“Why can’t he make friends with people his own age?” she would say. Or, “I don’t like his attitude.”

Ralf would shrug. She didn’t have to hang out with him, did she?

Some of his friends had also warned him about Brian. They were just scared of him.

Too bad for them. Whether they liked it or not, Brian was his friend. He was OK. Maybe not for everyone, but he was right for Ralf.

A friend to everybody is a friend to nobody.

2

2

“Ugh, typical.” Helen felt the first drops as she pushed her bike out of the garage. She turned up her collar, lowered her head, and cycled past the barriers and onto the main road. It had been dry and sunny all day, but as soon as she finished work, the heavens had opened. Cursing under her breath, she veered around a pedestrian who was opening an umbrella in the middle of the bike path. The smell of wet asphalt and damp earth filled her nostrils, and her thoughts wandered to the tattoo on her forearm she’d gotten a few months ago. It was very subtle. From a distance, it looked like a gray stripe, but when viewed up close, it read “Count Your Blessings.”

Worse things could happen to a person than a little rain. She saw the proof of that firsthand every day. The anxiousness that had filled her since she became a mother was only amplified by the struggles that so often played out in front of her. Patients would get an injection, close their eyes, and disappear—and where they went, nobody knew. All that was left was a limp, helpless body that the sickness had to be cut out of. But sometimes the sickness couldn’t be excised—and very occasionally, the blood pressure would drop, the heart would stop beating, and no amount of effort could bring the patient back from wherever they had gone.

Death didn’t discriminate. Not by age, not by gender or race. Whether you were beautiful or ugly, fat or thin, it made no difference. Death took what it wanted, at random.

That was why she still always felt a wave of relief when her daughters and her son got home safely from school or from a party. There was no sound more reassuring than the thud of their heavy wooden gate.

Helen hummed along to a Beatles track on her iPod. She wasn’t a Beatles fan except for this song, because her mother used to sing it to cheer her up. The rain might be falling now, but George Harrison’s warm tenor assured her that the sun was coming.

She breathed deeply, drinking in the damp air. The tires on her Batavus hissed along the path.

In the distance, she could already see the edge of the forest, the trees and shrubs lining the old railroad embankment. Nearly home.

3

3