The First Play Belonged to Riley

On the twenty-ninth day, they did the test again.

That is how they count it. Day one is the first day of medicine, and on day twenty-nine they take another sample of the marrow and send it to a lab to look for the disease at levels no one can see. A week later we drove down on a Tuesday and sat in a room with a fish tank.

Dr. Lindqvist came in with a folder and did not make us wait.

“It’s clear,” she said. “It’s what we hoped for. There’s no sign of it in the marrow.”

She had to say it again, because Mark said, “Say that last part again,” and Riley, who had held very still, looked at the ceiling tiles and let out a breath that must have been in his chest since August.

I went and stood in the hall in front of a framed painting of a barn, and I let my knees do what they wanted.

I want to be careful here about what a good report is. It was not the end. It meant the first month had done what a first month is supposed to do, and that there were two and a half years of medicine ahead, with a port and a binder and a mask on every errand. The church sent a card. I put it on the refrigerator beside the schedule with Mark’s pencil in the margin.

Our days found a shape after that. Riley did school at the kitchen table. Hannah did homework on the other side of it, close enough to see his play sheets, and pretended not to look. I went to the elevator in the morning and came home at five. Mark ran the combine through October with his phone in the cab, and I learned later he had set it to buzz only for me and for Coach Dunn.

I noticed that the casseroles on the porch had slowed and then stopped, the way they do, because people have lives. I did not mind. But one Tuesday afternoon a woman I knew only slightly from the quilting circle knocked, and when I came to the door she was already walking back to her car, calling over her shoulder that she was not coming in, she only wanted me to have a loaf of banana bread and to know that nobody expected a thank-you note. I stood there with the bread. It was still warm. It occurred to me that there is a particular grace in being allowed to receive something without owing it back, and that my son had been trying to say the same thing about shirts and signs.

Riley took his pills at the kitchen table at seven in the morning and seven at night, lined up in a plastic tray like a row of tiny soldiers, and he swallowed them one by one without complaint. He had decided early that if the medicine was going to be a job, it was going to be a job he did well.

I have told you about the good nights. I should tell you about the one that was not.