The boyfriend of my sister in law rolled up his sleeve, and there on the inside of his forearm was a tattoo of a playing card. It was a red card, with a thick yellow zero in the middle, the kind you find in a box of Uno. The whole table in Grand Rapids stopped chewing. His name was Dr. Amir Haddad, and he was a pediatric oncologist, a calm man in his early forties who had said almost nothing all evening. He rested his arm on the tablecloth and looked across at my son Tyler, who had gone absolutely still.
Chad, my brother in law, the hedge fund manager, had just finished a toast about how every family needs a few people who clean up after everyone else. He still stood, with his glass in the air, one eyebrow lifted, wondering why the mood had turned. Dr. Haddad said, in a low and kind voice, “Chad, may I tell a short story? I think your nephew might prefer that I not. But I think the rest of you should hear it.” He glanced at Tyler. Tyler gave a small, helpless shrug.
Dr. Haddad said, “In 2022, I was a new attending on the childrens cancer ward at Helen DeVos. We had a boy there named Eli. He was nine years old. He had a leukemia that did not respond to anything. By the autumn he was very sick. He stopped eating, and stopped talking, and would not let the nurses touch him. The doctors had run out of things to try. And the boy had run out of reasons to try.” He pressed his fingers against the card on his arm. “Then a night janitor started coming to his room.”
Nobody can fix everything, but a person can sit in a chair at two in the morning and deal the cards.
I felt every head turn to my son. Tyler works the late shift, mopping and polishing floors on the hospital wing, and he has done it for five years. He sat now with his big hands flat on his knees, the way he always does when he is embarrassed. Dr. Haddad said, “I assumed it was an accident. A man pushing a cart. But he came back the next night, and the night after. He sat in the plastic chair by the window with a deck of Uno cards and said, I am on my break. Do you want to play?”
The doctor smiled sadly. “Eli said no, the first six nights. The janitor said, that is all right, I will just play against myself. He dealt two hands. He played them both aloud, and cheated badly, and argued with himself, and lost. On the seventh night Eli said, You are doing it wrong. And he sat up in bed. From that night on, for four months, your nephew played Uno with that boy in the dark, in the hour between two and three in the morning, every shift he worked.”
His voice began to break. “Eli never beat him in the first month. By the second, he won every game. Your nephew told me he let him win. I never believed him. I think the boy was simply that good.” He stopped, and swallowed. “Eli died in February, with his mother and father, and his sister, and a deck of cards on his blanket. The last card in his hand was a red zero. That is what is on my arm. He asked me to remember it.”
Nobody said a word. My daughter in law was crying silently. Chad lowered the glass, very slowly, and put it down on the table, and I saw him look at his hands. Dr. Haddad said, “I met the boyfriend of your sister, I mean I am the boyfriend of your sister, and I did not know that your family was his family, until I saw his photograph on your wall tonight. I have been looking for him for three years to say thank you. He left before I could. He always left before.”
Tyler stood up. His chair scraped. He said, “Doc, I did not do anything.” Dr. Haddad shook his head. He said, “That child had no reason to live, and you gave him a game.” The two of them crossed the room and held each other, a tall doctor and a stocky janitor with the card on his arm and the memory in his chest, and the whole table rose, and the older relatives were weeping openly. I could not see for tears myself.
Chad was last to move. He walked around the table with his head down. He said, “Tyler, I have been an idiot for thirty years.” My son said, “It is okay, Uncle.” But Chad was shaking his head. He said, “It is not. I make money from money. You make a room feel like a room for people who are scared.” He took out his checkbook, then, ridiculously, put it back, and just said, “Is there anything that ward needs?” Tyler thought for a moment. He said, “They need a Uno table.”
There is a table in the family lounge now, a handsome oak one with a deck of cards on it and a small brass plate that reads, For Eli. Chad paid for it, and for a game room with it, with beanbags and a ceiling painted like the night sky. The children of the ward play there in the hours after midnight. Tyler is still on the late shift. He sits at that table when his cart is parked, and some nights a child who cannot sleep wanders in, and he asks, as he always does, “Do you want to play?”