Come What May

10. dim

CHAPTER TEN

DIM

—

• thursday, march 25th •

I half-expected the elation to die down when Storm and I parted ways at the park the other day, but it hasn't yet.

It stays for four whole days— when I'm showering and the water is at that uncomfortable line between cold and warm, when I'm cooking and I mess up the recipe and there's flour all over the floor, when I'm cleaning the flour all over the floor and some of it flies into my mouth.

Even now, when I'm punching in the number of the owner of the Airbnb to ask them how much I have to pay them at the end of this month, my first month living here, it's there.

As an underlying hum in my chest, one that I can hear saying, You have people here, it stays.

"Hey, this is Asif Nazari," I say into the phone when the owner picks up my call. "I'm staying at your home, uh— you rented out your house as an Airbnb? I'm the person staying there. Yeah, that's me. Not, not As-if. Asif. Yeah."

The owner is busy explaining to me how she doesn't want the rent until the end of my stay, and how beautiful her trip to Italy has been and I've just cock-blocked her by calling her in the middle of her date with an Italian man with a French accent, when my phone beeps with an incoming call.

Any other day that isn't the past four days, and I would have been annoyed by the long tangent that she's going on about. Or at least, mildly irritated. But today, I can't find it in me to care, because honestly? Good for her. I can only dream of an Italian man with a French accent.

I don't want to interrupt her as she gushes about how fancy the bathrooms are in the restaurant she's at, and how sorry she is that the bathrooms of her own house don't have a geyser for hot water, but the incoming call is about to turn into a missed call if I don't.

So, "Sorry, just one second," is what I decide to say into the phone before putting her on hold and picking up the call, not bothering to check the caller ID, almost positive that it's either Radhika or my parents.

And I'm proven correct when I hear Jen's voice into the phone.

But she doesn't sound like Jen. It's Jen but it isn't Jen.

The Jen I know is all smiles, even through the phone. She's excited about every single thing, she's swearing in every other sentence, she's greeting me with an, "Asif! How are you?"

This Jen greets me with a sniff and a small, weak, "Asif? It's Jen. H-How are you?"

"What's wrong?" I immediately ask, my thoughts of Italian French men, of lukewarm water that isn't so bad now that I'm used to it, of how much I wish I was on a date right at that moment flying out of my head, the only remaining thought being, No.

"Uh— nothing really. Just— just your mom," she whispers. "She had a mild heart attack, she's perfectly fine, I just thought that I should let you know. It's just a complication with the diabetes, the meds— we're at the hospital right now, everything's okay, I just wanted to call..."

I can't hear anything else. I don't want to hear anything else.

Because everything's come crashing down, and I don't know what to do, and my entire body is shaking, and this has happened before, and I just don't know what to do.

"Asif?" Jen's voice says through the phone, slightly shaky, but I can't tell if it's from her fear for Mom or her fear for me. Because the last time that this happened, which was coincidentally the very first time that this happened, I had ended up crying my eyes out, passing out, waking up on a hospital bed.