He sees the bell by the door that people ring when they are finished with treatment. He can’t wait to ring that damn bell. A shiny brass bell on a plaque with a small rope hanging from it. He wants his cancer gang to cheer. Brandon will ring the bell in a week. In college, Greg was on the rowing team, and in one match, his crew got off to a terrible start. They had no way of catching up to the other crews, but they paddled anyway. He feels as far behind as that. So many more weeks and days of this. He remembers being in that boat, how cold and black the water looked, how the sun seemed small behind clouds.
“Come sit, buddy,” Rosco calls to him. Rosco holds a tissue in his hands, and his brown sweater vest has lint balls. He unwraps a cough drop and puts it on his tongue.
“I sounded like a dick,” Brandon says to Greg. “Sorry.” Imogene bristles for a minute at Brandon’s language, but then smiles at him.
Greg pulls out his chair. He takes his hat off and the air feels good on his head. He rubs his smooth scalp and looks down. “I had no right… I wanted to have a right to say it, and I don’t.”
He stares ahead and purses his lips as he watches the nurses laugh about something behind the glass. He doesn’t feel insulted by their laughter the way some might. He is glad life is going on as usual for much of the world. “I just want to know I’ve done everything in my power to stop this,” he says, his voice far away.
Imogene pats his hand. “None of us knows what works, do we?”
Over in the rows of chairs, a woman with a scarf on her head is clipping coupons and filing them into a binder. A man with glasses is turning the pages of Vanity Fair. Fifi calls Brandon in and he moans and plods toward her. “See you when I see you,” he says. The hood on his sweatshirt bobs as he walks, and for a second, Greg thinks of him as a younger brother even though he doesn’t know what having a sibling feels like. They wave to their friend as he disappears behind the door.
The three of them don’t say much. Something about more snow on the way. Something about how the groundhog in Pennsylvania didn’t know what he was talking about. Outside the big window, the trees are bare but sturdy. A cluster of birds lands on the branches. They are small and gray with orange beaks. They hop around and fly off again.
Greg feels for his cell phone to make sure it’s there. He might have to call Freddie for a ride if he doesn’t feel better. He holds his teeth together for a moment and the pain seems to stop. The door opens for him, Fifi smiling and waving him in, and he slips his hat on, stands tall like he has an important meeting, like inside there are new clients to impress, and he is about to walk toward her.
But then the idea comes to him. He gives Fifi the just a minute signal with his finger. He feels the other patients watching as he rushes toward the door. He tugs the rope on the bell that no one told him he could ring, and he stands there and listens to the clanging, the victorious loud metal sound like a race has begun or the stock market is open, or a war is over, and it feels good to hear it whether he deserves this ringing or not. It feels good.
14. Watercolor
Hannah wakes up on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday to the sound of her neighbors fighting again. She peels the sleeping mask off her eyes. She turns to look at the clock: 9 a.m.
She never hears the exact words the couple says, but loud mumbles vibrate through the walls of her studio apartment, the high tone of the woman who shrieks when she’s apparently making a point, and the man who replies in grunts that sound like, “Chamomile, chamomile.” She isn’t even sure if they speak English or not, but they fight often. Sometimes they just scream all day. They must work at odd times, because for hours the silence is so dull against her beige walls that she thinks they’ve moved.
She flips the covers back, and today marks a slight difference for her. How did this happen? She feels relieved. A long-carried weight of disappointment is gone. She isn’t expecting Luke to be next to her. Lucas Jefferson Crowley. Not in bed. Not fumbling with the coffeemaker. Not on the phone in a hoarse morning voice trying to straighten out a late credit card payment. She doesn’t expect him to be anywhere today, her birthday, and she is not wrong.
Birthdays. On her twelfth birthday, the cop took her mother, barefoot, away in his car for writing bad checks. They were living outside Las Vegas then. Hannah remembers running after them with her mother’s shoes in her hand. The dry air. The two stray cats that lived outside their small house. “Get the hell inside,” her mother yelled, mascara smeared around her eyes. On her twentieth birthday, her friend Sammi, who is not her friend anymore, took her to a clinic for an abortion. Two years ago, on another birthday, she woke up and thought of jumping out her mother’s twelfth-floor apartment window in New Haven. Splat. Or writing a long note and getting drunk and letting the bathtub fill up over her head. But she got dressed and went to work her shift at the restaurant, and that day, she met Luke.