button every now and then, although she is fast asleep.

One of the chairs in the room folds out into a cot with a mattress thin as a wafer; this is where Sara is curled. “Hey,” she says, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Where's Anna?”

“Still sleeping like only a kid can. How was Kate's night?”

“Not bad. She was in a little pain between two and four.”

I sit down on the edge of her cot. “It meant a lot to Anna, you calling last night.”

When I look into Sara's eyes, I see Jesse-they have the same coloring, the same features. I wonder if Sara looks at me and thinks of Kate. I wonder if that hurts.

It is hard to believe that once, this woman and I sat in a car and drove the entire length of Route 66, and never ran out of things to say. Our conversations now are an economy of facts, full of blue chip details and insider information.

“Do you remember that fortune-teller?” I ask. When she looks at me blankly, I keep talking. “We were out in the middle of Nevada, and the Chevy ran out of gas… and you wouldn't let me leave you in the car while I looked for a service station?”

Ten days from now, when you're still walking in circles, they're going to find me with vultures eating out my insides, Sara had said, and she'd fallen into step beside me. We hiked back four miles to the shanty we'd passed, a gas station. It was run by an old guy and his sister, who advertised herself as a psychic. Let's do it, Sara begged, but a reading cost five bucks and I only had ten. Then we'll get half the gas, and ask the psychic when we can expect to run out the next time, Sara said, and like always, she convinced me. Madame Agnes was the kind of blind that scares children, with cataract eyes that looked like an empty blue sky. She put her knobby hands on Sara's face to read her bones, and said that she saw three babies and a long life, but that it wouldn't be good enough. What's that supposed to mean? Sara asked, incensed, and Madame Agnes explained that fortunes were like clay, and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.

She put her hands on my face and said only one thing: Save yourself.

She told us we would run out of gas again just over the Colorado border, and we did.

Now, in the hospital room, Sara looks at me blankly. “When did we go to Nevada?” she asks. Then she shakes her head. “We need to talk. If Anna is really going through with this hearing on Monday, then I need to review your testimony.”

“Actually.” I look down at my hands. “I'm going to speak on Anna's behalf.”

“What?”

With a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure Kate is still sleeping, I do my best to explain. “Sara, believe me, I've thought long and hard about this one. And if Anna's through being a donor for Kate, we've got to respect that.”

“If you testify for Anna, the judge is going to say that at least one of her parents is capable of supporting this petition, and he's going to rule in her favor.”

“I know that,” I say. “Why else would I do it?”

We stare at each other, speechless, unwilling to admit what lies at the end of each of these roads.

“Sara,” I ask finally, “what do you want from me?”

“I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like,” she says thickly. “I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back.”

But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.

To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

 

SARA

BRIAN AND I ARE SITTING ON THE COUCH, sharing sections of the newspaper, when Anna walks into the living room. “If I mow the lawn, like, until I get married,” she asks, “can I have $614.96 right now?”

“Why?” we say simultaneously.

She rubs her sneaker into the carpet. “I need a little cash.”

Brian folds the national news section. “I didn't think Gap jeans had gotten quite that expensive.”

“I knew you'd be like this,” she says, ready to huff away.

“Hang on.” I sit up, rest my elbows on my knees. “What is it you want to buy?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Anna,” Brian responds, “we're not forking over six hundred bucks without knowing what it's for.”

She weighs this for a minute. “It's something on eBay.”

My ten-year-old surfs eBay?

“Okay,” she sighs. “It's goaltender leg pads.”

I look at Brian, but he doesn't seem to understand, either. “For hockey?” he says.

“Well, duh.”

“Anna, you don't play hockey,” I point out, and when she blushes, I realize this may not be the case at all.

Brian presses her into an explanation. “A couple of months ago, the chain fell off my bike right in front of the hockey rink. A bunch of guys were practicing, but their goalie had mono, and the coach said he'd pay me five bucks to stand in net and block shots. I borrowed the sick kid's equipment, and the thing is… I wasn't that bad at it. I liked it. So I kept coming back.” Anna smiles shyly. “The coach asked me to join the team for real, before the tournament. I'm the first girl on it, ever. But I have to have my own equipment.”

“Which costs $614?”

“And ninety-six cents. That's just the leg pads, though. I still need a chest protector and catcher and a glove and a mask.” She stares at us expectantly.

“We have to talk about it,” I tell her.

Anna mutters something that sounds like Figures, and walks out of the room.