Chapter 2
It was Mateo who broke the ice, because Mateo had the particular gift of a seven-year-old who has been in enough hospital rooms to have stopped performing the social rituals that the rest of us spend our whole lives hiding behind. He looked at my beard, which I had been growing since I was twenty-six and which had achieved a scale and density that occasionally startled people who rounded corners unexpectedly, and he whispered, "That looks heavy."
I looked down at it. "It has its own zip code," I said.
A couple of the kids laughed. Not all of them. The girl in the pink hat did not laugh. She was sitting at the craft table with green eyes that tracked everything in the room without landing anywhere long enough to invite a conversation, and a pink knit hat pulled so far down it nearly touched her eyebrows. Her name was Ava, which the nurse told me later, after everything. She had not taken the hat off in three weeks, since her hair had started coming out in the particular way that treatment takes hair, quickly and without negotiation.
Beside her was a boy named Jalen, ten years old, with a red cap and a superhero blanket across his knees and the tired expression of a kid who had figured out something about the world that he was too young to have needed to figure out yet. Across from them was a little girl named Sophie, six years old, with a yellow scarf wrapped around her head that she touched at the edge every time someone new entered the room, like checking that it was still there.
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The nurse's name was Emily Carter. Red hair, blue scrubs, eyes that were kind in the way that costs something to maintain, the kind of kindness that does not come free. She moved through the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who has learned exactly how much comfort she can offer and exactly where the line is between comfort and intrusion. She had been working this floor for seven years. I did not know that yet either. I found it out later, the way I found out most of the things that mattered about that afternoon.
I noticed the mirror before I noticed most of the other things. It was on the wall beside the craft table, the kind of large wall mirror that playrooms have so that children can see themselves while they play, and it was covered entirely with construction paper. Sheets of it, overlapping, taped at the edges. Green and yellow and orange, carefully applied, doing a thorough job.
