Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

And yet, despite two hands’ worth of disappointments, William caught a reflection of himself grinning like an idiot, all the fingers in his reflection’s left hand holding all the fingers in the reflection of Irene’s hand, and all the fingers in his reflection’s right hand playing gently with the reflection of her hair.

William was aware, at least as long as Irene was around. Aware of the faint burned smell that always got jumbled up in her hair, postradiation. He’d gotten used to it after a month. How many more weeks of treatments did she have left? One? Two? Time was rushing laughably by. Not like the past several months, when he’d buried himself in work (for all the good it had done him) and rerouted his heart on dates with the Society of Korean Daughters of His Mother’s Friends. But now William was sitting beside Irene, aware of the vibrations of her throat against his shoulder as she awwed at a little baby in the next row, happily gumming the leg of a Barbie, naked except for one black glove.

His phone buzzed again; it was wedged directly against Irene’s outer thigh. She looked away from the baby, craned her head up at him, and whispered, “Is that your mother calling again, or are you just happy to see me?”

She looked so damned ridiculous trying to give him sexy eyes while the left one was covered with a black felt eye patch. She’d bedazzled it with rhinestones in the shape of a skull, claiming it was an ironic statement about Damien Hirst. William said it made her look more like a pirate than the eye patch alone. Irene said that was the irony. William didn’t understand, or care.

He didn’t care about a lot of things far more important than that. He didn’t care that he was unemployed. He didn’t care that he’d forgotten to make his June credit card payment and would now be charged a one-hundred-dollar fee, the first time this had happened in his life. He was actually a little excited. Ordinarily, he would have carried the guilt of that hundred dollars around in his gut like a bullet for the rest of the year. He’d have cared that the socks he put on that morning were not only two different shades of blue but of different thicknesses, such that his right foot ached and sweated while the left was fine. He’d have been distraught that Irene was still sick — worse, maybe, even than before. He did care, of course. It was just that these cares, like all the others, were wiped from his mind now that she was holding his hand.

In moments when he was alone, the circuits in his brain containing these ordinary cares and fears overwhelmed all others, and he couldn’t even sleep. But when Irene was around, even the disappointment he felt about her big surgery not going smoothly seemed to clear.

The morning after their epic night of barhopping, Jacob, true to his word, had brought William back to the hospital. While Sara had been dealing with the still jelly-legged George, William had slipped around the cheap curtain that hung around Irene’s recovery bed. He had been worrying about what to say: that he was sorry for leaving her in the train station; that he had woken up every day since then thinking of her before even remembering what planet he was on; that he had tried to call her dozens of times; that he had compulsively been donating to the American Cancer Society online at work; that he had run in a 5k to raise money but it turned out that he was a lot more out of shape than he expected and had limped the last 3k on a strained ankle. But the second he’d seen her lying there, these worries began to evaporate from the inside of his head.

She’d looked nearly concave, with thick bandages wrapped over the area surrounding her left eye, and her right eye fixed on the TV high up in the corner. But that right eye had swiveled to him. The lid around it had snapped up like a cheap blind. She’d seized his hand, pulled him to her, and locked her lips onto his. An alarm went off; she’d pulled off her pulse monitor clip and yanked her IV stand half over. A squat Dominican nurse had rushed in and threatened to put Irene into restraints. William had had to walk two laps around the ER. When they released Irene, the two of them had gone directly back to his apartment — actually no, they’d made one stop, back to her place to pick up some clothes and the scarf she’d bought for him at Christmas, which had remained wrapped and on the counter. Then back to his place, where she’d stayed every night since.

In a week she’d sold her bed on craigslist and rid herself of every other unneeded belonging, so she could maximize the work space in her East Fourth Street apartment. Every day she worked there but refused to show William, or anyone, what she was making. She never even spoke about it — but she always arrived at William’s itchy to return, talking only vaguely about working on something larger, something that she and Skeevo seemed to be into together.

Even now, Irene seemed quietly elsewhere as she and William followed the other passengers off the first bus and toward the next, an S62.

She looked down and said, “You don’t need to hold my hand.”

But she didn’t pull away.

“But I like holding your hand. ‘I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and…’” William tried to sing.

She screeched and tried to cover his mouth with her other hand, but he persisted.

“‘Oh, please… say to me-e-e-e-e. You’ll let me be your man…’”

He finally had to stop when, on the held-note, Irene got most of her fingers into his mouth, and he could no longer form words.

“OKKK FWINE YLOOOU WIHHN.”

Irene let him go and shot him another look that was difficult for William to decode without being able to see her eyebrows. The second bus smelled refreshingly of burned Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Once seated, Irene turned to William to explain. “I can still see out of the other eye. I’m not going to wander into traffic.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

The eye was fine. They had gotten the tumor out from beneath it without any damage to the nerves. It was still swollen, though, and with the thick black stitches there, it freaked people out. Hence the eyepatch, which still freaked them out but in a kinder way.

After the first tumor had been removed, the doctors had planned to head in for the one on her elbow, when one of them had noticed some swelling under her armpit. Thinking it might be a reaction to the anesthesia, they’d run a fresh scan, only to find suspicious shading on one of her lymph nodes. Just days earlier they’d done a complete battery of PET scans and found everything clean, but now there was definitely something. They stopped before beginning the surgery on her arm.

Now she had a “compromised lymph node.” This was, as Dr. Zarrani put it, “a big disappointment.” The cancer had gone off the skeletal rails and passed into her glands, from whence it could travel, fluid borne, to distant organs. It meant that the first rounds of chemotherapy had done very little, possibly nothing, and that they’d have to “really crank it up a notch now.” It meant adding ifosfamide and etoposide to the poisons they were secreting into her veins each day in the chemo lounge. But William wasn’t thinking about that now, only about the coconut smell of her hand lotion and of Irene’s relief when she learned she wouldn’t to have keep her arm in a cast all summer — and so would still be able to work on her sculptures.

The S62 bus squealed to a halt just to one side of the Staten Island Mall. William followed Irene off the bus into the mall parking lot. Steadily, the rest of the people headed toward the forty-foot-high signs for JC Penney’s and Loews Cinemas. Irene pulled William in the opposite direction, crossing one vast parking lot after another — each a little less crowded than the last — until they seemed to be a half mile from the actual mall. Irene danced over the cracks in the pavement, as if to not break the back of some mother somewhere. That was another mystery that William had a hard time thinking about. Where was her family in all of this? He became preoccupied by the light glinting on her legs as she leaped.