She looks at Casey. A long, measured, complicated look. “Your mother is also invited to call me,” she says, and each word sounds like it has been extracted at considerable personal cost. “If she wishes. I understand she... organizes events. We may have things to discuss. Eventually.”
Casey, to his eternal credit, does not laugh. He does not grin. He does not do the golden-retriever thing where joy radiates from every pore. He simply nods, with a seriousness and a respect that I have never loved him more for, and says, “I'll let her know, Meera. I’m sure she'd love that.”
Mother nods. She steps back. She clasps her hands in front of her, and her spine is straight, and her face is composed, and she watches us get into the car with the expression of a woman who is not letting go of her son but is, for the first time, loosening her grip enough to let him hold someone else.
The car pulls away. I look through the back window. Mother is standing in the courtyard. Priya is beside her. Yash is in the doorway. Karan is waving with both arms and appears to be executing the tyrannosaurus gesture. Kavita is wiping her eyes with the corner of her dupatta.
Daadi is at her window. I can just see her, a small figure in the upper floor, her silver cane catching the light. She does not wave. She does not need to. The light on the cane is her goodbye, the same way a single tap is her approval, the same way silence is her fury, the same way a story about a poet in a blue-walled house is her love.
I turn back to face the road. Casey's hand is in mine.
“That went better than I expected,” he says.
“My mother invited your mother to call her. This is either a breakthrough or the opening move of an international war we are not prepared for.”
“My mom makes a really good pie.”
“Pie will not save us from Meera Kapoor.”
“You underestimate pie, Doc. Pie has saved civilizations.”
I look at him. He looks at me. The Rajasthani sun is blazing through the car windows, and the road ahead is long and straight and dusty, and it leads to an airport, and the airport leads to Toronto, and Toronto leads to a cluttered apartment with a goldendoodle and an ER with a purple pom-pom pen and a life that is messy and imperfect and entirely, unambiguously ours.
“Take me home, Casey,” I say.
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. The gesture is so gentle, so simple, so completely devoid of performance or strategy or clinical terminology that it bypasses every defence I have ever built and lands directly in the centre of my chest, where it stays, warm and bright and permanent, like a sticker on a nightstand, like a tap of a cane, like the sound of a name said right.
“Home,” he says.
Chapter 33
Real
Casey
Real looks like this:
It’s a Tuesday in early May, and the Toronto winter has finally, mercifully, reluctantly surrendered. The ice on Lake Ontario is gone. The cherry blossoms in High Park are doing that thing where they explode into existence overnight and make the entire city look like the inside of a greeting card. People are walking around in short sleeves looking dazed and grateful, like survivors of a natural disaster who have just been told the danger has passed.
I’m standing in the paediatric ER at Lakeshore Memorial, elbow-deep in a Tuesday afternoon that has already included two broken arms, a plastic crafting bead lodged in a nasal cavity, and a truly spectacular case of a seven-year-old who superglued his fingers together with industrial strength Gorilla Glue while building a model volcano. The superglue kid is my favourite. He’s sitting on the exam table with his hand held up like a flipper, looking at me with a betrayed expression. It’s clear that he’s learned that scientific innovation has real-world consequences and progress always comes at a price.
“Okay, buddy,” I say, gently working the acetone-soaked gauze between his fused index and middle fingers. “We're going to get these fingers separated. It might feel weird. On a scale of one to ten, how attached would you say you are to these fingers?”
“Very attached,” he says solemnly. “They're stuck together, which is the whole reason I’m here.”
“That was a pun. I respect that. You're going to be fine.”
His mother, standing in the corner, is oscillating between laughter and mortification. “He used the entire tube,” she says. “The entire tube, Dr. Welling. I only turned around for thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds is all it takes. I once saw a kid glue a Lego to his forehead. He wore it to school. His teacher called it a fashion statement for the rest of the week, until his parents finally brought him in for help.” I peel the fingers apart with a satisfying, slightly grotesque separation sound, and the boy examines his liberated digits with wonder. I slap a holographic T-Rex sticker on his gown. “There you go. Good as new. Maybe next time, use the glue stick?”
“The glue stick doesn't bond at the molecular level, why else do you think I didn’t use it?” he says, with withering contempt in his voice. This a boy who takes his model volcanoes extremely seriously.
I like this kid. I like this kid enormously.
I finish the chart, wave goodbye to flipper boy and his mother, and step into the corridor, and there, walking toward me from the neurosurgery wing with his white coat pristine and his clipboard held at exactly the angle that makes him look like a nineteenth-century portrait, is Dr. Arjun Kapoor.
He’s the same. He’s entirely different.