Heart the Lover (45)

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.’