Chapter Forty The Sound That Wasn’t There #2
“Is it wrong that I’m still praying?” Her voice cracked. “I don’t even know what I’m praying for anymore. It already happened.
There’s nothing left to ask for.” “I don’t think that’s wrong,” he said carefully. “I think you’re allowed to talk to God even when you’re angry at Him. Especially then, maybe.
I don’t have your faith, not the way you do, but I don’t think it’s supposed to only work when things go well.
” Jennie cried properly then — the kind of crying she’d been holding at bay through the appointment, the procedure, the drive home, some professional instinct keeping her composed until composure no longer served any purpose at all.
Lin Xing held her through it, saying nothing else, offering nothing except the steady, unmoving fact of himself, which turned out, in the end, to be exactly what she needed most.
She fell asleep against him eventually, somewhere past midnight, exhaustion finally winning out over grief, and Lin Xing carried her to bed the way he had a hundred times before after long shifts, and settled the blanket over her, and stood in the doorway watching her breathe until he was certain she was truly under.
Then he did something he had not done in sixteen years. He went back to the hospital.
He told himself, on the drive, that it was to retrieve his laptop, left behind in the chaos of the afternoon.
He did not go to his office. He went, instead, to the small interfaith chapel on the ground floor, the one he had walked past ten thousand times in a decade and never once entered — a quiet, dim room with a few rows of chairs and a single window of plain, unremarkable glass, empty at this hour the way it almost always was.
He sat down in the back row, in the dark, and for a long moment he simply sat, hands folded, spine straight, the way he sat everywhere, holding himself together out of pure, exhausted habit.
And then, with no one to be steady for, no patient to reassure, no wife to hold, no father to protect from his own grief across an ocean
— Dr. Lin Xing, who had not wept at his mother’s funeral because someone had needed to make the arrangements, who had held Jennie through every tear of the last twelve hours without shedding one of his own, who had spent his entire adult life believing that composure was the same thing as strength — finally, completely, came apart.
It did not sound the way he might have expected, if he had ever let himself expect it.
It was not loud. It was worse than loud — a low, wrenching, involuntary thing, his shoulders folding forward, both hands pressed over his face as though he could physically hold in something that had already, at long last, escaped.
He wept for the heartbeat on a screen that had gone silent.
He wept for the small yellow room with its closed door.
He wept, somewhere in it, for his mother too, sixteen years late, the grief he had never once given himself permission to feel arriving all at once alongside this new one, indistinguishable now, both of them the same enormous, unbearable ache.
He wept the way he had refused to let himself since he was a second-year medical student who had decided, standing in a different hospital corridor, that the only way to survive loss was to never fully feel it.
He didn’t pray, exactly. He didn’t have the words, or the practice, or the certainty Jennie carried so easily.
But somewhere in the dark, between one shaking breath and the next, he found himself speaking anyway, barely above a whisper, to the empty room or to God or toa small heartbeat that had never gotten to hear the song he’d written for it.
“I would have been so careful with you,” he said.
“I would have been so careful.” And then there were no more words at all, only the weeping, until at last it wore itself out the way even the largest griefs eventually do, and left him sitting hollow and quiet and, somehow, fractionally lighter, in the dark of a chapel he had walked past for ten years without ever once needing until now.
He stayed until his breathing evened. He washed his face at the small basin by the door.
And then he drove home, and slipped back into bed beside Jennie without waking her, and held her through the rest of the night — and never told her, not then and not for a long time after, where he had gone.
Some griefs, he had finally learned, needed a place to go that belonged to no one else.
He had simply never, in sixteen years, let himself find one.
Sophia arrived the next morning without being asked, letting herself in with the spare key Jennie had given her months ago for emergencies neither of them had ever specified, and found the two of them still on the living room floor, a blanket pulled over both of them, neither having managed to make it to bed.
She didn’t say anything bright. She didn’t offer a single joke.
She simply sat down on the floor beside them, wrapped her arms around Jennie without a word, and stayed there for a long time, letting her own eyes fill and spill over in silent, unglamorous solidarity.
“I don’t know what to say,” she admitted finally, voice thick. “I always know what to say. I don’t know what to say right now.” “You don’t have to say anything,” Jennie whispered.
“You’re just here. That’s enough.” Emma came that evening, and brought no cake, no cards, no bright chatter — only a pot of soup she set quietly on the stove, and a long, wordless hug, and the particular, practiced gentleness of a nurse who had walked enough families through exactly this kind of morning to know that presence mattered more than any words she could offer.
“You don’t have to be strong for us,” Emma said, before she left.
“Not for me, not for Sophia, not for the hospital. Take whatever time this needs. We’ll hold everything else until you’re ready.
” Lin Wei called from Vancouver, having heard through his son’s careful, halting explanation, and said very little beyond the fact that he loved them both, and that grief like this didn’t move in a straight line, and that he’d learned that particular lesson the hard way and would be there, in whatever form was useful, for as long as it took.
Jennie’s mother cried on the phone until Jennie found herself, absurdly, comforting her own mother through an ocean of distance, and her father, quiet and gruff and utterly undone, said only, “We’re praying for you both, molé.
Every day. That doesn’t fix it. I know that.
But we’re doing it anyway,’ which was, Jennie thought afterward, possibly the most honest thing anyone said to her that whole week.
It was four days later, the yellow room still closed, the apartment still quieter than either of them had ever known it, that Jennie found Lin Xing sitting at the piano in the dark, not playing — just sitting, hands resting on keys he hadn’t pressed, the unfinished lullaby he’d been composing left open on the stand in front of him.
“I don’t know if I can finish it,” he said, without turning around.
“I keep sitting down to try, and I can’t make myself play a single note of it.
” Jennie crossed the room and sat beside him on the bench, the way she had the first time he’d shown her the melody, and rested her head against his shoulder.
“You don’t have to finish it today,” she said softly. “Or this week. Or this month. It’ll still be there when you’re ready.
Some things are allowed to stay unfinished for a while.” He was quiet a long moment, his hands still resting, unmoving, on the keys. “I keep thinking about what I told them,” he said finally, voice rough. “At the piano, that Sunday.
That I wanted this to be the first thing they ever heard, after your voice.
” His jaw tightened. “I don’t know what to do with a promise I made to someone who never got the chance to hear it.
” Jennie reached over and laced her fingers through his, resting their joined hands gently on the keys together.
“Maybe you keep the promise anyway,” she said. “Not because they'll hear it. Because you meant it. Because loving them doesn’t stop just because they didn’t get to stay.”
Her voice broke, but she pushed through it. “I think that’s what grief actually is, Lin. Love that doesn’t have anywhere left to go, so it Just — stays. In us.
However long it needs to.” He turned to look at her then, eyes wet, and for a while neither of them said anything at all — just sat together in the dark, hands joined over silent keys, two people who had built an entire careful, joyful life out of learning not to guard themselves against each other, now discovering, together, that the same openness that had given them so much joy also meant there was nowhere to hide from a grief this large.
“I love you,” he said finally, hoarse. “I don’t know how to make any of this better.
I only know I don’t want to face one single day of it without you.” “You won’t have to,” Jennie said, and meant it with everything she had left. “Not one day. I promise you that.”
Outside, the city moved on in its ordinary, indifferent way — traffic, distant sirens, someone laughing on the street below their window, all of it going on exactly as it always had, entirely unaware that somewhere above it, in a quiet apartment with a closed yellow door, two people were learning, slowly and painfully, how to hold a grief neither of them had ever expected to carry.
They didn’t know yet how long it would take to open that door again.
They only knew, sitting together in the dark, hands joined on a silent piano, that whatever came next, they would face it exactly the way they’d faced everything else since the day an elephant taught them both what a strong heartbeat sounded like.
Together. Without guarding anything at all.