Chapter 4 — The Seventh Night

On the seventh night, they talked for four hours.Not about their respective situations — those were still present, still unspoken in the way of things that are too large to carry into a conversation without collapsing it. They talked around those things, about everything else, which was its own kind of intimacy.He had grown up in Bangalore and moved to the US for graduate school and never quite left, which he described as "the most common Indian-American trajectory, I am a cliche, I have accepted this." She had grown up in Indianapolis, the daughter of parents who had come from Delhi in the 90s with two suitcases and her father's degree and her mother's stubbornness, which she said with affection."Did you always want to be a doctor?" he asked."Did you always want to be an engineer?""Fair. No. I wanted to be an architect but my father pointed out, correctly, that architecture required a much higher tolerance for clients with visions, and I had, at seventeen, what he called 'a low patience for nonsense.' He wasn't wrong."She smiled. A real one. She'd been doing that more in the last week — not large smiles, not the performed kind she used at work to reassure patients. Small ones that were genuine."I wanted to be a botanist," she said. "I had a very specific vision of myself — I was fourteen — studying plant adaptation in the Western Ghats. I had a notebook and everything. Very detailed.""What happened to the notebook?""It's in my parents' house. My mother kept it." She paused. "She keeps everything I've made. I think she thinks throwing things away is the same as throwing away the version of me that made them."He was quiet for a moment. "That's a lovely way to think about it.""It's also why their house has eleven notebooks from my adolescence and a papier-mache volcano that I made at ten and should not have survived this long."He laughed. It was the first time she'd heard him laugh — a real one, not the polite kind — and it was warm, the kind that came from genuine surprise."My mother kept everything too," he said. "Including a poem I wrote at eight about a dog we didn't own. I have never wanted to own a dog, and I don't know why I wrote the poem, and she has it in a frame.""In a frame," she said. "A frame.""With a small light above it," he said. "Like it's art. It is not art. It's eight lines of extremely mediocre verse about a fictional golden retriever."She was laughing now. Properly laughing, the kind that used her whole face, the kind she hadn't done in eleven weeks. It felt strange and then it felt — right. Like a muscle that had forgotten it existed and was being used.He was watching her, she noticed, with an expression that was soft in an unguarded way.She looked away, at her coffee. "Sorry.""Don't apologize for laughing.""I was going to say sorry for being the only one actually laughing.""I was laughing." He demonstrated — a smaller version, controlled, but genuine. "I have a quieter laugh. It's been noted.""By who?"A pause. A beat too long. "People," he said, and the word landed with a small weight, and she heard the people he meant and didn't follow that thread, because it wasn't time yet."My laugh has been compared to a car that won't start," she said, steering. "By my college roommate. She said it like it was a compliment. I still don't know if it was.""It's a compliment," he said. "Cars that won't start always do eventually."She looked at him."That was a better metaphor in my head," he said."It was fine," she said. "It was fine."Dana had stopped even pretending to do sidework and was asleep on a stool at the far end of the counter, head propped on her hand, phone on the counter beside her. Lou had gone quiet in the back. The chess men had gone home. The TV in the corner was playing a home shopping channel with the volume off, a woman silently displaying a bracelet to a camera."Do you ever think about what this place is like in the daytime?" Arjun said."Yes. I think it's completely ordinary. I think the lunch crowd comes and it's just a diner. Serviceable food. Mediocre coffee.""And then at three AM it's something else.""It's the same place. Just the people are different."He considered this. "The people who come at three AM are the ones who can't be anywhere else right now.""Yes.""Which makes it a kind of refuge.""A very unglamorous refuge.""Refuges don't have to be glamorous," he said. "They just have to be open."She looked at the flickering OPEN sign in the window. She had never thought of it as anything except a diner. But he wasn't wrong.At 4:30, she stood to leave."Same time tomorrow," he said. Not a question anymore."Same time tomorrow," she confirmed.