on his neck. She had stubbornly refused to go into Nico’s room without Terrence, and all the social worker had managed to broker was an hourly changing of the guard: Mr. and Mrs. Marcus, to whom Fiona wasn’t speaking, would spend an hour at his bedside while Terrence and Fiona sat in the ICU waiting area, and then Terrence and Fiona would get half an hour while the Marcuses went down to the cafeteria. Yale and Charlie and Julian and Teddy and Asher and a rotation of Nico’s other friends filled in the gaps. Yale was the one there with Fiona and Terrence—the three of them were stepping off the elevator—when the terrible nurse with the spiky hair came toward them, told Fiona she should go in there now, that this was the time. “Can I bring Terrence?” she said, and the nurse looked put out and said she could maybe get the social worker out of his meeting, and Fiona said, “I’m not going in without him.”
Fiona sat down then on the bench, and Yale didn’t know whether to look at her or to look at Terrence, who was shaking, his hands on the windowsill, or if maybe he should just leave—if this was the point at which he didn’t deserve to be here anymore. And after thirty seconds, Fiona stood up and said, “I’m so sorry, Terrence,” and ran down to Nico’s room.
Yale strode over to the nurses’ station, said, “Yeah, let’s get the social worker here. This is not okay. This is not okay.”
But while they were waiting for him, Fiona came back out, looking both twelve and a hundred, but not twenty-one. She was convulsing, sobbing so hard that she made no noise. Behind her, Mrs. Marcus started wailing. The doctor came out of the room and toward Terrence, and Yale prepared to catch him as he fell. But Terrence, once the doctor had confirmed what they knew he would, did not collapse.
He said to the doctor, in a voice like hollow stone, “I’ll be back in two hours. You’re going to clean him up, right? And they’ll have their time. And I will be back in two hours.” His knee was still hurt from running into the cleaning cart that morning, but he scooped Fiona up like she weighed nothing and walked straight out of the hospital. Yale stayed back to call Charlie and everyone else from the nursing station phone. He found out later that Terrence had carried Fiona around the outside of the hospital for twenty full minutes until she was ready to come back in and call for a ride. That someone, concerned that a black man was carrying a sobbing white woman around the parking lot, called the police, and an officer showed up and trailed them slowly, until Fiona shouted that she was fine, that it wasn’t illegal for a person to carry another person, was it?
And now it was Terrence in the bed, and at least this was a much better place, but did it matter in the end? And soon it would be Julian.
Terrence’s eyes had closed, and Yale sat there a long time, relaying gossip. Yale sang him “Auld Lang Syne,” croaky and off-key, till Terrence whapped him with the back of his IV-free hand to make him stop. The whole time, Yale thought Charlie might show up. But he didn’t.
Terrence opened his eyes. “Is it midnight yet?”
“It’s 10:40. But we could watch the ball drop in New York. Can you hold out twenty minutes?” He got the little TV in the corner working, showing a Times Square that Terrence would never visit again.
Terrence watched the ball, and then he said, quietly, “I made it. 1986, man.” He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Yale didn’t feel he should go yet—or maybe he didn’t want to—and so he sat there a few more minutes. The door opened and Yale thought it might be Charlie, but it was just a nurse, checking that everything was alright.
Yale squeezed Terrence’s thin hand as hard as he dared. He said, “You can’t die of a fucking sinus infection.”
* * *
—
Charlie wasn’t at home, either.
Yale left a long message on Julian’s answering machine, shamefully relieved that he hadn’t picked up. “I want you to let us know what we can do,” he said. “Some people—I mean, Nico and Terrence had each other, you know? And if you don’t have anyone—which isn’t what I mean—you have all of us.”