“Do other people rent canoes?”
“A few.”
“Please, can you ask around to find out if anyone took a canoe that night? It doesn’t have to have been a fisherman who rented-anyone at all. If you hear anything, call me. I’ll give you my number.”
“Okay, sir.”
A movement caught Dawson’s eye, and he turned to see a girl of about nine years old hovering in the half-open doorway of Forjoe’s dwelling.
“Hello,” Dawson said, smiling at her.
“That’s my daughter, Marvelous,” Forjoe said.
Dawson saw how his eyes softened as he looked at her. Forjoe gestured at her to come to him. “Marvelous, bra ha.”
She approached and leaned against her father, shyly keeping her head down as he put his arm around her waist. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face and the standard short schoolgirl haircut.
“Greet our guests, eh?” he told her.
She curtsied slightly and said, “Good afternoon,” in barely a whisper.
“Are you feeling tired?” he asked her softly, passing his hand over hair.
She shook her head.
It was a question Dawson would not have expected of a parent to his nine-year-old child, and it was eerily similar to what he had often asked Hosiah during his years of suffering heart disease. In a flash, Dawson realized that something was wrong with Marvelous. Hours of sitting with his son in inpatient wards and outpatient waiting rooms had trained him to observe signs of illness in children. Here he noticed that while kids of this girl’s age would normally have skinny ankles, Marvelous’s own were puffy and so were her hands. She was retaining fluid for some reason.
“Okay,” Forjoe said, his eyes still full of tenderness toward her. “Go and do your homework and get ready for school tomorrow, all right?”
She nodded, walked away with one glance back at her father, and disappeared round a corner.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” Dawson said. “But is she okay?”
“She’s okay,” he responded, nevertheless appearing troubled. “Please, why do you ask?”
“Because you asked her if she was tired.”
“You are right,” Forjoe said heavily, as if reluctant to admit it. “The doctors say there is something wrong with her kidneys.”
For Dawson, this struck home. Countless times, he had told people in response to their questions about Hosiah, The doctors say there’s something wrong with his heart.
“Can they help her?” Dawson asked Forjoe.
He shrugged. “Anything they can do, my wife and I can’t afford it. We are too poor. The doctors tell me that one day Marvelous will need a machine to clean her blood two or three times a week, but the cost of even one treatment is more than we make in one month. Or they can transplant one kidney from her older brother, but the cost of the operation…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
