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right now. I’ve been hearing about it on TV, ’cause a lot of firemen from here in Chicago have gone over there to help out. That kind of smoke has a special smell. It’s not like cigarettes or anything. I smelled it a couple of years ago when we went to Chain O’Lakes Park and they had a prairie fire.”
    “That’s amazing. Yes, there was a haze everywhere. You could smell the smoke from the mountains. But I had no idea that I had carried it back with me.”
    “Sure, I can smell it.” Jamie cocked his head and lowered his voice, like a conspirator. “So did you play hooky from that doctor meeting you went to?”
    “What do you mean?”
    Jamie grinned, his gums showing in the place of a missing upper tooth. “Your suntan lotion. I can smell that, too.”
    His smile was like a sun that never dimmed, despite a pall of illness, loss, and abandonment that would have dimmed the spirit of many who had traveled further in life. After his father was killed in Afghanistan, his mother was unable to care for him and turned him over to the custody of the courts. For two years, he had lived at the Grossman School for the Blind in Wheaton, where Mrs. Gore, a dormitory matron, acted as his legal guardian. He was bright and friendly and did well in school, learning to read in Braille and getting high marks in arithmetic. But an impish insistence on doing things his way had earned him more than a few detentions. Had he not been shielded from harsher discipline by Mrs. Gore, his natural-born independence might have progressed to outright rebellion.
    At the Grossman School, he was learning swimming and goalball. But baseball was what he really cared about. All through the spring and summer, he followed the Cubs and the White Sox on the radio, his spirits rising and falling with every crack of the bat. He liked the simplicity of the game. Football and basketball were too complicated to follow without the aid of sight. But in baseball, he could reconstruct everything that happened from what the radio announcers said. There was a moral simplicity to it, too, so plain that even a seven-year-old could understand it. Every man stood alone at the plate, his fate tied to his unique strengths and weaknesses, like a Greek hero. Jamie could identify with that. It was a mirror of what he saw life to be.
    When Dr. Helvelius once asked him what he would do if he got his sight back, his answer was immediate. “Baseball. I’m gonna be a major league baseball player. One day, I’ll lead the Cubs to the World Series. You’ll see I will!”
    As for Ali, once the mesquite smoke was out of her hair, Jamie always professed to dislike her smell of iodine and harshly laundered scrub suits. But her accent fascinated him. Few people ever noticed it. She had moved to New York as a little girl, and here in the Midwest, New York was all they heard. Jamie picked up on an older accent, out of the cradle, that had been almost erased, like the old writing on a palimpsest. He pestered her until she finally explained it to him, and from then on she was “Dr. Nefertiti” to him. Dr. Nefertiti . She didn’t take offense, for it was a recognition of a secret bond. Each had had to overcome adversity and sorrow. Each knew what it was to be an alien.
    Ali was aware that her relationship with Jamie was not objective. She had met him at the lowest point in her life, a time when she could hardly bear to drag herself out of bed each morning. When he first showed up in her clinic, it was as though the clouds had parted for the first time after a long, brutal, numbing winter. His rollicking laughter and breathless questions about wildfires and mummies and star travel and the New York Yankees beguiled her and made her forget her own loss. She looked forward to his visits, and then felt a gnawing emptiness each time Mrs. Gore led him home. In her restless nights, she would soothe herself to sleep thinking about Jamie’s gap-toothed smile, or the way his pink ears poked