I didn’t bother trying to sleep. I thought about Tim, but oddly, instead of the emaciated figure I’d seen in the hospital room, I saw only the young man I’d met at the beach, the clean-cut student with an easy smile for everyone. I thought about my dad and wondered what his final weeks were like. I tried to imagine the staff listening to him as he talked about coins and prayed that the director had been right when he told me that my dad had passed away peacefully in his sleep. I thought about Alan and the foreign world his mind inhabited. But mostly I thought about Savannah. I replayed the day we’d spent, and I dwelled endlessly on the past, trying to escape an emptiness that wouldn’t go away.
In the morning, I watched the sun come up, a golden marble emerging from the earth. I showered and loaded the few belongings I’d brought into the room back in the car. At the diner across the street, I ordered breakfast, but when the plate arrived steaming before me, I pushed it aside and nursed a cup of coffee, wondering if Savannah was already up, feeding the horses.
It was nine in the morning when I showed up at the hospital. I signed in and rode the elevator to the third floor; I walked the same corridor I’d walked the day before. Tim’s door was halfway open, and I could hear the television.
He saw me and smiled in surprise. “Hey, John,” he said, turning off the television. “Come in. I was just killing time.”
As I took a seat in the same chair I’d sat in the day before, I noticed that his color was better. He struggled to sit up higher in the bed before focusing on me again.
“What brings you here so early?”
“I’m getting ready to head out,” I said. “I’ve got to catch a flight tomorrow back to Germany. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, I know.” He nodded. “Hopefully I’ll be getting out later today. I had a pretty good night last night.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
I studied him, looking for any sign of suspicion in his gaze, any inkling of what had nearly happened the night before, but I saw nothing.
“Why are you really here, John?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I confessed. “I just felt like I needed to see you. And that maybe you wanted to see me, too.”
He nodded and turned toward the window; from his room, there was nothing to see except a large air-conditioning unit. “You want to know what the worst thing about all this is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I worry about Alan,” he said. “I know what’s happening to me. I know the odds aren’t good and that there’s a good chance I won’t make it. I can accept that. Like I told you yesterday, I’ve still got my faith, and I know—or at least I hope—there’s something better waiting for me. And Savannah . . . I know that if something does happen to me, she’ll be crushed. But you know what I learned when I lost my parents?”
“That life isn’t fair?”
“Yeah, that, of course. But I also learned that it’s possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not ever go away completely, but after a while it’s not overwhelming. That’s what’s going to happen to Savannah. She’s young and she’s strong, and she’ll be able to move on. But Alan . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. Who’s going to take care of him? Where’s he going to live?”
“Savannah will take care of him.”
“I know she would. But is that fair to her? To expect her to shoulder that responsibility?”
“It won’t matter whether it’s fair. She won’t let anything happen to him.”
“How? She’s going to have to work—who watches Alan then? Remember, he’s still young. He’s only nineteen. Do I expect her to take care of him for the next fifty years? For me, it was simple. He’s my brother. But Savannah . . .” He shook his head. “She’s young and beautiful. Is it fair to expect that she’ll never get married again?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Would her new husband be willing to take care of Alan?”
When I said nothing to that, he raised his eyebrows. “Would you?” he added.
I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out. His expression softened.
“That’s what I think about when I’m lying here. When I’m not sick, I mean. Actually, I think about a lot of things. Including you.”
“Me?”
“You still love her, don’t you?”
I kept my expression steady, but he read me anyway. “It’s okay,” he said. “I already know. I’ve always known.” He looked almost wistful. “I can still remember Savannah’s face the first time she talked about you. I’d never seen her like that. I was happy for her because there was something about you that I trusted right away. That whole first year you were gone, she missed you so much. It was like her heart was breaking a little bit every single day. You were all she could think about. And then she found out you weren’t coming home and we ended up in Lenoir and my parents died and . . .” He didn’t finish. “You always knew I was in love with her, too, didn’t you?”