Hope and Other Punch Lines(62)

“You came here to talk about your vivid imagination?” I catch myself, and then mime zipping my lips shut and throwing away the key.

He clears his throat.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve been telling myself a story. This is embarrassing to admit, because it makes me sound like such an idiot, but after a while, I started believing that story, you know? It went from an idea to fact without my noticing. Am I making sense?” he asks.

I nod. I tell myself stories too. We all do.

“I have a confession to make: the whole tracking-down-people-in-that-photo thing was because I wanted to prove myself right. It wasn’t really about the newspaper. Or not only about it, at least. So Blue Hat Guy? That was my dad. His name was Jason Stern. I thought, until we spoke to Jamal, well, I thought he was alive,” Noah says, and he coughs a little on the word alive. Like it was shameful of him to hope. I so understand that feeling, the cruel embarrassment that comes with wanting what cannot be, that I can’t help myself. I reach out and grab his hand and squeeze. He looks up at me, surprised. “I thought…It sounds so stupid, and Jack has been telling me for years it was stupid. I never listened. I thought he used nine-eleven as an excuse to run away. Since I was sick as a baby, I figured it was too much for him. Everyone else in that photo survived. I assumed he had to have also.”

I look over at our fingers, linked.

“I’m so sorry, Noah.” I try to catch his eyes, but they are darting around the room. Looking anywhere except at my face. I wonder if everyone, if everything, dies twice. If that’s how grief is: cyclical, never finished. The Towers are still falling. And falling again.

“That’s why I needed to get home after we talked to Jamal. I realized that my mom must have known. She had always known. And she didn’t tell me. My dad was this hero—he saved lives—and she kept it a secret.”

“Maybe she had a good reason?” I say this without a single thought as to what that could be. I want to extend her the same courtesy I’m asking of my own parents—to understand I had my own reasons for not telling them everything.

“Actually, I think she did.” Noah’s eyes glitter, and he clears his throat. “I wanted to tell you the truth. Not only because you deserve to know why we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing, why I was so insistent, which was horrible of me, but also because I didn’t want you to think I was running away from you the other day. I’m so sorry for all of it.”

“Maybe you should run away from me. I’ve got a tumor. I’m dying,” I blurt out.

Oh no. I had no intention of telling Noah this. In fact, I had every intention of not telling Noah this.

“What? Come on, you’re not dying. Though, by the way, there’s been a lot of talk that you OD’d.”

“Seriously? I’ve never done drugs in my life.”

“Wait a minute.” Noah pauses a beat as he catches up in our conversation. “You have a tumor?”

“In my lung. They’re going to biopsy it later today.” I keep my voice calm and refuse to allow self-pity to creep in. If Noah can handle losing his dad twice, I can handle a simple medical test.

“You don’t know you’re dying. You don’t know that for a fact.” He says it with such authority, it’s as if he thinks he can make it true by being emphatic.

“No one wants to say it out loud, but I’m sure it’s because of nine-eleven. Lots of people are getting sick. Fifteen years seems to be the magic number for these types of cancers.”

“Some people are fine. Lots of people. Jamal was the healthiest-looking person I’ve ever met and he’s forty.”

“I have a tumor.” My imploring tone now matches his. I don’t know why I feel the need to push the point when I never intended to make it in the first place.

In the early hours of the morning, after my mother had fallen asleep, I Googled lung tumors. The vast majority are malignant.

“What about if I know you’ll be fine? What about that?” Noah asks.

“Honestly, I wish it were up to you.”



* * *



—

A few minutes later, after we’ve turned the television on and off and waded through the awkwardness, Noah stands up, walks around the room one time, then comes back to the bed and sits down right next to me. Like he’s thought about it and made a decision.

“You need to get better. You know why?” Noah asks.

“So you can drive me crazy by calling me Abs?” I joke.

“Because I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re not sorry,” I say, but I’m smiling.

“You’re right, I’m not sorry. By the way, I like your shirt. I think unicorns are both over-and underrated, as far as mythical creatures go.”

“What? Why?” I ask, and then realize that now is not the time to get derailed by a Noah theory, though I do, at some point, want to know what he thinks of narwhals. “I don’t want to be your friend either.”

Our eyes catch for a minute. Noah looks at my lips and starts to lean in, and for maybe the first time in my entire life, I know exactly what happens next.

Noah seems unfazed by the fact that we are in the least sexy place in the world and that I, fewer than five minutes ago, told him I’m dying. It’s just him and me and the kissing—which isn’t normal kissing. We’ve graduated to the next level somehow: accomplished kissing, two people who know what they’re doing. My entire body hums with desire. Joy too.