Chapter 13: It’s Back

Two Good Years

First passed, and then second, in the ordinary, uneventful way childhood is supposed to pass and so rarely had for either of them until now. Cissy grew three inches. Liam lost his first tooth in the school cafeteria, to general applause, and insisted on keeping it in a small film canister rather than trusting it to any tooth fairy arrangement, on the grounds that some things a person ought to hang onto himself. Scans came back clean, every time, spaced further apart each year the way Dr. Li had promised they eventually would, until the appointments themselves began to feel less like verdicts and more like ordinary errands, penciled into a calendar between dentist visits and birthday parties.

They were, by the plain evidence of any hallway at Larkspur Elementary, inseparable — a fact so thoroughly established by second grade that new students learned it within their first week, the way you learn which teacher gives the most homework or which water fountain runs warm.

They had sleepovers again by then, real ones, unremarkable ones — no fever, no hospital, just two children building blanket forts in Liam’s room on ordinary Friday nights the way any two best friends might, and Bea found herself, more than once, standing in the doorway just to watch them fall asleep mid-conversation, some argument about a cartoon still hanging unfinished in the air between them.

Second grade brought a class trip to a working farm an hour outside Baltimore, the kind of ordinary school outing that would have been unthinkable two years before, and Cissy rode the bus there with her face pressed to the window the whole way, narrating every cow and fence post to Liam beside her as though he hadn’t seen a cow before either, and he let her, delighted by her delight, adding nothing of his own except an occasional “I see it, I see it” that made her laugh every single time.

“I forget sometimes that she was ever that sick,” Bea admitted to Étaín, watching a photograph from the trip that a teacher had emailed home — Cissy grinning gap-toothed beside a goat, Liam half a step behind her, watching her rather than the camera. “Is that a terrible thing to admit? Forgetting?”

“It’s not terrible,” Étaín answered. “It’s what we were fighting for. A life ordinary enough to forget, now and then, what it cost to get here.”

It was inevitable, given that, that the other kind of attention eventually arrived — the kind that had nothing to do with cancer or hospitals or anything either mother still quietly watched for, and everything to do with being seven years old and constantly in each other’s company.

“Liam and Cissy, sitting in a tree,” a boy named Dante sang out one lunch period, delighted with his own cleverness, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”

A ripple of giggling went down the table. Liam looked up from his sandwich with an expression of genuine, unbothered confusion, the way he might have looked at a math problem that simply didn’t add up.

“We don’t do that,” he said, plainly, not even annoyed, just correcting a fact that seemed to need correcting. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my Cissy. That’s a different thing.”