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“I am so sorry.”
“You can’t do this! You guys can’t just... throw me out!”
Arethea wraps her arms around me. I hop up and pace and try to reason with her. Cut a deal.
“He doesn’t want you in there. Not right now,” she says softly.
“Talk to Willard. He could let me in!”
She shakes her head. “Kellan is the patient. Cleo, we are with you... in spirit, but I can’t let you in. Not today. You want me to try to text you?”
“No!” I hold my head and sob so loudly, someone peeks into the little room to see what’s going on.
Arethea sits with me until she’s paged. She says she’ll try to text me. I nod, even though inside I hate her. I hate all of them.
He’s mine. Kellan is mine. I won’t stop until I get back in.
I don’t leave the transplant unit’s waiting room for three days. Arethea said she’d try to text, but I don’t see a message from her. I play on my phone and do sit-ups and change my clothes in a nearby bathroom, never leaving the area outside the locked doors for too long, in case he calls for me.
As for me, I call the ward incessantly. I talk to every nurse I know and beg them all. When someone walks through my waiting room, I try to talk to them. I call Kellan’s dad, his brother, leaving messages. I call Manning, Whitney. Nothing.
At the end of the third day, the woman at the desk appears in front of me with a short, red-haired woman, who explains that I can’t live here, as they put it.
I go back to my hotel for long enough to find an envelope with my name on it: a new notebook from Kellan. When did he find the time to write in this? I flip through the pages. Love notes. There’s an envelope as well.
Afterward, it says. Fuck that.
I dress in something clean and go back to the hospital. I shower in the day and sleep in the main lobby at night.
The receptionist who sent me packing can’t help noticing I’m back. I tell her our story. She seems sympathetic but she never gives me any news.
Five days pass. I forget to eat, forget to sleep. My mother calls. My phone rings and rings.
Six days.
A week. Unfathomable.
I go wandering the city blocks. I call his phone, and call and call. I buy myself a neck pillow so I can sleep out in the waiting room. The receptionist is my friend now. She says she is praying for me.
Manning shows up on the eighth day, and Whitney on the ninth. Something Whitney says turns my friend the receptionist against me. I’m asked to leave the waiting room and not come back.
I wan
der the hospital halls. I wonder if I do this long enough, if I can catch his cancer. They would let me in, then.
I ask every day about him. Sometimes janitors I recognize, a few times nurses. No one tells me he’s dead. So I assume he is alive. I write him letters. I send them. I start a list of quotes I wrote on the sparrows and one day, in a fit of delirious exhaustion, walk a few blocks down and get one tattooed on my ribs.
“Unless you love someone,
nothing else makes any sense.”
–e.e. cummings
My clothes hang loose. I find a pair of Kellan’s narrow-waisted longue pants in my bag and vow to never take them off. One afternoon—day twelve, I think—I take the subway to the Carlyle, where I still have a room, and shave my head. My mother comes and tries to make me go. She threatens me, like Kellan’s dad did him.
I call his dad’s office. I call Manning, begging. Whitney comes again, this time with a plane ticket home. I refuse it. She claims she doesn’t know how Kellan is. He made it through the first night on the ventilator, but no one is being updated.
He’s on a ventilator. Kellan is.
