It had never been this hard to talk to Beck before, not even before he knew the truth about Julien and Iman. Iman kept glancing sideways at him as he drove, his hands taut on the steering wheel, veins popping in his forearms. She wanted him to say something, to look at her, to do anything, but he was eerily focused: eyes straight ahead, reflections of trees and road in his glasses.
She almost felt selfish, bringing him here. As a kid, he'd watched his own mother die of cervical cancer, her body slack in a hospital bed, her pulse beeping, beeping, gone. It didn't feel right to bring him into another stuffy hospital room, to see another sick person, to watch somebody else...
Iman shook her head. She would not allow her mind to go there. Not yet.
The last time Iman had seen her father, after all, he'd been fine. It was June, his fifty-fifth birthday. Iman and her mother had baked him a strawberry cake, his favorite, and then all of them (minus Hana, who was accompanying her husband on a business trip at the time), had gone mini-golfing. Iman searched through that memory, trying to decide if there was something she should have noticed—a cough, maybe, a slight mental lag? But no. She couldn't think of anything.
The car rolled to a stop; Iman looked up, and realized they'd gotten off the freeway.
Her eyes zipped to the GPS navigation. "Wait, Beck," she said, with a hesitant chuckle. "We still have another fifteen miles. What are you doing?"
"Making a stop," he said, without inflection.
Iman sputtered. She didn't know what to say. Lost, she watched the light above their heads turn green and Beck hang a left. Behind them, the freeway ramp got further and further away. "Beck," she said. "But my dad—"
He shut his eyes, just for a moment, as if resting them. "I know," he said, glaring at the road again, so intensely it brought Iman to immediate stillness. "But you haven't eaten at all, have you? You've been gone two days and you haven't eaten."
"Who cares about me—"
"I do."
Iman sat up, one hand against the dash to balance herself, as Beck pulled into the parking lot of an unassuming diner. Only when Beck had yanked the keys from ignition, the engine dying underneath them, did Iman speak up again: "What if I don't get there in time?"
She saw him swallow.
He reached across the console, taking Iman's hand. His grip was firm, not painful but not gentle, either, and such an un-Beck-like thing that it startled her like a pebble in her shoe. His voice wasn't his own, either; it was lower, darker, a storm cloud against the cumulus which she'd grown used to. This Beck, she realized, was the one of which the world rarely got a glimpse—this was the younger Beck, the sorrowful Beck, the Beck who'd been able to do nothing but watch as the woman who gave him life lost hers.
"A few weeks is enough time, Immy," he said, "so please don't hate me when I beg you to eat something. It's too easy to forget about ourselves when someone's sick. Trust me; I know."
Iman squeezed his hand, her eyes falling to the cross necklace settled against his collarbones: silver, just slightly tarnished with age. "You never talk about her. Your mother."
"Yes," he said, drawing his hand back suddenly and opening his car door. "Because I loved her very much."
As they walked into the diner, Beck's shoulder against hers, a supporting arm slipped around her lower back, Iman wondered how it could be that you didn't want to talk about someone you loved.
She looked up at Beck then, however—that quietly distressed frown, how it transformed into a magnificent smile the moment he realized she was looking at him—and she understood.
Even though Beck had assured her everything would be fine, Iman was nevertheless relieved when they arrived in Annapolis and her father was still alive. The sliding doors parted as Iman and Beck entered the hospital, the air conditioning like a gust of cool wind. Iman saw her sisters first, loitering by the waiting room coffee bar, Cam watching intently as something chocolaty and sweet poured into a styrofoam cup.
"Cam? Hana?"
They both turned, staring at her in brief silence for a moment. Then, Hana was the first to move, stepping forward and closing Iman in a hug, Cam sniffling and following suit. The three of them were a tangle of arms and legs and hair, and Iman didn't know how she'd forgotten just how comforting it could be to feel her sisters' heartbeats working with her own.
They released each other.
Hana, dragging a finger underneath her eye to clean a smear of mascara, said, "I'm sorry, Iman."
Iman blinked. She was slightly aware of Beck drifting away towards the front desk, his curly head bent respectfully as he spoke with the receptionist, but she was more aware of the distress on her older sister's face. "Sorry?" Iman said. "Sorry for what?"
Hana looked away.
Cam peered into her hot chocolate, her hair falling around one shoulder. "We didn't tell you because we just—we just didn't know how, you know? It didn't seem fair, what with your time traveling and everything else you already have to worry about —"
"Cam!" Hana hissed.
The youngest Patel rolled her eyes. "What else are you going to call it, huh?" she said, then, slowly, as if doing so caused her physical pain, met Iman's curious gaze. "He was sick when we came down to see you earlier this month, and we didn't say anything. We're sorry, Im. We're really sorry."
"I—" She should have been angry, right? She should have felt like screaming. If only I knew, if only you'd told me, then... But, she realized with grim detachment, she was not. She wasn't angry; she didn't feel like screaming. It was as if the pit of worry in her stomach blinded her from feeling anything else. It should have, maybe, but it just...it just didn't matter.
Iman simply asked, "Where's Dad?"
"431B," said Beck from behind them. Iman whirled, the careful smile on Beck's face unknotting that worry inside of her, if only a little. "Are you ready?" he asked.
No, she was not ready. She didn't think one could ever be ready for something like this.
Still with that smile on his face, Beck leaned forward, tucking Iman's hair behind her ear. "You can do this, Immy. I'm with you, too, and I'm not going anywhere."
He started to pull his hand away, but Iman caught it, holding it close. It was the only thing about this entire situation that felt real.
Together, her sisters behind them, they made for the elevators.
Neesh Patel was not at all a quiet man. Most memories Iman had of him, he was being loud: shouting over the crowd at a soccer stadium, singing these long, arduous love ballads to her mother as he twirled her around the kitchen, slamming a hand down on the table in protest when he lost money in Monopoly. She knew his voice—somewhat gruff, slightly accented from the first twenty years of his life that he'd spent in western India—like she would a favorite song. Perhaps this was why it was so jarring to Iman when the first greeting her father gave her was a silent, meek wave.
The hospital room was bleak: pallid blue walls, white linoleum, two lonely balloons in one corner and one massive Get Well Soon poster with a bunch of tiny signatures in permanent marker in the other. Beside the bed sat Annette Patel, Iman's mother, in a threadbare silver cardigan, her small brown hands interlaced where they sat in her lap.
"Daddy?" said Iman, not knowing what else to say or do. She was looking at him, but it felt like looking at a poorly drawn portrait. His skin was too pale, his smile too lopsided—hidden, too, behind an oxygen mask—his eyes too colorless. Even the white hospital gown was strange-looking on him—Iman remembered him in wild sweaters in colors like pumpkin orange or cyan blue or, his favorite, a hot pink.
Where was her father? She didn't know this man. Where had her father gone?
"The doctors told him he should try not to talk so much," said Annette, rising from her seat. Her eyes met each of them in turn, lingering slightly on Beck. "It's...his COPD. It's worsened dramatically, girls."
"Ann..ette," came a broken voice, and horrified, Iman realized it was her father's. His voice was soft, like paper dropped in a puddle, barely audible over the rhythmic rise and click of his oxygen machine. "Don't...scare them...so much."
Iman wiped her eyes quickly, coming to her father's side. She knelt beside the bed, resting her hand in his. He turned his head slowly upon the pillow, gray-ringed eyes searching her face. "Iman...don't cry, lovey. I like it when...you're...happy..."
She could see the pain in his face, in the heaving of his chest. "Don't speak," she said. "If it hurts you, we don't have to talk. We don't have to say a thing."
God, a few weeks left of this? She could see it on her father's face, and no matter how much she wanted to deny it, she couldn't. If this was what lay ahead of him, he was ready to go now. It didn't matter how much she played with time, after all. She would still run out of it.
But still, Neesh shook his head, or at least as best he could. "Before you were born...we took your mother...to see my, ah, what is it, grandma? The same we did...for all of you"—eyes lifting, a tenuous smile spared for all three of his daughters— "Baa, you see, was said to bring...many blessings...for the children of our family."
"Neesh," said Annette. She was still on the other side of the bed, her dark eyes wide, watching the words struggle to leave her husband's mouth. "You don't have to—"
Iman's father pressed on. "Baa warned us you would be...different. That someone up above was going...to give you a gift...maybe curse. Your mother, you know, she worries. But I did not. I always...knew...you would overcome it, whatever it was."
"Daddy," she said, brushing his cheek. There was a hand on her shoulder; she furled her own over top of it, recognizing Beck's slender fingers. "Please rest, Daddy."
"They said my baby was cursed," he said then, resting his eyes, "but you...you prove them wrong."
"That's enough, Daddy. You rest, now," said Cam, leaning over Iman's other shoulder, resting her young hand over Iman's and Neesh's. After a beat of hesitation, Hana did the same, and they rested there in silence until their father's eyes fell shut and he went to sleep.
Iman watched him for another moment, afraid the beep of the heart monitor was a farce and that her father was truly gone, until she felt his pulse beating against her palm.
She stepped back, into Beck's arms. He said nothing, and neither did she, and she just rested there, her eyes on her father's slumbering face.
"Girls," said Annette, scrubbing a hand over her trimmed afro, gnawing at her bottom lip. "We should go outside, you know? Let him sleep."
Iman nodded, and she and her sisters started to follow her mother outside into the hall. Iman stopped, however, when she noticed Beck loitering by the bedside, something in his face inexplicably troubled. She knew. Somewhere in the back of her head, she knew she should never have brought him here.
"Beck?"
He looked up, belatedly. "Oh. I...just need a second?"
Iman's gaze drifted towards her father's unconscious form. "But he's..."
"I know," he said, quickly. "Yeah. I'll let him rest. I just need a second."
Unsure, Iman nodded and slipped out, dragging the door shut behind her. The last shot she got of Beck before Cam dragged her off was of him standing at the side of the bed, head down, something in the slump of his shoulders suggesting an astronomical weight upon them.