The man in the black coat stopped in the doorway of the dining hall and looked around the room.
He was tall. Maybe fifty. Dark suit, long black wool coat, gray at the temples. He didn’t look like anybody else in that room. Everybody else was wearing whatever they had. Hoodies. Work boots. A woman near the window had three sweaters on, one over the other.
He scanned the tables, slowly, like he was looking for one face out of three hundred.
Then he found it.
My son’s.
Noah was sitting next to me at the end of a long folding table, holding a paper cup of water. He’d been rubbing the zipper of his backpack with his thumb all afternoon. Back and forth. Back and forth.
When he saw the man, his thumb stopped.
His face went white. Whiter than the chemo had already made it.
He grabbed his backpack with both arms and pulled it into his lap.
The man walked straight across the dining hall toward us. Past the dessert table. Past the woman in three sweaters. Past a little boy eating chocolate cake with his hands.
He stopped in front of our table.
“Clarice?” he said.
I stood up.
“Yes?”
“I’m Daniel.”
I’d heard that name once before. Through a bedroom door. Hi, Daniel. Followed by a sentence that had been sitting in my chest like a stone for two weeks.
Please don’t tell my mom yet.
I looked down at Noah. He was holding his backpack like it was a life jacket.
“Is everything okay?” I said.
The man raised both hands. Palms out. Gentle.
“Yes,” he said. “Noah isn’t in trouble. I promise.”
I stayed standing.
He glanced down at my son. Something soft passed over his face. Then he looked back at me.
“He hasn’t told you the truth,” he said. “Has he?”
My husband, Mark, died four years ago.
It was a Thursday in October. He was driving home from his shift at the warehouse. A truck ran a red light on Route 9. The police officer who came to my door kept his hat in his hands the whole time. I remember that. I remember staring at that hat.
Noah was eight. He was in the living room building a tower out of couch cushions. He heard me make a sound I’d never made before, and he came running into the hallway, and he saw my face, and he knew.
I thought nothing in the world could ever hurt worse than that night.
I was wrong.
Eleven months ago, my son was diagnosed with cancer.
It started with bruises. Big purple ones on his shins that he couldn’t explain. Then he got tired. Not normal tired. He fell asleep at the dinner table one night with his fork in his hand.
Then a fever that wouldn’t go away.
Then a blood test.
Then a doctor in a small room with a box of tissues on the table, saying a word I had to ask her to spell.
Leukemia.
Noah was eleven when treatment began.
He turned twelve in a hospital room.
I bought cupcakes from the hospital cafeteria for his birthday. Chocolate, with blue frosting. That was all they had.
He took one bite and made a face.
“This frosting tastes like toothpaste,” he said.
“It does not.”
“It does. Minty toothpaste. Taste it.”
I tasted it. It tasted a little bit like toothpaste.
He ate two.
That was Noah. Even scared, even sick, even with a tube in his arm, he could find something ridiculous to say.
That night, after the nurses came through for the last check, he looked up at me from his pillow.
“Mom,” he said. “I have to get better.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because who else is gonna leave dirty socks all over the house?”
I laughed.
Then I said I was going to get some ice. I stepped out into the hallway, and I pressed my back against the wall next to the hand sanitizer dispenser, and I cried into my sleeve until a nurse named Tasha came and put her hand on my shoulder and didn’t say anything.
He never saw that part.
At least, I hoped he didn’t.
For weeks, I barely left his room.
I slept in the fold-out chair by the window. It was too short for me. My feet hung off the end. I learned to sleep curled up on my side like a shrimp.
There were tests. Then more tests. Then waiting for the results of the tests. Then more waiting.
Some mornings, Noah barely touched breakfast. He’d push the eggs around with his spoon and say he wasn’t hungry and turn toward the wall.
Other mornings, he demanded pancakes.
“Not the hospital ones,” he’d say. “The real ones. From the place downstairs. With the whipped cream.”
I learned to love the pancake mornings. I’d run down four flights of stairs in my socks to get them before he changed his mind.
He kept a drawing of the ocean taped to the wall beside his bed.
He’d drawn it himself, with markers, the first week. Big blue waves with white tops. A yellow sun. A seagull that looked more like a capital M.
He’d never seen the ocean. Not once in his whole life. We live in Ohio. Mark always said we’d go someday. Myrtle Beach. He’d even looked up hotels.
Someday never came.
Sometimes, late at night, when Noah couldn’t sleep, he’d look at the drawing.
“Mom,” he’d say. “Are waves really that loud? Like on TV?”
“I think so.”
“Louder than the hospital?”
“I think so, baby.”
“Nothing’s louder than the hospital.”
“We’ll find out,” I said. “Someday. I promise.”
Then, one afternoon in March, a volunteer from a children’s charity came to his room.
Her name was Beth. She had red curly hair and a cheerful smile and a purple folder pressed against her chest.
“Noah,” she said, “I have a question for you.”
Noah looked at her folder suspiciously.
“Does it involve another needle?”
She laughed. “Not this time.”
She sat down on the edge of the chair and explained. Her organization granted special wishes. For kids who were going through serious illnesses. They could choose something meaningful. An experience. A trip. Something to look forward to.
Noah sat up straighter in bed.
“Like anything?”
“We’ll talk about what’s possible,” Beth said. 