Both families, Ronak’s and Mala’s, begin solemnly at my side when they arrive, asking for updates, getting me water, having the kids each give me a hug. I tell the children to play, play, and I turn the conversation to other things than me. After a few minutes, my encouragement works. The conversation shrugs off the sick mood and becomes animated, freer. The grandchildren ask to put their shoes back on and play outside. Mala, always wary of sun exposure (more so than Amber, who burns), tells them to wait until the backyard falls under the shade of the house. So they play tag indoors. On my chaise longue, I settle into the noise like a bath.
Now, a few hours into the weekend, they speak of things that have nothing to do with my health.
“… This is the time,” Ronak is saying. “If you refinance the house, do it now. But there’s no hurry. The rates aren’t going anywhere.”
Sachin nods. He likes hearing Ronak open up about money matters. Finance to him is esoteric wisdom, and Ronak is among the initiated, if not the elect. “They say I can get less than four.”
“Easily. This is a historic time.” Ronak waves his hands expansively. “Historic.”
“Thanks to some historic blunders on the part of the banking community,” says Mala. She is always needling him about the financial crisis; it is in jest, but only partly.
“I wouldn’t call them blunders.”
“No?”
“Blunder is too generous. It sounds like they didn’t know what they were doing.”
“What, then? Crimes?”
“Maybe that’s shooting to the other extreme. They were making money, which is what they were supposed to be doing. The right word is kind of in between.”
“It’s okay, Ronak. You’re not in front of a congressional committee.”
“And I never will be. I had nothing to do with that whole part of it.”
“Nothing?”
“What I do is in a completely different department. It’s like, let’s say the cardiologists get caught doing something shady, like cathing people who don’t need it just to make money. You don’t blame all the doctors in the hospital. You don’t blame the ENTs and family practitioners. You blame the cardiologists and leave it at that.”
“Well, those cardiologists are gonna have to ramp up how many caths they do, because there’s no money in seeing patients anymore.”
“You mean the Medicare cuts?”
“That’s only the beginning. That’s just the first few nips from the piranhas. We’re waiting for the feeding frenzy.”
“They’ve got to save money,” says Sachin, “so they do it by paying us less.”
“Doctors usually don’t have to deal with this kind of uncertainty. It used to be the one good thing about medicine.”
Ronak stretches. “Uncertainty’s everywhere these days, Mala.”
“Everywhere but JPMorgan Chase.”
His stretch relaxes abruptly as he lets out a one-note laugh. “You guys’ll eat well. I wouldn’t worry.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The golden age is over. We’ll be like the doctors in Britain soon.”
Sachin smiles. “That’s not so bad, as long as we can work their banker’s hours.”
“What about the free dinners from the pharmaceutical companies?”
“The spouse has to be a doctor if they want to come. All those fancy dinners we went to with Dad, they’re gone.”
“Well, what about the pens? You still get the pens, right?”
“Nope.”
“You’re kidding. They don’t even give out pens anymore?”
“Not one measly ballpoint.”
“That’s cruel.”
“That’s medicine in the twenty-first century.”
Ronak glances at Shivani. “You going to tell her to go into it?”
“I’m not going to tell her anything. She can be what she wants.”
“It’s still the noblest profession,” Sachin insists. “It’s still a good profession. You help people.”
This is one of those Sachin comments that no one can argue with but no one can wholeheartedly support: factually right, but wrong for the mood. Ronak and Mala exchange a look. Mala is disillusioned with medicine in a way that Sachin isn’t, even though, as an ENT, she makes three times his family practitioner’s salary. Medicine, like anything else, has diminished by comparison to finance. His third year out of college, Ronak was making more than Abhi’s attending neurologist salary at Ohio State. Ronak took a shortcut to wealth that exacted no weekends and no house calls. He escaped Mala’s drudgery-decade of medical school, residency, fellowship. She did best in English as a student, yes, but what kind of job would English get her? She could read books in her free time. She needn’t major in it … We had not pushed her into medicine. We suggested it to her, mainly because we could. When it had been Ronak’s turn, we had asked his plans, received shrugs and mumbles, and waited until he told us. With Mala, we knew advice—was the advice itself pressure?—might have an effect. But she chose her profession herself.
The two eldest cousins, Vivek and Dev, have approached Amber. They know that her yes or no is inflexible; convince her and the others will follow.
“The kids are asking about the pool,” Amber says to no one in particular.
Suddenly they all turn to me as if asking permission, even Vivek and Dev.
“Go, go. It’s a hot afternoon. It’s a shame to keep them indoors.”
“You sure?” Mala asks.
“Yes. I’ll stay here, of course. The nurse is coming.”
“I can stay behind.”
“No,” interrupts Ronak. “I’ll stay behind.”
“No one has to stay behind.”
“Someone should stay to get the door.”
“I can get the door, Mala! And besides, your father is upstairs.”
“I’m staying behind with Mom,” says Ronak firmly.
“Ronak can stay,” seconds Amber. “I can go in with Raj. Dev and Nik are fine in the water.”
The two boys have been watching this conversation carefully, waiting for the right time to rejoice. Dev gives Vivek a double high five. “Waterslide!”
Abhi comes downstairs, rubbing his hands. He has the excited, relaxed air of having finished long work on something. “Sounds like we’re planning an outing, eh?”
I want to capitalize on his sociable mood. If Mala speaks first, she may apologize for the boys’ noise and tell him he needn’t come—she always assumes her father would rather be alone. But I sense he is on a break. “You can go if you like. Ronak is staying home with me.”
“Ronak? You don’t want to go have fun?”
“I’m fine.”
“The kids would love it if you go, Pappa,” says Sachin. “Come. Do you have a swimsuit?”
“Second shelf, left side,” I say.
“I think I will come splash around. What do you say, Vivek?”
Vivek returns Abhi’s high five. “I’m going to wear my Transformers swimsuit!”
Ronak absents himself from the preparations, snacking on Cheez-Its from the box Mala left on the counter.
“You guys need me?” Ronak asks Sachin, who is frantically searching for the pair of red sunglasses that will calm Vivek’s tantrum.
“Oh no, everything’s under control. Thanks for keeping Ma company here.” Sachin looks at me.
“Good times,” says Ronak.
The general shouting goes mute behind child-locked doors and tinted windows. The minivans pull out; I wave good-bye and am on the couch before the garage door groan has ceased.
Ronak approaches me, his phone out. He sweeps and taps the screen, then tucks earphones into its jack.
“I’ve got something for you.”
“What is it?”
“The Bhagavad Gita. It’s set to music with this full orchestra. Dad said you would like it.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“It’s awesome. I listened to a bit just now, it’s really great. Here.” He tries to tuck the earbuds in m
y ears.
I put up a hand. “Why don’t we talk, Ronak?”
“Sure. Sure. What about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to try listening to this? You’ll like it. It’s really holy.”
He holds the earbuds out plaintively at the level of my chin. Babies get binkies in the mouth. The old get holy music in the ears. “Okay.”
He eases the earbuds into place. His hands at the sides of my head feel like an embrace stopped short. The music is too loud. I look up at him to ask him to decrease the volume, but he has already turned to fetch his laptop. He points at the chaise, speaking so I can hear him over the music. “I’m right here if you need anything. I’ll just be on the computer.”
I pick up the gadget and try to find the volume. Ronak, settled into the chaise longue, sees me fiddling and says something. I take out an earbud.
“You know,” he says, “you can surf on that while you’re listening.”
“I want to turn down the volume.” I press something. The screen changes completely.
“There should be a button on the main screen.”
“The screen is gone.”
He sets his laptop aside with a sigh and scoots from his niche. The Sanskrit, belted by a church chorus with an intermittent string section in the background, deafens my right ear. I pull out the other earbud. He finds the correct screen and brings down the volume.
“This is the main screen, okay? You can surf, you can play solitaire, anything you want.”
I accept the thing in my palm and nod at its columns of icons. Ensconced again, Ronak hooks himself into headphones of his own, and his head starts bobbing forward and back. He still moves his lips when he reads, a habit he had as a child. You would not notice unless you looked very closely. I watch his fingers tap a private rhythm. His feet are crossed, one ankle settled in the cradle of the other. The one on top is bobbing. A music I cannot hear has colonized his whole body, head to foot. I look down at his phone. My eye falls to an icon at the bottom with a small red dot in its upper right-hand corner.
Mail.
I wonder. I shouldn’t. But I wonder. I touch the icon. The screen changes.
Can he tell? Does he have the same window open, or minimized, over on his own laptop? Can he see my activity? No. He will only be able to tell if I change something. And I won’t. I will just have a look and back out.
I wait. It takes only a few seconds, but they feel like a long guilty minute. Then I am in. His e-mails are all there, two at the top boldfaced, the rest not. I scroll the list. The names speed up and slow down and stop. I check for women. I want to know. Older. That is when. December or November. That’s when their fight happened. I keep going back. There are hundreds of e-mails for every month. He is so busy, so connected. A lot of bland American men’s names. A few Arab-sounding names give me pause, but he seems to be doing business in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. I won’t read the mail itself. I just want a name. The name will tell me what I need to know about the indefinable coldness between him and Amber. February. Come on, hurry up … January. No mails from Amber. Of course not; they probably did their fighting over the phone. December. I slow down. I stare at each name. All work-related—people with banks in their e-mail addresses. He is shrewd. He would delete them.
I pause. I rub my eyes.
Do I really believe my son would do such a thing to his wife? Only Americans do that to their marriages. Not us. But his generation—they are all Americans now.
I press the garbage can icon. I am rooting through his garbage now. Trash.
Most Indian mothers think of the girl as a calculating woman and her son as a boy, baited. My unlucky boy—even his lust is naïveté. Yet I never thought this with Ronak. From the beginning, I worried for my American daughter-in-law. At Christmas I had thought, What has he done to her? What has he done that she has exiled him from her family’s house? Whatever it was, she forgave him. No surprise there. He had a showstopper to start his apology, didn’t he? Mom just told me she’s dying …
Trash. There are hundreds more e-mails here. A woman’s name. Jenna DeVine. Who is this? A coworker? A secretary? I bring the phone closer. “Singles in your area! Manhattan area sing…” I shake my head. The e-mail is boldfaced; it slipped through his spam filter, and he deleted it without reading it. Another woman’s name. I can’t believe I am doing this. I press the square button that says Inbox. I scroll up and down. Everything is as it was before. Back to the innocuous screen full of icons. There. I focus on the Sanskrit being sung in my ears. He will never know. Neither will I.
* * *
The nurse is not a hospice nurse, or at least we do not call her that. She is here to chart my vitals, draw my blood, and ask questions. I told the oncologist I did not need someone to check up on me, but he said it was part of the specific research protocol. All the visits would be paid for. Abhi added sternly that we would do everything the protocol specified. He is always tense around office visits, even though he accesses my scan results ahead of time and discusses them with his oncologist friend from San Antonio, Sunil Joshi. (He and Sunil went to medical school together; I suspect Abhi called him as early as November, when I still didn’t want anyone knowing.)
The doorbell rings, and I worry that Ronak didn’t hear it. But he has uncrossed his ankles; he plucks out his earbuds and sets the laptop and pillow precariously on the armrest.
I hear the front door open with the quietness of strangers meeting. Ronak leads the nurse to me and sits at the foot my couch, his eyes on her. She is younger than the nurse who was here last time. Only her eyes are old, set deep in what is otherwise a girl’s face. Her accent sounds eastern European, maybe Russian, so this fits, this mark of a past in the eyes. I watch her profile as she inflates the blood pressure cuff. She asks questions off a questionnaire, followed by a checklist of potential symptoms, fatigue, yes, sleeplessness, sometimes. I rate my pain, assign it a number as if I know what ten feels like, giving it a three. Last comes the rubber tourniquet on my forearm, the near-horizontal slide of a needle, and three test tubes turning a heavy human crimson. My blood always shocks me with how dark it is.
The nurse is done with the visit in about twenty minutes. Ronak asks her no questions while she is beside me, but I hear them talking in hushed voices as he walks her to the door.
“I didn’t catch your name,” says Ronak.
“Lisa.”
“Ah, Lisa. Ron. Thanks for coming out here and helping out with my mother.”
Something gets said that I don’t catch. I move to the foot of the couch so I can hear better.
“… It keeps patients from having to go into the hospital for these kinds of blood draws,” Lisa is saying.
“It’s a big help. It’s tiring for her to have to go to the hospital, at this point. Look, can I offer you anything to drink? A snack, maybe?”
“Thanks, but I’m all right.”
“I couldn’t help noticing your accent. May I ask where you’re from?”
“Ukraine.”
“I thought so. I actually took two years of Russian in high school.”
“I see. Do you still speak it?”
“Spasiba.”
“Ah, you’re welcome.”
He says something longer in Russian.
She laughs. “Your accent is actually very good,” she says, sounding genuine.
“You know, you look awfully young. How long have you been a nurse?”
“Two years.”
“How did you pick this kind of nursing?”
“This is more of a transitional thing. I am saving money to go back to school. Are you in medicine?”
“Finance, actually. But everyone else in the family is. I’m kind of the black sheep.”
Lisa laughs again. “Finance is nothing to sneeze at!” The expression sounds odd spoken in her accent.
“Why do you want to go back to school?”
“I want to do pediatric nursing. Maybe intensive care.”
>
“I can see you doing that, I really can. Has it been a busy day for you, Lisa?”
“Not too busy. Just steady, you know, appointments through the day.”
“Do they have you driving all over the place?”
“It’s not so bad, usually. But my next house is an hour away.”
“Lisa, let me get you something for the road. A bottle of water at least.”
“Water would be nice.”
“I think we have a few cold in the fridge.”
He goes into the kitchen while she waits. I push the silent earbuds back into my ears. From my couch I see him bending in the light, not finding the water.
“On your right,” I say softly. “In the door.”
Ronak is heading back to the nurse when he stops and says, “Can I grab my phone?”
I unplug the headphones from the jack, glad I restored the screen. He takes the phone and goes back to the door.
“Thank you,” says the nurse. “You’re very kind.”
“Lisa, my sister is here, too. She may have some questions for you. Is there a number where we can reach you if we need you?”
“Sure.”
She says the number. He repeats it back as he types it in. Then he asks, “Is this your cell phone?”
“Yes. Or you can call the central Home Health number and ask for me.”
“Hey, thanks for all your help, Lisa.”
“My pleasure. Thanks again for the water.”
“No problem. Drive carefully, all right?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
I hear the door close. My son sits back in his niche in the chaise, the notebook open on his lap, the earbuds in his ears. He has forgotten the phone in his pocket. I watch him in silence, the cords from my ears meeting, coiling in my lap, ending in a bright blunt pin.
* * *
Late that afternoon, Mala and I start cooking. Amber and Sachin keep the children upstairs. I am often surprised at how easily Sachin and Amber talk to each other; they strike me as being in disjunct worlds, their only similarity the family they have married into. They don’t talk if there is someone else to talk to, but when there isn’t, they are like old friends reunited. Right now, over a cacophony of music-playing press pads and boys shouting at the Wii (Abhi bought a whole game system for this visit), Amber and Sachin are having a long conversation about Indiana Jones movies.
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