Days passed. Finally, the doctors on a “tumor board” met and took a vote, because, much like our decision making at the orphanage, they have to be realistic with the people who come to them. Five of the eight voted yes, which meant proceed with your surgery. I tried not to think about the three who voted no.

  We wanted to prepare you for what was going to happen. But your English back then wasn’t what it became, and my Creole was just so-so, and anyhow Miss Janine and I decided that this was not going to be a crash course for you in brain surgery, the way it had to be for us. Maybe we made the right decision, maybe we did not. I think we did. You were five years old, and we wanted you to enjoy being five years old, so we weren’t showing you drawings of lobes and ventricles.

  When we woke you early on the day of the operation, we hugged and kissed you as we always did, and we sang a good morning song as you dressed in the predawn darkness. We told you we were going to the building with the Superman, where the doctors were going to help you feel better. You yawned. You chose a doll for the ride. I lifted you into the car seat.

  And exactly five years, five months, and six days after you entered this world in that cinder block house by the breadfruit tree, you entered the towering Mott Children’s Hospital, where they assigned us a room and brought you a gown, light blue, with dancing bears all over it. Miss Janine helped you change.

  At one point, I was asked to sign consent papers in the hallway. There were diagrams, explanations. I mostly remember the part about “risk.” Risk of blood clotting. Risk of transfusions. Risk of possible side effects, including “death.” I tried to move through these briskly, telling myself they were required but highly unlikely warnings, the omnipresent slight chance of rain on a sunny day.

  Two hours later, you were in an operating room, under anesthesia. Instruments were prepped. Doctors and nurses surrounded you. Finally, a neurosurgeon named Hugh Garton, a thin, fit man who likes to climb mountains in his spare time, opened your precious little head and witnessed the invader firsthand.

  He spent a long time attacking it and trying to remove it, hours, really, a little here, a little more there, but it was entangled with so many important parts of your brain that he could not take out much; it was like that game Operation that the kids play at the mission, where if you touch the edge, you set off the buzzer.

  Dr. Garton removed about ten percent of the mass and then, choosing caution, stopped there. They stitched you back up and wheeled you to the recovery area.

  All this time, Miss Janine and I waited in the massive lobby, with a beeper that lit with periodic updates. Every new message sprung us forward.

  Finally, in the late afternoon, it flashed SURGERY COMPLETE. An hour later, we got our first look at you. You were sleeping on your side, so small, you only took up half the gurney, with tubes and wires attached to your body, and a large white bandage with a tiny bow wrapped around your head.

  My heart sank.

  Of all the hospital moments we would go through together, Chika, that one was perhaps the hardest, because until that point, despite the MRIs, the consultations, even signing those consent papers, I still had not faced the full gravity of your situation. You were playful in your first days with us, chasing me around the house, and I let myself get lost in that.

  Now here you were, so tiny on that gurney, knocked out by the anesthesia, surrounded by monitors. They had cut you open and worked for hours, yet nobody was saying “We got it all.” There was no relief, just more questions, and days to wait before the pathology came back. They said you would be in pain for some time, and even with the drugs, we should expect some challenges.

  I stared straight ahead. I had let them do this. I had given my OK. The thought that my decisions had in any way hurt you turned my stomach into knots.

  It also left me humbled, Chika. This might be hard to understand. But to that point, I still felt, foolishly, that I was in control of things—with you, with our kids—like I was Superman in that lobby. I had strength, I had resources. If I didn’t know something, I could learn it and still lead. Our kids were small. I was the grown-up. I could take care of whatever came our way.

  Standing over you that day, facing the first serious medical issue in the five years I’d been operating the orphanage, that sense of control was obliterated. A sense of foreboding took its place. You were smaller than me, yes. But what if this challenge was bigger than both of us?

  “Happy New Year!”

  We are on the cusp of 2014, and the kids jump around and sing “Auld Lang Syne,” which I taught them, minus the words, because I don’t know the words. So we all just holler, “Da-daaa, da-da-da, da, da-daaaa. . . .”

  It’s been our tradition since my first winter at the mission. Each December 31, we have a special dinner of pizzas from a Port-au-Prince hotel, and cups of apple juice, and a large sheet cake with chocolate icing. This is followed by the lighting of sparklers, one per child. We put them in the dirt along our wall and make a wish. When the last of the sparklers burns out, it is officially “our” New Year, even though it is barely eight-thirty.

  “Happy New Year, Chika,” I say, kneeling beside Chika Jeune, who has been with us for about six months. “Can you say ‘Happy New Year’?”

  She has a solid row of baby teeth, her two front ones touching.

  “’appy new year,” she says.

  “You know what? Tomorrow is January, which means your birthday is coming up. And you’ll get to wear the birthday crown.”

  Her eyes widen.

  “When my birt’day?” she asks.

  “Nine more days.”

  “How old I be?”

  “Four.”

  She considers this, and I count on my fingers to show her. When I reach four, I tap her soft cheeks and say, “Boink.” She rushes forward in a happy hug, although I don’t know if it’s for me or for the news that she will soon be older.

  Us

  “Mister Mitch?”

  Hmm?

  “Then what happened?”

  Hmm?

  “At the hospital?”

  I realize I have drifted off and am staring out the window at a dawn redwood tree, whose yellow needles are thick in these summer months. It’s the only yellow tree in our backyard, and I was trying to remember if we planted it, or if it was here when we bought the house twenty-five years ago.

  “Never miiiind,” Chika says, waving a hand.

  No, it’s OK, I say. You asked. I should tell you. I just don’t like this part.

  “How come?”

  Because it was bad news.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  It wasn’t bad news?

  She shakes her head no.

  * * *

  How could she determine that? I never told her this story, the moment Janine and I entered a small consultation room a few days after Chika’s surgery.

  Anyone who has sat through that slice of time, when you don’t know something awful and then you do, will confirm that it is literally a bend in your life, and what is critical is what you choose next; because you can view a diagnosis many ways—as a curse, a challenge, a resignation, a test from God.

  Janine and I had been hopeful that morning, based on doctors’ earlier analysis, that the mass in Chika’s brain could be manageable. It was fuzzy on the scans. And the frozen samples they removed during surgery were not overly alarming. The hope was for a grade one tumor, most easily dealt with, but we were braced for a grade two, which they warned could involve some radiation and long-term surveillance.

  Instead, Dr. Garton came into that consultation room, sat down, and, in a soft but direct voice, said the news was not good, worse than they’d thought, that Chika had something called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. When I asked if that was a grade one or two, he said it was “a four.”

  A four?

  He began to lay out options, which included radiation therapy and experimental medications, but all I heard was “four.” Four? I felt like I was stumbling, even as I was sitting down. Four? I kept listening for the part where the surgeons go back and take the whole monster out, but it never came. Apparently, if they did that, there would be nothing left of Chika’s brain to function.

  Four?

  “I’m really sorry to be bringing you this news,” Dr. Garton said. He shared some ominous truths about DIPG: There were only around three hundred cases in the United States every year; it usually struck children Chika’s age, between five and nine; it quickly debilitated them—their walking, their mobility, their swallowing. And the kicker: its long-term survival rate was, basically, zero.

  We were stunned. As Dr. Garton ran through the options, I remember deliberately closing my mouth, because it was hanging open, and realizing there was even more to this moment than the feeling of a piano crashing on your head; we were supposed to make a decision. That’s why he was telling us all this horrible information.

  A decision? On Chika’s life? She had just gotten to America, what, a few weeks ago? We were buying her shoes. Asking if she liked scrambled eggs. She was supposed to stay a couple of months, then return to the orphanage, cured by our amazing American medicine. A decision on her life?

  Janine and I exchanged glances.

  “What if she were your child?” I mumbled, falling back on that shell game of putting the onus on the doctor.

  “Well,” Dr. Garton said, exhaling, “I would probably take her back to Haiti, let her enjoy the summer, be with her friends, until . . .”

  It’s in the “until” that everything awful lies.

  I could see Janine tearing up. I felt my insides welling. I blurted out the question before I lost the courage to ask it.

  “How long does she have?”

  “Maybe four months,” he said, softly, then added, “maybe five,” although I think he just said five to ease the blow of four. Four. Again, a four. He said radiation could extend that time frame, maybe double it, although her “quality of life” might be affected, and he personally wouldn’t choose it, because she’d have to stay here instead of returning home, and, in the end, it would not make a difference.

  Now, generally, I am inclined to heed doctors’ advice. I respect their knowledge and expertise. But when he said “quality of life,” something turned in me like a crank. Here we were, sitting in America, in an extraordinary hospital in a very affluent city. “Quality of life,” as we knew it, had little connection to the land in which Chika was born, and whose toughness she carried in her veins. Remembering that she’d survived an earthquake in her first days on Earth, and slept in the sugarcane fields, and endured the death of a mother she barely knew, and had already bounced between four different homes, the idea of sending her back to wait for her demise seemed cruel. I found myself growing defensive, like a manager whose boxer was being underestimated.

  “She’s a fighter,” I finally said, looking over at Janine, who nodded. “And if she fights, we’re gonna fight.”

  Dr. Garton leaned back. “All right,” he said.

  And then, for a few moments, we all just sat there, staring at an invisible battle plan.

  * * *

  “Yay!”

  Chika claps her hands.

  What? I say.

  I realize I have been talking out loud, telling her the tale I didn’t want to tell her.

  “Yay!” she says again.

  Why are you clapping? Because I told you the story?

  No answer.

  Because we chose to fight?

  No answer.

  Why, Chika?

  She stands and takes my hands. She mashes them together.

  “Clap for us, Mister Mitch!”

  I flip my palms, confused.

  And she is gone again.

  Three

  Courtesy of the author

  Me

  Twenty years before Chika came to live with us, I embarked on the journey of my life. It wasn’t a great distance, less than seven hundred miles on an airplane from Detroit to Boston, and a thirty-minute rental car ride to the suburb of West Newton. I had come to visit an old college professor.

  His name was Morrie Schwartz.

  Morrie was dying. He’d been hit with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, the progressive neurodegenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, named for the famous 1930s baseball player who, forced to retire due to this illness, still announced in his farewell at Yankee Stadium, “Today . . . I consider myself . . . the luckiest man . . . on the face of the earth.”

  “Yeah. Well,” Morrie would tell me, “I didn’t say that.”

  At the time, I was thirty-seven and working five jobs, newspapers, TV, radio, books, freelance. I never said no to anything for fear I wouldn’t be asked again. I only learned of Morrie’s illness from television, an interview he did on ABC’s Nightline program. Ted Koppel, the show’s anchor, had flown up from Washington, D.C., to meet the elfish, dying professor, who was teaching visitors, often with a smile, what imminent death revealed about life. Koppel was so impressed with Morrie’s attitude, despite no longer being able to walk, dress, or bathe on his own, that Nightline did an entire show on him, and would do two more.

  I saw the first of these, and my jaw dropped. Morrie—a healthier version—had been my favorite college professor at Brandeis University. He taught sociology. I took every class he offered. He felt more like an uncle than a teacher. We’d walk around campus together, eat lunches together. Morrie was so ablaze with ideas, even with his mouth full, that when he spoke, little pieces of egg salad would come flying my way. (I once wrote that I had two urges the whole time I knew him: to hug him, and to hand him a napkin.)

  On graduation day, I gave Morrie a present, a briefcase with his initials on it. He teared up and hugged me and said, “Mitch, you’re one of the good ones. Promise me you’ll stay in touch.”

  I promised that I would.

  Then I broke that promise.

  For sixteen years.

  Sixteen years without a visit, a letter, even a phone call. I had no excuse except the one we all use. I was “busy”—in every pathetic way we employ that word—an in-demand sports journalist, climbing ladders, stacking successes, ever so importantly engaged, I thought.

  So when I saw Morrie on Nightline all those years later, my shock was followed by something gnawing. Guilt. Or maybe shame. The sense that I was no longer “one of the good ones.”

  I called him up. I made plans to see him. It was supposed to be a single visit. But Morrie broke through something during that first encounter. Even though weak and confined to a wheelchair, he so deftly dissected me—saying, “Dying is only one thing to be sad about, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else”—that I found myself coming back, another Tuesday and another Tuesday and all the Tuesdays he had left in his life. We took one last “class” together about what truly matters in life once you know you are dying, and he pulled out of me a better, previous version of myself.

  Our visits were eventually chronicled in a manuscript I wrote to pay his medical bills, Tuesdays with Morrie, which was supposed to be a small book yet somehow became a big book. And I became, as the years passed, an eternal graduate assistant for Morrie’s final course.

  It changed me. It couldn’t help but change me. My conversations with strangers went from who was going to win the Super Bowl to “My mother just died and the last thing we did was read your book together. Can I talk to you about her?” Perhaps my old professor knew that my hard head would require daily knocks to reach a softer, wiser center. Tuesdays with Morrie provided the pounding. It was a constant riptide back into Morrie’s waters, quoting him, recalling him, answering questions about him, until the actions once steered by him felt natural to me.

  I was asked to speak at hospice events, medical conventions, universities. I began to visit and even counsel newly diagnosed ALS patients.

  With the terminally ill, I shared Morrie’s observation that his last months proved his most vibrant; he likened them to the vivid colors of a dying leaf.

  With the healthy, I repeated Morrie’s mantra of pretending each day to have a bird on your shoulder, a bird that you ask, “Is today the day I die?”—and to live each day as if the answer were “Yes.”

  So you might think the journey of my life, twenty years earlier, was part of the Lord’s brilliant plan for handling Chika’s prognosis, arming me with a sturdy philosophy, and a heart steeled for the grimmest of news.

  Except an old man looking back on his years is not a little girl looking forward to hers.

  And, as it turns out, you can have more than one journey of your life.

  Us

  Chika? I say.

  I don’t see her. But I hear muffled laughter.

  I get out of my chair. I walk around the room. It is early September, more than a month since her last visit.

  Where is Chika? I say.

  This was a frequent game we played. Finding Chika. She would hide when she heard the front door open, under a blanket or beneath the kitchen table, and you’d have to yell, “Where is Chika? We lost her! Where is she?” until your voice displayed enough panic that she would burst forth and shout in her budding English, “Here is me!” Then she’d crack up laughing and throw her shoulders forward in hysterics. I have never witnessed a child happier to be discovered.

  Now, apparently, we are playing the game again.

  Where is Chika? I intone. Where did she go?

  I see a blanket spread over a futon, which I sleep on sometimes when I write into the night. I grab the blanket. I make my voice playful.

  Is she under . . . here? I say, yanking it up.

  “Nooooo,” she answers, from across the room.

  I turn. She is standing by my desk, reading the yellow pad. So I guess the game is over.