Heart the Lover - 4

III

Thursday

J ack is a liar when it comes to pain. He’ll say it’s a two when it’s a five, a five when he can barely speak. If it’s really bad, he’ll hand over his book and let one of us read it to him. It’s been bad for a week straight now.

Harry is doing his algebra homework at the kitchen table, headphones clamped tight, and Silas is making things sizzle and smoke in the wok. Jack and I are on the couch we moved in here for days like these. He leans heavily against me. I’d prefer to read him stories with no peril and happy endings, but he wants facts. I hold the book with one hand and rub his head with the other and read from a chapter about the mass extinction of mammals on each continent soon after the arrival of the first Homo sapiens.

‘When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today,’ I read. Among these were saber-toothed cats and eight-ton ground sloths as tall as twenty feet. And despite thriving for more than thirty million years, most of these large mammals would be gone forever in two millennia, obliterated by us.

Jack is wearing a hat Claudette knit for him with three magnets stitched into it, one at the forehead and one at each temple. She’s read a lot about magnetic therapy. He says it helps. As he listens, he presses the right-side magnet hard to his skull. I feel it happening before it happens. I feel it on my skin and Jack’s skin, a sudden squall, everything dimming. Silas, I think I say but I’m not sure. Jack’s body goes soft as if he’s just dozing off, then every muscle clenches hard all at once, his arms and legs stiff as wood, and I hold him close to me as he bucks and jolts, his head knocking my jaw, catching my tongue, and I am saying we are on the couch, we are on the couch, because the last time he was alone in the bathroom but here we are okay, we are okay, I am saying, and everything is electric but dark and Harry has pulled his headphones down around his neck and Silas is on the couch with us, holding us both and wiping the blood from where it has dripped out of my mouth. Jack is limp again in my arms. He opens his eyes. The scene is familiar to him, the pallor of our faces, the afterfeeling. He once compared it to Pompeii, waking up and seeing us covered in ash. For it is we who are stunned in place now, he who must wait for our return. His seizures are a response to the pain, and a relief from the pain. He will be an actual two for at least a few days.

‘It’s all right. I’m good.’ He lifts his head up slowly from my lap. I can feel the small aftertremors in his muscles. He reaches for the book that has fallen to the ground. ‘Let’s keep going, yeah?’

Harry swings his headphones back up and Silas gives us a few more squeezes before he rescues the food on the stove. I try to find my place in the book.

‘I want that surgery,’ Jack says.

Just after his eighth birthday, Jack began to lose his balance. He said his legs felt weird. They found three gliomas in his brain. He’s had three surgeries, but they haven’t been able to remove all the tumor tissue. What remains still causes pain and seizures. It’s pressing on the brain stem. The doctors down in Boston have recommended we go to Houston for this next one, to a surgeon who specializes in this particular high-risk procedure. We’ve been on her wait list for five months.

We’ve spoken to her once, this surgeon. On the phone she was brusque. She preferred to speak directly to Jack, even when Silas or I asked a question. She made lame jokes that Jack loved. ‘Now I hate to tell you, but you won’t be able to drive a car for six months.’ Jack is twelve. I don’t have a good feeling about it. But I don’t have a good feeling about much of anything these days.

‘I know,’ I say.

He knows the risks. He has seen it all online. It doesn’t matter to him. He is certain he will be fine.

‘When they call, I want the first opening. The very first.’

Across the room my phone dings in my bag. We all look at each other.

Harry reaches in, reads the text.

‘Who’s Sam Gallagher?’

Friday

I t’s Silas who insists I go. I hate leaving them, even for a night.

‘We’ll be fine,’ he says, pulling up to the departure doors. Jack has gone to school today, the first time in nine days.

‘I know.’ But I’m thinking about the surgery. The doctor said they might only give us a day to get to Houston for pre-op.

‘Even if we got the call right now, we could get there by Sunday.’

We don’t talk about the costs anymore, the unpaid time he’s taken off teaching, or the fact that I haven’t published anything in five years.

I nod and pull my small suitcase from the back.

‘It’s just one night,’ he says, hugging me outside the revolving doors. ‘I’m so sorry,’ He means about Yash, but I can only feel the sadness of leaving them.

‘I don’t want to go,’ I say, his arms still around me, my lips against the stubble of his neck. ‘I hate hospitals so much.’

On the plane I hold the rock Jack gave me. He has done this since he was very young, given me a little rock to travel with. He collects them. I’ve gotten this one before. It has a little dimple in it. Jack calls it heart-shaped but that seems like a stretch. It fits nicely in my hand. We lift off, level out. I watch the clouds out the window. I think of my mother when I’m on a plane. I think of her many places, even though she’s been gone sixteen years now. She never knew my boys, but she has helped me raise them. I know how much she loves them. I feel that. I talk to her. I pray to her. I shut my eyes now and beg her to keep them all healthy and safe while I’m away.

I can do this, I think, lifting my cranberry seltzer off the tray table.

It will be fine, I think, my suitcase gliding beside me from the gate to the exit. I bought this roller for my last book tour and I’ve barely used it since. It’s one of the nicest things I own, with its four pert wheels and heavy zippers that don’t break. It’s navy blue and so responsive and agile it can do pirouettes at the slightest touch. It could run off and join the ballet.

It will be fine, I think, on the highway heading toward the hospital. I can do this. I check my phone. Nothing from home.

In the lobby, I falter. I sink into an armchair facing the elevator bank. My suitcase comes to a reluctant stop by my knee. I can’t do this. The elevator cars roar up and wheeze down.

I let a few more minutes go by. When I get up and push the top button, a door slides open immediately. No one inside. My suitcase leaps over the threshold ahead of me. I have to follow it. I press 5.

Sometimes time has a resistance, like a wind. It takes a while for the floor to push against my feet and lift me up.

I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I need to be home. I check my phone again. No messages. No call from the surgeon.

The elevator shudders to a stop. The door opens. Ahead is a long hallway that wraps around a nurses’ station. The smell hits me. God, I hate that smell.

I look at the text from Sam again, check the room number. 508. I try to bypass the nurses’ station, but one of them looks up from her monitor.

‘Yash Thakkar?’

How does she know?

I nod.

She points to the corner room diagonally across from where we are. And there is Sam, his back to me, leaning against a wall beside the door and talking to several older women. It’s confusing. He has not aged, at least not from the back. A full head of that copper hair, no thinning at the crown, not even a speckle of gray. The same straight spine, narrow waist, bowed legs. One of the women lifts her face to me as I come closer. Sam turns around and becomes a boy. A teenager, Harry’s age. Out of room 508 comes another Sam, smaller, younger. He stands there a moment, then his head falls against his brother’s shoulder. They move past me, faces crumpled, down the hallway.

‘Oh,’ the woman gasps, ‘Jordan.’ She grips my arm. ‘You look just the same.’

I have not been called Jordan by anyone but Yash in twenty-eight years.

‘It’s Rosemary,’ she says, ‘Rosemary Gallagher.’ Sam’s mother.

‘Rosemary,’ I say, unexpectedly moved that she would be here.

She squeezes my hands hard with sharp bones and gold rings. ‘You came.’

‘Jordan,’ the woman to her left says. I recognize her kind smile. Paige, Yash’s stepmother. Her hair is short now, her clothes soft and loose as she hugs me. Yash’s father died a few years ago, and Yash and Paige are closer now. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘this will mean the world to him.’

I don’t know why they are making such a fuss.

‘Go in,’ Rosemary says. ‘Go see him.’

I move to the door but someone is coming out. It’s Yash’s mom. ‘Oh, honey. You’re here.’ She is so small. I have to bend down to hug her. Her face, her bones are tiny. She is so frail in my arms. ‘He’s been waiting for you.’

She pushes open the door. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for any of this.

The room is large and full of people, all men. Eight or ten of them in chairs, a few others standing, all staring at the TV suspended on the far wall. Something happens and they yell at the TV all at once. A few jump to their feet. Yash is in the center, tilted upright in bed, wearing a Georgia Bulldogs cap with the tag still on and yelling with the rest of them.

He’s the only one who sees me come in. His face lights up like it used to. Then he sees me take in the oxygen cannula and the IV bags and the Foley catheter coming off the side of his bed, and he remembers where we are and looks at me apologetically.

He holds out his hand and I take it. I take Yash’s hand.

‘I didn’t think you’d come.’

‘Of course I came.’

‘But Jack.’

‘He’s fine.’

I bend over and hug him gently, not wanting to displace anything. His mother shoos one of the guys out of a chair and drags it over to me. She glides my suitcase into the corner.

‘You sit right here beside him, hon.’

I sit. Yash takes both my hands in his. We haven’t touched in this way since Paris. There’s another eruption of hollering at the TV.

‘It’s March Madness.’ His whole face is alight again. ‘Isn’t this amazing?’

I’m having trouble finding my voice. ‘It’s great,’ I say. There’s so much noise he can’t hear how wobbly it is. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m good.’ He squeezes my hand again. ‘I’m so good. You’re here. Everyone’s here.’

I force myself to look around the room, to identify Sam. Would he speak to me? Would I speak to him? None of the men in the room seems to be him. Brent and Arlo and Yash’s Uncle Percy greet me with quick hugs during a break in play for a foul shot. Brent takes a call and leaves the room, finger in his other ear.

‘You missed Bean. He was here this morning. He’ll be back, though. Isn’t this amazing?’ Yash says again, glancing around the chaos of the room. ‘You see that, Jimmy? I told you. Nothing but bricks from that guy.’

Jimmy agrees.

Yash turns back to me. ‘Can you believe this? All these people. I feel so blessed.’

I look at the place where the PICC line goes under the skin on his chest. I wonder how much morphine they’re giving him. ‘Blessed’ is not a word I’ve ever heard Yash use.

‘Do you have a date yet, for the surgery?’

I don’t remember telling him about this. That he is capable of recalling it, having concern about it, makes my throat ache. I shake my head.

‘You should be home with your family.’

‘I should be right here.’ This feels more true than I thought it would.

We squeeze our hands tight and look at each other for a long time without speaking, as if this were all normal, this open raw affection between us.

Yash’s mom comes in and hands me a cup of tea. ‘Do you remember my sister Sue?’ She pulls in Yash’s aunt, looking just as I left her in Knoxville, from the doorway.

‘Of course. I also remember the best piece of pecan pie in my life.’ I stand and give her a hug. I offer her my chair.

She waves it away. ‘You sit. You’re the guest of honor.’

‘I’m not. I’m an interloper.’ I point to the chair again.

She smiles and shakes her head. ‘Thank you for being here.’ Her eyes shimmer. ‘We’ll talk later.’

They go back out into the hallway. Yash reaches for my hands.

‘Why is everyone being so nice to me?’ I ask.

He doesn’t answer because someone has scored a three-pointer to tie it up.

A nurse comes in, to shush everyone, I assume. Instead, she just weaves between all the guys standing and sitting and reaches Yash’s other side and swaps out a bag from the IV pole and punches some buttons and adjusts his cannula. She taps a long white fingernail on the oxygen number on the vitals monitor.

‘Deep breaths or we’ll have to get out the mask.’

He sucks in hard and the numbers go higher.

‘Good boy.’ She looks at me. ‘We want him in the nineties, okay?’

I nod and she leaves and Yash takes my hand again and stares at me.

He was never a hand-holder or an eye-gazer. But somehow it is not uncomfortable.

‘I’m so happy, Hink,’ he says. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

We didn’t stay in touch after his visit to Maine. Or I didn’t. He sent us a thank-you note. He wrote me a letter or two. Maybe more. Things blur after Jack got sick. About a year ago, he called and told me he had cancer. Jack was recovering from his third surgery. We talked a lot that spring and summer. I put him in touch with Jack’s oncologist, who recommended someone in Atlanta. Yash had chemo, radiation, then he was placed in a clinical trial and the tumors in his lungs started shrinking. Within a few months one disappeared entirely. He texted me a listing for a small house outside of Atlanta. Below it he wrote, This worker bee just bought a house!

That fall I was invited to Boston University to give an evening reading and visit the graduate fiction workshop beforehand. The workshop was taught by the writer Ray Hart. ‘The Last Fall’ had been Ray Hart’s first story to appear in print. Since then, he’d published two perfect novels, twelve years apart. The first I’d read in Phoenix, when I was living with my mother. I wasn’t writing then, but when I finished it I told my mother that I was going to write a novel. I keep that book on my desk at all times, to remember that feeling. I’d stopped traveling for work, stopped accepting any kind of invitation years ago, but this wasn’t far and I had to go meet Ray Hart.

I called Yash while I was driving down to BU that afternoon. He’d come to love Ray Hart’s novels, too, and admitted upon rereading it that even ‘The Last Fall’ was a good story. It was one of those sharp sparkling October days. Even the highway was beautiful. Jack had gone to school and I was dressed and out of the house, being a professional writer again. Yash was the one person who would understand exactly how thrilling this moment was to me.

He answered on the first ring. I knew right away something was wrong.

The latest tests indicated that the tumors were growing again. The immunotherapy had stopped working. They had already taken him off the drug.

‘After one scan? What if it was a fluke? What if they start shrinking again next month?’

‘It’s a clinical trial. One strike and you’re out.’

‘What did your doctor say?’

‘He told me to tell people. Six months, is what he said.’

‘No. I don’t believe it. There’s got to be something else.’

‘Yeah,’ I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘I thought that’s what you’d say.’

His phone bounced like he was walking. I could hear how short his breaths were. ‘Where are you?’

‘In my empty house. I haven’t even gotten a couch yet.’

‘You need a couch.’

I heard him sit down somewhere. ‘A flight of stairs is like a triathlon for me.’ He paused. ‘Otherwise I’m just fine.’

I drove on through the sparkling day in a pair of new suede boots, bought for this moment, and felt as if a chasm of years had opened between us, me still young, and him an old man.

He regained his breath and said he was worried about his books. He didn’t want them to be separated. His voice split. Was he crying? He never cried. I didn’t think I could bear it. But he didn’t cry. He just said again that he worried no one would be able to take his books all together. This thought made his breathing worse and I wanted to say I would take them but I did not.

Instead I insisted there would be a new trial, a better drug. I said I would come visit soon, when things with Jack were more stable.

I walked to the university and found my way to the building on my itinerary, up to the classroom where the workshop was held. A few students were already there and I introduced myself and we chatted about their program. Ray Hart was the last to arrive and shut the door behind him.

‘She’s not here yet?’ he said, and a few of them pointed to me.

‘Ah, fantastic. Sorry.’ He came over and I stood up and we shook hands. ‘What a pleasure,’ he said. He was holding a few books, two of them mine, in a way that boys in college held them, against his hip. He wore old corduroys with the little ridges worn off at the butt. Everything reminded me of the college boy in his short story, even though he was over sixty now.

He offered me the highbacked chair at the head of the seminar table that was clearly meant for him, and I said I was fine where I was. He smiled and took his place and I could tell the students liked him, that he created an easy atmosphere in that room.

He began by saying he was grateful I was there, that he had admired my work since my first novel. He held up my most recent book and said it was one of the most astonishing things he’d read in years. His words made my chest burn. ‘I assigned it to this class two weeks ago and my inbox has been full of something I’m not used to receiving: thank-you notes. From these kids right here. Several confessed they’d never finished a book I assigned before this one. So, you have a captive audience for whatever nuggets of gold they can get out of you.’

He smiled warmly at me. I was stunned by his unexpected praise. We’d had no contact before this moment. I’d been invited by a committee, and all my interactions had been with an administrative assistant. I didn’t know he’d read a book of mine, and he had no idea of my attachment to his work.

I thanked him, my voice weakened by a swift clustering of feelings, and I tried to tell the story of discovering his work in college—but what came to mind was the photocopied pages beneath the back door of the Breach and Yash in the tree with my boys, all of them strong and healthy then, and Yash on the phone, upset about his books. I couldn’t tamp it all down. It got away from me so quickly. I began to cry at that seminar table and I could not stop. Ray Hart looked at me with horror and I could not explain about Jack, about Yash, about my love for Ray’s work and the great surprise of his kindness about mine, which I had all but given up on since Jack got sick. I kept holding up my hand, trying to reassure them I would collect myself in a moment.

I did eventually regain a bit of composure. To try to explain would unleash another episode, so I fell back on routine sentences about my novels and my process. I showed them the spiral notebooks with my first drafts written in pencil, and I answered their questions as best I could. After the class Ray Hart assigned a student to walk me over to the hall where I’d be speaking. When he introduced me on stage an hour later, I didn’t feel the warmth he’d had earlier for my work, but perhaps by then my shame was distorting things. At the dinner afterward we sat on opposite ends of the table, and I had to excuse myself before dessert, to make the drive back to Maine. In the car, I told myself I would write him to explain and apologize, but I never did. Once I got back on the highway I wanted to call Yash again and tell him what a fiasco it had been, meeting Ray Hart. But it was late and I did not want him to know, by telling him about all the crying at the seminar table, that I knew he was dying.

Something happens on the TV that isn’t good and the guys in the hospital room are grumbling.

‘There was a ridiculous line down there,’ someone says behind me, coming through the door.

My body tenses before my mind catches up.

Sam.

‘All the residents and interns who haven’t slept for days needing another hit,’ he says.

I have a strong impulse to pull my hand out of Yash’s.

A coffee in each hand, he rounds the corner at the foot of Yash’s bed and goes around to his other side. I notice a chair there in the corner, a backpack beside it. That is his spot. I didn’t see it earlier. He places the cups on the cluttered tray attached to the railing on his side. Without looking up, he collects the bunched napkins, empty straw sheaths, and to-go containers and tosses them in a bin behind him. He plucks a tissue from the bedside table, dips it into a cup of water, and wipes down the tray, lifting the new cups of coffee one at a time to clean under them, too.

Yash holds my hand tighter. He can tell I want to let go, not get caught. ‘What’s happening?’ Sam says, and looks right at me.

He has aged, but not all that much. Same hazel eyes. Same small grin.

‘Oh, wow. Jordan,’ he says.

He comes back around to my side and I get up.

We hug. I can feel him shaking.

‘It’s so good you came,’ he says.

We turn at the same time to look at Yash. He is beaming.

On the TV someone scores and there is cheering. Yash tries to sit up straighter, which pulls the cannula out of his nose, and Sam and I reach to adjust it. Yash takes my hand again.

‘Do you want more ice?’ Sam says, jiggling Yash’s oversized plastic cup.

‘No, no. Sit and watch the end of the game.’

Sam sits in his chair in the corner. His head tips back against the wall. He’s looking at the TV but not watching it. Within seconds his eyes shut.

‘Do you know he has slept here every night for a week?’ Yash says. ‘Apparently I called him in the middle of the night speaking gibberish. He knew it was my oxygen. He drove over and brought me here. They said I would have died if he hadn’t. Every night they set up a little cot for him right there at the foot of my bed.’ He shakes his head, giving up on words. Water rises in his eyes then recedes. ‘He’s been such a friend to me, Hink.’

Sam’s boys come in and go around to their father’s chair. The younger one pushes his way in between Sam’s knees, tugs gently on his sleeve. ‘Dad.’

Sam startles. Opens his eyes.

‘Mom’s here.’

‘Okay. Okay. Get your bags.’

‘We have them.’ They both have backpacks on their shoulders.

Sam nods. He stands and hugs them. The older one is taller than him. ‘Are your uniforms at Mom’s?’

They say they are and turn to Yash.

‘Goodbye, tadpoles,’ Yash says.

‘Goodbye, toad,’ the older one says.

The younger one opens his mouth but nothing comes out. His brave face collapses. He bends over the railing and lays his head on Yash’s chest. Yash strokes his hair.

‘We can’t come tomorrow,’ the bigger one says.

‘Then I’ll see you Sunday,’ Yash says. ‘I’ll be right here. Okay?’

The little one straightens up.

‘You get your science quiz back yet?’

He nods.

‘And?’

‘Ninety-eight.’

‘I told you. Did I not tell you?’

He nods again and follows his brother out.

I’ve never known anything about Sam’s children or Yash’s relationship with them. He always claimed his friends abandoned him once they had kids.

Outside in the hallway the younger boy is sobbing.

Sam and I look at each other. I’m sorry, I try to say to him with my eyes. I’m sorry you can’t protect them from this.

‘They’re good boys,’ Yash says quietly.

Paige leans in from the doorway. ‘Rosemary says the doctor on rounds is down the hall.’

Rounds. Wasn’t it early for rounds? I look at the clock. Somehow it’s past five. I can’t account for this.

‘Can you put the game on in the family room?’ Yash says.

‘Ted’s doing that right now,’ she says.

Yash turns to Sam. ‘Time to get everyone out.’

Sam is already reaching for the remote. He cuts the sound and they all seem to know what to do. They high-five Yash on the way out.

I wait for them all to file out, then stand to leave, too.

‘Not you, Jordan.’ Sam says. Then more softly, ‘Would you stay?’

‘Of course.’ I sit back down, take Yash’s hand.

The doctor comes in followed by a flock of residents who quickly settle in a semicircle behind him. Yash and Sam are unfazed by this sudden array of strangers in the room.

‘Good afternoon, Mr. Thakkar,’ the doctor says without inflection, looking down at his iPad. He lifts his head abruptly and thrusts out his hand. ‘Dr. Gaucher.’

Yash releases my hand to shake his.

The doctor turns to me. ‘Mrs. Thakkar.’

None of us corrects him. I shake his dry hand.

‘How are you feeling today, sir?’ Dr. Gaucher says, with more pep than he seems to have in him.

‘Good,’ Yash says. ‘I feel great.’

‘Any pain or discomfort, on a scale of one to ten, one being the least amount of pain?’

‘Zero,’ Yash says.

I feel him trying to please the doctor, get his aid, by being such a good, pain-free patient.

The doctor places the coin of his stethoscope on Yash’s chest. ‘Seems like you’re breathing okay.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re getting enough morphine?’ He looks at all of us for the answer.

Yash and Sam nod.

‘Good,’ the doctor says, scrolling on his iPad. ‘That’s all very good.’

What about any of this is good?

On the other side of the room the residents strain to stay focused. They flex their jaw muscles, shift their weight. Their eyes travel around the room but never to our faces. I study theirs, one at a time. I wonder what dramas have played out among them. I can feel their youth in the room, a forcefield of energy and fear and longing and confusion. I can feel it so strongly. And I know they sense nothing about us, two men and a woman in our late forties, none of our old entanglements or the freakishness of the three of us being in this room together now.

We are all caught in this performance, Yash pretending that he isn’t dying, Sam and the doctor that medicine still has something to offer him, and me in the role of devoted wife at his bedside.

Sam asks him a few questions about oxygen, liters per minute, a medication I don’t recognize.

The doctor answers them. ‘Anything else?’ he says and glances at his watch. Several residents do the same.

Keep ’em alive until 6:05. An old med school refrain.

We shake our heads no.

‘It’s nice to see you have family around you,’ he says. ‘Not everyone does.’ He leaves, the flock close behind.

Sam’s phone vibrates and he pulls it out of his pocket. ‘It’s Cole.’

Yash shakes his head. ‘Not again.’

‘He says he can’t get here till Tuesday now.’

‘And he wants to know if I’ll be dead by then?’

Sam’s laugh is still soundless. ‘More or less.’

Yash is pressing on the skin below his collarbone. ‘Feel this,’ he says.

Sam touches the spot on his chest.

‘Push down.’

Sam pushes.

‘It’s spongy, right?’

‘Kind of. That new?’

‘I think so. Feel it,’ he says to me, spreading open his blue hospital gown wider for me.

I push down on the spot. His bare chest surprises me. I forgot its barrel shape, its smoothness. The spot feels like a small balloon, taut but not dense.

‘Should I call him back in here?’

‘Let’s see if it goes away.’

Sam nods. ‘Shall I bring back the horde?’

‘Sure.’

Sam goes down to the family room and Yash squeezes my hand. ‘You see my cousin Jared, with all the hair? Aunt Sue and Uncle Percy’s grandson?’

‘That was Jared ?’

‘I worry about that kid. Remember how his parents were supposed to come back and take care of him? They never did. Aunt Sue has had her hands full with him. He wants to be a graphic novelist.’ Yash rolls his eyes. ‘He wants to move to LA. He’s got some friend who knows people, supposedly. It’s all a lark. Will you talk some sense into him?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He doesn’t have a clue. He’s just all up here.’ He waves a hand above his head. ‘He’s not being practical. There’s some girl out there he’ll probably get pregnant.’ He sees my expression change, misinterprets. ‘Sorry, some very smart young woman. Just talk to him, will you? I worry about him. And I can’t help him anymore.’

‘Okay. I’ll talk to him.’

‘Thank you. Tell him what’s what. Tell him how hard it is, the creative life. The risks you have to take. Tell him about all the people you know, including me, who don’t make it.’

What do you know about taking risks, I want to ask him. You played it so safe. Mr. Cautious. And I protected you the one time things went off the rails.

It is an unpleasant feeling, having this anger at someone who is dying.

The horde returns along with new visitors, people coming straight from work. Two coworkers from the mayor’s office, a law school friend, a neighbor. I give up my chair. Jared’s back in the room but the chairs around him are all taken. Sam waves me over to his side. We lean against the far wall together.

I’m aware of how much blame I placed on him for everything that happened between me and Yash. All this time I suspected he’d been intent on sabotaging us from the start, lording his moral superiority over Yash, and scoring his final victory by luring him to Atlanta. But standing here beside Sam, who has probably not left this building in seven days, who has been only grateful and kind to me since I arrived, I see it might not have been so simple a story.

Beside him now, I actually feel like Jordan again. I feel so young, like I’ve been shot through a secret portal straight back in time.

‘Look at this.’ Sam hands me his phone. On the screen is a post on the Facebook page he created for Yash. It’s a long passage by someone named Connie about going to K-Mart with Yash in eighth grade to get materials for a project and how funny he was just picking out magic markers and how after that she had a mad crush on him but he never knew.

I laugh and hand back his phone.

‘There’s one like this every few hours. All the unrequited crushes on Yash Thakkar.’

Uncle Bill gets up, which leaves a free chair beside Jared.

‘Excuse me,’ I say to Sam and push myself off the wall. ‘Yash has given me an assignment.’

I slip into the empty seat. ‘Jared, right?’ I say. ‘You probably don’t remember, but we once played Red Light Green Light in your driveway.’

‘I remember.’ He tries to smile. His eyes are a mess. He swipes at his nose. ‘You had a side ponytail and called me a tater tot.’

‘Side ponytail. Impressive vocab. My husband is still shaky on the difference between a dress and skirt.’ One of Yash’s aunts lifts her head in my direction. It feels strangely unfaithful to mention a husband in here.

‘I draw people. So I have to know these things.’

‘Yash says you want to write graphic novels?’

‘I’ve written two. Nearly done with the third. It’s a sort of a triptych.’

‘Has anyone seen them yet?’

‘Yeah. I have an agent. She’s waiting for the last one before she goes out with it.’

‘And you’re moving to LA?’

‘I was supposed to be out there for interviews today and tomorrow at Pixar—I have a friend who works there—but I pushed them till next week. They’ve been cool about that.’ He looks at Yash, who’s talking to Sam and someone in a coat and tie who has just come in. ‘He’s like my dad or my brother, or both, really. I have to be here.’

This is the kid Yash was worried about?

‘He wants the very best for you.’

‘He thinks I’m a loser.’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘He does. He thinks my dreams are too big, that I’m in the clouds, drifting around.’

‘It’s more about him than you. He’s a worrier.’

He nods. ‘I know it’s out of concern. I just need to get to California. There’s a girl there. We’re not together or anything.’

‘But you’re going out to woo her.’

He leans back and tries to say something.

I wait.

‘I’ll probably be too sad to woo,’ he says with a lot of effort.

I pat his knee a few times. He has no idea how appealing an adorable big-haired grieving guy can be. ‘When you’re ready, you’re going to woo her socks off.’

‘Jesus,’ Yash says. ‘I said talk to him, not make out with him.’ The new people have gone and I’ve got my chair back. ‘You are not to be trusted, even at my deathbed.’

‘Jared’s going to be fine.’

‘You think?’

‘Totally.’

‘We’ll see. I’m leaving what I have to him. Not that it’s much. A very small nest egg.’

We’re silent for a bit.

‘Do you think I’ll know everything soon?’

My stomach turns over. I can’t meet his gaze and look down at our hands. ‘Probably.’

‘I’ll finally find out about that guy in Spain,’ he says.

I had a few boyfriends after Yash and before Silas, but I’ve only ever mentioned Paco. I was with Paco when Yash sent me the elephant poem.

‘I’ll tell you about that guy in Spain right now.’

Yash holds up his hand. ‘No. Don’t. I’ll wait for the EP afterlife version. All the gory details.’

‘Well, he’ll be the one with his sweaters tucked into his gray jeans.’

Yash laughs. ‘I knew he was a dweeb.’

‘It was a very cool look back then.’

‘Yeah, right.’

I notice his oxygen has dipped. I press the cannula back into his nostrils. ‘Take some deep breaths.’

‘Deep is relative,’ he says. I model some big breaths. He watches and imitates me as best he can and gets it back up to 93. He continues to stare at me.

It’s hard to return his gaze, the way he is looking at me. ‘You are so beautiful, babe,’ he says.

Babe . A word from another universe. It’s physically disorienting.

‘Yash,’ his uncle says from across the room.

But Yash ignores him. He sees I have something on my mind. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What is it?’

But Uncle Percy is louder. ‘Listen up, you two love birds. You need to tell us. What do you want for dinner? I cannot put another carton of pork lo mein in my delicate stomach,’ he says, patting his belly.

‘Looks like you have a pig or two in there already,’ Yash says.

‘I got a barnyard in here, Yashie.’

They decide on Italian.

Aunt Sue offers to go in her car. Jared holds up his phone. He can get it delivered.

‘You can’t deliver to a hospital,’ Uncle Percy says.

Jared explains.

‘Jordash?’ Uncle Percy says.

‘Door Dash,’ Jared says slowly.

‘Jordash is clothes.’

‘I got this,’ Jared says calmly, no irritation, then begins taking people’s orders.

Yash smiles at me and seems not to remember his last question.

‘Love in your novels, I think, acts as a form of hope. Why hope? Do you believe this?’

I was on stage in Reykjavik with my Icelandic editor, Birna Gunarsdóttir. We’d never met before this trip, my last before Jack got sick.

‘Most people ask me about sex, not love.’

‘I know. I have seen this online. But I want to know about love.’

‘Isn’t love a form of hope?’ I said.

‘No. Love is crushing. Love is something you let yourself feel at your own peril, despite your better sense.’ She wore all black and bright red lipstick and I saw in her face how serious she was. After a few seconds she forced herself to soften it.

She had the audience’s attention.

‘True. It’s all those things,’ I said. ‘But where would we be if we didn’t feel it? I think it’s the only form of hope we have. For our survival, I mean. What good is any other virtue without love?’

‘In literature love is a weakness. Othello is easily manipulated by Iago because of his love for Desdemona. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.’

‘Othello places his trust in Iago, not Desdemona. Anna Karenina’s society does not allow her to be with Vronsky. Love is not the weakness. People get in its way. People are weak and perilous, not love.’

She pursed her red lips and moved on. ‘I have read in several interviews from years ago that Independent People is one of your favorite books. Is this true?’

‘It is. Maybe my very favorite.’

There was some spontaneous clapping from the audience.

‘Why? Why this one about a miserable sheep farmer?’

‘You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.’ Even though nearly everyone in the audience is Icelandic and English is not their first language, I can feel that they are with me. ‘When I think of reading Independent People , I remember the summer air coming through our windows and the quilt we had on our bed and my boys, so little then. And I remember Silas, my husband, reading it right after I did and we started calling each other Bjartur.’ The audience burst out laughing and I figured it was because I’d butchered the pronunciation of his name.

Birna was amused, too. ‘You called each other Bjartur? Why?’

‘As a term of endearment.’

More laughter.

‘I think this has never happened in our country, making a pet name from this hard and complicated character,’ Birna said, smiling and shaking her head. ‘How did this book come to find you? Most Americans don’t know it.’

‘A friend gave it to me.’ For a moment I was barefoot in our road, watching his car disappear.

I could tell Birna wanted to ask more, but she sensed something and veered away. She smiled, thanked me for coming to Reykjavik, and opened it up to questions from the audience.

When the food delivery is close, I leave the room with Jared and Aunt Bev to help carry up the bags. At the elevator bank I try to give him cash to help him cover dinner, but he won’t take it. A door opens and the three of us get in. Aunt Bev is looking at me. I only met one of Yash’s aunts in Knoxville, Aunt Sue, not Bev or Mo. I remember him saying one was nice and one was mean. I’m not sure which Aunt Bev is, but she is glaring at me now.

‘You were the one.’

I shake my head.

‘You were. He never recovered,’ she says. ‘And if your books are any indication, he’s certainly not the only one you’ve chewed up and spat out.’

The door opens. I hope to God she’s the mean one.

We bring the food up to the family room and set it up buffet-style. A nurse brings us paper plates and utensils. I make plates for Yash and Sam and bring them back to the room. Nearly everyone else has gone down the hall to eat. The room is dim and they are talking quietly. Sam thanks me and tells me to come back with a plate of my own. Yash looks worse. He waves away the food.

In the family room most people have gotten their dinner and are seated in a big ring around the room. As I fill my plate a bald man with a lot of aftershave on tells me the carbonara is good. I thank him and scoop some onto my plate.

‘You have no idea who I am, do you?’

I give him a hard stare. I imagine hair on his head. ‘Oh my God. EJ?’

He tips an imaginary hat at me. I know that he spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, that he and Marni broke up, that he has a new family now.

‘How are you?’ I stammer.

‘I’m fine. A little beat up over all this. But it’s life, right?’ He loads his plate with seconds. ‘He’s just gonna get there a little before the rest of us. I only wish things had been different for him.’

Yash would say the same thing about EJ. ‘He’s so happy everyone’s here.’

‘Yeah, everyone’s here for a day or two.’ We stand with our full plates by the window. ‘But you’ve done well for yourself.’

I hold up my fork. ‘Please don’t tell me I was the one who got away.’

‘You got away all right.’

‘I was pushed.’

He shrugs. ‘He pushes everyone away at one time or another. It’s temporary. You knew that.’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t know that. At the time it felt like the end of the world.’

Sam comes up to us, apologizes for interrupting. ‘Can you come back to the room, Jordan?’

‘Excuse me, EJ.’

‘You go to Yasher. He needs you.’

I follow Sam down the hallway. Outside the room he says, ‘He gets this way at night. Really agitated. I’ve asked the nurse to give him some Ativan. I just—’ He looks up to the ceiling. ‘Maybe you could go in. Maybe you could, like, sing to him?’

‘Sing?’

‘You know. Some of your songs. About fairs.’ He grins at me.

It’s a shock when people remember what you remember. Those few weeks, many, many springs ago, when I sang Sam to sleep. ‘Sure.’ I don’t think I ever sang to Yash.

He opens the door for me and I go in alone. Yash has a terrible look in his eyes. I sit down in my chair and he clutches at me.

‘It’s not good. It’s not good, Hink.’ He’s shivering.

‘The nurse is coming.’

‘She won’t help.’

‘She will. She’ll help you sleep. Take some breaths.’

‘I can’t. I can’t take any more breaths.’

‘Yes, you can. Do you know about square breathing?’

He shakes his head but looks at me hopefully.

‘I do it with Jack. It helps a lot.’

‘With the pain?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That poor kid.’

‘It’s okay. He’s okay.’ I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know how his day has gone. My phone’s been in my bag in the corner since I got here. ‘You’re okay. Here we go. Take a breath in then hold three seconds, then breathe out and hold three more and breathe in again.’

His breaths are so short, so shallow. Maybe it isn’t good for him to pause. ‘Maybe one-second holds,’ I say.

He nods. He reminds me of Jack when it’s bad.

And then I’m singing. I sing about sailing away, my own true love. He looks at me with such surprise—You? Singing Dylan?—and I smile and my voice gets steadier. We both relax a bit.

When I sing this song for my boys, it’s like a fairy tale, with the mountains and diamonds and western winds. Here with Yash it becomes something different, our own saga of coming and going, of finding and losing each other, of letting go.

I sing and he grips my hands hard and his whole body shudders. I come to the line about wanting the same thing again tomorrow. I barely get it out.

I pause when the nurse comes in with the Ativan. I start up again when she leaves. It’s a long song and it’s hard to push the words out, each line laden with sorrow and regret. Every image seems like a metaphor for loss. I can’t look at Yash. I can only look at his hands in mine. Finally I get to the last lines. Yes, there is something she could bring back to him. Boots of Spanish leather. Yash’s eyes are closed and his trembling has died down.

‘Lovely,’ Sam says quietly.

I turn.

He’s in the doorway. He sees my tears and comes to put a hand on my shoulder. It’s warm and trembling. We watch Yash sleep.

An orderly rolls in Sam’s cot and he helps her set it up at the foot of Yash’s bed. He takes out sheets from a cabinet and makes up the bed. When he leans over, his T-shirt rides up and the band of his blue boxers shows above the waist of his jeans like it always did, way before it became a trend.

The clock above the sink says 9:45. I don’t know how that’s possible. I’ve missed saying goodnight to Jack. I let go of Yash’s hands. It doesn’t wake him. I stand up. My back is sore from stretching my arms over the bed railing most of the day. Sam sits on his cot.

‘Will he sleep through the night?’ I say.

‘Mostly.’

‘Will you?’

‘I think so.’ He stands up. ‘Do you have an early flight out?’

‘I’m going to change it. I’ll come back in the morning for a few hours.’

‘I’m glad. Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk more.’

I hope we don’t have that chance. I nod. ‘Noche noche, Sam.’

I get my suitcase from the corner and follow it out the door.

In the taxi, I switch my six a.m. flight to noon and text Silas the details. I check in at the hotel and go up to my floor. The hallway is wide and the carpet very plush. Before Jack got sick we used to travel. The boys loved going to hotels like this, racing down to the room, fighting about whose turn it was to unlock the door. Once inside they investigated every inch: the snacks, the safe, the showerhead. We got room service. We played cards on the bed. We always stayed in one room, two double beds, and I’m not sure I was ever happier than when we were all together in a hotel room.

This one feels very empty. My ears ring in the silence. I turn up the heat and I drop onto the bed with my phone. I call Silas. No answer. Carson and Claudette have texted me messages with a lot of emojis, sending love to me in Atlanta.

I click my screen off. It is black for a few seconds then lights up again. Silas.

‘You’re still up,’ I say. ‘Not a good sign.’

‘He’s okay.’

Silas isn’t okay, I can hear that.

‘We had a rough patch this evening. But he’s asleep now.’

‘Real asleep or fake?’

‘I think it’s real.’

‘He’s gotten good at faking it.’

‘I know.’ He’s exhausted. I can hear it. He’s had to absorb all the emotion because I’m not there to do it. We switch back and forth physically coping with Jack’s discomfort, but when we go to bed, I’m the one who holds the worry. Early on, I got angry about this, how he didn’t want to talk about it once Jack was asleep, wouldn’t listen or try to soothe my anxiety. Finally he told me that he couldn’t handle my fears at night, that they scared the shit out of him and he just needed to let it go and sleep. I can tell he’s trying hard not to off-load it all on to me tonight.

‘How’s Yash?’

I planned to tell him everything, from my dread in the lobby to the doctor mistaking me for the wife to singing him to sleep. Was that because I wanted to share the experience with him or to distance myself from the day by making it into a story? I’m too tired to figure it out or say much of anything. ‘He got agitated in the evening. It’s called breath panic.’

‘That sounds awful.’

‘It was. That’s why I switched my flight, to get a few hours with him tomorrow morning.’

He lets out a long breath. I feel my slight remove from the despair of one of Jack’s bad nights.

‘It’s going to be okay, my love. Tell me about Harry’s day.’

‘He went to bed early. He has that bio test tomorrow. I think something might have happened with Briar but you’ll have to get that out of him.’

‘Something good?’

‘I think so.’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘He was texting with that little smile he gets.’

I know just what he means. This makes me happy. He’s had a crush on Briar for a long time.

‘And he and Murphy did a little fishing off the bridge. To try out that rod they found. Wow, so many sirens there.’

‘I’m on the straightaway to the hospital.’

‘Are you going to be able to sleep?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s good you’re there.’

‘Bad timing.’

‘It was never going to be good timing.’

‘I guess not.’

‘I miss you.’ I can hear him patting my side of the bed.

‘I miss you, too,’ I say. ‘There was this moment today when he asked me if I thought he would find out everything once he was dead and I had this cold wave come over me and I felt like I should tell him.’

‘You should,’ he says in his clipped, definitive teacher’s voice that annoys me.

‘Silas.’

‘You always said you were going to.’

‘ You always said I was going to,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why it matters to you so much. I told you about it.’

He is silent. It hurt him, how long I’d waited. It was a rocky moment in our marriage. I told him because I was pregnant with Harry, and though I’d lied on the forms, the obstetrician took one look at me and knew. And that felt weird, her knowing and Silas not.

‘It matters to me because it matters to you,’ he says finally. ‘I know it does. It comes up.’

‘It comes up and then goes back down.’

‘Don’t you want to let it go?’

‘It’s too late. I missed my moment. He’ll just be angry and hurt and not have time to process it.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I think it might actually kill him.’

‘It’s not going to kill him.’

‘And then everyone will be like, that nasty girl from Maine came and killed our Yashie, and they’ll put me in an Atlanta jail for the rest of my life.’ I’m speaking with a Southern accent now. I have a very good Southern accent, truth be told.

He laughs but he’s not amused. ‘You’ve been given this opportunity. You’re not going to get another. Do it for yourself. You’ve protected him long enough.’

‘So weird that you said that. I was thinking that today. I protected him. Why?’

‘Because you loved him.’

‘It didn’t feel like love. I was angry at him. So angry. I wanted to punish him, he who always knew everything.’

‘It’s going to get in the way of saying goodbye. Just tell him.’

I can hear how tired he is. I have the impulse to launch a real argument, or tirade, about men and their ignorance of women’s lived experiences and how we cope with so much they cannot understand, but they always make us feel in some sort of debt. But he might only get a few hours’ sleep if Jack has a bad night, and Silas is the exception to the rule, so I let it go.

We say our goodnights and hang up.

As soon as his voice is gone I have that feeling I often have when I’m away from my family, like they are moving farther and farther away from me, beginning to flicker faintly as distant stars and I will never ever reach them again. It feels like a premonition of the fact that someday, one by one, we will be separated from each other forever.

A siren wails past. My remaining hours in this town stretch out before me. Too long and too short.

Saturday

I wake up in the dark, no light yet at the edges of the thick curtain, surfacing from a dream about trying to find Harry at a restaurant, to give him a message. He was still in a highchair. I saw him through a window, but there was no door.

I reach for my phone to see the time, to see how much more of the night I have to get through, and before I touch it a text from Yash lights up the screen.

Come as early as you can .

Coming.

Ten minutes later I’m in a cab.

The lobby of the hospital feels like a church, cavernous and empty. The elevator opens instantly and speeds me up to five.

Yash is alone in the room, Sam and his cot are gone. He’s holding his phone but the screen is dark. He’s fallen back asleep. I tuck my suitcase in its corner and slide a chair quietly to his bedside. When my bracelet clinks against the bedrail, he turns and smiles.

‘You’re here.’ He takes my hand and tucks it with two hands against his breastbone. It strains my back, reaching over the bedrail, but I don’t pull away.

‘When my cancer came back,’ he says, ‘yours was the only voice I wanted to hear.’

‘Came back?’

‘It was minor the first time. At least that was the impression I got.’ He shakes his head. ‘What’s major and minor in life? No one tells you up front. It was a procedure, some radiation. All over in a few months. That’s when I went to Maine, after the treatment was over.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘There weren’t any friends up the coast. I just didn’t want to die without seeing you again.’

‘Yash.’ I squeeze his hand on his chest tighter and put my other hand on top of it.

‘I’m glad we’re friends again,’ he says. But he’s looking at me like we’ve had a long and intimate life together.

Sam comes through the door with three coffees. Again I have the impulse to pull my hands out of Yash’s.

He puts Yash’s coffee on his tray and holds up the other two cups. ‘Do you drink coffee now?’

‘In a pinch.’

‘Black?’ He holds up the other one. ‘Or with milk? I can go either way.’

‘No, you can’t, Sam.’ I laugh. ‘Give me the milk.’

‘Thank God,’ he says with a little grin. Yash was right. His mouth is a bit like Silas’. He pushes a button on the side of the bed and Yash is tilted up to sitting.

We drink our coffees. Sam makes Yash laugh with his reports on the most recent Facebook posts.

It’s impossible to believe he is dying.

‘Remember,’ Yash says, ‘how Ivan would get us to get him a coffee that he’d give to the nurse he had a crush on?’

‘Mona,’ Sam says.

‘He was on the make till the very end,’ Yash says.

Sam is already done with his coffee and picking at the rim of the paper cup. They’ve done all this before, and now Sam is going to be left alone. I know Yash is thinking the same thing.

I say, ‘Remember how Ivan would come over in the morning and spread his arms out like this over the striped couch and say, “I was phenomenal last night. I outdid myself. ” ’

‘You sound just like him,’ Sam says.

Slowly we go back into the past. Ivan’s Finnegans Wake corkboard. Sam’s Hume breakdown. I describe walking into the Breach for the first time, the silhouettes above the table by the door, the wallpaper in the bathroom, the drawer of pipes in the study. None of us has thought of these things for so long. I’m careful to stay downstairs—no green bedroom, no etchings, no Confessions on the nightstand.

‘And those gorgeous wineglasses, paper thin. We used them when we played Sir Hincomb Funnibuster,’ I say and Yash nods with his morphine smile and Sam looks at me blankly.

‘The card game.’ I wait for him to remember. ‘Club the Policeman? Spade the Gardener?’

‘Heart the Lover,’ Yash says. He is looking at me as if Sam weren’t there.

Sam remembers.

Yash says the name of some breakfast place and I shake my head. ‘We went there all the time,’ he says, but my memory of that year seems limited to the Breach House.

They reminisce about other places, friends of theirs I can’t find faces for.

‘I remember you getting up at four thirty in the morning to write your short stories,’ Sam says.

I laugh. ‘The day they were due, no doubt.’

‘You’d go into Gastrell’s study and come out with a whole story. That was extraordinary to me.’

Did I do that? ‘Well, let’s say it was not high literature. And you two were the first to tell me so.’

‘They weren’t that bad,’ Sam says.

‘Revisionist history! Neither of you ever said anything kind about anything I wrote.’

‘The altar boy with the harelip?’ Yash says.

We all laugh hard.

‘My long Flannery O’Connor stage.’

‘But you were doing it,’ Sam says.

‘The two of you were my real education.’

They look at each other and grin.

‘That’s not what I mean!’ I laugh. And blush. ‘You took your minds seriously. I didn’t do that before I met you.’

‘But Gastrell called you a natural prose stylist,’ Yash says.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘On the bottom of your paper on The Aeneid .’

Someday we will remember even these our hardships with pleasure . I remember Gastrell closing the book and saying that line with his eyes shut.

‘He didn’t write that,’ I say.

‘You guys took his Immortality seminar together?’ Sam says.

‘How could you forget it?’ Yash says to me.

‘I always wanted to take that,’ Sam says.

‘I was a little piqued by it, actually,’ Yash says.

‘Because all he called you was a genius with the most protean mind he’d ever come across?’ I say.

Yash smiles. ‘I wanted to be a natural prose stylist.’

‘He taught that class at the house, didn’t he?’ Sam says.

I nod. The striped couch, our feet touching under the coffee table.

‘Yeah,’ Yash says. ‘It was strange.’

Sam nods. He’s torn his cup in so many places it looks like a starfish. He tosses it on Yash’s tray table. ‘I’m going down for another. Any takers?’

We both say no.

It’s still quiet on the fifth floor. We can hear his steps fade slowly away down the hallway.

‘I didn’t want to lose either one of you that fall,’ Yash says.

‘And you didn’t,’ I say and we squeeze our hands hard together.

‘Not then. But I did lose you.’

‘We lost each other,’ I say.

‘I need to tell you, Hink—’

‘Knock, knock,’ someone says in the open doorway.

‘Jamie’s back,’ Yash says.

‘How’re you feeling, Mr. Thakkar?’ A nurse in braids and dark blue scrubs comes in.

‘I’m great.’

She goes around to his other side and replaces an empty bag hanging on the rack with a full plump one.

‘You?’ Yash asks.

She pauses what she’s doing to shine a big smile at him. ‘I’m good, too,’ she says and squeezes his shoulder. All in one practiced motion, she detaches a tube by his elbow, attaches a syringe, pushes the plastic lever to the hilt, removes it, and replaces the tube.

When she leaves I see Sam intercept her out in the hallway. I wonder if he’s asking her about the air pocket below Yash’s collarbone.

Yash’s family arrives then, all at once, from the hotel. I try to give up my chair to his mom, to Paige, to Aunt Sue, but they insist I stay right there. They bend over Yash briefly, ask how he slept, glance at the oxygen meter, give him a reassuring pat, then take their places: the men in the chairs around the room and the women outside the door. They settle in like colleagues at the office. This is their work now, this vigil.

Yash takes a long sip of his coffee and shuts his eyes. The room is full of male murmuring. Uncle Bill is sharing his thoughts on supply chain management with Jared. Arlo and EJ are discussing seeds and brackets and perimeter shooting, gearing up for the next round of basketball.

I don’t know if I will get him alone again.

Yash opens his eyes. ‘Can I tell you a secret, Hink?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I know you have to go in a few hours, so I just wanted to tell you first. I’m not dying.’

‘No?’

‘I’m getting better. I can feel it. I feel bad because everyone’s here, but I’m not dying anymore. Don’t tell anyone yet. I want to enjoy it a little longer, all these people. Is that bad?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I can tell them tomorrow.’

‘All right.’

‘But thank you for being here. I’ll never forget it. With everything you have going on.’ He looks at me with so much concern my eyes get watery. He squeezes my hand. ‘He’s going to be fine, Hink. He is. We’re all going to be fine.’

His mother guides a visitor through the door: pinstriped suit, damp hair, big cup of coffee. I vacate my chair for him, but he recoils from it, says he is just here for a quick visit, he should have been at the office an hour ago, as if Yash has held him up. I take a chair across the room anyway.

‘Marco,’ Yash says. I can tell he doesn’t like him much.

‘Hey, buddy,’ Marco says as if speaking to an eight-year-old. ‘We miss you down there. Nothing’s getting done. The place is going to the shitter.’

‘Yeah, Sebastian told me he’s considering resigning.’

Marco’s smile freezes.

‘Kidding,’ Yash says.

Marco lets out a breath. ‘Don’t kid a kidder, Yashman.’

Uncle Bill turns on the TV. The local meteorologist drowns out the middle of their conversation. It clicks off after the weather report.

‘No, I never wrote more than a few chapters,’ Yash is saying.

‘You’ll do it.’

‘Dubious at this point, Marco.’

‘You will. I’m going to look for it. I’m going to look for it a year from now.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Well, I gotta hit it. It’s good to see you, buddy.’ He shakes Yash’s hand. ‘Really good to see you.’ He backs up. Before he leaves, he smacks the doorjamb a few times then points at Yash. ‘I’m going to look for that novel of yours!’

I try making eye contact with Yash, but Yash is still looking at the doorway. His phone lights up and he bends over it.

Every person in this room has a phone in their hand. Arlo is speaking into his loudly. ‘That is unacceptable period. Do not move forward exclamation point. Will discuss when I get back‘—he lowers his voice slightly—‘heart emoji.’

I look at Yash’s oxygen. It’s flashing between 89 and 91. I get up and reclaim my chair, push his cannula in further.

He says, ‘I want to tell you something.’

‘Tell me.’ I scootch my chair as close as possible to his bed and lean over the bedrail.

He laces his fingers through mine. ‘I want to tell you that I’m not angry at you anymore.’

I laugh. He’s serious. ‘Angry at me?’

‘For a long time I felt like you sort of enjoyed making me suffer, punishing me, stringing me’—he pauses to breathe—‘along and extracting more and more apologies without ever forgiving me.’

‘I remember an elephant poem. And a paragraph about Molly the prostitute—Céline was a Nazi sympathizer, by the way. I don’t remember an apology.’

‘I apologized so many times. In so many letters.’

Did he? I have no recollection of this. All I remember is other people’s writing, other people’s thoughts copied out in his hand.

‘You thought I was toying with you?’ I say.

‘I thought it was pretty immature that you wouldn’t talk to me for three years when we had been in what to my mind was a pretty serious relationship.’

‘Oh. A pretty serious relationship? But not serious enough to show up in New York. More of a drive-in-the-opposite-direction kind of serious.’

‘I worried we still couldn’t have this conversation.’

‘You’ve never tried to have this conversation.’

‘I’ve tried for years. You have never let me explain.’

‘What is there to explain? I was there. You weren’t.’

‘There were reasons for that.’

‘We had something kind of amazing.’

‘I know.’

‘And you threw it away.’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t mean to. I freaked out. Temporarily. I was twenty-three.’

‘I was twenty-three, too.’

There is a flurry of activity in the doorway and three women sweep into the room, sisters maybe, fluffy coats way too warm for Atlanta, their hair streaked blond in the exact same way, dark roots showing intentionally.

‘Oh, no way,’ Yash says to them.

‘Yes fucking way,’ the oldest one says.

They crowd around his bed. Big product and perfume smells. I get up and stand in the doorway with his mom.

Yash shakes his head. ‘You’ve come too far.’ He looks at me, asking for a truce. ‘It’s Marni and her girls, Hink.’

Marni. She and I hug, and marvel at her daughters, grown women now. Tears are already sending their mascara down their cheeks. She takes my chair and the girls lean against the bedrail.

‘Pigeons,’ Yash says reaching out his free hand. ‘No fussing about me. I’m fine. I’m really fine.’

This makes them cry harder.

I can’t make small talk right now. I feel like my lungs are on fire. I slip out of the room and look for Sam to find out what he talked to the nurse about. He’s not around so I keep walking to the bathroom. Yash’s posse is spread out over this whole floor. Brent and Aunt Bev are on their computers in the family room. EJ has found a little alcove for a work call, and Jared and Uncle Percy are in the kitchen eating ramen noodles beside the microwave.

In the bathroom stall I look at my phone. Silas has texted. All good here. Safe flight xo.

I look at the time. The numbers make no sense to me.

My noon flight has already left.

I call Silas’ phone.

‘Hello, Madre,’ Jack says.

The sound of his voice pushes everything else out of my mind. ‘Hello, sweet pea. How’s it going?’

‘Okay.’ He’s not in pain but something is pre­occupying him.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

I wait.

‘I just. I just want to get this procedure over and done with.’ He says the word ‘procedure‘ the way the Houston doctor said it. Her procedure was a seven-hour surgery.

‘This will be the last one for a long time.’

‘I just—’

‘I know.’

‘No, I don’t think you do know.’

I wait.

‘I’m like a ghost in school. Just when I start to sort of be like a regularish kid who actually shows up, I have to leave again. Otis has a girlfriend.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

I wait.

‘She wears funny shoes.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Old-fashioned. They’re weird. I’m getting behind in everything.’

‘In girls, you mean.’

‘In girls, in sports, in Spanish. Alex used a word I didn’t know today. Pájaro. Do you know what it means?’

‘Bird.’

‘Even you know it!’

‘I did live in Spain.’

‘I’m just behind. And I want to go on that trip next year. It’s part of the curriculum. You don’t have to pay for it.’

‘You will go on that trip. I promise.’ Please, dear God.

‘Do you think it’s possible for aliens to come and infect us like a virus with their thoughts?’

‘You are not allowed to watch that show.’

‘I’m not watching that show. Otis was telling me about it.’

Otis, the kid who told him about the atom bomb in kindergarten, porn in second grade, who never lets Jack’s surgeries, pain, or months of absences get in the way of a good friendship. The most loyal, foul-mouthed, naughty, generous friend you could ever wish for.

‘What are you at right now?’

‘One.’

‘Truthfully?’

‘Yes.’

‘You take your pill?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Take it before it creeps up on you.’

‘How’s Yash in the Tree?’ That’s what my boys call him, Yash in the Tree.

‘He’s all right. He’s not in pain.’

‘Morphine?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good stuff.’

Not what the mother of a twelve-year-old wants to hear.

‘I’ll be home later today. Early evening probably.’

‘Okay, cool. Otis asked if I want to be a thruple.’

‘Wow.’

‘You know what that is?’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘I said no.’

‘I think that was wise.’

‘I don’t want to share my first girlfriend.’

‘Or maybe any girlfriend.’

‘Down the line I might feel differently.’

Down the line. Oh, this kid of mine. I have to remember this conversation verbatim for Silas.

‘Otis says it was her idea. He says she was going to ask me out, then she heard I’d be out of school for a month so she asked Otis instead. They want to come visit me when I’m back.’

‘Even if you’re not a thruple?’

‘Yeah. I hope she wears those shoes. So you can see them. Mom?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you think, really really honestly and not just to keep my hopes up, do you think I’ll be able to go on that trip to Mexico?’

‘I do. I really, really do.’ And I do. It is my job to believe that, to know that, with my whole heart.

‘I forgot to brush my teeth this morning. And last night.’

‘You should go do that after we hang up.’

‘I can feel crud stuck in places.’ He is moving his tongue across his teeth. ‘Did Yash say that thing about his teeth being shelves for food?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think about that a lot.’

‘Me too.’

‘You do have teeth like that. You always have food in them.’

I laugh. ‘It’s a problem. I should probably get braces.’

‘You wouldn’t, would you?’

‘You don’t want a mother with braces?’

‘Mom.’

‘I could get the invisible kind, that look like plastic wrap and make you slur your words a little.’

‘ Mom .’

‘I won’t. Can you tell Dad I’ll be on a later flight? And I’ll grab a cab.’

‘Okay. I’m going to let you go now.’

I laugh. He’s imitating Silas’ mother. ‘Brush your teeth. I love you.’

I stay in the stall and book a flight for early evening.

Outside 508 Marni comforts her girls. ‘They had to put a mask on him and we couldn’t talk to him after that,’ she says.

She comes closer and says to me quietly, ‘God, he looks dreadful.’

Does he? I can’t see that anymore. I nod anyway.

She takes my hand. I’ve never done so much handholding in my life.

‘It’s good you’re here.’ She looks at her watch. ‘Oh shit. We have to go.’

‘We need to say goodbye,’ one of the pigeons says.

‘We will.’ She opens the door and they disappear through it.

I go back down the hallway and sit in the alcove that EJ has vacated. Was he hiding from Marni? Two nurses are nearby, chatting near the opening of their station where they come in and out. They are talking quietly about someone named Kelly. She never takes the tray, she sees it but she never takes it, so annoying. I sit there motion less, numb, knowing Marni and her girls are doing what I will have to do in a few hours. I don’t understand Marni coming for fifteen minutes. It makes no sense. None of it makes any sense.

I return to the room. Yash has a mask on. His oxygen is at 96. Sam is poking his neck.

Yash puts his hand out to me. ‘Feel that,’ he says, a bit muffled through the mask. He tilts his neck for me to poke too.

My finger sinks in, worse than before.

Sam’s phone buzzes. He looks at the screen. ‘He’s on his way.’

‘I’m inflating,’ Yash says.

‘We’ll ask the doctor.’

‘Who’s on the way?’ I say.

‘His boss,’ Sam says.

The DA arrives in the doorway in a charcoal suit without a crease. He is tall and striking. Yash has said he’s planning a run for Congress. Yash has been writing his speeches. I vacate my chair but he doesn’t sit. He shakes Yash’s hand then rests his forearms on the bed railing and says, ‘Well, this sucks.’ He speaks like a voiceover.

Yash lowers his mask. ‘It’s not optimal.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’ve seen worse. I know that. How did it go?’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Putty in my hands. I stole your line about not one good deed but the habit of goodness.’ His voice is mesmerizing.

‘I might have borrowed a tad from Aristotle.’

The DA nods twice. Then his face splits open. The smooth veneer cracks. He bends down closer and speaks quietly in a deep murmur. ‘I will never work with anyone as gifted again, Yash Thakkar. No one will ever come close. It’s been an honor and a privilege.’

‘The privilege has been mine, sir,’ Yash says.

They clasp hands for longer than I expect.

I signal to Yash that his oxygen is too low.

‘Pull yourself together, councilor, and go work the room.’ Yash says, and tugs his mask back up over his mouth and nose.

The DA moves slowly around the perimeter, introducing himself, repeating each name. He gives Yash’s mom a hug.

When he gets to me, I tell him my name and he says, ‘I have all your books.’

I look at Yash. ‘You foisted them on him, too?’

I see a smile beneath his foggy mask.

‘I’m a fan. The one about the musicians? Loved it.’

The DA moves on. Yash is feeling his neck again. It is swelling. How like him to complain about his job for years, when it turns out he is utterly revered by the boss.

He lowers his mask. ‘Do I look like a frog?’

I shake my head.

‘I do. I look like a frog.’

Sam taps my shoulder and gestures for me to step out of the room with him. I follow him down the hallway. He stops and leans against a wall between two rooms.

‘Jamie spoke to the doctor on rounds today about the air pockets. It’s something called subcutaneous emphysema.’

‘From the PICC line?’

‘Exactly.’ Small grin.

We discuss the options: They can make small incisions to release the air or they can insert a chest tube to remove it. Both involve risk of infection and further discomfort.

We shake our heads at the same time.

‘Okay, good,’ Sam says. ‘That was my feeling, too.’

He goes down the hallway to the bathroom and I go back to the room. The DA is gone. Yash is looking out the window. I sit in my chair and take his hand. He turns to me.

‘Let’s not argue, babe,’ he says.

‘No, let’s not.’ I sound like a Hemingway character.

‘I was thinking about how Silas got you to forgive him with a postcard. He must be some writer.’

He’s not done arguing.

‘All those years I tried to reach you,’ he says. ‘And you shut me out. For one lapse of judgement.’

‘It wasn’t a lapse.’

‘I was a lapse. I didn’t mean it to be the end. I thought we could talk it over.’

‘After you didn’t show up? Why not before I left Paris?’

‘I called on Christmas, remember? I wanted to talk then but you were in a rotten mood.’

‘Things were hard that fall.’

‘Hink, if I were given a hundred chances to do it over again, I would do it differently every single time. I loved you. I did. I just panicked a little.’

‘I know, it was a real commitment.’

He shakes his head and lowers his mask. ‘No, it wasn’t that. Or not only that. I mean, I was committed to you.’ His voice is much clearer, but the words come out slowly. ‘I was at the beginning of my life. I wanted to do so much. And I was barely responsible for myself.’ He stops to suck in more oxygen from the mask. ‘I didn’t know if I could carry us both, you know? Please don’t look at me like that. I was broke. You were broke. And you had debt. We weren’t being practical. I didn’t want to be like my father, saddled with responsibility so young. History repeating itself. And I wasn’t sure you understood the consequences—’

‘Consequences? Let’s talk about consequences, Yash. I was pregnant. I was five months pregnant in that Delta terminal waiting for you.’

And this is why I’d never told him. This slow shattering of his face. I never wanted to see it. He pulls away from me.

‘Whar mer,’ he says and is frustrated I can’t understand him.

His oxygen has plummeted. I lift the mask back over his mouth and nose. ‘Breathe,’ I say. ‘You have to breathe, babe.’

Above the mask his eyes are flashing back and forth.

Sam comes back in and around the bed to his spot on the other side.

Go away, I want to tell him. Leave us alone.

Yash makes a few sounds we can’t understand.

He turns to Sam. ‘Tell Cole not to come,’ he says slowly and with great effort. ‘I’m not going to make it to Tuesday.’

Sam and I look at each other. Yash shuts his eyes on us. Jamie comes in to check his vitals.

I leave the room before Sam can question me. I return to the alcove and sit with my back to everything. I take my phone out of my bag to check the time. The home screen is plastered with texts and missed calls from Silas, Jack, Harry, and the family group chat. My heart begins to race.

Jack has gotten a date for the brain stem surgery.

I scroll reluctantly through all the messages. Wednesday. This coming Wednesday. They want us in Houston by tomorrow night to begin pre-op testing on Monday morning. Jack’s texts are ecstatic, all caps, with happy dancing emojis. The percentages, the numbers, mean nothing to him. All I can think about are the cold numbers and the risks—cognitive damage, paralysis, death—and all he can see is his life returned to him.

Silas’ follow-up texts are logistical. He’s gotten the three of us on a flight out of Portland tomorrow afternoon and a room with two queens at the hotel attached to the hospital, and has arranged for his favorite sub to take over all his classes for the week and for Harry to stay with his best friend Eli’s family. Then Harry has written to say he has nothing going on in school the next few days and he wants to come with us and use his savings to pay for it. Silas writes that he has got Harry on our flight, too. Jack writes with more emojis that Harry is coming too. Harry has coped with Jack’s illness by pretending it isn’t happening. The first two surgeries were close by, in Boston, but he wouldn’t come to the hospital. Now he’s coming to Houston. The tears start as I write them back. I want to call Silas and talk to all of them, but I’m crying too hard and it would scare them.

‘Jordan.’ Sam sits in the little chair next mine. ‘Are you okay?’

I hold up the phone. ‘My son got a date for a big surgery.’

‘That’s good.’ Yash has told him about Jack. ‘When?’

‘Wednesday. In Houston.’ I wipe my face with the heels of my palms. ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to stop.’ It feels a lot like being in Ray Hart’s classroom, every awful terrifying thing flooding my system at once. ‘Did Yash tell you?’

‘No. He’s not speaking to anyone. What happened?’

‘I’m not sure he’s going to talk to me again. I hope he’ll talk to you.’

He nods. He reminds me of Silas then, the way he doesn’t ask more. ‘I’m going to get us some soup.’

He comes back in fifteen minutes with tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a cup of tea. I’ve mostly stopped crying.

The food tastes good. He’s gotten himself a grilled cheese, too.

‘I really dreaded seeing you, Sam.’

He nods. ‘I had some apprehension, too. Jordan, this is way too late, but I’m sorry. I truly am. I behaved badly.’

‘I’m sorry, too. I wasn’t very honest with you. Or anyone, really.’

‘I knew. I probably knew before either of you knew. I think some perverse part of me wanted to see how it all played out.’

Down the hall Yash’s mother is asking where Sam is. He doesn’t get up.

‘I can still see you on the ground,’ he says. ‘At that party. I didn’t mean to push you.’

‘I know that.’

‘I can still see the way you were looking at me. When I think of my boys going off to college and behaving like that . . .’ He shakes his head and crushes the sandwich wrapper into a small ball.

‘Are you still religious?’

‘No. Yash never told you?’

‘We didn’t speak of you. I know nothing about your life.’

He nods, taking this in. ‘After Ivan died I had a crisis of faith. Existential. Explosive. It blew up my marriage, estranged me from my parents and siblings, my community. Yash was basically the only one left, he was right there for me. He carried me through it. He had his own grief about Ivan and his own struggles, and he carried me on his back for two years. I wanted to die and he wouldn’t let me.’ He leans closer to me. ‘I don’t know the whole story, but since the moment he met you, I know he would have done anything for you.’

‘Except that one time when I really needed him to be there.’

‘You probably won’t believe me, but when he arrived at my door that night, I told him he was making a mistake. I knew how much he loved you. Because he’d risked our friendship for you. But he’s complicated. I can’t say I fully understand him even now. He chose to spend his life alone. It’s not something that just happened to him.’

Yash’s mom is calling our names. She finds us in the alcove. ‘It’s rounds,’ she says sharply. A little glimmer of the anger Yash described.

Sam stands. I don’t.

‘You’re not coming?’

‘I think it’s better if I don’t.’

‘All right. Don’t leave, okay? When’s your flight?’

‘At nine.’

He looks at his watch. ‘Stay till seven thirty. Whatever exchange you had with him, don’t go early. Give him some time and have one more talk with him. Say goodbye. Goodbyes are important.’

He walks back down to Yash’s room. I think that’s the longest conversation Sam and I have ever had.

Yash’s mother perches on the edge of the chair Sam was sitting in. She’s so small and brittle now. Pain turns women into birds, I think. I don’t want to turn into a bird in a hospital hallway.

‘Jared has gotten Venezuelan for dinner.’

‘I just ate a sandwich.’

‘I can’t eat either. Can’t eat a thing.’

She keeps such a distance from Yash. Or he keeps her at a distance. Whenever she comes into his room, I offer her my chair but she rarely takes it. The few times she did, they hardly spoke. She took his hand one time and he extracted it quickly. She prefers the doorway, the hallway, flanked by her sisters and Paige. We are not the same species, Yash said once. I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross. She wants things from me I cannot give, he said another time, hanging up from a phone call with her. Sam fills her in on what the doctors say. I’m not sure she absorbs everything he says. I know the feeling well, that fog of fear as you strain to listen to the doctor.

Aunt Mo delivers her a plate piled with arepas, rice, black beans, and plantains. Uncle Percy comes out of the family room with two plates, one for Aunt Mo. EJ comes next. They eat leaning against the wall facing us.

Yash’s mother pushes the fork through her rice but does not lift it to her mouth.

Brent and Bean come down the hallway.

‘We’re not playing sardines,’ Aunt Mo says, reluctantly moving over for them to fit in the alcove. ‘Peggy Lynn?’

Yash’s mother nods.

‘Do you remember when Alvin died, right here in this hospital?’

She grunts softly.

‘Do you remember a few days before, they brought in a tray of snacks, an enormous tray, full of cookies and the like? Where is that tray? We need a tray like that for all these people.’

Yash’s mother gets up and leaves without answering her and Aunt Mo turns her attention to me. ‘He waited too long, didn’t he? For someone so smart he could be awfully dumb, couldn’t he?’

‘I set him up with a girl once,’ Bean says. ‘Never again. She called me up the next day and said, “Who the fuck is Jordan? ” ’

EJ pushes himself off the wall and looms over me in my alcove. ‘What happened between you two? I can’t imagine any reason why you’d dump that guy. Heart of gold. Loyal as fuck.’

Aunt Mo takes the empty seat. ‘Yashie wasn’t easy to interpret, was he?’ She lowers her voice. ‘I think all that time he spent with Percy messed with him.’

‘His father suspected he was CIA,’ Paige says. ‘Do you think he was CIA?’

‘He gives me a book of yours every Christmas,’ Aunt Bev says behind me. ‘Every year. You’ve written so many .’

‘Only four.’

‘More than that. I get one every year.’

‘The book business? Talk about a dying market,’ Brent says. ‘I hope to God you’re transitioning to screen work. Now, streaming—that’s what we call shit-ton profit potential. Did you see Blood Force ? No book better than that series. You’re hobbled by the lack of visuals . There’s no competition with a screen. Sorry, but no matter how hard you try your dick is always going to be limp. I’ve read a book or two of yours. Started them, anyway. You’re good at dialogue. You gotta go after it. Thank God Yash never tried to write books. You know that’s what he wanted to do, right? He wouldn’t have been happy doing that. It would have made him more of a recluse than he already was.’

I excuse myself and go back to Yash.

Arlo is alone with him, in a chair at the foot of his bed. He’s playing the guitar. He’s singing a song I know from a tape Yash made me when I was in grad school and we started talking again after Ivan died. It was a tape of gorgeous, depressing songs and I had it for years. Silas and I used to listen to it in his car when we were dating. This one was the best song on it. We always fast-forwarded to get to it.

I sit in my chair. Yash’s mask is on tight and his eyes are closed. I take his hand and he doesn’t respond.

‘They loaded him up with meds,’ Arlo says over his fingerpicking. ‘He was getting twitchy.’

I squeeze his hand hard. I want him to wake up. But he’s in a deep chemical sleep.

It’s 7:43.

‘Where’s Sam?’

‘On the phone with his kids.’

I kiss Yash’s hand and let it go. I get my suitcase, say goodnight to Arlo, and walk out.

At the Hyatt, they give me a room that is the mirror opposite of the one from the night before. I collapse on the bed. My phone swarms with fresh texts. Where is the orange sleeping bag, Harry wants to know, he and Eli are going to sleep in a tent tonight. Jack hijacked Silas’ phone and, in response to an earlier text to Silas asking about how Jack’s day went, he wrote: Jack is fine. If Jack had his own phone you could ask him directly and get many more details.

The phone vibrates. It’s Harry.

‘It’s not in the closet or the garage,’ he says.

‘Did you try the way-back of the car?’

‘The car?’

‘I keep it there in the winter. In case of a sudden blizzard on the highway.’

‘You are so weird. Passing you to Dad.’

‘Only one in the car?’ Silas says. ‘What about the rest of us?’

‘If you guys were with me we’d be okay. We’d make a plan. Alone I would just need to get into a sleeping bag right away.’

‘You at the airport?’ Silas says. I barely pause and he says, ‘You’re not at the airport.’

‘I’m going to have to meet you in Houston.’

‘I bought you a flight from here with us.’

‘I know. I have to change it.’

‘I have been scrambling to put all the pieces together. I finally got Lorraine to take the dogs.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Planes aren’t easy.’ He means with Jack.

‘I know.’

‘The pressure.’

‘I told him.’

‘Told him what?’ He’s still on Jack.

‘I told Yash.’

‘Good for you.’ This is mean, this sarcasm, coming from Silas.

‘We had this fight right in the room with all these people around. And I told him and he wouldn’t speak to me and I have to go back. I can’t leave it like that.’

He is silent.

‘I will meet you in Houston tomorrow. I promise I’ll be there.’

‘Is this about Yash? Or is it about Jack?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are his rock. He’s never seen you scared. He looks at you and he thinks, I’m going to be okay.’ He takes a breath. ‘You cannot fall apart on him now.’

‘I found it!’ Harry says. He’s grabbed the phone back. ‘I love you, mother.’ He hangs up.

Silas doesn’t call me back.

Sunday

A strip of blue light shines through the crack of room 508. I nudge the door open. They are both asleep, Sam curled on his side on the cot, two fists beneath his chin, a sharp pale ankle thrust out beyond the mattress, and Yash with his head tipped to one side the way he used to fall asleep reading, the johnny slipping off both shoulders, wires taped to his bare chest.

Oh, my love. My old love.

His breaths are faster, shallower. He’s working so hard to breathe.

I drop into my chair and take his hand over the bedrail.

He makes a little whelp when he opens his eyes and sees me. ‘I was scared you’d left,’ he says, muffled through the mask.

I shake my head. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

His breathing, so short, so labored, disturbs us both.

Sam is snoring softly.

‘Jack?’ he says.

Sam must have told him.

‘Wednesday.’

‘You have to go home.’

‘I’ll meet them there tonight.’

‘You should be with them now.’

‘I want to be here a little while longer.’

‘Then tell me,’ Yash says. ‘Please.’

I nod. ‘First, let me just—’ I examine the bedrail between us. I find the little button and push it. It slides down easily. He reaches for both my hands. We are much closer now.

‘Tell me everything.’

I tell him. I tell him that I didn’t know until early October, that I tried to write but ripped up every letter I started, that I called him at his dad’s and at work and he never called me back. That I was five weeks, then six weeks, then seven. The French cut-off was ten. I didn’t want to do anything without talking to him, I tell him, but I was scared to talk to him. I knew this was what had happened to his parents. He’d said once that if the laws had been different, he wouldn’t have been born. I didn’t know how he’d feel. I loved him so much, I tell him, I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think only for myself. ‘It felt like a decision we had to make together but I couldn’t reach you. By the time we talked in December there didn’t seem any point. We’d be in New York in a week. I thought we’d figure it out in person.’

His head rocks back and forth. His breaths are too small.

‘Yash.’

‘Go on. Please go on.’

After Carson’s, I tell him, I went to my mother’s in Phoenix. By then I was clear about what I wanted to do. I tell him how my mom took care of me, how that healed something between us. I tell him about the agency and the photo of my first-choice couple. ‘They reminded me of an older version of us. They looked like they really loved each other, amused each other.’

‘You had the baby?’

‘I did.’

He squeezes my fingers hard. He’s still got a lot of strength.

‘A girl,’ I say.

Above the mask his forehead crumples. ‘A daughter?’

‘Yes.’

He can’t say anything more for a while.

‘Where is she?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. They couldn’t tell me. But every time I think of that photo, I know she’s fine. They were good people. I know it.’

‘Her name?’

‘I don’t know what they chose. I call her Daisy.’

He nods and tears run along the seam of his mask.

It’s nice without the railing. We are very close, my face only a few inches from his. I drop my head on his shoulder. ‘I had an hour with her. They let me give her a bottle. I wasn’t allowed to nurse her. They said it would make it harder on us both. She took that bottle like she knew exactly what she was doing. My boys weren’t like that. They sort of flopped around for a while before they figured it out.’ I feel him let out a puff of air, a laugh or a small sob. ‘Then a nurse came and got her. I checked a box, giving the agency permission to release my information to her. Whenever I move, I call and give them my new address. In case she asks for it.’

‘She hasn’t?’

‘Not yet.’

‘She’s twenty-seven.’

I nod.

‘When she does, will you tell her about me? Will you tell her I love her?’

‘I will. Of course I will.’

‘Tell her . . .’ he says. I can’t make out the rest. He’s crying hard. He tries again. ‘Tell her I’m always rooting for her.’

Neither of us can talk for a while. Our tears pool at his collarbone.

The only sound is Sam, snoring like a foghorn.

‘You did all that alone.’

‘I wasn’t alone.’

‘Without me.’

I look at the monitor. 87. Even with the mask. They will have to increase the liter flow.

‘Do you think—’ he stops for breath.

‘Don’t talk, Hink. Save your breath.’

‘For what?’

I don’t answer.

‘Do you think I should have married?’ He searches my face. ‘Would I have been happier?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t think I would have been good at it. Maybe a quarter of the time. The rest of the time I’d want to be alone.’

I can see how true that is. How unhappy it would have made me.

‘I have always loved you, though,’ he says. ‘Always always.’

The nurse Kelly comes in then. She smiles at Sam’s snoring as she goes around his cot. I lift up my head and let go of Yash’s left hand so she can pull a tube out of his IV and replace it with another.

When she leaves I put my head back on his shoulder.

‘Do you think I’ll be able to see her? Watch over her?’

‘I think so,’ I say. ‘In some way.’

‘Do you think it will be better?’

‘Better than life?’

He nods.

‘Yes,’ I say, as if it’s possible to imagine anything outside life.

‘We have a child,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘Not telling you.’

I feel him shake his head. ‘You told me. I’m so glad to know.’

We are quiet for a while.

I think he’s fallen asleep, then he says, ‘What do you make of death?’

‘Death?’ I stall.

‘Do you have a personal theory?’

‘You’re going to think it’s very Pollyanna.’

‘No doubt.’

‘You’ve spent your whole life reading everything. You should be telling me.’

‘Say it.’

‘Well, I believe we’re all one. Same consciousness or awareness or whatever you want to call it. The universe is expanding now but soon—in a few more billion years—we’ll start shrinking back again to what we were before the Big Bang. We’ll get smaller and smaller and then for a moment we’ll be a tiny speck. After that they say we’ll be nothing—we won’t exist at all inside a black hole. Then there’ll be another bang and we’ll return.’

‘Surprise!’ he says faintly.

‘I think we desire unity because we have felt it before and we want to feel it again. It’s our natural state.’

‘Eternity as a concept is a bit terrifying,’ he says.

‘Only if time exists as we experience it. Which we know it does not. Without time, eternity loses its bite.’

‘This is true.’

I wait for him to push against my theories. Instead he says, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to like billions of years of one consciousness.’

‘You might get used to it.’

‘I might. And I have a daughter.’ His voice breaks and he squeezes my hands hard. ‘It makes it easier somehow, Hink.’

We cry a little more and I feel his hands slowly go slack. He gives into sleep.

Sam rolls onto his side. Both feet are sticking out beyond the mattress now.

His open eyes make me jump.

He grins. ‘I slept in.’

‘You did.’

‘Was I snoring?’

‘Some.’

‘I’m sorry. I know it’s bad. Was he awake?’

‘For a little while.’

‘He sounds worse.’

‘He is.’

His clothes are on a chair in the corner and he can’t get to them.

‘I’ll go get the coffee,’ I tell him.

I go down to the basement and stand in line. It’s only hospital personnel at this hour. They wait in pairs or larger groups. Their chatter is comforting, these people who do such important work.

I was on a panel a few years ago with a philosopher who’d written a book on time. She said there were two prevailing theories, eternalism and presentism. Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all. Nothing before and nothing after. No exceptions. As we were walking off stage I asked her which she believed, and she told me she could make a strong case for either, but recently she was leaning toward presentism.

I didn’t understand why she would lean toward presentism, why she would choose only the present moment—no past, no future—when she could have everything all at once for eternity. But standing here in line, with all these good people working to help others get better, it feels okay to me to have this moment and nothing else. It feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here right now. I feel happy. I have told him.

The cot is gone. Sam is dressed and back in his spot. Yash’s eyes are open but he and Sam aren’t talking. I hand Sam a coffee and a bagel and put Yash’s coffee on his tray. I know he won’t drink it. He can’t take his mask off for that long now.

Yash reaches for my hand. He says something I can’t understand. He says it again but the sounds don’t turn into words. He can tell I didn’t get it, but he doesn’t try again.

‘He needs more oxygen,’ I say.

‘We’re at sixty,’ Sam says.

I look at him. Sixty liters per minute. It doesn’t go any higher than that.

A nurse we don’t know comes in. She turns on the lights and lifts the shade. ‘Why are all y’all in the pitch dark? Rise and shine. How are we this morning, my young man?’

Yash gives her a thumbs up.

Sam gets out of her way. She talks the whole time. She raises Yash up higher and she shifts the supports from one side to the other to prevent bed sores. Yash watches her and nods when she asks her questions and follows her with his eyes as she leaves the room.

‘I didn’t buy a couch,’ he says clearly.

‘Yes, you did,’ Sam says. ‘A red one.’

Yash shakes his head.

A few minutes later he makes this long awful sound deep in his throat, as if he were imitating a death rattle.

It surprises him as much as us. When he sees our faces, he chuckles. ‘Still alive,’ he says.

He makes a gesture to Sam and Sam lowers the bed a bit. Yash shuts his eyes. I see the boy I first knew. I see the boy sleeping on his back on the twin bed beneath the yellow bedspread.

An hour and a half later the family arrives. Yash has not woken up. His breaths are still very shallow, but they are not coming as fast. I watch them absorb the situation, the women first, the men more slowly. Sam takes Yash’s mom out into the hallway.

A while later a doctor appears in the doorway. She speaks to Sam and me out in the hall. She says she suspects Yash will go unconscious soon, if he has not already, and that it could be another day or two or more. She is holding his DNR. Sam follows along better than I do. I nod and try to stay standing.

We go back into the room and Sam explains everything to Yash’s mom and aunts.

Jamie comes in sometime after that and removes all the lines except the Foley catheter. She takes away the oxygen mask and the cannula and gently wipes his face with a cloth.

‘His beautiful face,’ Yash’s mom says.

It is beautiful. It’s so beautiful. Have I ever told him that?

He has deep red marks on his cheeks from the mask.

I brace myself for a terrible change without the mask, but his breathing is the same.

An orderly comes in with a platter of snacks, popcorn and cookies and chips in individually wrapped packages.

‘The tray,’ Aunt Mo says.

I come back from the bathroom and take my seat. The room is nearly empty, just Uncle Percy on his phone. I reach for Yash’s hand. But this time it is not his hand in mine. It is my mother’s hand. There is no other way to say this. It is my mother’s hand. I can see that the hand I’m holding is Yash’s, but what I feel are my mother’s plump fingers, my mother’s small, padded palm, the exact way her hand felt in mine when I was a little girl. It feels amazing.

Sam comes in with a woman named Jane from Yash’s office and I have to let go of my mom and give Jane my seat. I eat a packet of Lorna Doones from the tray in a chair near Uncle Percy. Nothing truly mystical has happened to me in my life before this. But for a minute or two in this room, some sort of channel opened up, and my mom was able to squeeze her hand through to me.

Jane from his office pats Yash’s arm and wipes her face many times. She says something very quietly to him then gets up and leaves. I return to my chair. My mother is gone. The hand is fully Yash’s again. He doesn’t turn when I touch it. He doesn’t tell me about Jane. I will never know her story.

My phone says 6:10. I have to go. I have to go to Houston. I hug the aunts and uncles. Paige and Peggy Lynn. Jared bends his thin frame like a willow against me. His bushy hair catches briefly on my earring. I wish him luck.

I go over to Sam’s side and we hug in silence for a long time.

I go back around and bend over you, my love. I brush my palm over your rooster’s comb. ‘I have loved you all my life,’ I whisper. ‘See you after the next bang.’

I spin my suitcase out of the corner. I look back once. Sam is holding both your hands.

I walk slowly to the elevator, like I have become a patient myself, like Hans Castorp falling sick at the sanatorium.

I push the green button and wait until a silver door slides open.

I thought it would feel better away from the hospital and at the airport, but it feels much worse. It’s loud and crowded and no one else here knows Yash is dying.

I punch keys at the kiosk, get my boarding pass, and move unsteadily to security. I take off my shoes, lift my arms over my head in the body-scanner. I try to regroup in the bathroom. It takes me a long time to fit my suitcase in the stall with me. It’s nighttime and I don’t remember eating today. I don’t look in the mirror while I wash my hands.

The central walkway is busy. I’ve already misplaced my boarding pass. I don’t know the gate. I need to find a departures screen. I won’t ever see you again. Where will you go? What will you be? I think of Aeneas going to look for his dead father in the Elysian Fields and how when he finds him he weeps as he tries to touch him, to hold him. Three times he tries and fails. His father is nothing more than a light wind in his arms.

I veer over to the windows facing the planes and runways lit up in the dark and sit on a bench. I think of our little red suit. I think of the tiny bed in Paris. La petite mort, you told me the Romantics called orgasm. The little death, we used to joke when you pulled out and your penis was like a small boneless animal, sweet and defenseless. Now you are facing the big death. Will you know I am remembering your penis? Will you watch over Daisy?

I stand in line at Chipotle. I’m halfway through my burrito when I realize I haven’t looked at a departures screen. I can see one across the food court. I leave my meal and go over to it. My flight leaves in forty-five minutes. A92. I head back to my burrito on the table and it looks like a half-eaten body on a tinfoil gurney. I leave it there and walk slowly away. I follow signs to my gate. People are moving so quickly in both directions. I can feel them look at me and look away fast. I can feel the blankness of my face. I don’t want to bring death to Houston.

I have a middle seat toward the back of the plane. A young woman is reading a novel beside the window. In the aisle seat a man with enormous shoulders is on his phone, hurriedly trying to connect what look like tomatoes before they explode. Neither has left me an armrest. When the plane begins to back away from the gate, I have a bad feeling. Death feels close. I have brought death onto the plane. I find Jack’s rock in my pocket and hold it tight. I used to have a superstition that the plane would go down unless I spoke to someone in my row before takeoff. I got out of this habit long ago, but tonight it feels like a safety measure I need to take.

‘Headed home?’ I ask the woman reading.

She looks up slowly, annoyed. ‘Vacation.’

‘Where to?’ As a reader, I feel for her. I wish I could stop myself. If only she understood it is for the protection of everyone on this plane.

‘Mexico City.’

‘Oh, cool.’

She returns to her book—I can’t see what it is from this angle—with a definitive twist away from me.

Liftoff has a soporific effect. I have to fight it. I don’t want to sleep here in the middle seat. My head has a tendency to plummet forward without warning. But I am so tired. My body gets even heavier as the plane pushes itself up further from the earth. I feel drugged and desperate for escape. I want to forget everything and go unconscious. But I don’t want to dream. I remember feeling this way when my mother died. I was afraid of dreaming about her, afraid of seeing her alive and having to lose her all over again. And I didn’t dream of her, not for a long time. I can’t stop my eyes from closing. When we level off and I can recline my seat so my head won’t drop down, I slip into a longer, dreamless sleep.

The captain’s voice wakes me up when he tells the flight attendants to prepare for landing.

I wait in line on the jet bridge to get my suitcase. Warm, humid air comes through the open door down to the tarmac. Once I have my bag, I follow a man with yellow sneakers into the terminal, where the AC has eradicated the warm air. I follow signs to ground transportation. I hate airports. I hate hospitals.

I come to double glass doors with signs on them that say no entry beyond this point . I go through. My phone vibrates. It’s a text from Sam.

Yash died.

I keep walking. Up ahead is an escalator. It seems to be moving much faster than regular escalators. My suitcase and I stand at the top. One metal step then another and another shoot out of the plate below my feet. Each one separates so fast from the one behind it and drops down. I can’t seem to take a step before it’s gone. It’s too much with my suitcase, impossible that we will both make it safely onto one of these small corrugated islands of metal. I know it is strange, given the travel we have done together, this suitcase and I, the many escalators we have gone down. The silver steps continue to appear and separate and go down without us. I cannot move. I cannot do it. I cannot do any of it.

I step aside and watch people walk on and go down, some with bags much larger and heavier than mine. I have to get to the hotel. I have to get to my family. It is nearly midnight. I try again. I step. We make it, my suitcase and I. We are okay. I hold onto the black rubber handrail. We go down. I look for another ground transportation sign and I see Silas.

Silas is at the bottom of the escalator. I don’t know how he is here. I didn’t tell him the airline or the time. Did he get the boys to the hotel and come back for me? I don’t know, but he is here and I step off and fall against him. He has to pull us out of the way of the people coming down behind me. He is in his big winter coat and I am in his arms and everything packed down inside me starts to rise. It comes up hard, in great heaves and groans then long quiet clicking sobs. He holds me so tight and we are there by the escalator a long time.

He holds me in the back of the taxi and in the hotel elevator. He pulls the key card out of his pocket and the door opens and we slip through quietly. The room is pitch-dark. I can sense my boys immediately, their sleep smells and breaths. Silas takes my hand and leads me in. I can make out two shapes now in the bed by the window. They are on their sides facing each other, mouths open, as if they fell asleep mid-sentence. I wrap my arms around Silas and we stand there beside the bed and my chest hurts with my love for the three of them.

I bend down and stroke Jack’s thick hair. They will shave his head again and we’ll see all the scars. Then they’ll cut into his skull once more. This precious boy, half his childhood carved into the skin of his crown.

He will be okay. I don’t know where this thought comes from, from me or from Silas, from Yash or my mother. It just comes to me. And it feels like an actual possibility.

Silas and I get into the other bed. I lie as close to him as I can, along the whole length of him. I cry some more and he holds me and I don’t know where Yash is or what will happen when the sun comes up and the week begins. Maybe it’s true what the philosopher said, that the past and the future don’t exist, that this is the only moment we ever have, this moment right now and this moment and this—

‘Casey,’ Silas says in my ear, half asleep, pulling me closer, reading my mind. ‘You’re here.’