It was not the first time she had stood before a window, waiting. A year ago, or perhaps more, she had watched through the tall glass panes in her room as she and her parents had arranged, but that was at the private hospital a hour’s drive away where you could have your own room and showers but now she was in the big public hospital in the most run-down part of her city and they couldn’t afford to give each patient their own room. And so it was three beds to a room, no shower, and that was fine, just different.

She had been here for weeks. It may have been well over a month already—she had stopped keeping track. But then her brother’s birthday rolled around, and she wanted to gift him something. It was the first birthday she had not spent with him. And it was an important one, too. Eighteen.

She blamed herself. How, after one hospitalization and a whole year of recovery, had she wound up back where she began? But when she really thought about it she couldn’t blame herself, not really. Circumstances had been out of her control—it was like that tarot Tower card had been pulled again and wrung out the world from beneath her. The universe liked to play tricks on her like this, and if it was fated then it must not have been her fault, was it? But still it saddened her, not to be able to be there for her brother, to celebrate such an important passage in his life.

She wondered now if it was even important to him anymore, or if the things that had happened and tore them apart had rendered something like an eighteenth birthday meaningless. Like how some people placed so much value on their work and then they got cancer and suddenly work couldn’t matter less to them. But it made her feel guilty and a little sick just to think that. Of course her brother still cared about his birthday. Why should that change because of her?

So she thought about her brother, and his birthday, and how meaningful it was to turn eighteen. Her eighteenth year had not been a particularly good one, in fact if anything it was a bad one, but she had liked being eighteen so much that when nineteen rolled around she had felt actual grief, like losing a very close friend, and she had wrote a poem about eighteen to say goodbye. And of course when nineteen was up she’d been devastated all over again. And now she was twenty.

One morning after the nurse had pushed the little tall white cart into their room and given her the two tiny paper cups with the yellow and orange pills in one and tap water in the other and watched her take them both before saying thank you and wheeling the cart out into the hall she lay back in bed, thinking. Her eyes turned to the pale rose curtains by the windows, billowing softly above the pillows of the other patients’ empty beds. They were probably out in the recreation room again, playing Wii sports with the morning group or doing chair yoga. She almost never attended these groups, nor took lunch with them out there. It was safer to stay in her room, under the thin blue covers, scribbling things in the journal one of the nurses had given her, thoughts and overheard conversations, like how a toothbrush was a comb for your teeth and a comb was a toothbrush for your hair, and how pretty the daisy pillow looked on the other patient’s bed. She turned to that page and skimmed over it, letting her eyes drift down the heavy lines from the small dull pencil that she was too shy to ask the nurses to help her sharpen. And then, with a sturdy hand, she tore out the page. It fluttered downwards gently like a wilting flower, then settled in the crook of her hand. She began to fold.

The paper made soft crinkles beneath her fingers, and every crease felt like setting down a stone, controlled and permanent. She did not know what she was folding, but she let the triangles and trapezoids and rhombuses guide her until, finally, she had something complete before her.

The shape looked familiar, and yet she had never seen it before. She turned it around in her hands, observing the lines and creases and edges until it came to her realization that she was staring at a fox. Its ears protruded out in sharp triangles from the top of its head, its head in another triangle slanting down, creasing like the lattice of a pie at the tip. It was beautiful.

She played around with the paper fox some more, fumbling carefully with the folds until she found that it could unfold, when done at the right angles, into a perfect heart. For the first time in months she smiled. She could do something with this. She could give this to her brother, for his birthday, and she could color the fox with red and black crayons and give it eyes and write a message inside the heart. Yes, that would do. And so that’s exactly what she did for the rest of the day until the next afternoon, breathing life into the fox, turning it into something as meaningful as an eighteenth birthday.

Now she was standing before the door with the little square window, the paper fox given to a nurse just moments before. It was a week later and her brother’s birthday had been days before, and he and her parents had come to the hospital and delivered a cake to her through the nurses, and she had cried as she tried to eat it. Vanilla, her favorite, with lemon frosting. She had ended up sharing it with the other patient because it had been so difficult for her to not feel guilty about eating it all on her own.

“They’re outside,” said the nurse, returning to her side with a smile. The paper fox was no longer in her hands, which meant, she thought happily, that it was with her brother. She breathed deeply and counted to herself as she watched the frame in the door. It was a heavy metal door, with a large red CAUTION sign telling the nurses to always, always, lock the door behind them, so that the patients wouldn’t try to escape or something crazy like that. One, two, three…seven, eight, nine…And then she saw them.

They appeared in the corridor behind the barred door, their familiar faces peering at her through the small square glass, distant yet so, so close. They waved to her, smiling happily, and tears streamed down her face. She wanted nothing more than to cross through that door and embrace them, to tell them how much she loved them and missed them, and never let them go. Instead she lifted a small thin hand and waved quietly back. Her brother lifted the paper fox, as if it were a trophy, and mouthed something to her she couldn’t quite understand. But that didn’t matter. She was simply happy to see them. So, so happy.

Happy birthday, she wanted to say. But her mouth wouldn’t open, and she knew he already knew what she wanted to say, and later he would read the message inside the paper fox that also turned into a heart and he would probably cry too, cry tears that tasted of joy and sorrow and grief and love. And later, perhaps, he would also look back on this day, this moment, where he had also stood before a window, waiting, for the first time in his life.

THE END

– Angelina Carrera