“I’m kidding! That is a lot older than you. Was it, um . . .” Saina realized that she had never discussed sex with either of her siblings.
“Actually, she was probably more like thirty-five.”
“Probably?”
“Probably definitely.”
“Were you . . . uh, was it . . .”
Andrew wanted to giggle. “Are you trying to ask me if we did it?”
“Well, I know you once said that you were waiting to fall in love when, well, remember? We had that talk.”
“Yeah, let’s not do that again.”
“Okay! Okay. Well, whatever happened, are you alright? Do you feel okay about everything?”
Without permission, a tear forced its way out of his eye. And then another and another. But he nodded.
“What? What’s happening? I don’t get it. Are you okay? Are you sad that you left her there? Did she break your heart or something? Are you going to go back there?”
More tears. “Whisper!”
“Sorry!”
“I’m . . . yeah.” How could he even explain it to her? He wiped his right eye, then his left. “I’m not going to go back there, probably.”
“Okay . . .”
He looked at his sister. Her eyes were a lighter brown than anyone else’s in their family, and now the glow from a wall sconce shone through them, making them look almost golden. He couldn’t say it. “Don’t worry, Saina. It just wasn’t what I expected, but I’m fine. Let’s go to sleep now.”
“Okay, but if you ever want to discuss, we can. Even if I am your sister.”
“Okay.”
Saina kissed his shoulder and matched her breathing to his as he closed his eyes and slowly dropped off to sleep.
Three hours later, Saina was still up. It must be almost dawn now, but her circadian clock was out of sync and the weird metallic tang that permeated the waiting room was difficult to ignore. She’d read Grayson’s email over and over again until the words had lost their meaning; her ex-fiancé and her now ex-boyfriend chased each other around and around in her head.
She got up slowly, trying not to wake anyone up. An old woman slept to her left, head tucked into her neck, her forehead remarkably unlined under a yellowish white bob. Saina had seen her come in close to three a.m., balancing a set of bamboo baskets topped with a pointed lid. Saina knew that there were steamed buns in there. She could smell their sweet yeastiness and the distinct wood-pulp whiff of the heated baskets. The thought of offering a few yuan for one was tempting, but these must have been made especially for a patient, someone very dear to this granny, who was willing to forgo a night of sleep and possibly a day’s wages to make a long journey.
Maybe her father was up, too, somewhere in this hospital. She had gotten nowhere with the nurse on duty, who refused to even look up a patient outside of visiting hours. Saina had tried to circumvent her by calling the number her father had dictated, but it rang right at the desk, and the nurse had picked it up triumphantly, saying in English, “Hey-lo!” Now the woman was finally facing away, engrossed in a Korean drama on the tiny block of a television that sat at her station.
Regrets were the easiest things to remember. She wished that she had never told Leo that Grayson always tried to make her be the big spoon. It was true, but it felt like a terrible thing to say about another man. Her former fiancé had always wanted to be the one who was hugged and protected. “We burn up the world together.” That was true, too. At their best, they were incandescent. Electrified by each other. In a room filled with friends and former lovers and people they should probably know, no one else had ever mattered but her and him.
Keeping an eye on the nurse’s back, Saina opened a door with another KEEP OUT sign and slipped into a long hallway. She’d kept vigil in a hospital once before, for a daredevil friend who’d been in a drunken motorcycle accident in Manhattan, but that time dozens of nurses had stalked the corridors, following patients in wheelchairs with IVs on rollers. It was different here, an hour outside of Beijing. Almost no staff. A crowd of waiting visitors. As Chinese as she felt in Helios or even Manhattan, the hospital in China was a foreign land. Her flats squeaked on the cheap linoleum floors, and she held her breath as something rattled in the distance. When nothing appeared around the corner, she let her breath out slowly. Yoga breath. Phew. Safe.
At the first set of double doors, Saina paused and looked inside the window. What the hell? The fluorescent lights blazed, and the patients lay in long, pathetic rows, as if they were in an army ward. Each one seemed to have a leg slung up on a pulley or a bandaged stump resting over their blanket. It was horrifying. Was her father in one of these wards? Alone in a crowd of Chinese people? He’d said only that he’d gotten into a fight and that they were both in the hospital. Were his injuries worse than she thought? She looked at the men—and they were all men—in the narrow room, relieved when she couldn’t find her father’s face.