In thirty years Billy has gone through his fair share of devices. These days, he speaks through a Toughbook in tablet mode. Eve tells me it’s called that, Toughbook, on account of its resilience; it can survive nasty drops and spills – and Billy. Though, to tell the truth, he’s much less hard on his devices than he used to be, his fingers now so accustomed to the pages and icons that you can scarcely keep up.

Eve keeps up. She is in what she might reasonably expect to be the Indian summer of her life, still full of energy, still overtaking men and women half her age on the sidewalk. These people. Move any slower and they’d stop!

‘Talk me through Billy’s adolescence,’ I say.

‘Oh boy,’ she says. ‘Those were bleak years.’

She remembers nights opening her eyes on her disappointingly dark bedroom, only thirty minutes or an hour lighter than the last time she had opened them, and climbing out of bed because she’d hear Billy up and about, thumping his teenage feet the width and length of the corridor. He could continue like that for hours, it seemed, over miles of corridor. How much further before he reached her wits’ end? So frazzled, in those instants, she didn’t know up from down. Nothing else for it but to wait for the sound of footsteps to recede. Or for sleep to reclaim her first.

He’d started having pain some months before, when he was sixteen, inexpressible, unlocatable pain, and she and Matt had had no rest, taking him to this and that medical department. It might be his wisdom teeth, they had thought. Or his periodic acid reflux. The dentist’s X-ray, though, had come up blank, as had the Ear, Nose and Throat man’s examinations. The doctors might have hoped Billy’s device could tell them where exactly he was hurting. But Billy didn’t seem to know where to press or point.

The pain was mysterious. It came and went. When it came and stayed it could walk him for hours at night along the corridors or in the kitchen.

Who sleeps much anyway? Eve mused on those exhausting nights. (Aside from Matt, the lucky log.) Not babies who wake in raging tears or young lovers in the throes of passion. Certainly not insomniacs or the elderly. Or those with something on their conscience. Maybe, just maybe, there wasn’t enough sleep in the world to go round. These night thoughts hardly soothed her then, they only caused her to fall even further behind on her fractured sleep. Forget beauty – her sanity sleep was what she needed. But there was never time. Darned if she remembered the last morning she had pushed snooze.

To think she had once feared a life of boredom.

✲

One morning she woke to marching music – what in hell’s name, that marching ants song coming from somewhere in the house. She got up and dressed and crept down the stairs, hearing the music getting louder. It was coming from behind the kitchen’s closed door. She opened the door and saw Billy’s tall back and his hands up over his ears. The song must be playing on the radio, she thought. And before she could find it to switch it off Billy turned around and sent her a look of exasperation. He dropped his hands from his ears, opened his trembling mouth and hollered, ‘I don’t like it.’

The alarm woke her.

A dream. She sat up, listened for music in the real house but there was none. It wasn’t the first time she had dreamed like this; her brain had plenty of material. More, in fact, since Billy had been taken ill.

Eve threw on her clothes and hastened down the actual stairs to an empty kitchen. He must have gotten peckish in the night – that explained the dirty spoons abandoned beside the sink and the jars left out on the counter, missing dollops of almond butter and blackberry jam. He had always had a good appetite. Ferocious. How he put away a cheeseburger, fries and shake in no time at all.

When he came down for breakfast, she remembered to tell him what reluctance had almost made her forget. She took his device in her hand and showed him the screen and pressed ‘hospital’. (The icon consisted of a downloaded photo of the squat concrete building.)

‘Hospital,’ she repeated.

A frown came on his face. She could hear him thinking, in her translation, Go to the hospital again? I’d better be getting a blueberry muffin out of it. She had had years of practice by then in translating his thoughts.

She explained about their having an appointment next week to see a gastroenterologist. (A new icon to add to her son’s device. She pictured twisty, compact tubes at the base of an upper body’s outline. Something like that.) She mimed the probing of his tummy. On a sheet of paper she drew the anaesthesia entering his arm until he slept. She told him that his arm might feel warm – that was normal. While he slept, a tiny camera would explore his insides, and he wouldn’t feel a thing. Then he would wake up and Mom and Dad would bring him home.

And yes, there’d be his muffin – muffins, even – waiting for him.

The week up, the operation done and the results in (all negative), Eve and Matt were torn between relief and confusion. If it wasn’t his teeth or acid reflux or his digestion, what was it that kept him up some nights pacing like he did? Soon, some nights became nearly every night. Billy paced and paced, driving Eve ever crazier with sleeplessness; she only hoped whatever the cause was it might go away any night now, and then one morning Holly found him on the floor in the kitchen and that was the beginning of the seizures. Shouts. An ambulance. Yet another hospital department.

Thank heavens for Holly, who had been with the Megargels for years, a sitter turned tutor turned all-round assistant – a ball of energy, light of the family’s life.

For the seizures and other symptoms the doctors started Billy on unpronounceable tablets with names that seemed to contain far too many x’s, y’s and z’s to be entirely reassuring. Were they necessary? Some days the family could have been forgiven for thinking that perhaps they weren’t. He might go to bed and stay there more or less overnight. He might walk up and down the living room in the daytime but that had long been his custom anyway, to pace like that, in the hour before Matt got in from work, while keeping an ear out for the car. He’d hear one approaching and look out the window, then continue pacing when the black Toyota wasn’t Dad’s red Ford SUV. He seemed just fine then. The same routines. His senses just as sharp. His gaze, for instance, roaming this or that room, would bump up against any misplaced spoon or disturbed photo and he’d set them straight right away.

Other days, however, the returning pain took possession of him and he’d be laid up for hours on end, enduring every secret spasm, enshrouding himself in his blanket. Or else, feeling embattled, attacked by his own body, he attacked it back: he’d suddenly go off and start slapping himself red and raw until the skin broke and wept. Eve and Holly would hold his arms until the rage in him subsided. The face he lifted to the women then was of someone broken, defeated.

Ben called from Michigan, where he was getting a degree in English.

‘What’s the latest with Billy?’

Eve thought, He’s really sick and nobody seems to know why. She paused for a steadying breath and said at last, ‘He’s okay. Could be better. The doctors keep trying him on different meds. He’s resting’.

Before long, Thursday nights too he remained in bed. The same Thursday night that went back years. Thursday night was when he and Matt usually sat at the kitchen table picking a restaurant for the weekend. Billy relished the picking, it seemed, at least as much as the future meal – it was always leisurely, methodical. He perused a large menu of restaurant logos which Eve and Matt had inserted into Billy’s device over the years. For a while the machine sat silent as Billy scrolled through each logo, lingering over several before pressing the one of his choice. The pizza place, it would seem to be. Matt would give a thumbs up then and wait, knowing what came next. He waited for Billy, already giggling, to switch the page on his screen and tap one of the newer icons, a sentence:

‘I changed my mind.’

He might change his mind half a dozen times more before the restaurant’s name would be known for certain.

But now the family discontinued their outings to the pizza place (or any other) on the weekend, and soon Billy wouldn’t come out even for a doughnut. At mealtimes he barely touched his food, lighter and blander with every month that passed. His skin turned coarse and ashen, his muscles less firm – the once stout calves which he had gotten from all his years of jumping. His tennis shoes sagged in the entryway – little worn and unrecognisably clean, they no longer went on their enthusiastic rampages around the barn, the garden, or up in the air on the trampoline.

In the summer, hot as the Mojave Desert outside, they no longer left for the coast. One time Billy allowed himself to be driven there, but he never left his bed for the beach.

In the winter, between inconclusive hospital tests, Eve sat at the back window that looked out on the garden. Her gaze drifted along the red gnarly bark of the Japanese maple. She saw the insides of her son, those precarious twists and turns in the intimate darkness, like kinked and congested roots; she felt the hard knots of pain that had choked all joy and colour from his body.

Long ago, during the months that she cradled and breastfed Billy, she and Matt had foreseen all kinds of big things for their son. He would ace every school test while raising an army of buddies. He would throw his graduation cap high into a cloudless blue sky. He would write and call home from far-flung lands they’d have a hard time locating on a map. Fall head over heels in love. Marry. Presumably have little Billies of his own.

And recalling every never-would-be scene as she thought of her son’s prostrate figure, it was all Eve could do not to succumb to bitterness. Iller boys than Billy talked and put their lives into words, could tell a parent what they were going through; while others, just as mute, had at least their health.

But then she would stop herself because, come on now, such feelings, natural as they were, got her nowhere, they didn’t console or give her strength.

Sometimes, feeling very low, she became apprehensive about checking in on him, dreading the strange stillness that met her as she came through his bedroom door. How it unsettled her, that stillness. It was so unlike him, so un-Billy. They were barely on communicating terms by that time, except for those rare moments when he mustered the strength to hold her gaze. Some message passed between them then, something she could word out in her mind. She read in his round blue eyes, ‘Yes, I’m listening.’ Or, ‘No better, the pain is still really bad.’

There he was, laid low and debilitated by his pain, baring his pain to her frightened eyes, his whole being in pain, become pain itself, for it hurt her even to glance at his blanket, or to enter his subdued presence as she neared the bed.

Near or far, at home or out in town, just the thought of him exercised a similarly piercing effect on her. It was something not very far from grief she felt, and shared with Matt.

Their Billy, earthbound. Housebound. Bedridden. Not that it stopped him sometimes – when Eve walked through a room – wrapping his invisible arms around her in a hug.

On other occasions she thought she heard the drums or percussion Billy didn’t play any more, and the short-lived relief she felt was that of leaving the eerie silence, since for all his wordlessness Billy had never been silent.

Once, in the early days of his illness, she had gone into the garage just to look at his portable radio. The garage had been converted into a studio for Billy’s painting and the radio’s accompanying music. On the spattered desk next to the radio (silence did not become it), a brush’s bristles parched and stiff; and ahead of the paintbrush, the easel which at this hour her son ought to have been facing. His most recent paintings were propped up against a wall and she looked at them, feverish swirls and dots and splashes made with bubble wrap, rubber spatulas, turkey basters; while on others he had rolled the paint, or flicked and thumbed it over the canvas. They reminded her of something she had noticed as Billy was making them: a gradual narrowing of his palette, relying increasingly on blacks and sombre reds.

She was standing there when she took the call from Michigan and heard Ben ask, ‘What’s the latest with Billy?’ And, looking at the canvases, answered inwardly, ‘He’s really sick and nobody seems to know why.’ She didn’t tell him this and he knew from her tone to move the conversation on; he himself had the stress of end-of-term exams not to mention. They understood each other’s omissions.

The months of Billy’s illness passed, not a day too soon, long months and months amounting inconceivably to years. Aside from Ben’s graduation, the occasional anniversary, the Megargels lost track of time. It was during one spring when Eve drove up to New Hampshire, when she parked outside the townhouse she had come to clear, and put a foot through the door, that this realisation struck her. The family’s holiday home had become a shrine to the years before the illness. She asked the walls, the dusty furniture, had it really been so long since they last vacationed here? It really had. She learned the date from the magazines on the bedside table, their news long grown old, then ancient.

Over the years of trial and error, little by little doctors came to understand Billy’s illness, which was complicated both by its variability and the patient’s silence. He was given multiple treatments, for inflammation of the lining in his stomach and of the tube – the oesophagus – that connects the mouth to the stomach, and for the immune system overreaction to this inflammation. Beta blockers were prescribed to calm the pain receptors in his nervous system; too much adrenaline, it turned out, was misleading his body.

Billy was on his fifth or sixth treatment when doctors finally hit on the right combination and dosage. It was a miracle, the slow then sudden change that came over Billy, how he gained weight, muscle, coordination and vigour. He could run again and jump again and laugh and paint and play the drums energetically. He could take up his device as before and swipe the screen and communicate. At night he – and the household – could sleep soundly and wake refreshed. His recovery vindicated his parents’ perseverance, their dedication, their faith in him.

✲

In the barn, Eve rolled out her yoga mat, and Billy and the other yogis theirs. The floor seemed even more spacious since the trampoline had settled in a corner.

It was the week before Thanksgiving, and Billy’s birthday. His thirty-third birthday. There would be quite the crowd – Ben and his wife, Holly and her wife – around the table.