“The nurses clapped. No one else cheered her on, but the nurses did. Like she was on a fucking game show.”

“She must have been happy that she didn’t have to come back anymore,” I said.

“I hit the gong once,” Daphne said, wistfully. “The thing that they don’t tell you is that everyone else in that waiting room hates you for getting that certificate. They think you’re smug for making a show of it.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because that’s how I felt when Jane was doing it. Like she was shoving it in our faces that she was going to live and maybe we weren’t. Probably, we weren’t going to make it.”

“But you hit the gong.”

“That was years ago. Look at me now. I don’t need awards just for surviving a few extra years.”

The idea of a survival gong made me want to burst out laughing. As Daphne rolled her eyes, I wondered why there was no such gong for surviving other life trials—like sustaining a marriage. What would a certificate of achievement look like if you made it one year, two, three, ten? They were not the same thing at all, incurable diseases and marriage, yet for those who found that it didn’t come naturally, marriage felt like a sort of improbable accomplishment that needed rewarding.

“How many more do we need to answer today?”

“We can stop if you’re tired,” Lorraine said.

“Thank you.” She pointed at her side table. “I wrote some letters. You can take them.”

Lorraine shuffled through her papers and settled on a few handwritten letters. She handed them to me.

“We can mail them for you,” I said.

“The people are already gone.”

“Then we’ll keep them safe,” Lorraine said.

When we walked back to Lorraine’s car, I didn’t feel like talking, or processing together. I could tell Lorraine didn’t want to, either.

“She’s a character,” Lorraine said.

“She is.”

We drove in silence as Lorraine slowly wended her way through streets the GPS directed her to. To avoid collisions on the freeway, we had ended up north of the city, where horse ranches were abundant. I stared out the window as Lorraine slowed to a crawl so we could look at horses meandering on someone’s land. She rolled down her window and stuck her arm out, as if she was hoping she could actually touch them.

“Beautiful,” she said. I rolled down my window, too. Eucalyptus trees lined the road around us, pale against the late-afternoon blue sky, and I stared at their peeling trunks and their leaves rustling in the wind. The bright smell of eucalyptus filled the car, and we both inhaled.

“You almost forget you’re in Los Angeles,” I said.

“I had no idea it could be like this.”