Chapter III
Sunday
Oh, my love. My old love.
His breaths are faster, shallower. He’s working so hard to breathe.
I drop into my chair and take his hand over the bedrail.
He makes a little whelp when he opens his eyes and sees me. ‘I was scared you’d left,’ he says, muffled through the mask.
I shake my head. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
His breathing, so short, so labored, disturbs us both.
Sam is snoring softly.
‘Jack?’ he says.
Sam must have told him.
‘Wednesday.’
‘You have to go home.’
‘I’ll meet them there tonight.’
‘You should be with them now.’
‘I want to be here a little while longer.’
‘Then tell me,’ Yash says. ‘Please.’
I nod. ‘First, let me just—’ I examine the bedrail between us. I find the little button and push it. It slides down easily. He reaches for both my hands. We are much closer now.
‘Tell me everything.’
I tell him. I tell him that I didn’t know until early October, that I tried to write but ripped up every letter I started, that I called him at his dad’s and at work and he never called me back.
That I was five weeks, then six weeks, then seven.
The French cut-off was ten. I didn’t want to do anything without talking to him, I tell him, but I was scared to talk to him.
I knew this was what had happened to his parents.
He’d said once that if the laws had been different, he wouldn’t have been born.
I didn’t know how he’d feel. I loved him so much, I tell him, I couldn’t think straight.
I couldn’t think only for myself. ‘It felt like a decision we had to make together but I couldn’t reach you.
By the time we talked in December there didn’t seem any point.
We’d be in New York in a week. I thought we’d figure it out in person. ’
His head rocks back and forth. His breaths are too small.
‘Yash.’
‘Go on. Please go on.’
After Carson’s, I tell him, I went to my mother’s in Phoenix.
By then I was clear about what I wanted to do.
I tell him how my mom took care of me, how that healed something between us.
I tell him about the agency and the photo of my first-choice couple.
‘They reminded me of an older version of us. They looked like they really loved each other, amused each other.’
‘You had the baby?’
‘I did.’
He squeezes my fingers hard. He’s still got a lot of strength.
‘A girl,’ I say.
Above the mask his forehead crumples. ‘A daughter?’
‘Yes.’
He can’t say anything more for a while.
‘Where is she?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. They couldn’t tell me. But every time I think of that photo, I know she’s fine. They were good people. I know it.’
‘Her name?’
‘I don’t know what they chose. I call her Daisy.’
He nods and tears run along the seam of his mask.
It’s nice without the railing. We are very close, my face only a few inches from his.
I drop my head on his shoulder. ‘I had an hour with her. They let me give her a bottle. I wasn’t allowed to nurse her.
They said it would make it harder on us both.
She took that bottle like she knew exactly what she was doing.
My boys weren’t like that. They sort of flopped around for a while before they figured it out.
’ I feel him let out a puff of air, a laugh or a small sob.
‘Then a nurse came and got her. I checked a box, giving the agency permission to release my information to her. Whenever I move, I call and give them my new address. In case she asks for it.’
‘She hasn’t?’
‘Not yet.’
‘She’s twenty-seven.’
I nod.
‘When she does, will you tell her about me? Will you tell her I love her?’
‘I will. Of course I will.’
‘Tell her . . .’ he says. I can’t make out the rest. He’s crying hard. He tries again. ‘Tell her I’m always rooting for her.’
Neither of us can talk for a while. Our tears pool at his collarbone.
The only sound is Sam, snoring like a foghorn.
‘You did all that alone.’
‘I wasn’t alone.’
‘Without me.’
I look at the monitor. 87. Even with the mask. They will have to increase the liter flow.
‘Do you think—’ he stops for breath.
‘Don’t talk, Hink. Save your breath.’
‘For what?’
I don’t answer.
‘Do you think I should have married?’ He searches my face. ‘Would I have been happier?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t think I would have been good at it. Maybe a quarter of the time. The rest of the time I’d want to be alone.’
I can see how true that is. How unhappy it would have made me.
‘I have always loved you, though,’ he says. ‘Always always.’
The nurse Kelly comes in then. She smiles at Sam’s snoring as she goes around his cot. I lift up my head and let go of Yash’s left hand so she can pull a tube out of his IV and replace it with another.
When she leaves I put my head back on his shoulder.
‘Do you think I’ll be able to see her? Watch over her?’
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘In some way.’
‘Do you think it will be better?’
‘Better than life?’
He nods.
‘Yes,’ I say, as if it’s possible to imagine anything outside life.
‘We have a child,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘Not telling you.’
I feel him shake his head. ‘You told me. I’m so glad to know.’
We are quiet for a while.
I think he’s fallen asleep, then he says, ‘What do you make of death?’
‘Death?’ I stall.
‘Do you have a personal theory?’
‘You’re going to think it’s very Pollyanna.’
‘No doubt.’
‘You’ve spent your whole life reading everything. You should be telling me.’
‘Say it.’
‘Well, I believe we’re all one. Same consciousness or awareness or whatever you want to call it.
The universe is expanding now but soon—in a few more billion years—we’ll start shrinking back again to what we were before the Big Bang.
We’ll get smaller and smaller and then for a moment we’ll be a tiny speck.
After that they say we’ll be nothing—we won’t exist at all inside a black hole.
Then there’ll be another bang and we’ll return. ’
‘Surprise!’ he says faintly.
‘I think we desire unity because we have felt it before and we want to feel it again. It’s our natural state.’
‘Eternity as a concept is a bit terrifying,’ he says.
‘Only if time exists as we experience it. Which we know it does not. Without time, eternity loses its bite.’
‘This is true.’
I wait for him to push against my theories. Instead he says, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to like billions of years of one consciousness.’
‘You might get used to it.’
‘I might. And I have a daughter.’ His voice breaks and he squeezes my hands hard. ‘It makes it easier somehow, Hink.’
We cry a little more and I feel his hands slowly go slack. He gives into sleep.
Sam rolls onto his side. Both feet are sticking out beyond the mattress now.
His open eyes make me jump.
He grins. ‘I slept in.’
‘You did.’
‘Was I snoring?’
‘Some.’
‘I’m sorry. I know it’s bad. Was he awake?’
‘For a little while.’
‘He sounds worse.’
‘He is.’
His clothes are on a chair in the corner and he can’t get to them.
‘I’ll go get the coffee,’ I tell him.
I go down to the basement and stand in line. It’s only hospital personnel at this hour. They wait in pairs or larger groups. Their chatter is comforting, these people who do such important work.
I was on a panel a few years ago with a philosopher who’d written a book on time.
She said there were two prevailing theories, eternalism and presentism.
Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once.
Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all.
Nothing before and nothing after. No exceptions.
As we were walking off stage I asked her which she believed, and she told me she could make a strong case for either, but recently she was leaning toward presentism.
I didn’t understand why she would lean toward presentism, why she would choose only the present moment—no past, no future—when she could have everything all at once for eternity.
But standing here in line, with all these good people working to help others get better, it feels okay to me to have this moment and nothing else.
It feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here right now. I feel happy. I have told him.
The cot is gone. Sam is dressed and back in his spot. Yash’s eyes are open but he and Sam aren’t talking. I hand Sam a coffee and a bagel and put Yash’s coffee on his tray. I know he won’t drink it. He can’t take his mask off for that long now.
Yash reaches for my hand. He says something I can’t understand. He says it again but the sounds don’t turn into words. He can tell I didn’t get it, but he doesn’t try again.
‘He needs more oxygen,’ I say.
‘We’re at sixty,’ Sam says.
I look at him. Sixty liters per minute. It doesn’t go any higher than that.
A nurse we don’t know comes in. She turns on the lights and lifts the shade. ‘Why are all y’all in the pitch dark? Rise and shine. How are we this morning, my young man?’
Yash gives her a thumbs up.
Sam gets out of her way. She talks the whole time. She raises Yash up higher and she shifts the supports from one side to the other to prevent bed sores. Yash watches her and nods when she asks her questions and follows her with his eyes as she leaves the room.
‘I didn’t buy a couch,’ he says clearly.
‘Yes, you did,’ Sam says. ‘A red one.’
Yash shakes his head.
A few minutes later he makes this long awful sound deep in his throat, as if he were imitating a death rattle.
It surprises him as much as us. When he sees our faces, he chuckles. ‘Still alive,’ he says.
He makes a gesture to Sam and Sam lowers the bed a bit. Yash shuts his eyes. I see the boy I first knew. I see the boy sleeping on his back on the twin bed beneath the yellow bedspread.
An hour and a half later the family arrives. Yash has not woken up. His breaths are still very shallow, but they are not coming as fast. I watch them absorb the situation, the women first, the men more slowly. Sam takes Yash’s mom out into the hallway.
A while later a doctor appears in the doorway.
She speaks to Sam and me out in the hall.
She says she suspects Yash will go unconscious soon, if he has not already, and that it could be another day or two or more.
She is holding his DNR. Sam follows along better than I do. I nod and try to stay standing.
We go back into the room and Sam explains everything to Yash’s mom and aunts.
Jamie comes in sometime after that and removes all the lines except the Foley catheter. She takes away the oxygen mask and the cannula and gently wipes his face with a cloth.
‘His beautiful face,’ Yash’s mom says.
It is beautiful. It’s so beautiful. Have I ever told him that?
He has deep red marks on his cheeks from the mask.
I brace myself for a terrible change without the mask, but his breathing is the same.
An orderly comes in with a platter of snacks, popcorn and cookies and chips in individually wrapped packages.
‘The tray,’ Aunt Mo says.
I come back from the bathroom and take my seat.
The room is nearly empty, just Uncle Percy on his phone.
I reach for Yash’s hand. But this time it is not his hand in mine.
It is my mother’s hand. There is no other way to say this.
It is my mother’s hand. I can see that the hand I’m holding is Yash’s, but what I feel are my mother’s plump fingers, my mother’s small, padded palm, the exact way her hand felt in mine when I was a little girl. It feels amazing.
Sam comes in with a woman named Jane from Yash’s office and I have to let go of my mom and give Jane my seat.
I eat a packet of Lorna Doones from the tray in a chair near Uncle Percy.
Nothing truly mystical has happened to me in my life before this.
But for a minute or two in this room, some sort of channel opened up, and my mom was able to squeeze her hand through to me.
Jane from his office pats Yash’s arm and wipes her face many times. She says something very quietly to him then gets up and leaves. I return to my chair. My mother is gone. The hand is fully Yash’s again. He doesn’t turn when I touch it. He doesn’t tell me about Jane. I will never know her story.
My phone says 6:10. I have to go. I have to go to Houston. I hug the aunts and uncles. Paige and Peggy Lynn. Jared bends his thin frame like a willow against me. His bushy hair catches briefly on my earring. I wish him luck.
I go over to Sam’s side and we hug in silence for a long time.
I go back around and bend over you, my love. I brush my palm over your rooster’s comb. ‘I have loved you all my life,’ I whisper. ‘See you after the next bang.’
I spin my suitcase out of the corner. I look back once. Sam is holding both your hands.
I walk slowly to the elevator, like I have become a patient myself, like Hans Castorp falling sick at the sanatorium.
I push the green button and wait until a silver door slides open.