A heap of discarded toys lay abandoned at the bottom of a chest in an attic. Inside the small toy chest, a miniature hula-hoop snuggled with a slingshot, a bag of marbles, and a cloth hot air balloon that had once swayed over the crib of baby Toby. These forgotten toys had been sheltering at home for more than a decade. Not that a cobwebby half-full chest on a three-legged table scrunched under the eaves was a real home. Their mission in life, a boy named Toby, who was no longer a boy, had deserted them to pursue his first love, baseball, then his second love, Margery – now his wife and mother of his three children - Luke, Corinna, and Joey, and finally his great passion, a career in medicine. He hadn’t needed the toys for a long time. But now, he needed them. Toby was sheltering in place at a facility that wasn’t his home. He was hunched over a microscope, testing endless samples for a virus that was shredding the health of people worldwide. Toby felt very alone like he had when he caught measles from his cousin and had been isolated from his best friend, his older brother Jake. Jake who now lay in a hospital bed in a quarantined ward in a city where thousands sickened and hundreds died daily. Toby shut his weary eyes and drifted back in time to those days in his sunny bedroom when his favorite companions were his toys. He could feel the hula-hoop whirl around his wrist as he rotated it. He smiled when he pulled the rubber band of his slingshot and aimed the marble at a chess piece, knocking the knight off the table. He wrote a note, placed it inside the basket of the cloth hot air balloon, and lowered it to Jake’s room, who filled the basket with Milky Way bars and packs of spearmint gum, which Toby hauled up to his room before filling it with a paper airplane he had constructed. That had started a contest where the brothers folded paper airplanes and launched them out their windows, testing how far their planes could fly or how many loops they could achieve. Toby yearned for those simpler days. A masked colleague entered his lab, carrying more samples to be tested. Toby jerked awake, but not before he glimpsed the forgotten toy chest cradling those childhood treasures. That was all it took. The toys heeded Toby’s need and began rocking back and forth until the toy chest lost its balance on the wobbly table next to a window, and tumbled on its side. The toys rolled out. Their mission: reach Toby, give him hope, and help him find a glimmer of joyful play. They couldn’t let their boy succumb to despair. The closed window didn’t deter them. The sling shot loaded up one marble at a time and with pin-point precision battered the cracks in the widow until it shattered and spilled out the frame. The toys hunkered down in the basket of the cloth balloon after the hula-hoop managed to rotate the knob of the fan to high speed. The moving air swirled around the attic, lifting the balloon and sending the balloon and its occupants out the window where the blustery wind raised them high above the deserted city streets and empty stores and blew them towards the research lab. Toby’s need drew them toward him as if he were a powerful magnet. Suddenly, dark billowing clouds covered the sun, and rain drops tumbled down, drenching them. Water-soaked, the cloth balloon became too heavy to fly, and they started to drop from the sky. Their mission seemed doomed. Undeterred, the hula-hoop began rotating inside the balloon like a whirling dervish. The energy around the twirling balloon created a momentary break in the clouds, and the sun poured down. A glorious rainbow appeared. It created a bridge of colors. The toys slid from their great height to the steeple of the church next to the research center. A solitary organist played “Amazing Grace.” Inside the research lab filled with rows of labeled test tubes, Toby was peering through the lens of a microscope. His vision blurred as he wondered if he would ever hold his wife in his arms again, play catch with Luke, applaud Corinna as she learned to do a flip on the trampoline, or watch Joey take his first steps. He rubbed his weary eyes and stretched his cramped limbs. From outside his window, a rainbow of light brightened the gloomy day. The array of colors beckoned him. Toby cranked open the window and reached his hand out to catch some drops of rain. He leaned out and felt a cool blast of air as rain splattered his face, drenched the bandana around his neck, and drizzled down his back. A smile hovered around his lips. The organ music swelled from within the church. Startled, Toby stepped back, then leaned forward as he spied the gallant trio of toys. How could he reach them? Had they come to take him on a voyage, like the imaginary trips he had flown in his childhood when measles had isolated him, quarantined him in his bedroom? The distance wasn’t insurmountable. Toby searched his research space, which moments before had seemed like a dungeon. He spied a rope coiled on the floor, one he had used before to repel down rocky mountain sides in the days before the urgency of testing for the virus. Quick, no time to lose. His nimble fingers fashioned a lasso. He twirled the rope above his head and tossed the rope toward the steeple where the balloon hung with hopeful occupants peaking out. Five failed attempts didn’t daunt him. The sixth toss encircled the ballooned, and Toby drew the toys across the void and into his lab. Drenched from head to toe, he slid down to the floor, his back against the wall, and cradled his long-lost toys. He rolled the marbles around his palm before he played a game of marbles. He set a ruler standing in his coffee mug and practiced tossing the hula-hoop over its measured numbers. He picked up a pot of flowering violets and placed it in the balloon’s basket which he hung from the ceiling so that every time he looked up, and he vowed to remember to look up from his microscope, he would see the lovely purple hues. Then, he grabbed a pad of yellow office paper and sat down with his back to the wall beneath the open window. He tore three sheets off the pad and furrowed his brow as his fingers remembered how to fold the creases to fashion a paper airplane. Next, he zoom-called his wife and children and challenged them to make their own paper airplanes. He added his brother Jake to the zoom call. For the next half-hour, he and his family of four made planes and zoomed them across their spaces that were no longer so isolating. When Luke threw, he tried to flick his wrist as if he was tossing a curve ball. Corinna tried throwing one after completing a somersault on the carpet. Joey crayoned rainbow scribbles on sheets before they flew. In the hospital, Jake folded a sheet of paper into a jet and flew it toward the nurse who came to check on him. She unfolded the sheet that said, ”Thank you for my life. Thank you for caring for us all.” She smiled and sat on the edge of his bed. She fashioned her own plane and flew it out the hospital door. It landed at the feet of an orderly, who picked it up and laughed before flying it down the hallway to the custodian scrubbing the floor and sanitizing the elevator door. A smile lit up his face. Toby breathed a big, deep breath. He filled his lungs with the fresh air streaming through the window. He looked at his family and recognized he was not quarantined and alone. They would make it through this pandemic together. He said goodbye to his family, grabbed his yellow pad, and headed to the cafeteria to organize a competition of paper airplane flying. The toys, after their long journey, relaxed. Their mission had been accomplished, and for a space of time, all was right with the world. They would provide joy to their Toby, they would keep him company, and they would teach Toby to play again.