at the side table, where I’d put his card. It was gone. I sat up straight and looked around the rest of the room. He wasn’t there.
Shit!
I’d woken up with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I didn’t know why, and the feeling had instantly grown at the realization that Noah was no longer in bed with me. I looked at my side table. Something was there, but I didn’t know what. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed it, and when I did, my fingers knew what it was before my brain did. I froze.
“Wh-wha- ho—” I stuttered out loud, the words sticking on my dry tongue, unable to form or get out.
How was this even possible?
Why was this here?
Who had put it here?
I raised it to my face and touched my cheek with it, like I’d done all those years ago when I’d first made it. I opened it. The paper and writing were old and almost illegible, as if it had been read and opened and closed over and over again. I rushed through to the lounge and looked around. Noah was still nowhere to be seen and I had so, so, so many questions. A feeling of panic started building and just when I was about to rush out of the door and go looking for him, the curtain to the deck blew into the room like a white ghost. It flapped in the breeze, so hard that it came back on itself and cracked like a whip. I stood there and watched as Noah walked through the door, his eyes rimmed red, as if he’d been crying and, as soon as he saw me, he stopped and looked down at the card in my hands. And then, he raised his card in his hands, the one I’d made him last night.
Twenty years ago – the night before Christmas
The Christmas lights looked really pretty that year. Shiny and bright and red and green. It was cool that I was staying on the third floor. That way I could see them from my window all the way down the street. The pediatric oncology ward was usually on the first floor, but a burst water pipe that Cyril couldn’t fix—Cyril is the nice man from maintenance who always comes to help me if my TV is broken or if my bed gets stuck in the upright position (he also smuggles me chocolates from the vending machine sometimes, which I am not really allowed to eat)—meant the whole ward got flooded. And when I say whole ward, I mean just Monty and me. Monty is the other leukemia kid. We hang out whenever we’re allowed to. When our immune systems are so compromised that a tiny germ will kill us. His real name is Montgomery, which is so fancy-sounding. His parents are really fancy too. His mom wears these big strings of pearls and talks with a British accent, and his dad is like a baron or something . . . or is it a sir? A duke? I don’t really know what he is. I just know that they all have British accents and say things like “Oh my” and “By golly.” Monty is not really like that, he’s pretty cool. We have this whole thing worked out where we have this code for communicating by knocking on the walls. It drives Sister Mary nuts! I guess that’s part of the reason we do it. But I think she also secretly likes it a little, even if she will never admit that! She’s always warning the other nurses about us naughty kids, but she always says it with a smile in her voice. She says it in isiZulu, so she thinks I don’t understand it, but what she doesn’t know is that I’ve been secretly studying it, so I can listen to the late-night conversations that the nurses have. It makes me feel less lonely at night, when the chair is empty in the corner of my room, to be able to listen to and understand someone else’s conversation.
The only horrible thing about being on the third floor is that this is where the ICU is. Well, it’s down the passage, and if I stand in my doorway I can see a lot of very scared and distressed-looking people in a small waiting area there. I guess they look like that because someone they love is in serious trouble. That’s why they would be