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  With gratitude to all the doctors and nurses and patients

  who taught me what I know of medicine

  and

  In loving memory of my parents, Jacquie and Paul,

  who taught me everything else

  The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON, NATURE

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  AFTER THEY KILL ME, THERE is nothing.

  Not exactly nothing. There is a kind of blissful lapping quiet like the unmoored state between sleep and beginning to dream. And then after a long time, or after no time at all, the quiet is broken by bits of color, like bright crockery splinters bobbing on a dark current.

  A blond woman holds a blue towel wide—for me? Behind her are two small windows, hazy with steam. I am being given a bath. The woman is no one I recognize, and yet I do.

  Now a puppy, fuzzed and golden, pushes the warm leather of his snout into my hand before turning to follow some invisible taunting trace across the grass. A shock of delight goes through me; it’s the first time I am seeing a puppy. But how can that be? I had a dog named Bluestone, black as wet paint, who ran away when I was nine.

  The world chatters with echo, tastes meltingly familiar yet new on my tongue, voices like remembered song warbled through water. A snow-collared tree in the yard is ghosted by another, its trunk buried up to its fork in white, branches making a stark lace against a different sky.

  It’s all like a sweet dream I didn’t expect.

  I don’t perceive the before running out of everything until it is nearly done. Leaving only the solid now and an impression, like a tang of distant fragrance being borne away by a determined wind, that there is—or there once was—something more.

  CHAPTER ONE

  * * *

  Ben

  MY MOM HAS THREE FRECKLES, light brown and almost perfectly square, two on her right cheek and one on her nose. She has an up-and-down line between her eyebrows that gets deeper sometimes. Like now, when the car has parked and she’s gotten out, and I still haven’t moved.

  “We’re here,” she says, opening the back door. “Hop out.”

  I put my thumb on the seat belt button beside my booster seat. Nobody else in my class still uses a booster seat. In two months, when I turn seven, I can use just the seat belt. If I grow.

  “How long will it be?” I ask.

  She looks at her phone.

  “I’ll come back for you at seven. So, four hours.”

  “What are you going to do?” My thumb still on the button.

  She purses her lips in a thinking way. “I will go out dancing. I will put on an electric-blue gown that goes all the way down to my toes, and silver high-heeled slippers.”

  “No you won’t.” She doesn’t have a dress or shoes like that.

  “No I won’t,” she agrees, smiling. “I will probably do some grocery shopping and clean the kitchen.” She puts a hand on the top of the car door. “Or do you want me to stay?”

  I sneak a look at the house beyond her.

  “Why does it have to be so many people?” I ask.

  “It’s not so many. Four is not so many.”

  Her phone burrs from her pocket; she takes it out and looks at the screen, then puts it to her ear and turns away, talking. She pushes the car door almost closed and leaves her hand on it, like I might jump out.

  How she looks: she has yellow hair that comes down to her chin, eyebrows darker than her hair and brown eyes, a black speck in the right one the shape of a bird with only one wing. One tooth is slightly forward from the others in her mouth, just a little bit, and her smile goes up more on the left than the right. There’s a white line under her chin from a roller-skating accident back when she was a little girl. Two holes in her earlobes where the earrings go, usually the little pearls, but sometimes dangly ones; none today.

  How she sounds: her voice brisk in the mornings, telling me to get a move on, softer in the evenings, and when she laughs I think of a brown velvet ribbon falling through the air. The nonsense song she sings to me when my tummy aches: lavender blue dilly dilly, lavender green. I told her once that lavender’s a kind of purple, and purple can’t be blue or green; she paused and then said, But the song’s still good with a question in it. Yes, the song is still good just the way it is. Other things she says: I love you more than pizza, or Bingo, or caterpillars. Last week she asked me, Do you really have a stomachache? while I lay with my head on her soft lap, ear down. You’re having a lot of stomachaches. Shhh, I’m listening to your tummy, I said. Sometimes my stomach hurts when I’m worried about something, she said. Are you worried about something? Sing some more, I said, and she did.

  The way she smells. In the morning like hand cream and shampoo. She brings a different smell home with her from the hospital. I said something about it once and now she washes her hands and changes her clothes right after work. Until her next shower, though, there’s always still a trace of that chemical smell.

  How she feels—when I go to her room after a nightmare she lifts the covers and it’s warm and she puts her arm over me, across my chest, and it’s warm and solid and she pulls me against her and I can feel that warmth spreading through me and the bad dream melts away. I love you more than bunny rabbits and Jell-O. More than Gorgonzola and crayons. Her long fingers, their smooth unpolished curves of fingernail.

  Before is sliding away. I barely remember it. The tall woman with the water-blue eyes, like a mother but not my mother, I know there was a time I saw every detail about her in my mind, but now I see her only in flickers: standing in a kitchen paring the skin from an apple into a looping red curl, or kneeling in the dark spring dirt. I feel the wet on my knees too, and the grainy earth, but as soon as that comes it’s gone again. She lives there now in that warm slice of time before I sleep, and even that is getting smaller, closing like a door.

  “Buddy, you’re so serious,” Mom says, putting her finger on my nose. She’s off the phone now. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m memorizing you,” I say, and that warm brown ribbon unspools and falls around me. I close my eyes and breathe deep to pull the noise in with my ears.

  “You are so funny.” She bends down a little bit and looks me in the eyes. “Honey, there’s no law that says you have to go.”

  “I want to go.” Kyle is my best friend and I got him the toy he wants most and I can’t wait to see him open it. But I don’t know how it will be with the other boys there.

  She knows what I need to hear. She puts her hands on the top of the open window and rests her chin there, so she sounds like she’s chewing when she speaks. “You’ll go inside,” she says. “Maybe Kyle will open the door or maybe his mother.”

  “And Scooter.”

  “Uh-huh. Scooter will bark at first, and then he’ll see it’s you and he’ll wag his whole butt.”

  Kyle’s dog with the flat face, whose mouth doesn’t ever close all the way, his pink tongue with brown spots on it always showing, moving when he breathes. Scooter’s kind of gross. But it is funny how he wags his butt because he doesn’t have a real tail.

  “You’ll take your shoes off in the hall. Remember, they have those wood
floors. You’ll line your shoes up with the other shoes.”

  Now I can see the wood floor in my mind, long and shiny. Scooter’s toenails clack clack on it, and when he runs to the back door to greet Kyle’s dad he sometimes can’t stop and slides right past into the laundry room.

  “Then you’ll pet Scooter.” He’ll slobber on me and I’ll need to wash my hands; it’ll be okay, though, there’s a little bathroom on the first floor that Kyle’s mom calls the powder room. “Then you’ll probably play some games.”

  “Kyle has PlayStation.” I can see the basement room where the games are, the blue bouncy sofa and the Lego corner where Kyle and his dad are working on a castle. They’ve been building it for months and it’s taller than me.

  “Then you’ll have cake. I don’t know what kind,” she says before I can ask. “Maybe chocolate. You’ll sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and he’ll blow out the candles, and then he’ll open his presents and there may be some time to play with them before the movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I weigh this—the maybe-chocolate and the unidentified movie.

  “Then you’ll come?” I ask. “Right after the movie?”

  “Right after.”

  “Okay.” Now I can see it, the afternoon ahead into the evening, and finally the want to go defeats the dread. I push the belt release button with my thumb and the bands across my chest and tummy suck back into the holder. Mom straightens herself up and swings the car door open.

  “I can stay for a while,” she says, taking the wrapped box from the back of the car.

  “No.” No one else’s mother will be there. I’m the smallest kid in my class, the youngest by more than a year. The only one with training wheels, maybe the only one who’s never been to a sleepover. I can’t be the one whose mom stays with him during a birthday party.

  I hold her hand until we get to the front walk and then slip it out, just in case someone is watching from the window. When we’re on the doorstep, she gives me the present to hold.

  “Ben!” cries Kyle’s mom when she opens the door. She’s holding a coffee cup with a big yellow smile on it. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Thank you for inviting me,” I say. Kyle’s mom raises her eyebrows, makes a nodding smile at my mother.

  “I bet I know what this is.” Kyle’s mom takes the present from me with her free hand. “The boys are downstairs in the playroom. We’ll be having pizza and cake in a little while.”

  “Where’s Scooter?” I ask.

  “He’s on a doggy playdate,” says Kyle’s mom. “He gets a bit too enthusiastic around pizza.”

  “You okay, buddy?” Mom asks. She puts a hand under my chin; my heart pulses once, twice, against her fingertips where they touch my neck. I nod.

  “Go on downstairs. I’ll let you know when the pizza comes,” says Kyle’s mom.

  My mom drops her hand. She looks at me hard and I nod again; she smiles and follows Kyle’s mom toward the kitchen.

  I rip the Velcro straps on my shoes and line them up in the hall next to the others. I am careful not to slip on the wood floors. It’s easier when I get to the living room; there’s a carpet with a tasselly fringe. The door to the basement is around the corner.

  “What a little gentleman you’re raising, Karen,” I hear Kyle’s mom telling my mom as I open the basement door and the music of the PlayStation game swells out. “Can you stay for coffee?” I step down onto the first step and pull the door closed behind me.

  * * *

  WE HAVE TO take turns. There are four of us, but only two can play at one time. I get pretty far on my turns; I’m good at shooting things. In between it’s fun to watch Kyle play; it’s his game so he knows all the tricks.

  “I’m going again,” says Charlie when he’s finally Game Over. That’s not fair, he’s had a long turn with Kyle while Elliot and I watched. Charlie keeps the controller and presses the buttons to start a new game.

  “It’s my turn,” says Elliot. Charlie pretends not to hear him.

  “Who’s playing with me?” says Charlie. He’s one of the biggest kids in class. Some kids say he already did third grade at another school, and when he came to our school they made him repeat. So he should be fourth grade and I should be second grade, but we’re both in third. He and Kyle are on the same soccer team.

  “It’s my turn,” Elliot repeats. I really can’t believe he says this. Neither can Charlie; he turns his head slowly, like a robot. “It goes Kyle, then you, then me, then Ben.”

  “Lemme go. You can go next,” says Charlie.

  “It’s my turn,” repeats Elliot, and I want to tell him to shut up. Charlie hands the controller over, but I know that’s not the end of it.

  Kyle offers me his controller, but I shake my head; he shrugs and presses Start.

  So it’s Elliot and Kyle jumping through the Dragon Kingdom while Charlie and I watch. Charlie’s next to me on the sofa. He’s the kind of person who does something mean and then says, What, you can’t take a joke? when the other person is crying.

  “That’s the doorbell,” I say. Are more boys coming?

  “Probably the pizza,” says Kyle, jump-punching the serpent that killed me on my last turn. There’s heavy walking on the floor above. “Elliot, get that power-up right in front of you.”

  “Pizza!” says Charlie. “I’m starving.”

  “No green peppers, right?” says Elliot, collecting a trio of stars on the screen, boosting his health bar. “I’m allergic.”

  “I don’t know,” says Kyle. “My mom ordered.”

  “Smelliot’s allergic,” says Charlie in a whiny singsong.

  “I get hives,” says Elliot. “I swell up.”

  “Like your face swells up?” says Charlie. “Or what?”

  I can see that Charlie is hoping there will be green peppers. A part of me almost hopes so too. I’ve never seen someone swell up before. I’m allergic to cats, but when I get around them I don’t swell up, I itch and sneeze.

  “Everywhere,” says Elliot. “No green peppers or pecans,” he tells Kyle. “My mom must have told your mom.”

  “Pay attention,” orders Kyle. They’re at a tricky part.

  “Who puts pecans on pizza?” says Charlie.

  “Not on pizza,” says Elliot. “Just any pecans. In anything.”

  “She usually gets pepperoni,” says Kyle. “Jump now, jump!”

  “Smell-i-ot,” says Charlie. “Smelliot can’t eat pee-cans. What else can’t Smelliot eat?”

  And just like that we’re on the edge of something. I can feel it, Elliot can feel it. Kyle, who’s concentrating on the game, is unaware.

  “Just green peppers,” says Elliot. His voice is blank, like he’s making a wall with it, trying to stop what’s coming. His avatar takes one hit, then another. He flails, runs into a wall, tries to jump away from it, but his lifeline is pulsing red. “Ben, it’s your turn next.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.

  “Use the one upstairs,” says Kyle. He’s still trying to shoot them out of the dead-end Elliot has brought them to. “The one down here has spiders.”

  The word is electric. He has to know what will happen next. Or maybe kids like Kyle, kids everyone likes, don’t have to see what is obvious to kids like me and Elliot. We can see what’s coming: Charlie sitting on one of us, dangling a spider Open up while pinching nostrils shut. Chest burning, mouth finally gasping open. I can almost feel the spider legs tapping my tongue.

  “But it’s your turn.” Elliot is almost pleading; he’s looking at me instead of the screen. Kyle yelps disappointment at the dying whine of Game Over.

  “You can take my turn,” I tell him, pushing away the shame. I shouldn’t leave Elliot to risk the spiders on his own. “I really have to go.”

  I am quickly up the stairs, safe at the top. Behind me, I hear a thud and an oof—Elliot hitting the floor. I hesitate for a moment, but then turn the doorknob, step throug
h, and shut the door behind me. I cross the hallway into the powder room and close that door too. I didn’t actually have to pee before I went in, but suddenly I find I do. I turn on the fan and run the water in the sink. I’m careful, but I miss just a little bit, and I tear off some toilet paper to wipe up the drops from the floor. It’s the end of the roll, though, and when I pull the remnant off and the cardboard is naked, I’ve got only half a square in my hand. I open the cabinet under the sink, where Mom keeps the toilet paper at home, and there it is, a soft white pyramid. I’m not careful enough reaching into the cabinet: I jostle things and a plastic bottle tumbles out onto the floor and rolls away from me, spilling a thin line of oil.

  I retrieve the bottle, find the cap and screw it on, put it back into the cabinet. Then I crouch and try to wipe up the floor with toilet paper, but the oil spreads into a big shiny patch. It’s obvious that I spilled. Steps go by outside the door; is someone about to knock? My heart is going fast.

  I wind off lots of toilet paper, wet it in the still-running tap, pump one one thousand, two one thousand hand soap on, use the clump of it like a sponge to wash the floor. Too many bubbles; a bigger mess. I use several wet-tissue-clump sponges with no soap, and then some dry ones. When everything is finally back to the way it was, more than half the toilet paper roll is gone. I rub my hands under the water for two alphabet songs and sniff them to see if the oil is gone, but I can’t tell. Hand soap and two more alphabet songs, and then I dry them on one of the hanging towels, using the part that’s behind, next to the wall, so the wet doesn’t show. I turn off the tap and the overhead fan and take one last look at the floor. I can still see the shiny place, but maybe no one else will notice.

  Doors are always risky—you can never tell what’s on the other side. I use both hands to turn the doorknob and open the door just a bit, then a bit more, then finally take a breath and push so it swings wide open. Half expecting to see Charlie looming in the gap: you’ve been in there forever. Laughing, Eww you smell like a lady, maybe all the boys laughing, even Kyle, who’s never laughed at me before. But the hallway’s empty.