A waiter came out with a cup of cocoa and a plate with two star-shaped cookies. Mama stopped the waiter and said that my hot chocolate needed whipped cream. And chocolate shavings. And my cookies needed white icing and silver candy balls. Like the boys had. The waiter looked at the old woman. She nodded once, slowly, in a way that filled me with both glee and terror. But I wasted no time in slurping thick gobs of cocoa-tinged whipped cream from that cup, and letting the buttery sweetness of icing-slathered shortbreads melt on my tongue, while the thin blonde lady and two boys watched in horror.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Mama and the older woman standing almost nose to nose, speaking in tense, hushed tones. When I saw Mama squat in a mock curtsey and heard her sneer, “Yes, Lady Rosalind!” I knew my time in this weird Heaven was running out.

“Hey buddy, you gonna finish those cookies?” I asked the younger of the two boys. “Because I —”

Mama’s voice boomed, “Crow. Time to go. Now.”

I wolfed down the rest of my cookie, plus the one the kid in the suit had gingerly shoved toward me, and glugged the last half of my hot chocolate. Mama buttoned my coat, took my hand, and ushered me to the door. The old woman followed us, perching in the door frame as we walked down the steps, bidding us Merry Christmas and good riddance.

I smiled, curtsied, and said, “Good riddance to you too, ma’am,” thinking it was some kind of rich person holiday greeting.

My mother turned to look the old woman square in the eye, then smiled so that every last one of her false teeth were bared, and said, “Lovely glass house you have, Lady Rosalind. Be grateful I’m not one for throwing stones.” Mama hustled me down the walkway. And just past the spotlit nativity scene, my traitorous gut expelled all of that hard-won decadence, all over the walkway of my father’s fancy family home. I’ve had a knack for a timely upchuck ever since.

I am too scared to turn around to see the precise quality of the look on Mama’s face right now, but judging by the way she is steering my wheelchair at breakneck speed down the hall and turning the rickety bugger on a dime, the old doll is livid. Now is not a good time to ask questions about my father’s family. Then again, there may never be a good time to go dredging through that toxic pool of old stories, even if there are uncharted islands of truth and revelation somewhere in it.

There’s also never really a good time to get the results of a brain tumour biopsy, but within days, the call comes. Con­gratulations Crow Fortune, you are the proud host of moderately invasive, extremely unpredictable, totally inoperable triplets, a trio of grade two-ish astrocytomas! They grow long, nebulous tendrils that infiltrate surrounding tissue and are near impossible to cut out in any kind of clean way, especially when they have snuggled nice and deep into the grey matter of three separate brain lobes. Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and I are bonded for life. And although they grow slowly and are technically considered low-grade and not yet cancerous, that could change in a wink. It usually does. Grade two astrocytomas are unpredictable little fellas. One day, they will just wiggle their little starry tendrils at each other and say, “Hey boys! Let’s get our cancer on!” Then, bam! Brain cancer. Inoperable. Terminal.