“Is there another kind at your fake-ass job?” Reena said, laughing.
The room was red and bright. The lamps were on. “I like my free moments. I like my fake-ass job,” he said, which was mostly true. David blew her a kiss. “Feel better,” he called out.
He didn’t think much of it at work. It was late October, and the center was dressed in the obligatory Halloween orange and black. David spent the morning sending e-mails. He answered a couple of phone calls about tutoring. A kid he knew from Stanley Isaacs Houses came in and asked to borrow some money. He and another counselor talked about how pathetic the Knicks would be that year. He watched a trashy Spanish talk show with a roomful of seniors. He ate lunch alone on the benches beneath the project shadows, blew smoke rings and watched the cars drive up Third Avenue.
It was a quarter to seven before he got home. Reena was already there. The apartment smelled awful. Reena looked awful. The bathroom door was open and the light was on. The room glowed a sickly yellow and orange hue. She sat up in bed when he came in. “Hey, babe,” Reena said in a tired voice.
“You all right? What’s going on?”
She wasn’t feeling well, she’d had to come home.
“You should’ve called me at the center,” David said.
“I thought you were going to call me.”
David winced.
“I just came home and fell asleep anyway,” Reena said, shrugging. “Well, slept and threw up a little. I ate some soup. That must be it.”
He made her tea, and Reena said she was feeling better, but all night she kept waking up and stumbling to the bathroom. She threw up four times. It was nearly daybreak when she and David admitted that they weren’t going to get any sleep. The pungent smell of vomit hung in the small apartment like a toxic cloud.
The cab ride to the emergency room reminded David of everything he hated about the city. A weak dawn sun cast no shadows. Dogs and people picked through piles of trash. Reena slumped into his lap, and he stroked her hair. She was feverish. It occurred to David that Reena might be pregnant. He felt his stomach sink. Her eyes were closed and they were still five blocks from the hospital. The idea of it spread until he could feel fear humming in the very tips of his fingers. He didn’t mention it to her.
In the waiting room, Reena called her mother on David’s cell phone. David held her hand as she spoke, could feel in her pulse the effort she was making to sound stronger than she was. Tik, she said, which was the only Hindi word he knew. It meant okay. The conversation was brief. Mrs. Shah was coming, of course.
For a moment, David allowed himself to consider the possibility that Reena was really ill. There they were together, hands clasped, in the waiting room of a public hospital. Her mother would come. He would be courteous. Responsible. Explain things—I am the boyfriend—and everything else: Reena’s last few weeks, how tired she seemed and stiff, and what he’d observed from watching her, being with her, and loving her, every day in the apartment they’d shared since August.
“I love you, babe,” David said.
Reena nodded.
“Should I leave?” he asked, hopefully.
She lay her head against his right shoulder instead. He put his arm around her and rubbed her temple with his thumb. He listened to the soft rhythm of her breathing.
“Not yet,” Reena said finally. “In a while.”
His hand stopped moving of its own accord. David felt a heat in his chest, a sensation so unpleasant he wondered for a moment if whatever Reena had was contagious. Mrs. Shah was on her way from Englewood, just across the George Washington Bridge. It would be twenty minutes more, maybe twenty-five. Another half hour before he was displaced, and until then he could rub her head and soothe her and then he would have to go. Or he could leave now. He felt icy and useless. He eased her head off his shoulder. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“Everything hurts.” Her face drooped into a sad frown. Reena held her hand out, and for a moment, it hung there between them. She looked pitiful. He took her hand in his and massaged it. He pulled it to his lips and kissed the third knuckle. He stood to leave.
“Will you clean up the place?” Reena asked. “In case my mom wants to take me back there?”
David said he would.
All alone in the apartment, David appreciated its darkness. He sprawled out on the bed and left the lamps off. The faucet dripped. It would be such a childish gesture, but somehow satisfying: to leave a clue. Something undeniably his. His basketball, scuffed and bruised on the Riverside courts; or his camera, which he’d used to take pictures of Reena at her last dance performance. He got up and pulled the curtain, the anemic midmorning light filtered in through the window. He thumbed through a stack of photographs on the desk and found the one shot he loved of Reena in her mustard-colored sari, gold earrings and glittering bracelets on her wrists and on her ankles above her graceful, bare feet. She was gleaming and young. Her parents were there. How close he had been to them, as if he could have stepped out of the crowd and into their world, and offered his hand: Mr. Shah. Mrs. Shah. How simple it would have been.
Her father had died a few weeks later. Then Reena had started working at a lab uptown and studying full-time. She had dropped her dance classes altogether.
David showered and put away his things. On his knees, he cleaned the bathroom. He left a fine mist of aerosol disinfectant floating in the air, a lemony medicinal scent that stung the inside of his throat. He left and locked the door.
By mid-December, she’d been to three doctors. Lyme disease, said the first. The second mentioned lupus, but said he couldn’t be certain. The third, whom Reena chose to believe for the calm and reassuring manner in which he spoke, diagnosed early-onset arthritis. It was comforting, she told David, to have a diagnosis, a name to give her symptoms. She’d quit her job. Most days she wanted to lie in bed. Her knees hurt. Her elbows. The individual joints of her fingers. On the worst days, she described steel rods running the length of her legs, unbendable knees, the stiffness of a frozen cadaver. The doctor said it would pass, but Reena told David that sometimes she felt she was dying. I’m too young for this, she said.
Her mother came nearly every day now, and David wondered, in his more selfish moments, what was worse: a sick girlfriend or her overbearing mother exiling you to the streets. Reena and David hadn’t made love since before the trip to the emergency room. She was always tired, or looked so ill and unhappy that he was afraid touching her might be interpreted as an assault. Her mother came and stayed late, sometimes till eight or nine. She cried with her daughter and told Reena that someone had cursed them. She burned incense and herbs with such overpowering odors that the neighbors complained. They prayed together while David waited outside, or at La Floridita, brooding, for Reena to call him on his cell phone so he could come home. He still waited for Mrs. Shah, watching for her unsure steps as she came down the escalator from the train. Each time, Mrs. Shah turned uncertainly toward 125th Street, or looked down Broadway, a pause as if lost, before heading up toward the apartment.