“What does it mean?” she asks. “‘Time Changes’?”

  It’s the second thing you taught me, I say. The second lesson on the list you wanted me to make.

  She pulls out my chair.

  “Write it.”

  Then she plops in the seat and laughs.

  I have to sit there to write, you know.

  “I know,” she says and laughs again.

  She spins the chair back and forth on its swivel. “Wrrrrr! Wrrrrr!” Suddenly, the blanket from the futon is in her hands. She pulls it over her head.

  “Where is Chika?” she yells.

  I sigh.

  Lesson Two

  Time Changes

  Do you remember the first morning you woke up at our house? I was already down in my office, because mornings are when I write. Suddenly, my phone rang; it was Miss Janine, calling from the bedroom. In a raspy, just-woke-up voice, she said, “Mister Mitch, Chika is hungry for breakfast. Can you help her?”

  I came upstairs and led you to the kitchen, and we found eggs and butter and some cheese and tomatoes. I showed you the frying pan, the burner, and you stood on your tiptoes and helped move the spatula around. I poured juice. We said our prayers.

  And I watched you eat.

  And I watched you eat some more.

  To call it “leisurely” doesn’t come close. You chewed. You looked out the window. You put down your fork, yawned, and picked up your fork again. You swayed back and forth to some internal rhythm. It took nearly an hour. I would compare this to the pace that I eat breakfast, except I don’t eat breakfast.

  But the next morning, when I heard your feet thumping down the steps at 7:00 a.m., I rose from my desk, met you at the door, lifted you as you said, “Mister Mitch, I am hungry!” and carried you up to the kitchen.

  A child is both an anchor and a set of wings.

  My old way of doing things was gone.

  Time changes. With a little one, it is no longer your own. All parents will tell you this. But perhaps because it happened to Miss Janine and me so late in life—after twenty-seven years of it being just the two of us—the difference was jolting.

  When we decided you were not going back to Haiti, Chika, not until we found a way to beat this awful thing, we brought you home from the hospital with two stuffed animals, a bandage on your neck, and a suitcase full of hopeful naivete. We didn’t realize the scope of this undertaking, that we were ushering in not only a child but a challenge—a full-time search for a cure to an aggressive disease that, two weeks earlier, we had barely heard of.

  You had a pace. The disease had a pace. And from that point forward, all we knew about time would change, from the way we used to spend it, to the way we cherished it.

  * * *

  Do you know how old I am, Chika? You used to guess “Thirty!” and when I said no, you tried “A hundred!” Relative age must be so mysterious to children, who count their time in half years. (“I’m five and a half!”) But we were in our late fifties when you came to live with us, young enough to maintain our routines, old enough to bristle at changing them.

  Not surprisingly, Miss Janine was faster at adapting than me. I think she was always, in some manner, preparing for this day.

  On the other hand, when I was younger, I was afraid of becoming a father. I saw how it ate up the hours. I worried that I wouldn’t give it the proper time and would wind up being a bad dad. Also, to be totally honest, I thought it would hinder my career. I was advancing fast and wanted to keep up that pace. Ambition is not something I ever warned you about, Chika, but I have learned it can overtake you gradually, like clouds moving across the sun, until, consumed by pursuing it, you get used to a dimmer existence.

  When Miss Janine and I married, she knew all this. But she believed in a better version of me, a more generous one, and in our early years together, I wanted to live up to that. Still, hoarding time becomes a habit. I remember once, when we were trying to have children, I raised the idea of hiring an au pair to help take care of them. Miss Janine rejected it. She got angry, actually, which she rarely did. I wondered why she wouldn’t welcome the help, blind to the hurt that her husband was already planning time away from a baby we didn’t have.

  I was a foolish man in many ways, Chika, when I look back on things.

  And then you, with your unhurried ways. You were five years old, but such a curious five-year-old, as if the pages of your life had been stacked but not yet turned. If you saw squirrels darting up a tree, you shouted “Squirrels!” then asked where they were going, then asked if they could see you. You had questions about books. Questions about food. Questions about clouds and angels. You examined your entire inventory of clothes before getting dressed.

  “Those red socks are good,” I’d suggest, growing impatient.

  “I think I want the green ones.”

  “The green ones are good.”

  “No, wait, wait. The blue.”

  With little choice, we slowed to your rhythm. We kneeled to your sight line. I often found you sitting on the floor by our back window, just studying the yard. I remember Morrie, my old professor, pointing to a window once and saying he appreciated it more than I did, because, due to his sickness, that window was his view of the world, while to me it was a pane of glass.

  You appreciated a window more than I did, too, Chika, and all the amazing things on the other side of it. I had to decelerate to match your awe, to hit the brakes in my life, to beg out of dinners because of your bedtime, to be late for work because of places I needed to take you, to constantly apologize to bosses and editors for my suddenly slower production.

  But I did. Miss Janine did, too. And we found ourselves studying you in a growing fascination. We’d nudge each other as you clapped for a movie, or danced around the table without knowing we were watching. If you nodded off in my arms, I’d hold you for a long time while Miss Janine stroked your hair. I don’t know how many hours we spent just looking at you, Chika, but there were many, and they were treasured.

  Before you came to us, we would watch TV in bed, and often fall asleep with the TV still playing. Once you arrived, we shut the lights and tiptoed around you in the darkness. Often, in the dead of night, you would wake us up.

  “Mister Miiiitch?”

  . . . “Hmm?”

  “I have to go potty.”

  I would guide you to the bathroom, then wait, yawning, outside the doorframe. I’d hear you flush, help you wash your hands, then guide you to your bed, which was nice and low so you could tumble into it.

  “Is she OK?” Miss Janine would whisper as I crawled back in beside her.

  “She’s fine,” I’d mumble, closing my eyes. “She’s good.”

  The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.

  I learned that from you.

  * * *

  By the way. About your bed. It may sound funny, but when you first arrived, we didn’t know where to put you. It wasn’t like we’d had months to plan. Our house, which we had lived in for nearly twenty-five years, was as set in its form as we were. The guest bedrooms were downstairs. We couldn’t have you that far from us. But you were too big to put in a crib.

  In the end, we got a full-sized air mattress, draped it in Frozen sheets and colorful blankets, and set it at the foot of our bed. The first night you spent with us, I forgot it was there. I got up to use the bathroom, tripped, and went stumbling to the floor.

  Eventually I got used to it. I’d remind myself in the darkness to take four extra steps before turning left, and reverse my field on the journey back. I also made a habit of leaning over you in each direction, checking on your small form, splayed between pillows, your soft breathing so different from mine.

  Do you remember the day I came home to find you and Miss Janine laughing mischievously? And Miss Janine said, “Chika, how does Mister Mitch sound when he sleeps?” And you made a loud snoring noise that suggested a lion coughing up a hairball? And I grinned stupidly and said, “Great, now there’s a second set of ears on me.”

  Well, of course, that was true. A second set of ears, a second set of eyes and arms and legs, a second bed that we had to walk around. This is what changes hand in hand with time:

  Space.

  Before you, Chika, we were a pair. Now, we were a trio. Our car went from a married couple in the front seat to you and Miss Janine in the back, and me behind the wheel like a chauffeur. Tables for two became a four-top and a decision: Which of us sat next to you and helped cut your food? We expanded in every way—and it quickly became the norm.

  Suddenly, three. Three seats for a movie. Three seats in a shoe store, or a waiting room, or a dentist’s office.

  And three seats at the Beaumont Hospital radiation clinic in Royal Oak, Michigan, on a Monday morning, where a nurse came out and asked if you were ready to get a “special helmet,” and you shrugged and said “OK.” We stood and walked together, all of us holding hands, one, two, three, down a long hallway and into the fray.

  It is July of 2015 and sweltering hot, my first trip back to the mission since Chika left. She is the only one of our children to ever go to America, and I am not inside the gates thirty seconds before the other kids surround me and the questions start.

  “Does Chika live with you?”

  “Does Chika sleep in your house?”

  “Does Chika have her own room?”

  “Does Chika have a dog?”

  They ask when Chika is coming back. They tell me they are saving her bed and no one else is sleeping in it.

  The next day, I hang a drawing Chika made in the school office. It says, “Hi, everybody. I am playing and having fun. Love, Chika. P.S. I miss you.”

  The kids stare at it. She is different to them now, outside the gates, under my care. One of our girls asks if she can go to America, too, and I say no, not right now.

  “But why?” she says. “I don’t have a mother, either.”

  Us

  “Mister Mitch?”

  Hmm?

  “Why did you keep this?”

  Chika reaches between a stapler, coffee cups, rubber bands, and a tissue box (my desk looks like the sale bin at Office Depot) and holds up a picture frame: inside is a school questionnaire from Haiti that she filled out just two weeks before coming to the United States.

  By “Name” she wrote “5.” By “Age” she wrote “Chika.”

  At the bottom, she was asked to finish this sentence:

  “When I grow up I want to be _____.”

  She wrote a single word.

  BIG.

  “Why did you keep it?” Chika repeats.

  How do I answer? Because it once made us laugh? Because later it made us cry? Because I stare at it now and argue with God over why such a simple request could not have been granted?

  When I grow up I want to be . . . BIG.

  I don’t know, Chika. Some things you just keep.

  “I got big,” she says.

  When?

  She drops her eyes.

  “Don’t you re-MEM-ber?” She fills her cheeks with air, like she’s blowing up a balloon.

  I push back in my chair.

  I remember, I say.

  * * *

  Dexamethasone is a corticosteroid meant to reduce inflammation. Chika started taking it in advance of the radiation treatment, little pills she would swallow with applesauce. As a sports journalist, I had covered athletes who used steroids to bulk up, and when I first heard the doctors talk about this drug as “Dec,” for its brand name, Decadron (“How much Dec is she on?” “We could increase her Dec”), it sounded almost sports-like. Ballplayers using steroids would call it “getting big.” And indeed, in a short time, Chika got big, but not the way they did.

  The steroids shrunk the tissue near the tumor but inflated her everywhere else. Her appetite grew ravenous. Her breakfast went from one banana to three eggs, cereal, grapes, and two pieces of toast with almond butter. At dinner, she could eat as much as I could. We were careful not to indulge these heightened cravings with junk food, but Chika’s hunger was not discerning. She’d eat two helpings of salmon. Brussels sprouts. Caesar salad. If she saw me eating anything, her voice would skip up high. “Mister Mitch, what’s thaaaaat?” I’d say, “It’s a turkey sandwich.” And she’d look away and mumble, “I wish I had a turkey sandwich.”

  In less than two months on steroids, Chika looked like someone else. She had a double chin, and her cheeks were so full, you’d have thought she was storing walnuts. I learned there is a medical term for this, moon facies, or moon face, something a mean kid might holler, and I worried about what other kids would say to Chika. Her arms and legs had dimpled, and her tummy protruded noticeably. She went from forty-eight pounds to seventy-three.

  None of this diminished her joy. Her smile was just as bright, but instead of spreading across her face, it was puckered between her cheeks. Her mouth and eye still drooped down on the left, and she still walked with a hitch in her left leg, but the doctors said this might change if the radiation was effective.

  I learned that despite the great complexity of the human brain, all an invader like DIPG had to do was to press against a certain spot on a certain lobe and boom—your eye drooped, your legs buckled, your speech drawled. Diminish the pressure, and the symptoms disappeared. It was almost too mechanistic, as if you could yell “Back off!” to the tumor and everything would return to the way it was.

  The radiation was to serve that purpose, a beamline of subatomic particles, narrowly aimed and as destructive as a bomb. Every morning, five days a week, Chika would slide into a massive machine, her head locked down by a helmet, her eyes with little choice but to look up into the cylinder. The nurses who prepped her were endlessly upbeat—“You’re amazing, Chika! You’re a rock star!” Still, I wonder what the rock star thought when those nurses had to leave the room before the machine turned on.

  All told, she did six weeks of this. We introduced routines to make it more fun—she signed herself in when she arrived, she picked out music to listen to during the session. But Chika’s body paid a price. The hair behind her right ear disappeared, because radiation will destroy healthy cells along with cancerous ones, particularly fast-growing ones like hair cells. At night, sometimes, she would sweat and flop around the bed, yelling, in Creole, “Doktè! Doktè!”

  Still, over time, there was significant shrinkage of the tumor, beyond what they had hoped. Her radiation oncologist, Dr. Peter Chen, showed us images on large computer screens and MRI scans. You see this? That’s when she first got here. Now look. By early autumn, when I took her to a cider mill to feed the ducks and taste some apple pie, Chika’s tumor had retracted by twenty-five percent.

  Twenty-five percent?

  “Maybe even thirty,” Dr. Chen said.

  We were filled with a sense of strength. With her initial at bat, Chika had smacked a solid triple. “She is going to beat this,” Janine told me. “Why can’t she be the first?”

  As time passes, Chika acquires clothes, some that we buy her, some that our friends bring her. She likes to dress up, the frillier the better. She marches around in Janine’s high heels. She drapes herself in multiple necklaces. She wears two hats at the same time.

  “She likes to gild the lily,” Janine jokes.

  One day Chika and I are heading out.

  “Hold on,” I say. “You have something on your face.”

  “What?” she says.

  I grab a napkin. I pat the area around her lips.

  “You’re kind of wet here. How did you get all wet?”

  “Mister Mitch!” She throws up her hands. “That’s my lip gloss!”

  Us

  Summer is over before Chika appears again. I switch from shorts to long pants, and turn off the ceiling fans in the office. Chika always liked this office. When she came through the door she would lift her eyes to the tall bookshelves. She knew this was where I wrote, and that I needed quiet when I did. Perhaps getting to enter made her feel special.

  This time, when she arrives, she taps me from behind and I nearly jump out of the chair. She laughs hysterically.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  Writing.

  “About me?”

  Like you wanted me to.

  “Hmmph.”

  She spins to the piano behind us.

  “Let’s play something.”

  I have always had a piano in my office, owing to my earlier days as a musician. Even now, when I get lost in the woods of writing, I turn to playing to guide me out. Chika starts whacking the keys, making the same cacophony she made when she was alive.

  “Don’t bang,” I used to scold. Then one day, I brought her to visit a friend, a jazz musician, who listened calmly as she pounded, then stood over her and created a bass line with his left hand and some chords with his right, a tuneful bed to envelop her wanderings. That was the last time I told Chika what to play. Everything in this world is music if you can hear it. Make a joyful noise, the psalm says.

  We sit and tap out “Jingle Bells.” Christmas songs were always welcome, even in summer. I sing, Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh, over fields we go—

  “Through the fields,” she corrects.

  Through the fields?

  “Yeah.”

  Not “over” fields?

  “No. See.” She sings, “Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh, through the fields we go . . .”

  I start to sing with her, but she puts her hand over my mouth, then finishes with, “laughing all the way, ha-ha-HA!”

  You have to do that? I ask, smiling.

  She grins. Most times we sang, Chika cupped her palm over my mouth, a clear sign that her act was solo. It made me laugh then. It makes me laugh now.

  “Mister Mitch? Why did you write those words?”

  Which words?

  She slides off the bench and moves to the desk. She points at the yellow pad, and number three on the list.