A lot can happen in the span of seventeen minutes: a birth, a death, a work of art, a three-and-a-half-mile trip from the city to an island nestled between the Puget Sound shipping lanes and the ancient forests of the Olympic Peninsula.Today I am in the car, with the dog, on the way to the ferry. I have just visited my friend Tia, who has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. Tia has a lovely hospital room in one of the University of Washington medical towers in Seattle, overlooking Montlake Cut, a narrow channel of water that connects Lake Union to Lake Washington. As I drive, I notice the hills and sparkling water all around, the bridges, overpasses, and arterials, welding the landscape together. The colors of the trees are changing from green to yellow to magenta. It is fall now, just barely.I brought Tia a little painting, one of my 8 by 10 abstract landscapes. Normally I like to work quickly, completing a project in twenty minutes or less, before the light (or my thoughts) change, but this one took longer. I had started it when I was on Vashon Island this summer, at the cottage I used to own with my first husband before he died, which, at the time of writing this, is fifteen years prior. Now I go there, sometimes with my new family, and often alone. The house faces west, overlooking a protected bay. We had beautiful sunsets that week and I tried to capture the blood-orange hues by mixing red with yellow and yellow with pink neon paint and painting the various color degradations in hasty lines across the paper, but then the wind shifted and the air was filled with smoke from the British Columbia wildfires. The sky turned to chalk, so I mixed silver and white together and dabbed that into the foreground, but it still didn't look right by the time I had to leave the island, so I put the art on a piece of newspaper and placed it into the back of the car along with the dog and a bag of recycling and returned home to Seattle via the ferry. I decided a long time ago that whatever happens to a painting-in-progress is up to the painting. If dog hair or bits of dirt end up on a canvas, well, those elements become part of the story.Once on board the ferry, I kept looking back at the painting, hoping it would tell me what it wanted me to do with it. The dog had done nothing to alter the shapes or colors; she was fast asleep on a different side of the seat. My car was parked on the south section of the car deck, so I stared through the passenger window, past the cracked paint and rusty steel open air portholes of the ferry, out to the water. Puget Sound had an eerie quality to it, surrounded by so much smoke and fog. You couldn't see Mount Rainier but you knew it was there. The foothills were gray-blue and the water was a bluer gray-blue and the sky was a whiter gray-blue and even the ferry, the vessel itself, a color-blocked grayish-white with a solid green-blue stripe, the way it's always been, but that day I noticed all of it, how similar all the colors were and I felt that I, sitting in my gray car with its black interior, wearing my favorite green tee, was a just a tiny speck of color inside a much larger landscape.What can I bring Tia? I thought, before it was time to go to the hospital. I grabbed a tube of light ultramarine. I didn't take off my jacket or put on my green apron, like I usually do when I'm painting, to protect my clothes. I just picked the first color that caught my eye and squeezed it onto my fingers, closed my eyes and moved my hands around a bit on the paper. It's often hard to know when something is complete. But I knew immediately this one was done as soon as I opened my eyes. Finally, with the contrast of the blue you could see the pop of the old sunset peeking through, plus the silver and the yellows and magentas and greens and the whole mess that I'd made weeks earlier, and now it seemed like it might be a little thing someone could enjoy.Tia's eyes today were the bluest blue I'd ever seen, somewhere between cerulean sky and indigo ocean. The piece was dry by the time I got to the hospital's Triangle Parking Garage, so I tucked it inside a cellophane sleeve as I walked up the garage's escalator. Tia stared at the art for a few moments before she placed it onto the hospital tray, saying there was something about it that reminded her of what was going on both inside and outside of her. I didn't know if that was a compliment or an insult or something else entirely, I don't know—there are a lot of things I feel self-conscious about, but working with paints is not one of them. She could throw it out later if she wanted to, or get it framed. It was just a little something I made, a mood. I sat in the chair next to her hospital bed. She said we couldn't touch, her immune system was compromised, so we bumped elbows instead.Tia had an IV pole next to her which she referred to as her “tree of shit,” but I said, Isn't it a tree of life? There were all kinds of translucent bags hanging from metal branches and tubes to connect to her IVs. Some had clear liquid in them; one was more the color of a pale magenta. Doxorubicin is its name, I've since learned. The nurses refer to it as “the red devil.” Tia said she was going to name her tree “Puff” for “Puff the magic dragon.” She'd been sensing dragon metaphors everywhere. Cancer evokes fighters. “See those checkmarks?” she asked, pointing at the whiteboard on the opposite wall. “Those are all the people who have donated blood for me. I wouldn't be alive without it.” I looked up and began to feel faint. I'd never told Tia about my blood phobia. I'm a fainter. Fainted all the time starting around age five. If I see blood I faint. If I think about blood, I faint. If I hear talk about blood, I faint.A large curtain separated the bed from the door, a wall of glass. Beyond the glass was the nurses’ station. Above the curtain rod I could see the door open, hear the faint click of the door handle. Tia and I locked eyes. Did she want me to stay or to go? Stay, her eyes said. But I was sitting too close to her for the nurses to get between us so I got up and walked to the other wall of windows facing the water, sat down, and put my head in my palms.“Put your head between your legs” my mother advised me when I was a kid. She never thought to question the cause. I guess I didn't either. I fainted throughout high school, college, and beyond. Several times people thought I was dead. My eyes rolled back inside my head. They thought it was weird or funny or both, but I never did. Finally, as an adult, I told a therapist about my fainting spells. With the blankest expression on her face, she asked, “What was happening when you were five?”“My sister had cancer,” I said.“There you go,” she replied.Sometimes I feel like the contours of my life are trapped inside a color wheel and all I do is make zigzag marks trying to figure things out. As I continue on my path toward the ferry through the concrete channels carved through this city, water below, mountains above, I remember all the trips to the hospital with my sister Lisa when she was diagnosed with leukemia. Same as Tia. Lisa survived. This was back when people didn't talk about cancer. Especially kids with cancer. Love your child now before she dies. Even the doctors didn't say much to my parents. And my dad was a doctor. Across the bridge we drove, along Montlake Avenue over the cut, past the stadium up the hill to the Children's Hospital. Wait at the light by the Baskin Robbins, watch the seagulls soar overhead at the landfill across the street behind the chain link fence, near the water. Later, when I moved to this neighborhood as an adult, I learned how the lake had become poisoned with a toxic sludge, the marshlands tinged with yellow and green algae. The nickname for that part of the lake was “garbage bay.” Now it's a playfield and a natural marsh area teaming with eagles and bird watchers. The university touts it as an atonement for past environmental sins. You'd never know it used to be a dump or that my sister used to have cancer, except when I run the gravel trails, I remember. You can see the oily rainbows glisten in the mud puddles after it rains.As the nurses worked on Tia and the minutes ticked by, I thought about my rush to get there, the impatience in waiting for the paint to dry. People move slowly in hospitals. It's quiet. Women sit at front desks that curve like waves. There are little signs everywhere: “Wait until you are called.” “Quiet please.” “Do not enter.” “Staff only.” “Don't re-use cups.” “This lounge is for families only.” “Please press for assistance.” I was a woman in a hurry. I should know hospitals better but I don't. There's a quietness to them I find unsettling. They are so unlike the places I normally frequent—grocery stores with the sounds of fake rain in the produce section, school hallways buzzing with noisy children, home, with its robo calls, leaf blowers blaring outside, the sharp yelps of my barking dog, the dull hum of the television, the chatter of a FaceTiming teenager, the gurgling dishwasher. As I ran from the car up the escalator and across the street in the rain, people were moving slowly and I was moving quickly and I had a piece of art in my hand and I had places to go and my body could move on my own accord. I could ask for directions. I sensed the staff noticing me. My energy was different from everyone else's. I could maneuver around wheelchairs and avoid making eye contact with people sitting in hospital gowns with bright pink plastic bracelets on their wrists. I like that the nurses, dressed in their utilitarian scrubs—magenta, teal, and dark blue—commanded authority. There's a science to it, a kind of chromaticity. So many vials and syringes, clipboards and equipment, smiling and concerned faces. Things appear differently here than in the real world. I wonder if this is what physicists mean when they talk about spectral power.Before Tia got sick, she and I used to exchange photos of dead things via text and e-mail. Bugs, butterfly wings, a squirrel so flat it looked like a slab of furry beef jerky. I knew Tia liked feathers so I responded with a dead bird series, beaks sharp as knives, sparse feathers, bones exposed, showing the truth of their anatomy. Back and forth, back and forth, we shared these photographs. Some close up, some farther away, whatever angle best showcased the carcass's architecture. We didn't talk too much about what we might do with these photos. Tia said essays, maybe. I said art, but then laughed, because who would want a framed picture of a dead squirrel on their wall?I sat with Tia from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and the hours passed in a blink. Tia and I talked for a few more minutes about dragons and rivers and the trauma of pain and the family history of pain and how there is no beauty without pain. They go together. The pain pushes the energy forward. You must do something with the pain. It flows, up and down, carving new paths, sloshing around, cleansing.The last thing Tia told me before I headed for the ferry was that not only was her drug cocktail, Puff, going to kill the cancer but when she's done with this treatment and gets her bone-marrow transplant, she'll be a whole new person, with two sets of DNA. A chimera, she tells me. I have to look it up to see what it means.Weeks go by. Tia isn't well. No more visitors. It's always cold on the ferry. Today it is gray. The water is gray, the sky is gray, my coat is gray, the car is gray. The dog is black and white, her leash is blue. The car smells like death. The dog must have rolled in something, I don't know what, but there are dead things all over the island. I found a dead doe in the yard by one of the old and craggy apple trees. The apple tree is probably a hundred years old, as old as the house. The doe was very dead, guts exposed, fur and bones. Which was strange, because the week before when I was on the island, I didn't notice a dead doe, but it's possible I just hadn't walked to that part of the yard. There's always so much deer poop up there, I have to make sure I'm wearing boots. There's no telling what the dog got into. When it's time to go I always put on her leash so I can catch her more easily, otherwise it's a game of sticks and chase and old tennis balls she finds in the tall green grass and yellow and brown rotting leaves. Some years there are apples, tiny and hard, and some years there is nothing. Moss is the only constant. A warm green, almost the color of chartreuse, it wraps around the base of the fruit trees and larger limbs like leg warmers. Grayish-green lichen spores cling to the smaller branches. Every year I notice they spread and grow larger, making the trees look more mature. Up close the lichen looks like puffs of seaweed or coral, a nest of arteries. I imagine this is what many diseases look like under a microscope.My husband died at the ferry dock in the fall of 2003. In the weeks leading up to his death, I found dead birds all around our property. “Flew into the window” he said with a shrug. He scolded me for thinking it was a sign, an omen. Then he died. Just like that. Heart attack in the tiny park-and-ride lot near the ticket booths after a long training run. He was 39 years old. White and gray seagulls soared overhead. The paramedics shoved a clear tube down his throat and hooked him up to oxygen and then a big red ambulance hauled him away. I didn't know if he was dead or almost dead or if they just didn't want to tell me anything other than to drive slowly to the hospital. Why? To give me more time? It took me almost an hour to get there when really the trip should have taken less than twenty minutes. When the baby and I were finally let into his room, all I could see was white. White floors, white walls, white cabinets, white curtain. Rows of white fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. His body lay in the center of the room on a gurney, unmoving, arms and legs outstretched, blue-gray eyes staring up at the ceiling. I walked over, closed his eyelids, and knew I had to start over.The first few times I took the ferry alone, without him, all I could see was his yellow shirt, cut open, nodes on his chest, the small patch of blood behind his head where he fell. The red ambulance. The small crowd with looks on their faces that said What happened? and Whoa, I'm glad that's not me. The image of me standing there, holding our ten-month-old daughter, my hair cut short, still thinking it was just a seizure, and he'd be okay. How many times did I walk or drive past that exact spot before the blinding colors turned more muted, before the city added a chain-link fence separating the walk-on passengers from the rows of cars, before signs went up saying “Registered carpools only. No pickup/drop off,” and before the spot where he collapsed was turned into a plug-in station for electric vehicles?In late fall I return to the island. Still no visitors allowed for Tia so I send her messages via the CaringBridge site her husband has set up for her, and don't expect any replies back. I have to go back and forth to the island a lot now, mainly because the leaves pile up so fast, and also because we are building a new pumphouse for our antiquated water system. I want to supervise the construction since this is where I might set up an art studio. It's kind of a joke. I don't actually think I'm doing real art nor will the pumphouse ever become a studio. But it's fun to think about. I have no artistic training; I've just been messing around with the art supplies I found at my mom's house after she died. I tell myself I'm “working on a new series.” I've been printing out photos from my walks in the woods, cutting them into scraps, pasting them onto paper, and filling in the blanks with whatever colors come to mind. My husband spent his last days in these woods, running the trails, unaware that his time was limited. Under the microscope, heart disease looks like interlocking tree branches of varying degrees of thickness, and thousands of tiny twigs.An hour later there is a faint tap on the door. The dog doesn't bark. It's my neighbor, Jan. She tells me their horse is dead. They had to put him down yesterday and that it wasn't easy to find someone with a big enough truck and a tractor with a backhoe so they could lift the horse out of the truck and dig the hole in their yard for the burial. Jan tells me all of this so I can keep the dog and myself inside and avoid the entire scene but I decide to venture out instead.So much death. I go for a trail run with the dog. I see a sign for a lost cat. I see a dead raccoon on the side of the road, his mouth open. Teeth as sharp as spikes, like he wanted to take a bite out of whatever hit him but the cold jaws of death grabbed him instead. When I return from my trail run there's a tractor in the driveway and the neighbor's horse is hanging from a sling. His body is the color of tree bark when it hits the sunlight. Every time the tractor moves, the horse shakes a little, like he's squirming to get out, and I want to rush over and release the harness under his belly so he can run off into the woods.I remember the day my husband collapsed at the ferry dock. How I wanted him to get up, brush himself off and help me strap in our daughter's car seat so we could get on with our afternoon.The neighbors’ side of the driveway is pristine. The gravel is well maintained and Jan's husband John leaf-blows on a daily basis. My side is littered with leaves, colors ranging from golden honey to a warm burnt clay, similar to the horse's hide. Underneath, clumps of bright green moss, scabs that have fallen off the trunks of the firs that tower above. I just raked a day ago. It looks like there is no other possible floor covering for our driveway other than leaves. When my husband was alive, the driveway was always kept clear. After he died, my neighbors took over. Sometimes friends and neighbors just know what to do. I don't know if I'm one of those people. When I remarried, I married a doctor. The doctor is someone who knows how to fix things, see the big picture. If he were here today the driveway would have been clear already; he's not like me, choosing instead to go for a trail run and look at dead things. Today is dry. Dry leaves are easier to rake than wet leaves, but it still takes me almost an hour. The contractor drives his truck over my piles. He has to go back into town to get a doorknob for the pumphouse. He says it's the nicest pump house he's built in a long time. Wasn't sure about the color I picked out (Benjamin Moore “Raccoon Fur”) but that it looks really nice and blends well with the landscape.When I walk toward the pumphouse after the contractor is done, I see that the dead doe is still under the biggest apple tree. More leaves have fallen so just the ribs are sticking up out of the ground like arches. Most of her face is obscured by the leaves. It doesn't smell anymore. My neighbors with the dead horse tell me that if I move the carcass out to the road the county will have to pick it up, and she will no longer be my problem. I'm not sure what I want to do with her but I feel responsible. Maybe I should just dig a hole before another animal carries her away. Maybe there will be so many dead things in our yard that we will just designate this spot as a graveyard.I remember the day I brought Tia here and she told me she could feel the presence of my dead husband rustling in the leaves and in the eagles soaring overhead. I assumed the two of us might spot some dead things in the yard or on the trails but we didn't, and I thought that was strange because it seems to me that the island, and Tia and I, are always in some stage of decay.By winter, Tia posts selfies on Facebook. One is just her hairless face and head, unadorned, one is of her donning a wig, a pretty chestnut color with bangs, and one is of her bald head covered in multicolored adhesive holiday bows, with the caption “Merry Christmas.” Her expression is wry and unsmiling. Her blood counts are good enough for a visit so I bring Tia a couple of handwoven blankets made by churchwomen and she thanks me profusely because how did I know that she is always cold? I ask Tia if I can bring art and she shakes her head. There's nowhere to keep it because now she's the one doing all the back-and-forth. Soon she'll be out of the hospital but it doesn't mean she's out of the woods. Now the real work begins. Her family lives on the other side of the mountains, a three-hour drive over the pass, and she needs to travel often for chemo and blood draws. Tia doesn't trust the hospitals where her family lives and I don't blame her. The Tri Cities (“dry shitties” as we say) in Eastern Washington are home to the Hanford Site, a decommissioned nuclear production complex where Tia used to work in the 1980s. I asked her if she thought that working there had anything to do with her cancer and she paused for a moment. “Probably,” she said. “I saw things I shouldn't have.” I asked her about the colors and she tells me radiation is colorless, packed inside metal probes. I don't want to ask more, but am confused about the science of it, even more so after I later search “radioactive probe” and the first result to come up is all about DNA sequencing.Tia gets an apartment downtown designated for cancer patients only, and in early January I ask if I can take her to her appointments and then to lunch. When I pick her up, she walks out to my car, able but weak. Her clothes hang off her limbs like swaths of Southern tree moss. She tells me the thing she misses most is gardening in her yard, and she's not even allowed to touch her dogs. Dirt is dangerous for her in her immunocompromised state. Microbes are bad. She can't even eat soft cheese. We drive to the hospital. It's only three blocks but we circle around a few times, mostly because she is confused about where we are. Her mind is drifting. I tell her it's okay. I want to hug her but she seems frail and her body language says don't touch me. Instead I ask if I can bring her some new clothes in smaller sizes and she says no. The ones she has now remind her of the person she used to be, and besides, if she gets through this thing alive, she's burning everything.The cancer hospital is a strange place because there are only three kinds of people: cancer patients, medical staff, and visitors accompanying cancer patients. The cancer patients wear baggy clothes and tired expressions. The medical staff wear scrubs in emerald colors. The visitors wear horror on their sleeves. Tia and I are there for hours. We change locations twice and run out of things to talk about. Mostly we just sit there in silence. There aren't many conversations you can have when you are separated by nothing except a beige curtain, so we talk about books for a while. Tia likes Ann Pancake and Terry Tempest Williams, but she hasn't been able to read much because she's on so many different medications her brain is in a fog. Tia tells me about a trip she took to a writing conference in her home state of Kentucky. How she drove by her estranged mother's house one time and saw her outside, arranging dolls on a mound of dirt island ringed with broken bricks. How she wondered which one of the dolls was for her, which ones represented her brother or sisters. Tia's mother had birthed five children. Two of them had died in infancy. Tia was the third. She has two younger sisters, just like me. Were the dolls the three sisters or the three ghosts? This sounds like a word problem. I'd read some of Tia's pieces before so I knew a little about the history. “Did you stop and say hello?” I asked, knowing full well the answer. Tia smiled and changed the subject. She told me about a different time in Kentucky, near Troublesome Creek, when she spotted something in a drainage ditch and got out of her rental car. It was a dead turtle, its shell packed full of assorted bones, little shriveled white leathery things and spider webbing. She shipped it home via UPS, wrapped in her dirty laundry, only to realize during the flight home that the white things could be snake eggs. When the package arrived two weeks later, she used barbeque tongs to open the box.Reading up now on this history of Troublesome Creek, I learn this is where the “blue people” are from, their skin the color of a bruised plum.When we're done I take Tia to lunch at a restaurant near the hospital called Lunchbox Laboratory, which is known for its burgers and milkshakes. My instinct is to order something healthy, leafy greens or a soup, but Tia says she's only allowed to eat dead things that have had the shit cooked out of them, so we order burgers (well done) and fries.The distance between our house in Seattle and the tiny cottage on the island is about 30 miles. It takes about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on traffic. If the whole trip were the equivalent of a restaurant meal, the drive to the ferry would be the getting seated, ordering off the menu, and looking at signs part, the wait for the food would be the wait in line, and the real meal deal would be the seventeen-minute crossing, the views, the smell of the saltwater mixing with aromas from the galley, maybe a snack from the galley. Ah, and then dessert, the best part: the twenty-minute drive to the cottage, the towering evergreens and tall grass, no honking horns, nobody giving you the finger, the little light-up signs in the windows of the three restaurants in town, and the outdoor county pool, shaped like a popsicle, topped with a creamy white bubble in winter that looks like a giant marshmallow.The next time I'm on the island, I run into an old friend who birthed two premature babies on the ferry. According to the story, her kids got free ferry rides for life. Turns out it's a myth. The ferry only speeds up during medical emergencies, and will call for an ambulance to meet on the other side. I once asked her if she thought that would have been a good deal, though, the trading of a short-term ordeal for a free lifetime pass, and she said no, it would have been much better to give birth in a hospital. “Well, at least you got some prize,” I said, referring to her bragging rights, her two perfectly healthy teens. Nobody offers you anything if one of your family members dies near the ferry.Lately, my kids have been complaining about going to the island. “Boring,” they say. I get out the board games. Move three spaces and sit at the same table where you were a baby and your dad spooned apple sauce into your mouth a week before he died. Move another space and climb up onto the same couch where I courted the man who is your father now. Back and forth, back and forth. Dating is a game but moving through the grief is not. The island offers such an exquisite shelter and there's so much to think about while I cut up photographs and mix paints.In the new year as I sit in the ferry line the sun sets over the Olympic mountains and the colors go from magenta-pink to orange-yellow, and then pink-magenta-purple-blue. The snow-capped peaks in the distance look like crystalized ice cream and the small sail boats in the foreground are just sad pieces of slowly rotting wood and I wonder if anyone ever takes these boats out, because they are always anchored here every time I sit in line for the ferry.When you have two kids from two different marriages it can get complicated trying to remember which dad said what and which ferry you want to get on and the lines can be long and sometimes I want to stop at Trader Joe's and get some dark chocolate peanut butter cups for the ride and I remember that the first husband would have never allowed this because sugar was evil but husband number two never says no to sweets and that is a sign of a happy relationship. The ferry line is always unpredictable, just like death is unpredictable. You never know when your number is up, just like you never know where your car will land in the ferry line.After several more trips to the island, I notice that Tia has gone dark. She's stopped all communications now that she is close to transplant. I'm not sure what this means—good news or bad or something in between—or if she's one of those people who doesn't want to talk about anything in case she dies. I have no idea what she looks like now and wonder if she feels like a dead thing or an alive thing and I don't ask. I sense she will reach out when she's ready.Soon, I get word. The transplant date is set: March 1. Tia doesn't know if she'll make it but if she does, she'll be a brand-new person with a brand-new DNA, and apparently, she's going to reemerge with the blood of a 26-year-old male.On March 1, in the ferry line, I notice that the sky is periwinkle and the water is steel gray mixed with royal blue and when I look south toward Mount Rainier I think I see two bright stars in the distance, glowing and lined up perfectly, but it turns out they are just airplanes in line waiting to land. Once we are on board, I ask my son what video game he is playing in the backseat and he says, “Nothing,” and I say, really, nothing? It sure looks like you are playing something and he shouts YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING and that's when I take the iPhone out of his hands. I can't stand the sound of sniffles over the hum of the ferry's engine, so after a few minutes I give the phone back. I used to think it was hard being in your forties thinking about death all the time but now I wonder if it might be more challenging to be an 11-year-old living in a completely different world. My daughter says nothing. She understands the reality in which she and I both live.That weekend, it begins to rain. The kids, second husband, and I drive to the center of the island to get ice cream, then back to the house again. Ahead, I notice a couple walking along the long stretch of two-lane highway. She is in a hospital gown and slipp