I pick up my visa at the French consulate in Atlanta with amazingly little trouble after everything that preceded it. Two weeks later, I’m back in Paris, and the tests have come back.

“He’s riddled with it,” Sébastien says quietly to me. We’re in the RER B coming back from the airport, a grim, empty ambience for this kind of conversation, with the RER car’s torn vinyl blue cushions, its graffiti, its stale odors and endless concrete tunnels. “Liver, lungs.” I can see his grandfather, eyes merry as a boy’s, saying, Mais elle est jolie! as he embraces me, rolling his dark, rich, insidious brunes to smoke with his family outside under the rain. “They’ll try chemotherapy,” Sébastien says and stares at his hands, locked together between his knees. He rubs his thumbs together, uselessly, not knowing what to do. Neither do I. At the Feast of Kings, that tiny, happy man had pulled me into the family, bouncing on his toes with all his energy. This is horrible news. Yet I lack the presumption to cry. I have met him only a handful of times; Sébastien was rocked in his arms as a baby.

René’s hospital is simple and clean, with a disquieting absence of technology. His room has a little balcony, and the setting is beautiful. His room looks out over green sloping hills to the red tiles of a village framed in its green-nestled distance by nearer trees. Among the paved paths of the park below and the old stone houses converted into different components of this hospital, humans and animals wander at will: goats, geese, rabbits, tired men and women pushed in wheelchairs, patients trailing IVs and their healthy family members.

On our very first visit, René still has that gorgeous, thick hair of his, the hair that Sébastien inherited. It thins quickly to a few faded wisps as the chemotherapy leeches the energy out of him. It seems like no matter when we visit he is tired but happy to see us, and there are family—second cousins, grandnephews—stopping by. They make my acquaintance courteously, and then I press my back into a corner or hover on the balcony, feeling useless and extraneous to the heart grief of this situation.

“La petite Laura,” René always greets me.

Titi, if he’s there, mocks his father in that brusque way that always makes René laugh. “La petite? Elle est aussi grande que toi!” Which is true—René might be stockier, might have been stockier, but he is about my height. We all wait and talk and try to make jokes to cheer René up, and René tries to let us, sinking back into tiredness between laughs. And we all feel totally helpless.