Through the window we watched the girl with the bald head and her taller, athletic twin brother play with the amiable pig. She had tied a red ribbon to a stick and was clumping around the muddy paddock, the boy running ahead, the pig giving chase in starts, as if unconvinced of the amusement in all this but indulgent. I asked about the child’s illness. I was almost afraid to ask, but the mother told me she had been diagnosed and started treatment about a year ago, that the disease seemed to respond to the chemotherapy, but it was unpredictable and aggressive and kept coming back. They went down to Charlottesville for the treatment, she said, and Cassidy liked going there, they tried to give her a treat each time, like taking her to the zoo or the children’s museum. Wayne came too. We try to make it a holiday for all of us, she said. She ran the faucet in the sink and held her hands underneath, letting the stream slip though her fingers. When it recedes she has a time of reprieve, she said, like now, after her chemo. She was in bed until yesterday morning. Now she wants to play outside all day. Next week we go back to the oncologist. If the cancer keeps spreading, it will destroy her, they say. With this cancer, once it spreads, the doctor says he cannot give a child more than a few months to live at best. She looks so full of vitality, I ventured. She looks like she must be healing. We do our best, said Dora Jean. There are all sorts of new cancer drug trials, we do everything the doctors want—radiation, drugs. It keeps coming back, she said, whispering, no matter what we do. She turned; I saw she had been silently crying. I looked, startled, into her swimming eyes, they were pale blue and the skin around them creased, tiny blue veins ran across her face, the pores of her skin visible. We don’t know how much time she has, we just don’t know. A sensation of vertigo seized me, as of a darkening tunnel closing, my limbs giving way. I wanted not to hear this, I thought, who wanted to hear such a thing? I held on to the kitchen table with both hands. I’m so sorry, I said, feeling inadequate. In my mind ran an old history lesson, about the young Siddhartha, the four things he encountered, that he didn’t want to know about, what were they—old age, suffering (or was it disease?), death, and asceticism, only the last one being a positive. I moved abruptly, not wanting to think about the child’s illness.
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