Chapter III
Friday
It’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!