At 5:43 on a cold Arizona morning, the sickest boy on the fifth floor asked whether one motorcycle could pass beneath his hospital window before sunrise.
Not two hundred.
Not a parade.
Not television cameras.
One motorcycle.
One engine.
One moment of noise strong enough to make the glass vibrate the way it used to when his father came home.
The ten-year-old boy sat beneath three blankets in a black wheelchair near the large window at the end of the pediatric oncology corridor. His head was completely bald now. His skin had become so pale over the previous seven months that the faint blue lines beneath his wrists showed whenever he lifted his hands.
He had stopped asking how much longer treatment would take.
That frightened his mother more than anything.
Children were supposed to ask when they could go home.
When they could see their dog.
When they could eat pizza.
When they could run outside.
When they could sleep without nurses entering every few hours.
Her son had asked all those things at first.
By October, he stopped asking about school.
By November, he stopped asking about baseball.
By December, he stopped asking when his hair would grow back.
Now, in early February, he mostly asked about small things.
Could the blinds stay open at night?
Could he have ice instead of water?
Could his mother move the chair closer to the window?
Could somebody find the old photograph of his father sitting on a motorcycle?
And that morning:
“Could one ride past?”
His mother looked up from the narrow hospital couch where she had slept for perhaps forty minutes.
“What?”
The boy kept staring through the window.
Outside, the parking structure stood beneath a fading night sky.
“Just one motorcycle.”
His voice was weak enough that she had to lean closer.
“Why?”
He shrugged.
That tiny movement exhausted him.
“I want to hear it.”
His mother looked away.
She knew exactly which sound he meant.
For nearly four years she had avoided it whenever possible.
Motorcycles at intersections.
Motorcycles outside restaurants.
Motorcycles passing the house late at night.
Even television commercials featuring motorcycles could cause something inside her to tighten.
Her husband had ridden.
Not casually.
Motorcycles had been part of his life long before she met him.
There were old photographs she almost never showed their son.
Black leather.
Sunburned faces.
Rows of machines outside desert diners.
Men standing shoulder to shoulder.
Her husband younger, broader, laughing with one arm around an enormous gray-bearded rider whose nickname she had once known and deliberately taught herself to forget.