Chapter III
I thought it would feel better away from the hospital and at the airport, but it feels much worse. It’s loud and crowded and no one else here knows Yash is dying.
I punch keys at the kiosk, get my boarding pass, and move unsteadily to security.
I take off my shoes, lift my arms over my head in the body-scanner.
I try to regroup in the bathroom. It takes me a long time to fit my suitcase in the stall with me.
It’s nighttime and I don’t remember eating today.
I don’t look in the mirror while I wash my hands.
The central walkway is busy. I’ve already misplaced my boarding pass.
I don’t know the gate. I need to find a departures screen.
I won’t ever see you again. Where will you go?
What will you be? I think of Aeneas going to look for his dead father in the Elysian Fields and how when he finds him he weeps as he tries to touch him, to hold him.
Three times he tries and fails. His father is nothing more than a light wind in his arms.
I veer over to the windows facing the planes and runways lit up in the dark and sit on a bench.
I think of our little red suit. I think of the tiny bed in Paris.
La petite mort, you told me the Romantics called orgasm.
The little death, we used to joke when you pulled out and your penis was like a small boneless animal, sweet and defenseless.
Now you are facing the big death. Will you know I am remembering your penis? Will you watch over Daisy?
I stand in line at Chipotle. I’m halfway through my burrito when I realize I haven’t looked at a departures screen.
I can see one across the food court. I leave my meal and go over to it.
My flight leaves in forty-five minutes. A92.
I head back to my burrito on the table and it looks like a half-eaten body on a tinfoil gurney.
I leave it there and walk slowly away. I follow signs to my gate.
People are moving so quickly in both directions.
I can feel them look at me and look away fast. I can feel the blankness of my face. I don’t want to bring death to Houston.
I have a middle seat toward the back of the plane.
A young woman is reading a novel beside the window.
In the aisle seat a man with enormous shoulders is on his phone, hurriedly trying to connect what look like tomatoes before they explode.
Neither has left me an armrest. When the plane begins to back away from the gate, I have a bad feeling.
Death feels close. I have brought death onto the plane.
I find Jack’s rock in my pocket and hold it tight.
I used to have a superstition that the plane would go down unless I spoke to someone in my row before takeoff.
I got out of this habit long ago, but tonight it feels like a safety measure I need to take.
‘Headed home?’ I ask the woman reading.
She looks up slowly, annoyed. ‘Vacation.’
‘Where to?’ As a reader, I feel for her. I wish I could stop myself. If only she understood it is for the protection of everyone on this plane.
‘Mexico City.’
‘Oh, cool.’
She returns to her book—I can’t see what it is from this angle—with a definitive twist away from me.
Liftoff has a soporific effect. I have to fight it.
I don’t want to sleep here in the middle seat.
My head has a tendency to plummet forward without warning.
But I am so tired. My body gets even heavier as the plane pushes itself up further from the earth.
I feel drugged and desperate for escape.
I want to forget everything and go unconscious.
But I don’t want to dream. I remember feeling this way when my mother died.
I was afraid of dreaming about her, afraid of seeing her alive and having to lose her all over again.
And I didn’t dream of her, not for a long time.
I can’t stop my eyes from closing. When we level off and I can recline my seat so my head won’t drop down, I slip into a longer, dreamless sleep.
The captain’s voice wakes me up when he tells the flight attendants to prepare for landing.
I wait in line on the jet bridge to get my suitcase.
Warm, humid air comes through the open door down to the tarmac.
Once I have my bag, I follow a man with yellow sneakers into the terminal, where the AC has eradicated the warm air.
I follow signs to ground transportation. I hate airports. I hate hospitals.
I come to double glass doors with signs on them that say no entry beyond this point. I go through. My phone vibrates. It’s a text from Sam.
Yash died.
I keep walking. Up ahead is an escalator.
It seems to be moving much faster than regular escalators.
My suitcase and I stand at the top. One metal step then another and another shoot out of the plate below my feet.
Each one separates so fast from the one behind it and drops down.
I can’t seem to take a step before it’s gone.
It’s too much with my suitcase, impossible that we will both make it safely onto one of these small corrugated islands of metal.
I know it is strange, given the travel we have done together, this suitcase and I, the many escalators we have gone down.
The silver steps continue to appear and separate and go down without us.
I cannot move. I cannot do it. I cannot do any of it.
I step aside and watch people walk on and go down, some with bags much larger and heavier than mine.
I have to get to the hotel. I have to get to my family.
It is nearly midnight. I try again. I step.
We make it, my suitcase and I. We are okay.
I hold onto the black rubber handrail. We go down.
I look for another ground transportation sign and I see Silas.
Silas is at the bottom of the escalator.
I don’t know how he is here. I didn’t tell him the airline or the time.
Did he get the boys to the hotel and come back for me?
I don’t know, but he is here and I step off and fall against him.
He has to pull us out of the way of the people coming down behind me.
He is in his big winter coat and I am in his arms and everything packed down inside me starts to rise.
It comes up hard, in great heaves and groans then long quiet clicking sobs.
He holds me so tight and we are there by the escalator a long time.
He holds me in the back of the taxi and in the hotel elevator.
He pulls the key card out of his pocket and the door opens and we slip through quietly.
The room is pitch-dark. I can sense my boys immediately, their sleep smells and breaths.
Silas takes my hand and leads me in. I can make out two shapes now in the bed by the window.
They are on their sides facing each other, mouths open, as if they fell asleep mid-sentence.
I wrap my arms around Silas and we stand there beside the bed and my chest hurts with my love for the three of them.
I bend down and stroke Jack’s thick hair. They will shave his head again and we’ll see all the scars. Then they’ll cut into his skull once more. This precious boy, half his childhood carved into the skin of his crown.
He will be okay. I don’t know where this thought comes from, from me or from Silas, from Yash or my mother. It just comes to me. And it feels like an actual possibility.
Silas and I get into the other bed. I lie as close to him as I can, along the whole length of him.
I cry some more and he holds me and I don’t know where Yash is or what will happen when the sun comes up and the week begins.
Maybe it’s true what the philosopher said, that the past and the future don’t exist, that this is the only moment we ever have, this moment right now and this moment and this—
‘Casey,’ Silas says in my ear, half asleep, pulling me closer, reading my mind. ‘You’re here.’