GREEN SNAKE (ARTIST UNKNOWN)

It wasn’t until a half hour later, after a detour past the food sellers at the fringes of the hospital campus, where Chi’s acute sense of smell caused a relapse of olfactory agitation, that they made their way down the circular drive to the building where the palliative care unit was housed. It had been some time since Ladarat had visited—at least a year ago, when the unit first opened. But Chi knew his way around, and he bounded up the front steps with the authority of a tour guide. Then he pointed his nose at the gap between the heavy front doors, as if he could open them through the strength of will alone.

Perhaps he could, but Ladarat decided to help him, and she opened one of the doors and followed Chi up a few more stairs into a comfortably furnished space that could have been someone’s living room. There were books and games for children on bamboo shelves and a long table and a little kitchen at the far end. Although the unit couldn’t escape the institutional feel of a hospital, with dusty institutional windows and a bland tile floor, someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to make it homelike. Flowers in vases lined the long windowsill, and children’s artwork covered the walls. One watercolor caught her eye—an image of a long green snake. She was sure that this was in fact the painting’s subject, because the young artist had provided a helpful label: “Green Snake.”

As if guided by his own system of labels, invisible to humans, Chi pulled her to the right, into the hallway where the palliative care rooms were located. And here, too, someone had tried very hard to make the unit’s guests comfortable. There were overstuffed chairs in the hallway and pale blue carpet on the floor. Even the nurses’ station was disguised to look less institutional. Charts were hidden from view, and the countertop held only a single blooming orchid.

Ladarat found herself thinking that she very much looked forward to reviewing deaths that took place in this unit. Surely those deaths would be good ones by any standard?

“Oh, Chi. We missed you!”

This from the nurse behind the counter, the older of the two: Sudchada.

“And Khun Ladarat, welcome!”

It was nice to be welcomed, of course. But Ladarat tried not to take offense that the dog apparently had precedence in the social etiquette of this unit, especially since it was Sudchada herself who had asked her to look into the matter of Dr. Taksin’s … difficulties.

“Are you … taking Chi on rounds now, too?”

Ladarat explained that she mostly just housed him in her office, but she’d recently started to take him on visits. She found it both peaceful and oddly comforting, although she hadn’t yet figured out the proper protocol.

“When Sukanya brings him here, does she go to each room?”

“Ah, no. You see, some people do not like dogs. Or they have family members who are allergic. So we usually identify some people who would welcome a visit.” She glanced down at a piece of paper and then smoothed it on the counter between them. Running her finger down a list of patients, she stopped next to one.

“You should see Khun Melissa … Doble. Is that how you pronounce it? She is English, you see, so we do our best.”

Ladarat looked over Sudchada’s shoulder. The woman’s name was “Double.” Melissa Double.

“Yes, I think so. She lives in Thailand?”

“No, Khun. It is a sad story. She retired recently and came to Thailand on holiday. She is from … Wales. That is in England, yes?”

Ladarat wasn’t sure. Perhaps a cousin of England? But she nodded helpfully.

“She was planning to explore the north of our country, then perhaps venture into Laos and then to Hanoi. But she began feeling ill. Very ill. And when her hotel doctor was called in, he sent her to the hospital in Chiang Kong, where they found that she may have cancer. Apparently she had cancer of the pancreas in the past, but she thought it was cured. Now, maybe not. And when she began having very bad symptoms—pain and nausea—and went to a rural hospital, she was transferred here. Now we are helping to make her comfortable as she decides … what to do.”

“What to do?”

“Well, yes. If her cancer has returned … she is not from Thailand. She is deciding whether she should go home, while she can. As she becomes more seriously ill, perhaps with more symptoms, it will become very difficult for her to travel.” Sudchada paused, glancing down the empty hall.

“Khun …?”

“Yes?”

“If you were this woman. Mrs. Double. Would you want to go home?”

Ladarat thought about that question for a moment. Well, of course, she would, to be with friends and family. Who wouldn’t choose that? And yet …

“It seems obvious that she would. But … she is still here.”

“Yes.” Sudchada nodded.

“I mean to say, she has not gone home.”

Sudchada nodded.

“I mean to say, she could have gone home, but she hasn’t.”

“Exactly,” Sudchada said.

“So perhaps what seems like an obvious choice to us is not so obvious to her.”

Sudchada nodded again. “And I don’t know why that would be. She seems very outgoing and friendly. Also very intelligent. She always has books by her bed. It seems she made friends with the owner of a bookstore in the Old City, and he brings her a book every day. Why would such a person not want to go home to be with friends and family?”

Ladarat shook her head. It was something she had been wondering about this morning as she read through the medical charts of people who had died in her hospital. Did they think about it at all? Or perhaps they, and maybe this Mrs. Double, too, simply did not make a decision. They were overwhelmed by events and ended up where those events took them, like a small paper boat carried along by a stream. But all streams, no matter how peripatetic, reach the ocean eventually.

“Well, I will go to see her, certainly.” She paused. “We will go to see her. And perhaps we will learn something.”

Walking with more purpose than she felt, Ladarat followed Chi down the hall, looking for Khun Melissa’s room, number fourteen.

Some of the doors were closed, but many were open, and Ladarat noticed that the unit seemed to be full. More than a few rooms held families, and in one three young children were playing with small toy cars, zooming them around the legs of a low wooden coffee table. She smiled. This, then, would be the sort of good death that she was looking for: people spending their final days with family nearby, and with children playing, nearby but unburdened.

Ladarat was still thinking of that ideal death—which she’d yet to see in her chart reviews—when she almost ran into a thin man wearing a white coat who emerged from one of the rooms to her right. A doctor. Absorbed in thought, and making notes on a clipboard he cradled in one hand, he didn’t watch where he was going and tripped awkwardly over Chi’s leash, which slipped between Ladarat’s fingers. That probably saved him from a fall, and he managed to keep to his feet, although he lost the clipboard and most of his dignity in the process.

The doctor looked up, annoyed, with a smile that was not so much a smile as a grimace. Yim mee lessanai, a smile that is intended to mask wicked thoughts, but which doesn’t quite succeed.

His expression changed when he saw Chi, though. Then he offered a true smile and a wai as his glance came to rest on Ladarat. She returned the greeting and began to apologize, but Dr. Taksin—for that’s who it was—didn’t let her finish.

“Ah, no, Khun Ladarat. I was lost in thought. I wasn’t looking where I was going. An occupational hazard.” And he reached down, picked up his clipboard and pen and then Chi’s leash, which he handed to her with a mock bow.

Dr. Taksin’s most arresting feature was a shock of dark hair that covered a high, intelligent-seeming forehead. That, and his eyes, which seemed to focus intently on whoever he was looking at. That intense look, if only for a few seconds, would make you feel very important, as if you were the only person who mattered in that moment. No wonder the nurses adored him; his patients, too, of course, but also the nurses. And perhaps one nurse in particular.

And yet, despite that intensity, which was still there, he seemed tired. There were bags under his eyes, suggesting that he was not sleeping well. And his tie—a bright yellow, of course—was loosened around his neck. His collar, too, was looser than was quite right. It was as if he had lost weight but hadn’t had the insight to adjust his clothing accordingly. That was something a good wife would do.

He wasn’t married, was he? That’s what she’d heard. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t signify anything. Many Thai men don’t wear rings.

Dr. Taksin reached down again to scratch behind Chi’s ear, who responded with a dignified wag of his tail, no more. Then the doctor yawned, a barely restrained yawn of someone profoundly fatigued, and hoping only to get to sleep. They said their goodbyes, and Dr. Taksin made his way down the hall on his rounds, checking his clipboard before entering the room where the children’s cars were doing laps around the coffee table.

There was, Ladarat thought, something going on there. Dr. Taksin was not himself. He was certainly not the energetic and enthusiastic doctor the hospital had recruited to run their palliative care unit. Yet he was not obviously impaired, either. He was tired, of course. Anyone could see that. But so were most physicians. They didn’t seem to take care of themselves the way they should.

There would be time to figure that out. Now Chi’s considerable talents of navigation had led them to the door of room number fourteen, which he seemed to have chosen from among all the other rooms. Ladarat thought that was an odd coincidence, until she knocked and entered the room and Chi made a heroic jump up onto the bed, again pulling the leash from her hand.

Startled, Ladarat reached for the leash to rein him in, but the woman on the bed laughed and tried halfheartedly to fend off Chi’s affectionate kisses.

It was the sad woman. The sad woman from the courtyard. But she was no longer sad, apparently. Delighted to see Chi, she could have been his old friend.

Up close, she seemed … fairy-like. That was the best adjective Ladarat could think of. Her thin figure under the doll’s dress, pale white skin, and silvery hair made her seem like someone not quite of this world. But her smile was warm and very, very human.

Ladarat offered a wai and an apology—something she seemed to be doing a lot lately because of this dog. But the woman on the bed waved her apologies away, smiling.

Ladarat introduced herself and Chi. Again the woman smiled. “And you should call me Melissa, please. And of course I know Chi dog. We’ve become good friends these last few days.”

Then: “You speak English very well.”

“Thank you, you’re very kind,” Ladarat said, dropping Chi’s leash and taking a seat in a comfortable chair next to the bed. “I studied for a year at the University of Chicago, so I had the chance to learn a great deal.”

The woman named Melissa Double nodded. “Of course. There is nothing like living in a place to force you to learn a language. I was hoping perhaps to settle somewhere for a few months and to do that. I thought perhaps that would help my mind to stay alert after retirement. A challenge, you know? But that wasn’t meant to be.”

Ladarat nodded. “Nurse Sudchada told me something about why you’re here.” She paused. “I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles.”

Melissa shrugged. “The timing isn’t great, to tell the truth. I just retired as a librarian two months ago. I was truly looking forward to this trip. I thought I was cured and was ready to celebrate with a trip. But now … perhaps it will be a very short trip. But perhaps not. Who knows?”

She shrugged again, with a bit more animation. “On the other hand, this timing also couldn’t have been better. I’ve had a good life. I’ve done everything I had to do, and a little bit more.” She paused as Chi reorganized himself and curled up in a ball on her stomach.

“Have you ever been reading a book and thought, ‘I’ll just stop when I finish this chapter’? Or when this conversation ends? Or when this character does this or that?”

Ladarat nodded. All the time. That was the only way to stop reading at night. You had to find …

“A stopping place. That’s what this would be for me. If it is. That would be unfortunate, of course. I would have liked for my book to have been longer. Perhaps with a few more chapters. But this would be a good place to stop.”

“Were you …?” Ladarat wasn’t sure how to ask the question that she felt she had to ask.

“Yes?”

“Well,” Ladarat said hesitantly, “my office, my new office …” As if that mattered. “It looks out over the hospital courtyard.”

Melissa’s thin eyebrows went up a fraction of a centimeter.

“And I saw, or I thought I saw you earlier today.”

Melissa nodded, waiting.

“And it seemed as though … well … it seemed as though you were crying. But nobody seemed to notice, so I thought perhaps I was mistaken. And then I had a visitor, or several visitors, and by the time I could break free, you were gone.”

Ladarat finished this awkward little monologue in a rush.

Melissa looked at her, furrowing eyebrows and cocking her head to one side.

Had she offended the woman? She probably shouldn’t have said anything. If Khun Melissa been crying, that was her affair, wasn’t it?

Besides, you ask someone whether they were crying because you want to know why they were crying, either because you are a kind person, or merely a curious person. But now Ladarat knew exactly why this woman was crying. So why had she asked? Stupid.

Yet Melissa didn’t seem to be offended. Instead she smiled and pointed out something that Ladarat herself had been curious about.

“No one else seemed to notice. Or they did, but they were too polite to say anything. That is the Thai way, isn’t it?”

Ladarat had to agree that was true.

“And yet, you, from one of those high windows … you noticed. You have impressive powers of observation.”

Ladarat just shrugged. Her meager powers of observation were not really the point here, were they?

“I was crying a bit, I suppose. But that’s done. I’ve moved on.”

“You seem very … philosophical about this possibility. I meant to say, the possibility that your cancer has returned. Philosophical—is that the right word?”

Melissa nodded. “Yes, I suppose. I mean, yes, it’s certainly the right word. And I think it’s a good description. But it’s helpful to look at things that way, I’ve always found. We often can’t change what happens to us, but we can change how we react. Or whether we react at all.”

“That is a very Buddhist thing to believe.”

“Is it?” Melissa smiled, tilting her head to one side. “That’s very good to know. You see, I’d hoped to learn something about Buddhism in my travels. Firsthand, you know? Not just from books. Now it looks like I won’t have the chance, but perhaps I won’t need to? Perhaps I’m already something of a Buddhist?”

She looked intently at Ladarat for a moment, and Ladarat recognized the same sort of single-minded focus for which Dr. Taksin was so well known. “I didn’t mean any disrespect to Buddhism, you understand. I mean, I didn’t mean to make light of your religion by treating it so simply.”

When Ladarat didn’t reply immediately, Melissa’s eyes grew wide and she clapped a hand to her mouth at top speed as if she were stifling a yawn.

“I just assumed you were a Buddhist,” she said hesitantly. “I read that more than ninety-eight percent of people in Thailand are Buddhist, so I just assumed …”

Ladarat smiled. “That’s correct, we are. Or most of us are. And I am, too, so no offense taken. Besides, Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion. So many people are Buddhists, whether they know it or not. So perhaps you really are a Buddhist.”

“That is certainly good to know. It’s very good when one can accomplish something—especially something so weighty as becoming a philosopher—by accident.”

Ladarat was having two thoughts more or less simultaneously. The first was that this was precisely why she loved taking Chi on his rounds. It wasn’t, as most people would assume, because she loved dogs. Of course, dogs were fine, and often excellent company. Truth be told, Chi was often better company than her own cat, Maewfawbaahn, whose strange predilection for solitary nocturnal hunting often drew him away from human company. (The name was a play on words, literally: Maewfawbaahn meant “cat watch house,” or watchcat.) He was at home presumably doing precisely that at this very moment.

No, it was because the presence of an animal—any animal—caused people to let down their guard, just a little. Animals make people comfortable, enough, sometimes, to say things they wouldn’t otherwise say. And sometimes enough to speak truths, whether they knew it or not.

But it was the second thought that surprised her. And that was that Melissa Double was wrong. So that’s what she said.

“But it’s not really by accident, though, is it?” Ladarat asked. “You didn’t just become a Buddhist. I’m guessing that you’ve always had … similar thoughts. You’d always been philosophically minded in that way?”

Melissa smiled and then winced as Chi shifted his position on her lap. “I think it’s time for my pain medication again.” She paused. “But yes, I suppose you’re right. When I was younger, much younger, I had a cancer scare. The doctors thought I had advanced breast cancer that had spread to many lymph nodes.”

Ladarat nodded. That would be very bad indeed. Advanced breast cancer was very hard to cure. It could be treated, and contained, sometimes, often for years. But a cure was difficult.

Melissa shrugged. “It turned out to be nothing. Or not nothing—just an infection or some sort of inflammation. They were never quite sure. But anyway, while all that was going on, I had a chance to think about what I would do if someone gave me a terminal diagnosis—You know the word ‘terminal’? Is that the right word to use?”

Ladarat nodded.

“Well, I had a lot of time to think about that. Going back and forth to the doctors and waiting for all sorts of blood tests and scans and biopsies and whatnot. And somewhere in there I started thinking that if this diagnosis turned out to be real—which was looking pretty likely—I would just … go away.”

“Away? Away where?”

Melissa smiled a sad smile. If Melissa were Thai, what would be called yim sao: a smile of regret.

“Honestly, I hadn’t figured that out yet. And, fortunately, I never had to. But I just thought …” She trailed off, focusing her attention on the blissful ball of fur in her lap, who would have been purring contentedly if he were a cat. She seemed deep in concentration for a few moments, marshaling her thoughts before she continued.

“I just thought that by going away somewhere, I could get distracted from being sick,” she said finally. “I didn’t want to be sick, and I certainly didn’t want to be ‘dying.’ And I didn’t want other people to think of me that way.”

Melissa shook her head sadly and made the sort of pursed-lip grimace you’d make if you bit into a particularly sour kumquat.

“I’d just be the woman who was going to die at such a young age, and isn’t that such a shame. Instead, I thought I’d go somewhere that no one knew me. And where I didn’t know anyone, either. It would be a new place, or hopefully many new places. And I’d keep traveling, and I’d be a tourist, seeing new things and asking questions, and probably taking lots of pictures.” Melissa smiled, thinking about what that would be like.

Ladarat wasn’t following. Not at all.

“And then?”

Melissa stopped smiling, and her right hand stopped in the middle of Chi’s neck. Chi looked up, blinked, and put his head back down with a soft pffttt.

“And then … well … I hadn’t gotten to that point. Would I come home as I got sicker? Maybe. Or maybe I was hoping that someday I would just … die suddenly. I know that doesn’t make sense. But that’s what I was thinking then. So even twenty years ago, I was thinking that perhaps it might be better for me not to struggle. Just to accept the inevitable. Is that what a Buddhist would have done?” She smiled. “If it is, then I’ve truly been a Buddhist for a very long time.”

Was it? Ladarat wasn’t sure. She was no Buddhist scholar, that was for certain. Besides, what this woman was saying didn’t really make sense. Given a terminal diagnosis, she would just … what? Travel halfway around the world, leaving her friends and family behind her? Ladarat couldn’t fit that into any belief system she could think of.

At a loss, unsure what to say, whether to agree or plead ignorance, Ladarat was saved when her cell phone rang. It was Sukanya, the pharmacist. She excused herself, answered, and told her where to find her dog.

“It’s Chi’s owner. She’s the official … how do you say it? Dog handler?” Melissa nodded.

“She’s coming to pick Chi up. I can have her meet us here, if you like? She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“No; thank you, though. It’s time for my pain medication, and after I take those two little blue pills I’ll be asleep for the next few hours.”

As she shifted her legs under the covers, Chi recognized his cue with the alacrity of a professional actor. He stood, stretched, shook himself in a wriggling happy dance, and bounded off the bed. Melissa winced again, but she was smiling.

“It’s been a good day, so thank you for that.”

“A good day?”

“My friend from Back Street Books in the Old City brought me two new books to read. And I saw Chi again. And I met you, and had a fascinating conversation. Like I said, it was a good day. As long as I can still have good days like this, I’m happy that I’m still here.”

Ladarat didn’t know what to say to that. But as Professor Dalrymple admonished, often the most important thing a nurse can say to a patient is … nothing.

Instead, she promised to ask Sudchada on her way out to bring in Melissa’s two blue pills. “And perhaps I can stop by tomorrow?”

Melissa nodded. “I’d like that very much. It would be another good day.”