BRIAN AND I ARE SITTING ON THE COUCH, sharing sections of the newspaper, when Anna walks into theliving room. “If I mow the lawn, like, until I get married,” she asks, “can I have $614.96 right now?”

“Why?” we say simultaneously.

She rubs her sneaker into the carpet. “I need a little cash.”

Brian folds the national news section. “I didn’t think Gap jeans had gotten quite that expensive.”

“I knew you’d be like this,” she says, ready to huff away.

“Hang on.” I sit up, rest my elbows on my knees. “What is it you want to buy?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Anna,” Brian responds, “we’re not forking over six hundred bucks without knowing what it’s for.”

She weighs this for a minute. “It’s something on eBay.”

My ten-year-old surfs eBay?

“Okay,” she sighs. “It’s goaltender leg pads.”

I look at Brian, but he doesn’t seem to understand, either. “For hockey?” he says.

“Well, duh.”

“Anna, you don’t play hockey,” I point out, and when she blushes, I realize this may not be the case at all.

Brian presses her into an explanation. “A couple of months ago, the chain fell off my bike right in front of thehockey rink. A bunch of guys were practicing, but their goalie had mono, and the coach said he’d pay me fivebucks to stand in net and block shots. I borrowed the sick kid’s equipment, and the thing is…I wasn’t thatbad at it. I liked it. So I kept coming back.” Anna smiles shyly. “The coach asked me to join the team for real,before the tournament. I’m the first girl on it, ever. But I have to have my own equipment.”

“Which costs $614?”

“And ninety-six cents. That’s just the leg pads, though. I still need a chest protector and catcher and a gloveand a mask.” She stares at us expectantly.

“We have to talk about it,” I tell her.

Anna mutters something that sounds like Figures, and walks out of the room.

“Did you know she was playing hockey?” Brian asks me, and I shake my head. I wonder what else mydaughter has been hiding from us.

We are about to leave the house to watch Anna playing hockey for the first time when Kate announces sheisn’t going. “Please Mom,” she begs. “Not when I look like this.”

She has an angry red rash all over her cheeks, palms, soles, and chest, and a moon face, courtesy of thesteroids she takes to treat it. Her skin is rough and thickened.

These are the calling cards of graft-versus-host disease, which Kate developed after her bone marrowtransplant. For the past four years, it’s come and gone, flaring up when we least expect it. Bone marrow is anorgan, and like a heart or a liver, a body can reject it. But sometimes, instead, the transplanted marrow beginsto reject the body it’s been put in.

The good news is that if that happens, all the cancer cells are under siege, too—something Dr. Chance callsgraft-versus-leukemia disease. The bad news is the symptomology: the chronic diarrhea, the jaundice, theloss of range of motion in her joints. The scarring and sclerosis wherever there’s connective tissue. I am soaccustomed to this that it doesn’t phase me, but when the graft-versus-host disease flares up this badly, I letKate stay home from school. She is thirteen, and appearance is paramount. I respect her vanity, because thereis so little of it.

But I cannot leave her alone in the house, and we have promised Anna we’ll come watch her play. “This isreally important to your sister.”

In response, Kate flops onto the couch and pulls a throw pillow over her face.

Without saying another word I walk to the hall closet and pull a variety of items from drawers. I hand thegloves to Kate, then jam the hat on her head and wind the scarf around her nose and mouth so that only hereyes are visible. “It’ll be cold in the rink,” I say, in a voice that leaves no room for anything but acceptance.

I barely recognize Anna, stuffed and trussed and tied into equipment that, eventually, we wound upborrowing from the coach’s nephew. You cannot tell, for example, that she is the only girl on the ice. Youcannot tell that she is two years younger than every other player out there.

I wonder if Anna can hear the cheering through her helmet, or if she’s so focused on what’s coming towardher that she blocks it all out, concentrating instead on the scrape of the puck and the smack of the sticks.

Jesse and Brian sit on the edge of their seats; even Kate—so reluctant to come—is getting into the game. Theopposing goalie, compared to Anna, moves in slow motion. The action switches like a current, the playmoving from the far goal toward Anna’s. The center passes to the right wing, who skates for broke, his bladesslicing through the roar of the cheering crowd. Anna steps forward, sure of where the puck is going a momentbefore it arrives, her knees bent in, her elbows pointed out.

“Unbelievable,” Brian says to me after the second period.

“She’s got natural talent as a goalie.”

That much, I could have told him. Anna saves, every time.

That night Kate wakes up with blood streaming out of her nose, her rectum, and the sockets of her eyes. Ihave never seen so much blood, and even as I try to stanch the flow I wonder how much of it she can stand tolose. By the time we reach the hospital, she is dis-oriented and agitated, finally slipping intounconsciousness. The staff pump her full of plasma, blood, and platelets to replace the lost blood, whichseems to leak out of her just as quickly. They give her IV fluids to prevent hypovolemic shock, and intubateher. They take CT scans of her brain and her lungs to see how far the bleeding has spread.

In spite of all the times we have run to the ER in the middle of the night, all the times Kate’s relapsed withsudden symptoms, Brian and I know it has never been quite this bad. A nosebleed is one thing; system failureis another. Twice now, she’s had cardiac arrhythmias. The hemorrhaging keeps her brain, heart, liver, lungs,and kidneys from receiving the flow they need to work.

Dr. Chance takes us into the little lounge at the end of the pediatric ICU floor. It is painted with smiley-facedaisies. On one wall is a growth chart, a four-foot-tall inchworm: How Big Can I Grow?

Brian and I sit very still, as if we will be rewarded for good behavior. “Arsenic?” Brian repeats. “Poison?”

“It’s a very new therapy,” Dr. Chance explains. “You get it intravenously, for twenty-five to sixty days. Todate, we haven’t effected a cure with it. That’s not to say it might not happen in the future, but at the moment,we don’t even have five-year survival curves—that’s how new the drug is. As it is, Kate’s exhausted cordblood, allogeneic transplant, radiation, chemo, and ATRA. She’s lived ten years past what any of us wouldhave expected.”

I find myself nodding already. “Do it,” I say, and Brian looks down at his boots.

“We can try it. But in all likelihood, the hemorrhaging will still beat out the arsenic,” Dr. Chance tells us.

I stare at the growth chart on the wall. Did I tell Kate I loved her before I put her to bed last night? I cannotremember. I cannot remember at all.

Shortly after two A.M., I lose Brian. He slips out when I am falling asleep beside Kate’s bed and doesn’t comeback for over an hour. I ask for him at the nurse’s desk; I search the cafeteria and the men’s room, all empty.

Finally I locate him at the end of the hallway, in a tiny atrium that was named in some poor dead child’shonor, a room of light and air and plastic plants that a neutropenic patient could enjoy. He sits on an uglybrown corduroy couch, writing furiously with a blue crayon on a piece of scrap paper.

“Hey,” I say quietly, remembering how the kids would color together on the floor of the kitchen, crayonsspilled like wildflowers between them. “Trade you a yellow for your blue.”

Brian glances up, startled. “Is—”

“Kate’s fine. Well, she’s the same.” Steph, the nurse, has already given her the first induction of arsenic. Shehas also given her two blood transfusions, to make up for what she’s losing.

“Maybe we should bring Kate home,” Brian says.

“Well, of course we—”

“I mean now.” He steeples his hands. “I think she’d want to die in her own bed.”

That word, between us, explodes like a grenade. “She isn’t going to—”

“Yes, she is.” He looks at me, his face carved by pain. “She is dying, Sara. She will die, either tonight ortomorrow or maybe a year from now if we’re really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic’s not acure. It just postpones what’s coming.”

My eyes fill up with tears. “But I love her,” I say, because that is reason enough.

“So do I. Too much to keep doing this.” The paper he has been scribbling on falls out of his hands and landsat my feet; before he can reach it I pick it up. It is full of tearstains, of cross-outs. She loved the way itsmelled in Spring, I read. She could beat anyone at gin rummy. She could dance even if there wasn’t musicplaying. There are notes on the side, too: Favorite color: pink. Favorite time of day: twilight. Used to rea dWhere the Wild Things Are, over and over, and still knows it by heart.

All the hair stands up on the back of my neck. “Is this…a eulogy?”

By now, Brian is crying, too. “If I don’t do it now, I won’t be able to when it’s really time.”

I shake my head. “It’s not time.”

I call my sister at three-thirty in the morning. “I woke you,” I say, realizing the minute Zanne gets on thephone that for her, for everyone normal, it is the middle of the night.

“Is it Kate?”

I nod, even though she cannot hear that. “Zanne?”

“Yeah?”

I close my eyes, feel the tears squeeze out.

“Sara, what’s the matter? Do you want me to come down there?”

It is hard to speak around the enormous pressure in my throat; truth expands until it can choke you. As kids,Zanne’s bedroom and mine shared a hallway, and we used to fight about leaving the light on through thenight. I wanted it burning; she didn’t. Put a pillow over your head, I used to tell her. You can make it dark,but I can’t make it light.

“Yes,” I ............