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She waited for him to continue. “And?”
“All those games I played. I waited to see one of them in the stands. Even for a quarter. Just five minutes of playtime, I didn’t give a shit. I was a starter, you know. I played every game.” He looked at her. “Mom was always at the hospital with her. Dad… did the best he could, but we still lost the house.” Gus lifted his forefinger to make his point. “Do you have any idea how selfish that was? I was all bitched out because I didn’t have an audience, and meanwhile my dad was getting four hours ofsleep a night and losing ground, and my mom was having a big old fucking party watching her daughter scream her way through another bone marrow biopsy. Fun, fun.”
“You had things you needed.” Lydia looked down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. “Things… you wished for. Things you missed.”
“She was in hell.”
“So were you.” Tears filled her eyes and she brushed them aside. “You weren’t being selfish. There was no room for you in your own life. That was the problem.”
He was quiet for a while and a couple more emails came in. Then he released a long, slow exhale.
“Here’s all I know for sure.” Gus held up his forefinger in that way he did. “Life’s meaning is nothing more than the intersection of Murphy’s Law with our random catalogue of dreams—while we hurtle through cold space on a rock and wait to die ourselves. So make the shit count where and when you can, Lydia. You’re going to have to live with what happens in the next month or two for longer than you’ll be going through it. Trust me, the aftermath is worse than the during. Make every second count now with him.”
“I’m trying to. Daniel’s on my mind every second of the day, all through the night. All I think about is—”
“But you need to still feel him. As a man, not asa patient. Let me be his doctor, so you can be his partner. I got the clinical side of things, okay? And one last thing. It’s too late to save yourself. Pulling back from him now isn’t going to make the goodbye any less painful. You’re already in this with him.”
“I’m not pulling away. I haven’t…”
Last night, she thought. In the bathroom. When she’d covered herself… as if Daniel were a friend. Or a stranger—
Lydia got to her feet in a rush. “I’ve got to go find him. Ah—do you need him back down here?”
“No, we’ve replenished his fluids and I’m waiting for a couple more test results. I’ll let you guys know if he needs to see me again.”
“Thanks, Gus.”
“Always.”
When she opened the door, he said, “Remember, he’s still the man you fell in love with. Inside his body, his soul is what it always has been. That hasn’t changed—and neither have you.”
“I need to believe that, Gus.”
“So be like Nike.”
“You mean, Mikey? From the Life cereal ads?” she asked, confused.
The best doctor she’d ever met lifted one of his feet and pointed at his sneaker. “No, Nike. Just do it.”
FOURTEEN
XHEX! XHEX—WAKE UP!”
At the sound of her name, Xhex whipped up her head so fast, she nearly spiked her skull like a volleyball. Blinking furiously, she ground her fists into her eyes.
“Wha-what—what?” She started talking before she realized what she was saying. Then again, there was only one thing that mattered. “Where’s Doc Jane—we need—”
“He’s awake.”
Focusing on hermahmen, Xhex couldn’t understand the words at first. But when they sank in, she jumped up and looked around Autumn’s robed figure. There… on the hospital bed… John was in the exact same position he’d been in, slightly elevated, a cannula under his nose and looped around his ears, his arms out straight by his sides, his lower body covered by a precisely folded blanket that she had tucked around him herself. Down the center of his bare chest, the incision that had been sutured closedwas a good twelve inches long, no bandages covering it so that the superfast healing of the species could be monitored for evidence of infection.
So yeah, everything was exactly how she’d left it when she’d put her head down on the rolling table for just a moment—except for one small and extraordinary thing.
His eyes were open.
“John,” she choked out as she launched herself up to the head of the bed. “John.”
That blue stare was the kind of thing that she hadn’t realized she’d resigned to never see again. But now it was locked on her, the pupils evenly dilated, the whites only slightly bloodshot.
