Nurse Marion joins us. “If nothing happens, it doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening,” she whispers. “We’ll connect Mr. Skinner to electrodes for another twenty-four hours after we’ve completed these tests. I actually trust them more than this ‘mind reader,’ which only observes Mr. Skinner for an hour. That’s nothing: he could be anywhere but here during that hour.”

“How’s Maddie?” Sam asks.

“She’s fighting, Samuel. She’s fighting.”

“She wants to live, but she’s scared,” he explains.

“You must know her well to make presumptions like that, eh?” Marion teases him.

“No, she told me,” he answers.

“Oh really?”

“Yes, in my dreams,” Sam says earnestly. He states it in the same tone of voice that authors adopt when they tell me about their new ideas—calmly and with conviction. I’ve never found any of them pompous. Not even when a writer revealed to me that dreaming was when your spirit visited its soul mate, even if that person was already dead. Dream machines, lucid dreams, dream time travel: none of them ever struck me as absurd or crazy. Poppy, Ralph, Andrea, and I have often debated the possibility of impossible things happening. I’m accustomed to the unbelievable. Literature exists to survey unfamiliar worlds. Who else but writers will gladly take on that task? Who else is duty-bound to consider, without inhibitions, “What would happen if . . .”?

And yet now I take a step back. This here is reality, not a book or some nerdy competition. That humming monster over there, Dr. Saul’s questions, and Henri’s ventilator, pumping air in and out of him eight times per minute: they’re reality. Henri hasn’t breathed independently for six weeks now. The time for miracles has come—a time when nothing’s more urgent and nothing’s rarer.

“When did you dream about her?” Nurse Marion asks slowly.

“The night after I found out she got blood poisoning.”

“Do you mind telling me your dream? You know, dreams are definitely a means of communication and—”

“I’m going to get a cup of tea,” I angrily interject.

I can’t stand the way Nurse Marion is raising Sam’s hopes, even at this juncture.

“Don’t you want to hear this, Mrs. Tomlin?”

No. It breaks the last tiny, intact corner of my heart to look at the boy in this light and see his resemblance to his father. I promise to protect you, Sam, even if I have no idea what you need protecting from. Maybe from too many illusions? Yes, that’s it—from the illusion that miracles occur when you most need them.

“Have you never dreamed of him, Mrs. Tomlin?” the night nurse asks in her smoker’s voice.