Restlessly, I open my Instagram. There are a dozen private messages, and I open the list, scanning for the name Isaak used. It is not there, but at the end of the list is another name. Noam Tal.
My heart leaps. Ma bichette, you are not alone. This I promise you.
Emotion swells up my throat, stings my eyes, and before I know it, tears are falling down my cheeks, hot and unstoppable. I dash them away, uncaring, and text back, How can I reach you?
But there’s no reply. Feeling as if I might leap out of my skin, I text Miriam. Are you free? Need to talk. In person.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sam
It’s hard to know what time it is, between the lack of windows and the ridiculous amount I’m sleeping. A nurse tells me at one point that I’ll be moving to a regular room tomorrow, so I should just try to enjoy the quiet for now. “Quiet?” I echo ironically.
“Quiet,” she affirms and bustles out.
As I sleep and wake, the game stays with me, almost haunting me with possibilities. I haven’t had enough energy to do anything about it, yet, but the urgency with which it is presenting gives me a sense of faraway hope. It’s possible I’m just consoling myself with something that’s going to be completely unworkable once I see it without a fevered brain, but I don’t think so. I trust this.
Trust my own creativity.
Willow comes in, looking like she rolled out of bed and ran here, her hair barely brushed, her T-shirt wrinkled. “Hey,” she says. I see her hesitancy and think of calling her, calling her, calling her. So embarrassing.
“Hey,” I say.
She stands at the side of the bed. Her tiny fingers curl over the bar, and I flash on her baby hands, the tiny oval nails that so charmed me when I first saw them. I couldn’t believe how tiny her fingernails were. She seemed like something delivered from another world, not the sister and playmate I’d been hoping for. “How are you doing?” she asks.
For a minute, I can’t think of any way to answer. I close my eyes, and across the screen of my imagination runs a tiny being, a baby crawling into the woods of my game.
Huh.
Finally, I realize she is still standing here. I can smell the remarkably robust scent of her skin, a sweaty smell that manages to still be reassuring. I open my eyes. “I’m so tired. I’m sorry, I can’t—”
“Sam, we love you. You don’t have to do anything. We’re doing the stuff right now, okay?”
I nod, and she rubs her hand over the round of my shoulder.
“We would sleep in here with you, but they won’t let us.”
“Don’t stay overnight,” I say. “Go home and rest.” I tell a lie. “Asher said he’d come back for the night shift. You know he doesn’t sleep.”
“We’ll see.” A frown crosses her brow. “I think there’s something going on with Gloria, so I might have to do a couple of things.”
“What’s going on with her?”
“Probably nothing,” she says firmly. “And if it becomes something, I’ll tell you. The only thing you’re allowed to do right now is sleep.”
And because even that small conversation has demolished me, I close my eyes. When I open them again, she’s gone.
I page the nurse, and she comes and takes my vitals and hands me my iPad and tells me I need to eat, which I agree to try, but when she brings soup, it tastes like water. “You’re not going to be able to leave the ICU until you can build up some strength,” she says, so I drink it a spoonful at a time until most of it is gone.
My email list scrolls and scrolls, but I can’t really read. My eyes are not willing, and maybe that’s a good thing. There’s something from Jared, but I don’t open it. It seems too exhausting.
A doctor comes into the room, head bent over the chart, and I recognize him a split second before he recognizes me.
Eric.
Of course. He’s a virologist, and this is his hospital, and I suppose meningitis qualifies. Not as exotic as the diseases he traveled everywhere to study, but not as common as some either.
He doesn’t look up for a minute, and I wonder if that chart is mine or if he’s still lost in a different case. He’s wearing ordinary clothes, jeans and a sweater in many colors that I recognize from a trip we took to Scotland. It pierces me a little, and the day flashes over my memory, the long walk over the moor, a fish-and-chips supper in an ancient pub—
I tap my inner wrist. Stop.
Eric. We’ve been broken up for almost three years, and until this very second, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if I ran into him again.
Eric and I were together for four years, living together for three of those. Not married, not yet, but I had every faith that one day, when I least expected it, he’d fall on one knee at some dramatically romantic moment and propose.
It was a relationship that started all at once and flared into something amazing before either of us knew what was happening. It was wildly romantic, not like anything that had ever happened to me.
I thought it was real. I really did.
We met at a running event, a half marathon. He was a medic, and I had tripped over a rock at mile twelve and sprained my ankle. At first, furious that I was so close, I got up and tried to keep going, but I crumpled again a few yards down the road. Race assistants helped me to the med tent, and Eric was there, tucking a heat blanket around a guy shivering like he was dying.
I saw his hair first, brightest blond and not at all what I usually found attractive, but the color was so shiny bright in the tent and the curls so unruly that it was charming. When he straightened to turn my way, I saw an expression light on his face, as if he’d been waiting for me. I felt like I’d been waiting for him, like because I would meet him on this day when I had practically despaired of ever achieving the life I hoped to have, a life with a husband and children in some ordinary suburb—it would be impossible to express how badly I had wanted that all my crazy not-suburban life—because I would meet him now, on this rainy day, I had not met anyone else, even though all my eggs were going to turn to dust if I didn’t hurry up.
He looked at me. “Hello.” His eyes were the palest possible blue; his nose was patrician straight, with a jaw to match. He’d grown up in Minnesota, though of course I didn’t know that then, and everything about him was as hale and masculine as with any Viking. Aside from running, I was never much of an outdoor girl, but Eric grew up kayaking through the Boundary Waters, hunting deer, swimming in clear, ice-cold lakes. He loved the outdoors and being physical, and I learned a lot about that with him.
As he stands beside my hospital bed, what I feel is nothing.
I’m waiting for him to say something, and I wouldn’t blame him if he turned around and walked right back out. I was the worst kind of crazy breakup ex at first. I just hadn’t seen it coming, at all.
He didn’t take anything except his clothes.
We’d been traveling in Vietnam two weeks before he left. I knew he’d been struggling with some work issues, a series of painful losses, but I just tried to be present, be with him.
And then he came home from work one day and announced that he was moving out. Like, out of the blue, just gone. At first, I was sure it was just a manifestation of his depression, that was my theory, but within six months, he married someone else. Someone I’d never even heard him talk about. She wasn’t younger than me or particularly beautiful or anything, just another doctor he worked with.
They went to Africa with Doctors without Borders, and I really did kind of lose my mind for a few months, diving into grief and loss in a way that worried the hell out of my friends and Gloria, not eating, sending Eric a million letters, running so many miles I turned into a skeleton. Willow was traveling to Renaissance Faires with a Celtic band, so she didn’t really notice it until she came home for a visit and saw how thin I’d become. She showed up at my apartment one night armed with a care package and didn’t leave for three days.
Even now, the memory makes me smile. The vibrator she brought was
alone worth the price of admission.
Eric is a specialist in infectious diseases, thus the travel to distant places, and thus it’s not that weird that he would be my doctor.
It’s still weird.
He stands beside the bed. “It is you.” He frowns, his gaze collecting data—complexion waxy, rings below the eyes, lips chapped from fever. “I saw your name on the chart and couldn’t believe it. How are you feeling?”
“A little better,” I manage, but my voice sounds thin.
“Looks like you’ve been very sick.”
I don’t know what to say to that. My headache starts to thrum behind my eyebrows, down the back of my skull.
“Your fever is still pretty high.” He frowns a little. “How’s your headache?”
“Still there, but not so bad.”
“Neck stiff?”
“Yeah.”
He makes notes of various numbers on his tablet. Up close, I see that he has new lines around his eyes, and his cheeks are thin above the beard. He leans in. “Do you mind if I touch you?”
It’s almost humiliating. So crazy. I was so crazy there for a while, so bewildered that I couldn’t accept that it was over.
I lower my eyelids, shake my head. He picks up my wrist and takes my pulse, touches my cheek with the back of his hand, and then leans in. “Sorry.” With his fingers, cool and professional, he checks my neck, palpating the muscles at the back. It means he bends over me, and I can smell his familiar scent. It assaults me, makes me wish I were not lying here helpless, with tubes and electrodes and whatever all over me. I feel a crumpling in the middle of my chest—so much lost, so many dreams!—and keep my eyes closed as he kneads those tight muscles.
“Very stiff,” he says, and I hear a gust of breath leave him. “You were lucky to get here when you did.”
I open my eyes, but he hasn’t gone that far away; he’s still leaning closer than seems appropriate, his pale eyes full of concern. I ask, “What does that mean?”
“That you very nearly died, Sam. You have bacterial meningitis, which can be deadly in a very short time.”
It doesn’t mean anything to me. Not right this minute. I can’t seem to care. “I don’t know how I got it.”
“We’ve seen a handful of cases in Brooklyn. Have you been down there recently?”
I start to nod, but the movement is so painful I halt and say, “Yes. Only a few nights ago, though. That seems very fast.”
A shrug. “Not really.” He straightens again, picks up the tablet, and makes a note. “We should probably get a history of your movements over the time between Brooklyn and getting sick.”
“Jeez. I ran all the way from my apartment down to Gloria’s. And I saw my dad. And I fed a bunch of homeless people.”
A half smile quirks his mouth. “Doughnuts?” I’ve been buying doughnuts for the homeless ever since I discovered my gluten intolerance.
I allow a moment of connection. “Yes. Are they in danger, do you think?”
“Probably not. That’s very casual contact.” He’s still scribbling notes with a digital pen. “Might need to let Gloria know.”
“Oh my God! Do you think she’s really at risk?”
He raises his head. “Not likely. But just to be safe. She is older.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that.”
He smiles.
“My sister was there too. But my dad! My dad has little kids. We had coffee together at that place on Eighty-Ninth Street. By the park.” My voice is ragged. “He’s going to be so mad at me.”
“It’s not your fault you caught a virus.”
“No, I know.” But I’m thinking about my dad’s face when he hears the news, and it makes my unsettled stomach roil unpleasantly. To distract myself, I add, “I was in Brooklyn for a release party for a new app. I mean, if I got sick there, other people might have too.” I think of Jared. We had close contact at the party, and again at dinner.
He nods, writing. “Where?”
I give him the address.
“Anyone else?”
“Asher brought me in.” My stomach flips. “He was at the party too.”
“Okay.” He pauses. “Are you two together now?”
I think of my dream, the house in Brooklyn, the little boys, and tears well up in my eyes. I look away, hoping they won’t fall, and twist the edge of the sheet into a tiny tube. “Nope,” I manage. “Still not.” He was always weirdly jealous of Asher. “We actually had a falling-out a while back. I haven’t been talking to him much.”
“You and Asher?” His tone is just this side of incredulous.
“Yeah,” I say, and it exhausts me to even think of it all. Our long history, our coming together, our terrible, terrible fight that broke us apart. “Me and Asher.”
For a long moment, Eric rests his eyes on my face, taking in all my little tells, and I hope he can’t read my longing, my wish to go back in time and keep my mouth shut. “And how’s Tina?”
“She married Nuri and moved to Atlanta with him. They just had a baby.”
That diamond-sharp gaze. The uncomfortable directness. “You must be pretty lonely.”
The words are galling. I hate that he can see through me so well. That he knew me so well and still walked away so cruelly.
But instead of grief, what I feel now is a distant sense of outrage. It was cruel and I was blindsided. He doesn’t get to be nice to me now and expect that I’ll just be the old Sam who worshipped him.
“You know me,” I say flippantly. “Lone wolf.”
His smile is gentle. “You’ve never been a lone wolf,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say. By which I mean, Don’t be kind, don’t act like you know me, just . . . don’t. “How’s Rachel?” I ask abruptly. His wife. The one he met only a few months after we broke up.
“Good. She’s in Sierra Leone, actually.”
“On a mission?” She’s a member of Doctors without Borders.
“Yeah.” He flips a piece of paper, flips it down.
Good, I think spitefully. Serves him right. “Are you still doing missions?”
“No.” A wry smile as he admits, “Africa just about killed me.”
“Too hot?” His intolerance of heat was a joke between us—I teased that his Scandie blood was too thick to tolerate it.
He raises his brows. “‘Hot’ is an understatement. But no, I contracted malaria.”
“Malaria!”
“It was bad. I couldn’t work for almost three months. Just knocked me out.”
A ripple of pain moves over my eyes, and I close them abruptly. “I think the lights need to be off. Gloria turned them off, but the nurses turned them back on.”
“I can fix that for you.” The room went dark. “Better?”
A voice cuts into the quiet. “What the actual fuck are you doing here?”
It’s my sister, coming in like a warrior queen, her hair flying. A part of me thrills to it.
“Willow,” Eric says. “Good to see you too.”
Her eyes narrow. “That’s not exactly what I was thinking.”
“I gathered.” He looks at me. “If you need anything, just ring. I’m on call.”
“Yes. Thanks.” My eyes are closed, and some drug must be pumping through me, because I’m very sleepy. A movie reel of the game unspools, Willow in a breastplate and armbands, a warrior queen defending the kingdom.
“Are you okay?” Willow asks, taking my hand. Her fingers are cold and fierce.
Despite my wish to stay aloof, I cling to her small hand, pleased that she hates Eric, that she’s here, that I’m not, actually, alone.
“Thank you, Willow,” I say.
She brushes hair from my forehead. “It’s all good, sis. Rest. I got you.”
“Is my brain going to be okay?” I ask. Or I think I ask it; I don’t know. The lake of sleep sucks me under.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gloria
Miriam lives in the same apartment she bought in 1976,
a two-bedroom her father helped her buy since nobody would have given a single woman a mortgage in those days. The best part of it is the light, which pours in through large windows, and the walls are filled with her own paintings and drawings of places she’s visited around the world—watercolor-and-ink sketches filled with movement and light, and oils reconstructed from photos and drawings. She’s dressed now in a bibbed apron and jeans, her feet bare, her hands stained with the paint I can smell.
“Come in, darling,” she says, holding the door. “I’ve made coffee.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I say. “Are you in the middle of an artistic fog?”
“I don’t work in a fog,” she says, tossing back her hair. “It’s only for pleasure, and why would I make that more mysterious than having fun? Come in the kitchen.”
The kitchen itself is a tiny galley, but the breakfast nook is open and airy with another big window looking out toward Park. It’s a tall building with good views toward the city and the United Nations building, and I have always loved the light. She’s set the table, as she does, with cotton place mats and napkins in a whirl of big, smeary florals in blues and purples. A trio of purple irises stands in a narrow pottery vase I recognize. “You picked this up in Fez, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Good memory.” She carries a silver pot over to the table, then swings around and picks up the tray of cream and sugar. “If you’d fetch the tray in the fridge, we’ll be set.”
We met the first day of training in 1967, each of us the tallest woman in the room until we met each other. She was a half inch taller but always thinner. In the bright light, I see every wrinkle on her face, and the crepey skin at her chest, and the softness of her jaw. Her eyelids are droopy, her fingers gnarled. Just like mine.
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