“It was.” I smiled and bit my bottom lip. “How can we top that?”
He laughed and reached out, pushing a wet strand of hair out of my face. “We’ll have to see.” And then he pulled me into his arms and my head came to rest on his big chest. He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed as I bent my leg and draped it over him.
And that’s how we fell asleep that night. Tangled up with each other, in many more ways than just physically.
CHAPTER 70
I looked over at the sleeping Noah. He looked so peaceful with his head squished against the pillow in a way that made his cheeks puff and his lips press together like a cherub. I climbed out of bed quietly, careful not to wake him. I was still naked, and I picked up the nearest thing I could find, Noah’s T-shirt, and popped it on. I walked out of the bedroom into the huge, luxurious lounge that sprawled out in front of me. I walked to the massive glass window that looked out over the deck. The monkeys were gone, but they had left their mark across the entire deck and pool. It was late, everything was dark, except for the smudges of light lined up on the ocean horizon. I wondered about the people on those ships. Were they on holiday? Going somewhere? And if so, where? Sleeping? Or was there someone standing at the window like me, wondering about the lights?
I looked back over at Noah to make sure he was still sleeping, and then gently pushed the doors open. The salty sea breeze hit me immediately and I shivered. It was cold, but the air felt so fresh out here, and alive. I walked over to the couch and grabbed the throw that was draped over it, wrapping it around my body, and that’s when I saw the hotel stationery on the table. I glanced at Noah again. I wondered whether this was where our adventure ended. What would happen when Noah and I returned home? Him to his studies, and me to my—God knows what I would do now. But if it did end here, in this room, by this ocean, if this was where our story ended, I wanted him to know how much it had all meant to me. How special he was, and how much he’d changed me . . .
I picked the stationery up and went out onto the deck. I sat at the table and smoothed the paper out, ran my fingertips over it as I always do, as if I’m trying to pull the image out of it. The one that’s already inside the paper, just waiting to come out. I folded the paper in half and was just about to start when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. The monkey who’d tried to carry the champagne bottle into the bush was lying on the grass, passed out over the bottle. Each time the wind blew, the bottle moved and the monkey startled, only to pass out again seconds later! I shook my head at him disapprovingly and turned my attention back to the paper. I lowered the pen and started.
The playful-looking font came to me immediately; writing the big thank-you across the front of the card also did. And then, with the greatest care and patience, I set about decorating the letters with elements from the last two weeks together. A little ambulance raced over the top of the “T,” chilis grew out from behind the “H,” I gave the “A” a tie-dye effect, I drew waterslides curling around all the letters, even a joint popped out from behind one, flames from the fire on the beach, champagne and the waves and monkeys hanging by their tails off the top of the “Y” and, finally, when I came to the last letter, I decorated it with a spray of cosmos.
The cosmos was where it had all gone wrong for me. The cosmos was where I’d stopped living the first time, but the second time in the cosmos with Noah, that is where I’d come to life again. Just like the flowers themselves in autumn. Once the design was complete, I opened the card and the words just flew out of me.
And when it was done, I signed my name at the end. I’d been signing my name on the bottom of my cards like this right from the first card I’d ever made all those years ago. The letter “Z” that looked like a little lightning bolt. And when it was all done, over two hours later, I quietly walked back into the room and placed the card on Noah’s bedside table, before climbing back into bed and wrapping my arms around him.
CHAPTER 71
I woke up the next morning and the first thing I did was reach out and feel for Noah. But he wasn’t there. The bed was empty, the duvet thrown open. The pillow had fallen to the floor. I looked at the side table, where I’d put his card. It was gone. I sat up straight and looked around the rest of the room. He wasn’t there.
Shit!
I’d woken up with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I didn’t know why, and the feeling had instantly grown at the realization that Noah was no longer in bed with me. I looked at my side table. Something was there, but I didn’t know what. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed it, and when I did, my fingers knew what it was before my brain did. I froze.
“Wh-wha- ho—” I stuttered out loud, the words sticking on my dry tongue, unable to form or get out.
How was this even possible?
Why was this here?
Who had put it here?
I raised it to my face and touched my cheek with it, like I’d done all those years ago when I’d first made it. I opened it. The paper and writing were old and almost illegible, as if it had been read and opened and closed over and over again. I rushed through to the lounge and looked around. Noah was still nowhere to be seen and I had so, so, so many questions. A feeling of panic started building and just when I was about to rush out of the door and go looking for him, the curtain to the deck blew into the room like a white ghost. It flapped in the breeze, so hard that it came back on itself and cracked like a whip. I stood there and watched as Noah walked through the door, his eyes rimmed red, as if he’d been crying and, as soon as he saw me, he stopped and looked down at the card in my hands. And then, he raised his card in his hands, the one I’d made him last night.
Twenty years ago – the night before Christmas
The Christmas lights looked really pretty that year. Shiny and bright and red and green. It was cool that I was staying on the third floor. That way I could see them from my window all the way down the street. The pediatric oncology ward was usually on the first floor, but a burst water pipe that Cyril couldn’t fix—Cyril is the nice man from maintenance who always comes to help me if my TV is broken or if my bed gets stuck in the upright position (he also smuggles me chocolates from the vending machine sometimes, which I am not really allowed to eat)—meant the whole ward got flooded. And when I say whole ward, I mean just Monty and me. Monty is the other leukemia kid. We hang out whenever we’re allowed to. When our immune systems are so compromised that a tiny germ will kill us. His real name is Montgomery, which is so fancy-sounding. His parents are really fancy too. His mom wears these big strings of pearls and talks with a British accent, and his dad is like a baron or something . . . or is it a sir? A duke? I don’t really know what he is. I just know that they all have British accents and say things like “Oh my” and “By golly.” Monty is not really like that, he’s pretty cool. We have this whole thing worked out where we have this code for communicating by knocking on the walls. It drives Sister Mary nuts! I guess that’s part of the reason we do it. But I think she also secretly likes it a little, even if she will never admit that! She’s always warning the other nurses about us naughty kids, but she always says it with a smile in her voice. She says it in isiZulu, so she thinks I don’t understand it, but what she doesn’t know is that I’ve been secretly studying it, so I can listen to the late-night conversations that the nurses have. It makes me feel less lonely at night, when the chair is empty in the corner of my room, to be able to listen to and understand someone else’s conversation.
The only horrible thing about being on the third floor is that this is where the ICU is. Well, it’s down the passage, and if I stand in my doorway I can see a lot of very scared and distressed-looking people in a small waiting area there. I guess they look like that because someone they love is in serious trouble. That’s why they would be at the ICU. They almost—almost—look as distressed and scared as the moms and dads down at the oncology ward.Almost.
Although no one will ever look as distressed as Mr. and Mrs. Dlamini, when Sizwe died right in the room next door to me a few months ago. He got an infection after a bone-marrow transplant and it led to septicemia, which is the worst kind of infection you can get. That’s what Sister Mary told me anyway. I didn’t know Sizwe for very long, but he was cool and I was sad when he died. I couldn’t go to his funeral, though, so we all had a little funeral here in the hospital. We lit candles and said a prayer, and I feel really bad sometimes about what I prayed for. I know I was supposed to be praying for Sizwe and stuff, like praying that he went to heaven and that. But I was really praying for myself. I was praying that I didn’t die too like him, and that my mom and dad didn’t have to scream like that and crumple to the floor, and they didn’t have to call a doctor to give my mom a sedative like they had to give Mrs. Dlamini. Sister Mary always says that losing a child is unnatural. That you should never have to bury your own child. She says she cries for days when she loses a child in her ward. I wonder why she works in the pediatric oncology department then, if it upsets her so much.
Monty and I couldn’t knock on the wall that night. He’s feeling very weak today and is in a lot of pain. I hope he doesn’t die either. I would be really sad if he died and it would seriously suck. We have been in and out of hospitals together for a while now. But I’m trying not to think about that. Instead, I’m thinking about the Christmas lights and how I wished I could go outside and see them for real. I don’t get to see much stuff for real. I only get to see things from behind a window. Except that time we all went to the zoo together. This charitable organization arranged it for us all—well, for the cancer kids who were allowed out of the hospital. They even opened the zoo an hour earlier for us so that we could all see the animals without other people being there. It was very kind of the zoo people. The lady who ran the zoo lost her mom to cancer or something like that, and now she ran these things where cancer patients could come out and look at the animals. I got to play with a lion cub, which was pretty much the coolest thing ever. Monty and I joked that maybe we should steal it and smuggle it out with us. We could keep it as a pet in the ward and no one would notice. The only thing I didn’t like about the zoo was the panda bear. He looked so sad and lonely. Panda bears are actually only found in China, and China is like a million miles away from South Africa, and I wondered if maybe he was missing his family back home. After that I decided that zoos weren’t so cool. That no animal deserves to be locked up like that and look at the world through a pane of glass, like I do. For some reason I was thinking about that panda a lot when I looked at the Christmas lights. Maybe it was because spending Christmas, or my birthday, in hospital is literally the worst ever. But I guess I’ve kind of got used to it. The nights before Christmas and your birthday are usually the worst, because my parents can only come on the actual day, so the night before, it’s only me. They used to take turns to sleep in the hospital with me when this first all started. But after a year of doing it, and me getting older, we all agreed it wasn’t necessary anymore. I was used to being in the hospital, and now that I’d gotten to know all the staff and other kids, I kind of had a family here in a way.
I walked away from the window. Looking at the lights was starting to irritate my eyes. But I couldn’t go to sleep either. Mostly because there was a constant stream of business in the passage outside my room, and if you closed your eyes and listened really hard, you could hear the “beep beep” of all the machines in the ICU. And every now and then you would hear a very loud “Beeeeeeeeeeeep,” followed by a lot of noisy commotion. That was the part I didn’t like.
I walked over to the door and peered out. The small waiting room had been empty for a while, but now, it wasn’t. I was shocked when I saw what I did, and at first it frightened me, so I quickly hid behind the door before he could see I was staring at him. My heart pounded in my chest. I’d never seen so much blood before, and I’d been living in a hospital for almost two years and had so many operations I couldn’t even count them. When I’d mustered up the courage to look again, I peered around the doorframe, only my forehead and eyes looking out.
In the waiting room, all alone, was a boy. Maybe a bit younger than me. He was staring off into the distance at a spot on the wall, as if he was waiting for something to happen. I followed his eyes and looked at the wall, thinking I might see something there. But I didn’t. He was staring at a blank wall with a faraway look in his eyes that made me feel scared. His shirt was covered in blood. It was everywhere. His pants too. It was dry, though. It wasn’t like it was dripping on the floor or anything like that, but still, it was everywhere. And then I saw a man in a uniform, a paramedic, rush up to the boy and wrap a blanket around his shoulders.
“Your dad will be here soon,” the man said to the boy, rubbing big circles on his back. But he didn’t move, he just continued to look at the blank spot on the wall. It was actually a little creepy. Like he could see a ghost that I couldn’t. I once read that animals, especially cats, can see ghosts that we can’t, and when they stare into the distance at nothing at all, that it was actually a spirit that we are unable to see with the human eye. I wondered if he was staring at a ghost now too.
I watched the paramedic walk off a little way and then he started talking to a nurse. I got up and rushed to the other side of my room and pressed my ear up to the small window that never opens to listen.
“I have to get back on duty,” he said. “Is there someone who can sit with him? Poor kid has been through the wringer. He’s the one that called the police.”
