Sofia replaces Nur at the head of Abdi’s bed as her parents go to complete the discharge paperwork.
“Rest, Abdi,” she whispers to him. She lays a hand tentatively on his shoulder, and he lets her leave it there for a moment before shrugging it off.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll leave you be. We’re going home soon.”
She folds her hands into her lap and remembers that when Abdi was a baby he followed her everywhere as soon as he could move, and tried to copy everything she did. If she studied his face in the minutes after he was born, he studied hers a million times in the years that followed. She remembers his gummy smile, his baby-tooth smile, his gappy smile, and the smile after that, when his new adult teeth seemed too big for him. She feels that the two of them were knitted together at his birth and always would be.
He’ll be able to speak when he gets home, she tells herself, and she says this out loud to her parents when they return to the bedside.
The police escort them out and offer to drive them home.
As they exit the parking area, Sofia sees the Children’s Hospital next door. They’ve told her that Noah’s being treated there. That makes sense. There’s no way they could have mistaken him for a sixteen-year-old.
Noah’s condition is critical. The police have explained this to Abdi, apparently in an effort to persuade him to talk. She wonders how wise that was.
She also wonders what Abdi saw and what he and Noah did.
When she swallows, all she tastes is fear.
Noah,” Mum says. “Can you open your eyes, love?”
I can’t.
She asks me to squeeze her hand, but I can’t do that either. I can’t move at all.
“Anything?” Dad asks.
“No.”
I think I can feel Mum’s fingers tightening around mine, and then, a little louder than before, she says, “Noah! Darling, can you hear me? Can you squeeze my hand at all, Noah, even just a little bit?”
My first response is to think, I’ll be able to later, I’m sure I will. But then I’m not so sure, because everything is kind of a gray mist right now. I’ve no idea what’s happening. There’s only one thing that’s clear in my mind: a very recent memory. It’s the unforgettable, irreversible fact that I’ve had the talk, the one where they tell you that the wheels have fallen off the bike and there’s no putting them back on.
“How long have we got?” Mum said to Sasha, the day we got the news. We were sitting in the room in the pediatric oncology ward that’s supposed to be for parents to take refuge in when everything gets a bit much. Only families who are new to the ward use it, though, because everybody else knows that it’s also known as the “bad news room.” You learn to avoid it like the plague.
Sasha’s my oncologist. Full name: Dr. Sasha Mitchell, with lots of letters afterward, but she’s been treating me for eight years, so we’re firmly on a first-name basis.
“I can’t predict that with any accuracy,” she told Mum. “I’m sorry.” She had a grip on Mum’s hand, and I was glad because Mum looked as if she might vaporize if somebody didn’t physically hold her. “But I would hope, if we don’t get any kind of unexpected event, that there might be a couple of months. We can discuss how we might alleviate Noah’s symptoms, so that time can be as enjoyable as possible, but I’m afraid that’s all we can do.”
Silence.
“I’m very sorry,” Sasha repeated. I didn’t want her to look at me.
Dad wasn’t with us that morning. He was on a plane back to Bristol from somewhere.
My favorite nurse, Sheila, was in the room, sitting in the circle of bad news. She’s been treating me for years, just like Sasha.
My medical notes were on her knees, a stack of papers so thick that nobody had yet transferred them to the electronic system. They’re filed in multiple cardboard folders, each bursting with paper, dog-eared and coffee-stained, and held together with rubber bands. They follow me around the hospital to wherever I’m having treatment. Trolleys look as if they might sag under the weight of them, and nurses have to carry them with two arms. They document everything that’s ever happened to me here. Families who haven’t been in the system for as long as we have eye them with fear. One of Sheila’s tears soaked into the cardboard cover. I wondered what the hospital would do with them when I’m gone. Trash them, I suppose.
I blubbed in the bad news room, of course I did. The three of them rallied around me, arms crisscrossing my back, and Mum said, “Noah, love, Noah.”
I said, “But there are so many things I need to do.”
On the way back to my room, with Mum and Sheila and the rolling IV stand that I was attached to, I noticed the other nurses at the station averted their eyes. They knew. I wanted them to face me. I used my elbow to knock over a tray that one of them had left in a precarious place. Syringes and blood vials clattered across the linoleum. The fourth-floor color scheme is blue in Bristol Children’s Hospital, if you’re interested. Blue floor, blue walls. The vials rolled a satisfyingly long way. I felt as if everything was happening in slow motion.
Mum’s voice interrupts my thoughts. She’s speaking slowly, like I’m half-witted or deaf.
“Darling, you’ve been in an accident. You fell into the canal and you banged your head while you were under the water. The doctors have put you in an induced coma because they think that’s the best way to get you better. You’re in intensive care.”
“Do you remember being by the canal last night?” Dad asks.
The canal: black water, the surface a thick, slick membrane until I hit it, and the cold clenched my chest.
“With Abdi?” he adds.
“Don’t,” Mum says.
“He might remember.”
“He’s not even conscious.”
“Then why are you talking to him and asking him to squeeze your hand?”
“Because I think it’s good if we talk to him, but I don’t think we should be asking distressing questions. We don’t know what happened.”
“It was an accident. What else could it have been?”
“I’m not talking about it now. I’ve just said it might distress him.”
She has lowered her voice, but I can still recognize the tone she uses to let him know that she knows best. She does know best. Dad’s never home enough to understand everything about my treatment.
My parents are quiet for a while, until Mum says she’s going to the loo. Dad waits until the sound of her footsteps has faded and then he talks to me again.
“You’re tough, buddy, you’re going to pull through this. We have things planned, Noah, and we’re going to do them. It’s not going to end like this.”
He’s talking about my bucket list. We made the list when he arrived at the hospital after I got the news. He lay on my bed with me all night, smelling of airports and strange places, and we handwrote the list with a stubby pencil he always carries in his shirt pocket. Together, we whittled it down to thirteen items. Thirteen is not a lucky number, I know, but at this point you can probably understand why I’m not too concerned about that.