How High We Go in the Dark(14)

“You don’t need to stay,” she whispered, still lying next to her son.

I took the dishes to the kitchen. Dorrie stepped out of the room and thanked me for the welcome.

“Fitch really doesn’t have friends anymore,” she said. “I think it meant a lot to him to have someone else here.”

I poured us each another glass of wine, finishing off the bottle. I took a long sip, not really knowing what else to say.

“Can I ask you why you came to the park?” Dorrie asked.

“I was the class clown in high school,” I explained. “But, you know, I came from a stereotypical Silicon Valley Asian family, which meant being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker or tech entrepreneur. I just wanted to make people laugh. I wanted to help people cut through the bullshit and see the world.”

“So, you had a gift and you didn’t want to waste it,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“Not sure me making fun of my cheap parents or telling stories about going to comic book conventions to pick up women is much of a gift, even if they are one of the few public spaces in America where it feels totally fine to be Asian, especially when the girls think you look like some anime character.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“So many Sailor Moon dates.”

Dorrie took a sip of wine and tried to contain her laughter, almost dribbled some onto her shirt.

“At least here I feel like I’m helping people, even if it’s not the way I ever would have planned it,” I said.

I showed up at Dorrie’s cottage the next day and the one after that, devising a different excuse each time. I brought Fitch some of the comics I’d amassed as a kid, along with paints from the gift shop for Dorrie, since she’d mentioned attending art school before she became a mother. She immediately set about painting a solar system in Fitch’s room, complete with spaceships. In the living room, she painted glowing orbs filled with light, flowers, and scenes from ancient history that Fitch told her he sometimes sees when he dreams. After about a week, I stopped making excuses and Dorrie knew to expect me at her door or outside her work most evenings. She was a part-time office assistant in the checkout facility, where parents went to collect the ashes of their children. We never really discussed a name for our arrangement, and I told myself that I wasn’t responsible for Fitch, that the whole situation was more than I wanted in my life. Part of me worried that I was using her to feel like a decent human being.

Every time I talked to my parents, I wanted to tell them about Dorrie, but I didn’t want to jinx whatever it was I had with her. Months later, I finally told them I’d met someone.

“She’s beautiful and paints these fantastical dreamscapes. And she has a terrific son.”

“A son?” they both said in unison.

“Is he—?” my mother began.

“Yes, he’s sick,” I said.

My mother’s gaze seemed to reach across the state, through the screen. My father only shook his head.

“Hope you know what you’re getting into, son,” he said.

“Oh, Skip,” my mother said. She held a hand in front of her mouth as if to contain her disappointment.

“It’s a good thing, really,” I said. “For me. For them.” I looked out the window toward the cottages, imagined Fitch reading one of my comic books.

“We hope so,” my mother said.

After ending the call with my parents, I walked to Dorrie’s cottage and found her outside gazing up at the sky with a small telescope, swirling paint on canvas, creating an imaginary wormhole just beyond the moon, a maelstrom of violet and yellow. At the wormhole’s center, perhaps millions of light-years away, she’d painted a tiny blue planet, not unlike Earth, orbiting a red star.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked, and saw that tears had stretched her mascara into tiny flames. I assumed she was upset about Fitch, since she never met the other kids at work like I do. Her job is to deliver a small wooden box of ash, with nothing but a name, photo, height, and age in her file to guide her through the process.

“I’m wondering if he’ll ever be well enough to play on that jungle gym set in the courtyard. If any of them will be.”

I stared at the swing set, the rainbow carousel, tried to imagine children playing. I had never wanted kids, but the fact that I could barely remember ever seeing one playing in the street, or on a crowded basketball court, or heading to school on a bus unnerved me.

“The park manager once told me the jungle gym was for morale,” I said. “To give the trial patients hope. I think part of him really wants to see the kids out there one day.”

We walked toward the playground. I followed Dorrie’s lead, took off my shoes to feel the cool sand under my feet before sitting on the swing. The seat was damp from the misty air. I could feel it soaking through my jeans, no doubt leaving a dark spot. The lights from the windows of the other cottages and trailers played like a dozen tiny television sets—glimpses of people washing dishes, eating dinner, having a fight. One of the guards was punching a heavy bag. Molly was playing some sort of board game with her parents. Victoria was doing yoga.

“I wish people would come out once in a while,” I said. “Apart from staring at the fire pit like zombies and getting shitfaced, I mean.”

“We’ve gotten so used to keeping to ourselves, surviving. You can’t blame them,” she said. “You know Fitch talks about this park like it’s some kind of promised land. He barely caught a glimpse of the rides when we got here, but he dreams about it. He asks me if I’ll ever take him, why we can’t go on one of his good days.”