They would have needed a new wardrobe anyway. The clinic did not allow skirts. The clinic did not have air conditioning. The clinic, the whole jungle really, was plagued by mosquitos. These few, small facts they managed to glean combined with the one that was readily available—that highs would hover in the mid to high 90s every day—meant they both needed all new clothes, and those clothes proved fortuitously androgynous: long cotton pants, breathable shirts with long sleeves, walking sandals, sunhats. The night before they left, Rosie packed for both of them, then knocked on the turret door.
“So. Are you ready? Are you excited?” Rosie felt neither but tried to sound both, and when she got no response turned instead toward the practical. “I packed for you.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything special you want to bring with us?”
“No.”
“I mean, I have all the essentials, but maybe you want to bring Alice and Miss Marple?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Or a picture of your friends.”
“I have no friends.”
Rosie winced but plowed on. “I think I have all we need but one thing.”
“What?”
Rosie sat on the edge of the bed and took her baby’s hands and said as gently, gently, gently as she knew how, “I don’t know what to call you, my love.” Her love looked slapped but spellbound by something just over Rosie’s head. “Should I call you Claude or Poppy? Should you be my daughter or my son? You can be either one, and you know we’ll all support you. You know we’ll love you no matter what, no matter who. You have only to tell me: who do you want to be?”
“It doesn’t matter who I want to be.”
“Nothing matters but,” Rosie insisted.
“It only matters who I am.”
“And who is that?”
“Claude.” He spat the name. “I have to be Claude.”
“You don’t, sweetheart—”
“I do. Claude is my punishment.”
This child is only ten, Rosie’s breaking heart implored the universe. “What are you being punished for, my love?”
“For lying to everyone. For pretending to be something I’m not.”
“You aren’t lying. You aren’t pretending—”
“Not anymore,” said Claude.
*
In the thirteen days that had passed since Rosie’s midnight text, Claude’s stubbly bald head had sprouted weak downy shoots, but he still looked like a cancer patient, and that’s what everyone assumed he was. Rosie had learned during Poppy-her-sister’s first round of chemo, and a thousand times since, that once one of your identities is sick, that’s the only one that matters. She knew the sympathetic looks she was getting were only because everyone assumed her child had cancer, but she didn’t care. She felt deserving of the kindness of strangers, in fragile need of a little extra space and succor, so she was grateful for their blessings, however misguided. Whether Claude could see everyone around him assuming he was dying, Rosie wasn’t sure, but that didn’t matter either. Claude felt like he was dying, so he’d have appreciated the conjectures, had he raised his eyes from the ground long enough to take them in. He did not.
Rosie thought eighteen hours on an airplane was the perfect occasion for heartbreak anyway. Into every life, a certain amount of misery must fall, and if you could get some of it to coincide with the eighteen cramped, queasy hours you had to spend in coach, so much the better. Claude stared out the window with swollen red eyes, waved away all proffered food, chain-sipped ginger ale, and garnered sympathy for his mother.
Rosie had sold the trip to Penn and Claude together. It’ll be an incredible opportunity, she’d said, to travel somewhere new, to see the world, to help those less fortunate.
“No one is less fortunate than me,” said Claude.
“Than I.” Penn did not care for “than” as a preposition.
“You are healthy and strong and able”—Rosie felt there was more at stake here than grammar—“with food enough and clean water, a safe neighborhood, a secure home, indoor plumbing, medicine when you need it, family and friends who love you, a world-class education, and a very cute dog. You are more fortunate than many, many people.”
Claude rolled red-rimmed eyes. “If it means I don’t have to go back to school, I’ll go anywhere.”
“That’s true too.” Rosie tried not to seem too eager. “This trip would allow you to take some time and perspective, to take a break from here.”
“From here or from me?” Penn said.
Claude looked up, alarmed. His parents didn’t fight often enough for it to be no big deal when they did. On the one hand, Rosie was gratified to see him notice something, anything, that wasn’t happening inside his own head. But this wasn’t a conversation to have in front of him, and they both dropped it. Later though, Penn said, “Thailand is a long way to go just to get out of an argument.”
“That’s not why I’m going.”
“Sure it is.”
“I need to do something to mollify Howie.”
“You never have before.”
“That’s why. We can’t afford for me to lose this job.”
“It’s never going to come to that, and you know it.”
“It’s a good cause, Penn. The clinic serves Burmese refugees, undocumented residents, people from the hill tribes. It’s important work—”
“In which you’ve shown no interest until this moment.”
“It’s not that I wasn’t interested. It’s that it was never possible before with the kids and school and—”
“What part of that has ceased to be true now?”
“It’ll be good for her—him—whomever to see a little bit of the world,” Rosie stumbled. “Thailand is friendly, safe—”