The geography of home is accidental: where you’re born, where you grow up, the tugs and hooks of what you know and what shaped you. Home is pure chance. But it can also be a choice. They’d built a whole life in South Africa, with their friends, and Miles’s friends, and good jobs and a lovely school, and their ramshackle house in Orange Grove with the stained-glass windows and the creaky wooden floors that always tipped them off that Miles was about to bounce into their bed, and the rising damp they battled every other year, and their overgrown garden where their cat Mewella Fitzgerald liked to lurk in the long grass and pounce on your ankles. They’d chosen this home, this life, their people. On purpose. So yes, she was damn well going back, thanks for asking, Immigration Guy.
Don’t tempt the fates.
“Please place your right hand on the fingerprint reader. Look into the camera. You too, little man.” The agent examined his screen, and then stamped their green mambas and waved them through. “Enjoy Disneyland!”
Did they pick it up right there? On the fingerprint reader, which she’s never ever seen wiped down? Or was it the elevator call button at the park hotel they’d paid extra for so they could be first through the gates? Jabbing a pin code into the credit card machine at the restaurant? The handrail on the Incredicoaster? Or passed hand-to-glove from Goofy to Chewie to the kids? All she knows is that within a few days, all eight of them came down with the flu. They didn’t know then it was HCV. No one did. Or what the strain carried inside it, like a crackerjack oncovirus surprise.
They all spent the whole weekend dripping snot and sloping feebly from Splash Mountain to Harry Potter World, on a cocktail of decongestants and flu meds she’d brought along in her family first-aid kit.
“At least it isn’t measles,” Devon had joked. It made for a good story, all of them holed up together, in the inter-leading hotel rooms. Jay led the kids in making a blanket fort, turning the couches upside down with the comforter spread over them, and they got room service and watched movies and it was a bonding experience, wasn’t it? “Connective tissue(s),” she’d joked, and even Intimidating Sister-in-Law™ Tayla had smiled and groaned at the terrible pun.
And four months later, Jay received his diagnosis. What were the chances of a seventeen-year-old developing prostate cancer? Like winning the worst lottery in the world. Devon flew back out to the U.S. for Christmas, Cole and Miles joined him in Chicago in February, when air travel was still a convenient irritation rather than a rarity for the very rich or connected. Miles insisted on going to see Jay in the hospital, wearing the “Fuck Cancer!” button he’d asked Cole to buy off the internet for him.
“Couldn’t you have got a censored version?” Devon complained, “It’s not cool for a kid to wear that. What about the other patients?”
“I’m one hundred percent sure they share the sentiment.” She and Miles had stoked themselves up on the plane. If you could explode tumors with pure righteous fury about the unfairness of it all, they would have been able to cure Jay and everyone else in a thousand-mile radius.
She’d switched away from the news when it came up, the cameras hungrily searching out the gaunt men and boys in the cancer wards, the graphs tracking the new cases across the world, the grim statistics—to protect Miles, she’d justified it to herself—and then mainlined it with a junkie’s fervor after he’d gone to bed.
“An unprecedented global epidemic” was one of the phrases you heard a lot, along with “experts are considering possible environmental factors” and, Cole’s personal favorite, from a shell-shocked oncologist, “cancer simply doesn’t work this way.” That one got meme-d. She caught Miles looking at the remix on YouTube, autotuned against a techno beat that kept getting faster and faster, set to scenes from some zombie movie.
When they arrived at the in-laws’ double-story apartment, smelly and jet-lagged, Tayla hugged her too tight, too long. She was alarmingly disheveled, in an oversize sweater and jeans, her braids pulled into a messy bundle rather than the ornate twists she usually wore, ashy and wan with bags under her eyes. This is what fear does to you, Cole thought. Fear and grief. Eric smiled too much, offered them coffee, and five minutes later coffee again, and the twins were subdued, tiptoeing around their parents, the dread an extra unwelcome guest in the house. But of course, it wasn’t sustainable. They swept Miles off to their room and the bright yelps of laughter that emerged felt like knives to the adults sitting downstairs, drinking only one cup of coffee (thank you, Eric).
But she still wasn’t prepared for how frail Jay looked when they got to the hospital for visiting hours. Like the life had been sucked out of him. His skin was tight around his bones, eyes sunken and dulled. Tayla and Eric waited outside—because the hospital only allowed three visitors at a time, and her sister-in-law insisted she had grading to do, besides. Holding on to normalcy any way she could. Cole knows what that’s like, now.
Jay smiled when he saw Miles, a hollow version of his sideways grin, his lips only flicking up a little. The crease at the corners of his eyes could as easily have been pain. In storybooks they warn you about witches with poison apples and conniving chancellors who lace the king’s wine with deadly substances. Try explaining to your ten-year-old kid that the doctors are voluntarily pumping poison into Jay’s veins to kill the other poison that is growing in deep and secret places inside him, the tumors bulging out of his cells like those bath toy beans that expand into sponge animals.
“Hey, squirt,” Jay reached out a hand to poke Miles’s badge. “I like your pin.”
“Hi, Jay,” was all Cole could manage, before the words caught in her throat. His bare head, the lack of eyebrows and lashes making his eyes look huge.
“You wanna come sit up here with me?” Jay said, patting the bed.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea…”
“It’s okay,” Devon said. “Tayla says the girls do it all the time. Just take your shoes off, buddy.”
“Watch the tubes and shit. Hang on, let me raise the back. You want to do it, press this button. But not too far or you might fold the bed in half.”
“What’s it feel like?” Miles said, squirming in next to Jay, although not quite touching him.
“It hurts when I pee. Like, a lot. And chemo sucks. It’s not working anyway.”
“Jay…” Devon warned.
“What? I’m not gonna lie to him.” He was angry. Understandable. “You can handle the truth, right, squirt?”
“Yeah!”
“Fuck cancer!”
“Fuck cancer.” But her son glanced over at her like he needed permission before he scrambled up.
“Hey, Jay, Miles made you a comic.”
“Get outta town.” Jay waved a hand. She couldn’t help but see the way the veins stood out, the pockmark scabs from all the needles that had been stuck in. “You made me a comic?”
“Yeah, it’s about monster babies who take over the world.”
“Oh, yeah, I see that. Tell me about this guy, he looks scary.”
“That’s Eruptor, he’s got a volcano head and when he gets mad, boom! Molten hot lava and burning rocks everywhere! Melt your face off.”