Chapter 16 — Epilogue

EpilogueOne year after the first night.Manny's was the same. Manny's was always the same.Dana was in her last semester at DePaul now, studying communications, which she mentioned to Inaaya one night with the slight embarrassment of someone who had been observed not being serious and was now being serious. Lou had retired in October and been replaced by a man named Felix who was equally quiet and slightly better at eggs. The chess men were still in the back booth every Friday. The tea woman had finished her paperback and started a new one.A new regular had appeared in September: a woman in her late thirties who came in at 2:30 AM and ordered hot chocolate and sat at the far end of the counter looking at nothing in particular. Inaaya noticed her the way she'd been noticed — not intrusively, just registering the shape of someone finding their 3 AM place.She hoped someone would sit two stools down.* * *Inaaya's fellowship started in July. She was doing exactly the work she'd wanted to do — the diagnostic work, the complex cases, the patients who had been through the system and needed someone to look again carefully. She was good at it. She had always been good at it; now she was also sure she was good at it, which was different.She called her parents every Sunday. She went to Indianapolis for Diwali, and Arjun came with her, and her father spent three hours showing him photographs of bridges he'd photographed on a trip to Japan, which Arjun received with genuine enthusiasm that Inaaya was fairly sure was not performed.Savita told her, in the kitchen, while her mother was making chai: "He's a good man." Not a question, not a prediction. A statement."Yes," Inaaya said."You're good together," Savita said. "Not because you're similar. Because you're honest with each other. That's the thing that holds." She tapped the counter. "Your uncle and I — forty years. It's not because we're perfect for each other. It's because we kept saying the true things even when it was uncomfortable."Inaaya thought about a counter at 3 AM and two people addressing their coffees instead of each other and still, somehow, saying the true things."I know," she said.* * *Arjun's next project was a pedestrian bridge in Seattle — Deepa had texted Inaaya "YOUR ENGINEER IS BUILDING MY CITY" in all caps when she heard — and it meant he was travelling every other week, which was an adjustment, which they adjusted to.He called her from Seattle on a Tuesday at 11 PM her time — 9 PM his — and she was already in bed, residency hours still in her body even post-residency, and she answered half-asleep."Did I wake you?" he said."No," she said, which was not quite true."You absolutely did," he said. "Sleep. I'll call tomorrow.""Tell me about the bridge first," she said.He told her about the bridge. She listened with sixty percent of her brain, the warm sixty percent, and fell asleep before he finished, and in the morning there was a text: the span calculation works. go back to sleep.She looked at the text for a moment in the early light of her apartment.She thought: I am happy. Not the uncomplicated kind. But the real kind. The kind built on something that has been tested.She got up. She made tea — the good kind, the kind she made for herself now, properly, in a pot, with time for it to steep.She thought about November. The rain, and the light in the window, and a man on a stool two seats down who had asked if the not-sleeping got better.It levels off, she'd told him. You stop expecting sleep and then it's less of a fight.This was still true. And it was also — she hadn't known to say this then — that the not-sleeping had brought her somewhere she wouldn't have found otherwise. That the 3 AM hours, which she'd endured as loss, had turned out to be their own kind of gift: hours when all the performed versions of herself were too tired to show up, leaving only the actual one.You met the real people at 3 AM, she thought.You met the real yourself.She took her tea to the window and looked at the Chicago morning — grey and real and hers.She drank it.— THE END —