Chapter III #3
The DA moves on. Yash is feeling his neck again. It is swelling. How like him to complain about his job for years, when it turns out he is utterly revered by the boss.
He lowers his mask. ‘Do I look like a frog?’
I shake my head.
‘I do. I look like a frog.’
Sam taps my shoulder and gestures for me to step out of the room with him. I follow him down the hallway. He stops and leans against a wall between two rooms.
‘Jamie spoke to the doctor on rounds today about the air pockets. It’s something called subcutaneous emphysema.’
‘From the PICC line?’
‘Exactly.’ Small grin.
We discuss the options: They can make small incisions to release the air or they can insert a chest tube to remove it. Both involve risk of infection and further discomfort.
We shake our heads at the same time.
‘Okay, good,’ Sam says. ‘That was my feeling, too.’
He goes down the hallway to the bathroom and I go back to the room. The DA is gone. Yash is looking out the window. I sit in my chair and take his hand. He turns to me.
‘Let’s not argue, babe,’ he says.
‘No, let’s not.’ I sound like a Hemingway character.
‘I was thinking about how Silas got you to forgive him with a postcard. He must be some writer.’
He’s not done arguing.
‘All those years I tried to reach you,’ he says. ‘And you shut me out. For one lapse of judgement.’
‘It wasn’t a lapse.’
‘I was a lapse. I didn’t mean it to be the end. I thought we could talk it over.’
‘After you didn’t show up? Why not before I left Paris?’
‘I called on Christmas, remember? I wanted to talk then but you were in a rotten mood.’
‘Things were hard that fall.’
‘Hink, if I were given a hundred chances to do it over again, I would do it differently every single time. I loved you. I did. I just panicked a little.’
‘I know, it was a real commitment.’
He shakes his head and lowers his mask. ‘No, it wasn’t that.
Or not only that. I mean, I was committed to you.
’ His voice is much clearer, but the words come out slowly.
‘I was at the beginning of my life. I wanted to do so much. And I was barely responsible for myself.’ He stops to suck in more oxygen from the mask.
‘I didn’t know if I could carry us both, you know?
Please don’t look at me like that. I was broke.
You were broke. And you had debt. We weren’t being practical.
I didn’t want to be like my father, saddled with responsibility so young.
History repeating itself. And I wasn’t sure you understood the consequences—’
‘Consequences? Let’s talk about consequences, Yash. I was pregnant. I was five months pregnant in that Delta terminal waiting for you.’
And this is why I’d never told him. This slow shattering of his face. I never wanted to see it. He pulls away from me.
‘Whar mer,’ he says and is frustrated I can’t understand him.
His oxygen has plummeted. I lift the mask back over his mouth and nose. ‘Breathe,’ I say. ‘You have to breathe, babe.’
Above the mask his eyes are flashing back and forth.
Sam comes back in and around the bed to his spot on the other side.
Go away, I want to tell him. Leave us alone.
Yash makes a few sounds we can’t understand.
He turns to Sam. ‘Tell Cole not to come,’ he says slowly and with great effort. ‘I’m not going to make it to Tuesday.’
Sam and I look at each other. Yash shuts his eyes on us. Jamie comes in to check his vitals.
I leave the room before Sam can question me. I return to the alcove and sit with my back to everything. I take my phone out of my bag to check the time. The home screen is plastered with texts and missed calls from Silas, Jack, Harry, and the family group chat. My heart begins to race.
Jack has gotten a date for the brain stem surgery.
I scroll reluctantly through all the messages.
Wednesday. This coming Wednesday. They want us in Houston by tomorrow night to begin pre-op testing on Monday morning.
Jack’s texts are ecstatic, all caps, with happy dancing emojis.
The percentages, the numbers, mean nothing to him.
All I can think about are the cold numbers and the risks—cognitive damage, paralysis, death—and all he can see is his life returned to him.
Silas’ follow-up texts are logistical. He’s gotten the three of us on a flight out of Portland tomorrow afternoon and a room with two queens at the hotel attached to the hospital, and has arranged for his favorite sub to take over all his classes for the week and for Harry to stay with his best friend Eli’s family.
Then Harry has written to say he has nothing going on in school the next few days and he wants to come with us and use his savings to pay for it.
Silas writes that he has got Harry on our flight, too.
Jack writes with more emojis that Harry is coming too.
Harry has coped with Jack’s illness by pretending it isn’t happening.
The first two surgeries were close by, in Boston, but he wouldn’t come to the hospital.
Now he’s coming to Houston. The tears start as I write them back.
I want to call Silas and talk to all of them, but I’m crying too hard and it would scare them.
‘Jordan.’ Sam sits in the little chair next mine. ‘Are you okay?’
I hold up the phone. ‘My son got a date for a big surgery.’
‘That’s good.’ Yash has told him about Jack. ‘When?’
‘Wednesday. In Houston.’ I wipe my face with the heels of my palms. ‘Sorry. I can’t seem to stop.’ It feels a lot like being in Ray Hart’s classroom, every awful terrifying thing flooding my system at once. ‘Did Yash tell you?’
‘No. He’s not speaking to anyone. What happened?’
‘I’m not sure he’s going to talk to me again. I hope he’ll talk to you.’
He nods. He reminds me of Silas then, the way he doesn’t ask more. ‘I’m going to get us some soup.’
He comes back in fifteen minutes with tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a cup of tea. I’ve mostly stopped crying.
The food tastes good. He’s gotten himself a grilled cheese, too.
‘I really dreaded seeing you, Sam.’
He nods. ‘I had some apprehension, too. Jordan, this is way too late, but I’m sorry. I truly am. I behaved badly.’
‘I’m sorry, too. I wasn’t very honest with you. Or anyone, really.’
‘I knew. I probably knew before either of you knew. I think some perverse part of me wanted to see how it all played out.’
Down the hall Yash’s mother is asking where Sam is. He doesn’t get up.
‘I can still see you on the ground,’ he says. ‘At that party. I didn’t mean to push you.’
‘I know that.’
‘I can still see the way you were looking at me. When I think of my boys going off to college and behaving like that . . .’ He shakes his head and crushes the sandwich wrapper into a small ball.
‘Are you still religious?’
‘No. Yash never told you?’
‘We didn’t speak of you. I know nothing about your life.’
He nods, taking this in. ‘After Ivan died I had a crisis of faith. Existential. Explosive. It blew up my marriage, estranged me from my parents and siblings, my community. Yash was basically the only one left, he was right there for me. He carried me through it. He had his own grief about Ivan and his own struggles, and he carried me on his back for two years. I wanted to die and he wouldn’t let me.
’ He leans closer to me. ‘I don’t know the whole story, but since the moment he met you, I know he would have done anything for you. ’
‘Except that one time when I really needed him to be there.’
‘You probably won’t believe me, but when he arrived at my door that night, I told him he was making a mistake.
I knew how much he loved you. Because he’d risked our friendship for you.
But he’s complicated. I can’t say I fully understand him even now.
He chose to spend his life alone. It’s not something that just happened to him. ’
Yash’s mom is calling our names. She finds us in the alcove. ‘It’s rounds,’ she says sharply. A little glimmer of the anger Yash described.
Sam stands. I don’t.
‘You’re not coming?’
‘I think it’s better if I don’t.’
‘All right. Don’t leave, okay? When’s your flight?’
‘At nine.’
He looks at his watch. ‘Stay till seven thirty. Whatever exchange you had with him, don’t go early. Give him some time and have one more talk with him. Say goodbye. Goodbyes are important.’
He walks back down to Yash’s room. I think that’s the longest conversation Sam and I have ever had.
Yash’s mother perches on the edge of the chair Sam was sitting in. She’s so small and brittle now. Pain turns women into birds, I think. I don’t want to turn into a bird in a hospital hallway.
‘Jared has gotten Venezuelan for dinner.’
‘I just ate a sandwich.’
‘I can’t eat either. Can’t eat a thing.’
She keeps such a distance from Yash. Or he keeps her at a distance.
Whenever she comes into his room, I offer her my chair but she rarely takes it.
The few times she did, they hardly spoke.
She took his hand one time and he extracted it quickly.
She prefers the doorway, the hallway, flanked by her sisters and Paige.
We are not the same species, Yash said once.
I am a human being and she is a two-ton albatross.
She wants things from me I cannot give, he said another time, hanging up from a phone call with her.
Sam fills her in on what the doctors say.
I’m not sure she absorbs everything he says.
I know the feeling well, that fog of fear as you strain to listen to the doctor.
Aunt Mo delivers her a plate piled with arepas, rice, black beans, and plantains. Uncle Percy comes out of the family room with two plates, one for Aunt Mo. EJ comes next. They eat leaning against the wall facing us.
Yash’s mother pushes the fork through her rice but does not lift it to her mouth.
Brent and Bean come down the hallway.
‘We’re not playing sardines,’ Aunt Mo says, reluctantly moving over for them to fit in the alcove. ‘Peggy Lynn?’
Yash’s mother nods.
‘Do you remember when Alvin died, right here in this hospital?’
She grunts softly.
‘Do you remember a few days before, they brought in a tray of snacks, an enormous tray, full of cookies and the like? Where is that tray? We need a tray like that for all these people.’
Yash’s mother gets up and leaves without answering her and Aunt Mo turns her attention to me. ‘He waited too long, didn’t he? For someone so smart he could be awfully dumb, couldn’t he?’
‘I set him up with a girl once,’ Bean says. ‘Never again. She called me up the next day and said, “Who the fuck is Jordan?”’
EJ pushes himself off the wall and looms over me in my alcove. ‘What happened between you two? I can’t imagine any reason why you’d dump that guy. Heart of gold. Loyal as fuck.’
Aunt Mo takes the empty seat. ‘Yashie wasn’t easy to interpret, was he?’ She lowers her voice. ‘I think all that time he spent with Percy messed with him.’
‘His father suspected he was CIA,’ Paige says. ‘Do you think he was CIA?’
‘He gives me a book of yours every Christmas,’ Aunt Bev says behind me. ‘Every year. You’ve written so many.’
‘Only four.’
‘More than that. I get one every year.’
‘The book business? Talk about a dying market,’ Brent says.
‘I hope to God you’re transitioning to screen work.
Now, streaming—that’s what we call shit-ton profit potential.
Did you see Blood Force? No book better than that series.
You’re hobbled by the lack of visuals. There’s no competition with a screen.
Sorry, but no matter how hard you try your dick is always going to be limp.
I’ve read a book or two of yours. Started them, anyway.
You’re good at dialogue. You gotta go after it.
Thank God Yash never tried to write books.
You know that’s what he wanted to do, right?
He wouldn’t have been happy doing that. It would have made him more of a recluse than he already was. ’
I excuse myself and go back to Yash.
Arlo is alone with him, in a chair at the foot of his bed.
He’s playing the guitar. He’s singing a song I know from a tape Yash made me when I was in grad school and we started talking again after Ivan died.
It was a tape of gorgeous, depressing songs and I had it for years.
Silas and I used to listen to it in his car when we were dating.
This one was the best song on it. We always fast-forwarded to get to it.
I sit in my chair. Yash’s mask is on tight and his eyes are closed. I take his hand and he doesn’t respond.
‘They loaded him up with meds,’ Arlo says over his fingerpicking. ‘He was getting twitchy.’
I squeeze his hand hard. I want him to wake up. But he’s in a deep chemical sleep.
It’s 7:43.
‘Where’s Sam?’
‘On the phone with his kids.’
I kiss Yash’s hand and let it go. I get my suitcase, say goodnight to Arlo, and walk out.
At the Hyatt, they give me a room that is the mirror opposite of the one from the night before.
I collapse on the bed. My phone swarms with fresh texts.
Where is the orange sleeping bag, Harry wants to know, he and Eli are going to sleep in a tent tonight.
Jack hijacked Silas’ phone and, in response to an earlier text to Silas asking about how Jack’s day went, he wrote: Jack is fine.
If Jack had his own phone you could ask him directly and get many more details.
The phone vibrates. It’s Harry.
‘It’s not in the closet or the garage,’ he says.
‘Did you try the way-back of the car?’
‘The car?’
‘I keep it there in the winter. In case of a sudden blizzard on the highway.’
‘You are so weird. Passing you to Dad.’
‘Only one in the car?’ Silas says. ‘What about the rest of us?’
‘If you guys were with me we’d be okay. We’d make a plan. Alone I would just need to get into a sleeping bag right away.’
‘You at the airport?’ Silas says. I barely pause and he says, ‘You’re not at the airport.’
‘I’m going to have to meet you in Houston.’
‘I bought you a flight from here with us.’
‘I know. I have to change it.’
‘I have been scrambling to put all the pieces together. I finally got Lorraine to take the dogs.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Planes aren’t easy.’ He means with Jack.
‘I know.’
‘The pressure.’
‘I told him.’
‘Told him what?’ He’s still on Jack.
‘I told Yash.’
‘Good for you.’ This is mean, this sarcasm, coming from Silas.
‘We had this fight right in the room with all these people around. And I told him and he wouldn’t speak to me and I have to go back. I can’t leave it like that.’
He is silent.
‘I will meet you in Houston tomorrow. I promise I’ll be there.’
‘Is this about Yash? Or is it about Jack?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are his rock. He’s never seen you scared. He looks at you and he thinks, I’m going to be okay.’ He takes a breath. ‘You cannot fall apart on him now.’
‘I found it!’ Harry says. He’s grabbed the phone back. ‘I love you, mother.’ He hangs up.
Silas doesn’t call me back.