Today they ran into each other in the corridor and embraced spontaneously, Cheri taking care not to set the wig askew. The woman’s husband stood quietly at a distance, staring over their shoulders, holding a straw purse.

This afternoon she came upon Les’s son, the businessman, right here in the courtyard. Huddled on a stone ledge, half inside an overwrought bougainvillea bush, he wore a suit with the tie loosened sideways, his usually smooth hair adrift and spiky from him running his hands through it. A parody of a drunken man, only it wasn’t alcohol, it was grief. Surrounded by giant blank-faced purple blossoms, he sobbed into a cell phone, eyes shut, mouth wrenched wide open in a child’s grimace.

Now the courtyard is empty and dark, lit only by the muted lamps hidden amid the fronds and ferns. At the very center, the pool shimmers in its own light, like Aqua Velva. Cheri drops her robe and slides into the water, cool and bracing. She does a slow backstroke until it tires her, turns over, dives, and comes up with her hair slicked away from her face like a seal or a woman who knows she’s beautiful.

Courtesy of her mother, it all is. All Cheri had to do was ask. Fifteen thousand dollars, just like that, for palm trees and exotic blooming flowers, the muggy Amazonian glade-like feel of this courtyard. All from her mother and her mother’s husband, who wrote the check without flinching, buying her, if not an actual future, then the promise of a future. And the miracle is that she now feels healthy, her insides rinsed and wrung out, her exterior massaged and polished, the very blood in her veins carbonated. And it isn’t better living through chemo; it’s simple and organic. Fruit, coffee, oxygen, and words. You are loved, we love you, you can live, others have lived.

The water now feels warmer than the air, amniotic. A familiar sound drifts over the stone wall, subdued and infectious: Katy’s laughter. They’ve returned from their walk, chatting just outside the gate, oblivious to the open shutters and the acoustic properties of the narrow street. Cheri lets herself drift backward until she’s floating again, the sound of indistinct voices overcome by the water lapping against her ears. Eyes closed, she summons an image of Katy, with her wide grin and flat Brooklyn accent, hoop earrings, raucous hair; when she was in the room, you couldn’t look anywhere else, nobody could. Then Sarah, she of the beautiful, deceptively serene face, hair knotted behind her head in a careless bun, choosing her words thoughtfully, then speaking them in the broad cadences of the Midwest. They’re interesting, Cheri thinks. Compelling. She imagines the two of them huddled inside the rhododendron bush in her front yard, like Les’s son in the arms of the bougainvillea, weeping.