Chapter 33
Real
Casey
Real looks like this:
It’s a Tuesday in early May, and the Toronto winter has finally, mercifully, reluctantly surrendered.
The ice on Lake Ontario is gone. The cherry blossoms in High Park are doing that thing where they explode into existence overnight and make the entire city look like the inside of a greeting card.
People are walking around in short sleeves looking dazed and grateful, like survivors of a natural disaster who have just been told the danger has passed.
I’m standing in the paediatric ER at Lakeshore Memorial, elbow-deep in a Tuesday afternoon that has already included two broken arms, a plastic crafting bead lodged in a nasal cavity, and a truly spectacular case of a seven-year-old who superglued his fingers together with industrial strength Gorilla Glue while building a model volcano.
The superglue kid is my favourite. He’s sitting on the exam table with his hand held up like a flipper, looking at me with a betrayed expression.
It’s clear that he’s learned that scientific innovation has real-world consequences and progress always comes at a price.
“Okay, buddy,” I say, gently working the acetone-soaked gauze between his fused index and middle fingers. “We're going to get these fingers separated. It might feel weird. On a scale of one to ten, how attached would you say you are to these fingers?”
“Very attached,” he says solemnly. “They're stuck together, which is the whole reason I’m here.”
“That was a pun. I respect that. You're going to be fine.”
His mother, standing in the corner, is oscillating between laughter and mortification. “He used the entire tube,” she says. “The entire tube, Dr. Welling. I only turned around for thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds is all it takes. I once saw a kid glue a Lego to his forehead. He wore it to school. His teacher called it a fashion statement for the rest of the week, until his parents finally brought him in for help.” I peel the fingers apart with a satisfying, slightly grotesque separation sound, and the boy examines his liberated digits with wonder.
I slap a holographic T-Rex sticker on his gown.
“There you go. Good as new. Maybe next time, use the glue stick?”
“The glue stick doesn't bond at the molecular level, why else do you think I didn’t use it?” he says, with withering contempt in his voice. This a boy who takes his model volcanoes extremely seriously.
I like this kid. I like this kid enormously.
I finish the chart, wave goodbye to flipper boy and his mother, and step into the corridor, and there, walking toward me from the neurosurgery wing with his white coat pristine and his clipboard held at exactly the angle that makes him look like a nineteenth-century portrait, is Dr. Arjun Kapoor.
He’s the same. He’s entirely different.
The same: the dark curls, meticulously styled. The green eyes, intense and focused. The posture, straight as a surgical instrument. The white coat, tailored, immaculate, buttoned with the precision of someone who considers wrinkled fabric a personal failing.
Different: there is a Stegosaurus sticker on his clipboard.
It has been there since we returned from India three months ago, and no one has dared ask about it, and the residents have developed approximately fourteen theories, and the leading theory, according to the scrub nurse who told me in confidence, is that the Dread Prince lost a bet.
The Dread Prince did not lose a bet. The Dread Prince put a sticker on his clipboard because the man he loves gives them to children and it means something to him, and if the residents want to speculate, they can speculate.
Also different: the way his face changes when he sees me.
It’s not a dramatic transformation. It’s not a smile, exactly, because Arjun Kapoor doesn’t smile in hospital corridors with the casual ease of a normal human being.
But something shifts. The set of his jaw loosens by a fraction.
The line between his eyebrows softens. His eyes, which are always assessing, always calculating, always operating in surgical margins, find me and settle, the way a compass needle settles when it finds north.
“Dr. Welling,” he says, as we pass in the corridor. Formal. Professional. The Dread Prince voice.
“Dr. Kapoor,” I say. Equally formal. Equally professional.
His pinky finger brushes mine as we pass.
The contact lasts approximately a quarter of a second.
Nobody sees it. Nobody would notice it even if they were watching, because it’s the smallest possible gesture, the absolute minimum physical contact that two hands can make while passing in a corridor, and it sends a jolt through my entire body that’s medically significant.
He keeps walking. I keep walking. We don’t look back.
We have rules now. Not the leather-notebook rules from the apartment in Toronto a lifetime ago. Real rules, the kind that two people make when they are building something honest on ground that was previously occupied by a deception and a fight and a four-day separation and a hotel room in Jaipur.
Rule one: no clinical language during fights.
This rule has been tested twice. The first time, three weeks after we got back, when Arjun left wet surgical notes on my kitchen counter and I moved them and he couldn't find them and he started to say “the displacement of the documentation has created an organizational cascade that...” and I held up a newspaper I'd bought specifically for this purpose and he closed his mouth and said, “I'm frustrated that you moved my notes.” Glorious progress.
The second time was harder. It was about Meera.
She called on a Sunday evening and spent forty minutes discussing Dev's latest career accomplishments with the pointed, strategic emphasis of a woman who has not given up so much as recalibrated her timeline, and Arjun hung up and retreated into clinical distance so fast I could practically hear the drawbridge slamming.
I sat on the couch and I waited, and he paced, and Oliver watched us both with the anxious, attentive expression of a dog who knows something is wrong but doesn't know which human to sit on and squish.
Eventually, Arjun sat down beside me and said, “She makes me feel like a failed experiment,” and the sentence was messy and imprecise and entirely human, and I pulled him into me and held him, and Oliver climbed onto both of our laps simultaneously, which is a feat of engineering for an eighty-pound goldendoodle but which Oliver considers his personal responsibility in times of emotional crisis.
Rule two: I’m allowed to leave rooms during arguments, as long as I come back within fifteen minutes.
This rule exists because of me, because of the thing my mother named in a phone call from Huntsville, the bracing-for-disappearance reflex that I’ve been carrying since my father's heart stopped. Arjun proposed this rule. He proposed it in clinical language, initially (“I suggest we implement a structured de-escalation protocol with a defined return interval” ), and I held up the newspaper, and he rephrased it as, “If you need to walk away, walk away, but come back, because I will be here, and I will always be here, and the room will not empty while you are gone.” I haven’t needed to use the rule yet.
But knowing it exists is a kind of safety net that makes the heights less frightening.
Rule three: one weekend a month in Huntsville.
This is non-negotiable. This is my rule, and Arjun accepted it with the gracious resignation of someone who knows that arguing with a Welling about cottage country is like arguing with a Kapoor about tea: the outcome is predetermined and resistance is aesthetic.
The Huntsville weekends are where I fell in love with him again.
Not the Rajasthan love, which was intense and pressurized and performed under the surveillance of aunties with iPhones.
The Huntsville love. The love that happens when you watch someone who wears Savile Row to the operating room sit on a dock in loose-fitting borrowed shorts and read a book while the loons call across the lake.
When you watch him eat pie on your mother's porch and compliment her lattice technique with such specific, genuine admiration that she blushes, and Brenda Welling does not blush — Brenda Welling has not blushed since 1997.
It’s the love that grows when you watch him throw a tennis ball for Oliver in the backyard and miss, every single time, because Arjun Kapoor's spatial awareness outside of a surgical context or polo is genuinely, spectacularly terrible, and Oliver fetches the ball from increasingly improbable locations with the patient, forgiving enthusiasm of a dog who loves his person regardless of their throwing ability.
Arjun leaving a toothbrush at my apartment was not the milestone.
The toothbrush appeared on week two, placed in the holder with deliberate, considered precision.
I could tell he thought about this gesture for several days before executing it.
The milestone was Oliver deciding that Arjun was his person.
It happened on a Wednesday night in late March, when Arjun came over after a marathon surgery, exhausted, his hands trembling, his eyes hollow.
He lay down on the couch without speaking.
Oliver, who had been lying in his bed across the room, got up, walked over, and climbed onto the couch and pressed his entire eighty-pound body against Arjun's legs and put his chin on Arjun's knee and did not move for three hours.
Arjun cried. Not a lot. Not theatrically. Just a few quiet tears that he thought I didn't see, and that I pretended I didn't see, because some moments are private even when you are in the same room, and being chosen by a dog for the first time is one of them.