Heart the Lover (54)

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.




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.