Chapter 51 Tuesday

Chapter 51 Tuesday
Juni

I had been awake since five rehearsing how to say it, which is how I know it mattered.

I picked him up at seven. His truck still wasn't fixed. I had already put the hospital address in the GPS the night before.

He got in and looked at the screen.

"You looked it up," he said.

"Last night," I said.

"Okay." He settled into the seat.

"I want to tell you about the number before we get there," I said.

"Okay."

I started driving. I had practiced this part too, so I just said it.

"Gerald has had a discretionary fund from Rosie's for a year and a half. He tried to give it to you twice and you said no both times."

"Juni..."

"Nate's parents offered too. Your mother turned them down. They said so when I called them." I kept my eyes on the road. "They still want to help."

"You called them."

"Yes."

"When?"

"The night Marcus mentioned the clinic. I needed you to say no to him first, on your own." I paused. "The no needed to be yours. The help could be mine after."

"Why does it matter which order it happened in?" he said.

I had thought about this at 5 AM, which is when you think about things most clearly.

"Because you've been carrying everything alone for three years," I said, "and the point wasn't to take it from you. The point was to make sure you had a real choice. Between taking Marcus's offer with nothing else available. Or saying no to him and having something waiting."

"So you built the something."

"Yes."

"Without telling me."

"Yes."

"Okay," he said.

We drove. I counted the minutes because I couldn't help it. Three of them passed before he said anything else.

"Thank you," he said. Quietly. Not the version of thank you that sounds like a formal acknowledgment. The other kind.

"You're welcome," I said. Just as quiet.

St. Mercy's third floor looked like every hospital floor... the specific beige of places that get cleaned too much, the corridor smell, the sound of equipment running in rooms you can't see into.

She was already in the chair when we walked in.

I don't know what I expected.

She saw me and her face did something that I couldn't fully read. Not surprise. Something more considered than surprise.

"You came," she said.

"Of course," I said.

"Dec didn't tell me you were coming."

"He didn't know."

She looked at Declan. She looked at me. She opened her sketchbook. "Okay," she said, in the tone of someone filing information in a very specific folder and closing the drawer.

He sat in the chair on her left. I sat on her right. The room was small and the chair was plastic and the IV line in her arm was the first time I had seen the full medical reality of what this cost her, and I did not make it visible on my face because she was not looking for my reaction to it. She was drawing.

The nurse came in at the top of the hour. She said she needed to do the check, which meant the corridor.

We stood against the wall, backs to the painted cinderblock, waiting. The fluorescent light overhead was the kind that makes everyone look slightly wrong. It smelled like disinfectant and the slightly warm air of climate-controlled buildings. He reached sideways and took my hand.

Not the arrangement version. Not the version designed to be seen. Just his hand finding mine against the wall of a hospital corridor on a Tuesday morning and holding it there.

I held back.

"I don't know how to thank you for this," he said.

"Don't thank me," I said. "Just let me be here."

"You are here."

"I know." I looked at the closed door. "I'm saying let me."

He didn't say anything else. We stood there until the nurse came out. Then we went back in.

Lily had drawn a new panel while we were in the corridor. She held it up without being asked. I looked at it.

The fox and the girl. June with the dark curly hair and the notebook, the paper-thin disguise. The fox beside her. Neither of them moving toward anything or away from anything. Just sitting. Side by side.

"What do you think?" Lily said.

"I think that's exactly right," I said.

She nodded like I'd confirmed something she already knew. She closed the sketchbook. She leaned back in the chair and went to sleep.

We sat with her while she slept. Two hours. I had my notebook. He had his phone. We didn't talk much. There was nothing to manage or calculate. We were just there, in the same room, working in parallel the way we do in the truck, except the truck is ours and this room was Lily's, and she had let me into it, and I was being careful with that.

"She drew us," I said eventually. Quiet enough not to wake her.

"I know," he said.

"June and the fox."

"The disguise is thin."

"Very thin." I looked at the sketchbook, closed now on her lap. "How long has she known?"

"Since the first panel with the curly hair and the notebook," he said. "Maybe before."

"She never said anything."

"She was waiting for it to be real," he said.

"And now she drew them sitting still," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

They released her at four. She was quiet on the way out, not bad quiet. She sat in the back with the sketchbook in her lap and the window down a crack and her eyes half-closed, drawing something I couldn't see from the front.

At my house he walked me to the door. It's a thing he does now. I've stopped pretending I don't notice.

"Same time Thursday?" I said.

"Thursday," he said.

"Not a session."

"Just Thursday," he said.

"Good." I looked at him. "You're already doing this right, you know."

"Doing what right?"

"This," I said.

He looked at the door frame. Then back at me. "I'm going to get the scholarship," he said. Not asking. Not hoping. Stating, the way he states things he has already decided are true.

"I know," I said.

"And after that I'm going to figure out how to do all of it better."

"Take your time," I said.

I went inside. I heard the truck door close. I heard it pull out.

I went to the kitchen and made tea I didn't need and stood at the counter and thought about Lily saying you came like she had been expecting it, like it was a given, like of course Juni came to the infusion, where else would she be.

I thought about the corridor. The hand. The fluorescent light making everything look slightly wrong and none of it mattering at all.

I thought: I am in this completely. I am not performing being in it. I am just in it.

That, it turns out, is what it feels like when something is real.