Chapter III
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.’