He takes my hand, closes his eyes. And then he starts to cry. “God,” he says. “God!”

I move closer, put my arms around him, move his head down onto my chest.

“Tell me something, Myra. Anything. Just talk to me.”

“Okay. Okay. You just close your eyes, and you hold on to me. I’m going to tell you something. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid for you. Where you’re going, it’s beautiful. I know that. I don’t know how, but I know. This won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine; you’ll just float. And then I think … you’ll fly.”

He nods, then holds still, waiting. I clear my throat, keep talking. “Once I met a man out walking in the woods. And we walked together for a long time. He was really happy. He told me he’d been a janitor. He said he’d always worn a lot of keys on his belt and it always made him feel so important, like he could open anything. Said that was the one thing he missed about his job. But you’re going to have all the keys now, all the time, Chip.”

He sighs. I can feel him relaxing into me.

“Yesterday I saw a cardinal feeding another cardinal. It was the male feeding the female. She could have fed herself; they were both at a feeder. But he gave to her, and she took it.”

Outside, I can hear the distant shouting of children, the sound of the cars passing by.

“What else?” Chip asks.

What else? “Well … Once I was at an airport, and I saw a man who was in the cab line do a handstand. It was extraordinary—he just all of a sudden stepped back from the line and did a handstand! He stayed in that position for a long time, and he was wearing this brown suit, and the jacket settled over his head, and the pants rode up on his legs, and you could see his nice brown socks. I don’t know if his back got a spasm and he was fixing it or what. But when I saw that, I thought, You know? You just never know. And I wished … I kind of wanted to meet him, someone who would do that.”

Chip pulls away from me, sits up straight. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.” He takes in a breath. “Okay. I’m ready to do the next part.”

He puts a handful of yellow capsules in his mouth, swallows them with some tea, then leans back and closes his eyes. Quickly, I slide the first pill out of my pocket and swallow it. I don’t want to be too far behind him.

He takes another handful. Then he sits up suddenly, holds quite still. After a moment, he lies back and says, “I need to wait just a minute before I take the rest.”

“Okay.”