Chapter 34 #2
I sit down on the edge of the bed. Oliver, who was lying on my side, lifts his head, assesses the situation, and puts his chin on my thigh.
“It needs to be right,” I say.
“It needs to be honest,” Daadi corrects.
“Right is a treatment standard. Honest is a human one. Our marriage was arranged, as you know. But the first time your grandfather told me he loved me, it was not planned. We had been married for three years. He was in the garden, planting roses, and he looked up at me with dirt on his hands and said it as if the words had simply fallen out of him, unfinished and unrehearsed, and it was the most honest moment of our marriage because he did not mean to say it. He just could not hold it in any longer.” She pauses.
“Stop planning. Start living. The ring is in your pocket. The man is in your hospital. The words are in your chest. Let them out.”
She hangs up. Daadi Nirindra does not say goodbye. She simply finishes speaking and the call ends, the telephonic equivalent of a cane tap.
The next afternoon, I am standing in the doorway of the paediatric ER.
I did not plan this. I did not compose a speech.
I did not strategize the timing or choreograph the setting or select the appropriate lighting conditions.
I finished a four-hour surgery, a routine shunt revision that went smoothly, and I walked down from the neurosurgery floor to the ER to find Casey because I wanted to see him, which is what I do now, which is what I have done every day for the past four months, which is the simplest, most unstrategic, most human thing about my life.
And I am standing in the doorway, and I am watching him.
He is in the middle of the ER floor. He is wearing his dinosaur scrubs, the ones with the Stegosauruses and the Triceratops, stretched to their absolute limit across his chest and shoulders.
There is Dermabond on his forearm. His blonde curls are escaping from his surgical cap.
He is crouching beside a small boy on a gurney, a kid with a split lip and a terrified expression, and Casey is doing the thing that Casey does.
He is making the scary thing stop being scary.
I watch him produce a sticker from behind the kid's ear, the magician's gesture that I have watched a thousand times and that still, every time, makes my chest expand in a way that is not anatomically possible.
The kid giggles. The mother, standing nearby, exhales with the shuddering relief that comes when your child has stopped crying.
Casey stands up, his face radiant, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners, and he high-fives the kid, and the sound of the small hand against his enormous one echoes across the ER floor.
This is where I fell in love with him.
Not in Rajasthan. Not on a terrace under the stars.
Not in a bed with silk sheets or a kitchen at two in the morning or a festival with lanterns and music.
Here. In this ER. Through a window. Watching him do exactly this, two years ago, while my mother planned my engagement on the phone and Gabriel told me I had the bedside manner of a Victorian ghost and the February sleet battered the windows and I looked down and saw a man made of sunshine putting a sticker on a crying child, and the entire trajectory of my life bent toward him like light bending around a star.
The ring is in my pocket. My hand closes around the box.
I do not have a speech. I had one, briefly, in the elevator on the way down.
It started with “Casey, over the past four months, the evidence-based trajectory of our relationship has demonstrated a statistically significant...” and I abandoned it before the doors opened because Priya's voice in my head said I will end your surgical career, and Daadi's voice said, Stop planning, start living, and Gabriel's voice said, For the love of God, Arjun, and so I am standing in the doorway of the paediatric ER with no speech and a ring and the terrifying, exhilarating, completely uncontrolled certainty that the moment is now.
Not because the timing is right. Because the timing doesn't matter.
Because the man I love is standing in the ER in his ridiculous scrubs with Dermabond on his arm and a sticker in his hand and his whole face lit up because he just made a kid laugh, and there is no version of this that is more perfect, because this is who he is, and this is who I fell in love with, and the ring in my pocket has been waiting for a moment that was always going to look exactly like this.
I walk onto the ER floor.
I am aware, dimly, that people are watching. Nurses. Residents. The scrub tech by the supply station. The mother with the split-lip kid. I do not care. I do not calculate the social implications. I do not clasp my hands behind my back.
Casey sees me coming. His expression shifts from the radiant, post-sticker glow to something curious because I am walking toward him with a specific kind of purpose, the kind that he has learned to read over four months of living with a man whose body language is a more reliable indicator of his emotional state than anything that comes out of his mouth.
“Hey, Doc,” he says. “You okay? How was the shunt revision?”
“Clean. Textbook. Casey.”
“Yeah?”
I stop in front of him. The ER floor. The fluorescent lights. The beeping monitors and the distant hum of the ventilation system and the faint, ever-present smell of antiseptic and Dermabond and the specific, particular warmth of a children's hospital that never sleeps.
I take the box out of my pocket.
Casey's eyes drop to my hand. His face does something that I will remember for the rest of my life, a sequence of expressions so fast and so layered that they defy categorization: surprise, confusion, recognition, and then, flooding in behind the recognition like dawn breaking over a flat horizon, understanding.
“Arjun,” he says, and his voice is very quiet.
I open the box. The ring catches the fluorescent light, platinum and gold, simple and personal, nothing from the Kapoor vaults, something I picked out myself in a tiny shop on Queen Street West.
“I don't have a speech,” I say. “I had one in the elevator and it started with 'evidence-based trajectory' and I abandoned it because everyone I love would have disowned me.”
A sound comes from somewhere behind me. It might be a nurse. It might be a gasp. I do not look.
“I have a ring,” I continue, and my voice is shaking, and I let it shake, and my hands are trembling, and I do not hide them behind my back.
“I have a ring that I bought from a woman named Maria who listened to me talk about you for twenty minutes and then showed me a band with a line of gold through the centre, and it is the right ring because it is simple and warm and it has something precious running through the middle of it, and that is you, Casey. That is what you are. You are the line of gold through the centre of everything.”
The ER floor has gone very quiet. The kind of quiet that has texture, that you can feel against your skin. Even the monitors seem to be holding their breath.
“You are the line of gold,” I say, “and I am the man who almost lost you because I was too afraid to stop performing and too clinical to say what I meant and too controlled to let anyone see me shake. And I am shaking right now, in front of the entire ER, and I do not care, because you taught me that shaking is not weakness. Shaking is what happens when something matters so much that the body cannot hold it still.”
Casey's eyes are bright. Wet. His blue eyes are shimmering under the fluorescent lights, and his jaw is working, and his enormous hands are at his sides and they are steady, because Casey's hands are always steady, and the steadiness of them right now, in contrast to the trembling of mine, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“Marry me,” I say. “Not because my mother is watching. Not because an astrologer says our charts align. Not because it is strategically optimal or culturally expected or part of any plan I have ever written in any leather notebook. Marry me because I love you, and because you love me, and because this hospital is where I saw you for the first time, and I want it to be where I ask you for the last time, and I want the answer to be the beginning of something that does not need a plan.”
“Yes.”
He says it before I finish. He says it the way he says everything, without hesitation, without calculation, without the agonized, multi-layered processing that I bring to every decision.
He says it the way he said yes in a supply closet, the way he said yes on a terrace, the way he said yes in a hotel room in Jaipur.
He says yes like it is the easiest word in the world, like it has been sitting in his mouth for years, waiting.
“Yes,” he says again, and his voice cracks, and his face is doing the crumbling thing, the thing it did in the hotel room when I said “not a lapse in judgment,” except this time it is not crumbling from pain but from joy, and the difference between the two is the difference between breaking and opening, and Casey Welling is opening, right here, on the ER floor, in his dinosaur scrubs, with Dermabond on his arm and tears on his face.
The ER erupts.