Chandler's Wednesday

Noelle had the system down. Boba tea from the place on Colfax, both orders memorized. Brown sugar milk tea light ice for me and whatever seasonal thing she’d been rotating through since October. She knew which chair was mine and which outlet the IV machine needed. She’d figured out that the third chair from the window got a draft and steered me away from it without saying anything. Six weeks of Wednesdays and she had it mapped.

I was deep into Cycle 6 when the door opened and it wasn’t Hanna.

Chandler stood in the doorway in his hoodie, backpack over one shoulder, looking at the room the way he looked at most things, like he’d already decided. His eyes found me. He didn’t wave or make a face or do anything that required a response. He just came in.

Noelle looked up from her phone. Then at me. Then back at Chandler. She lifted her chin in that way she had, the one that covered everything, and he nodded back, and that was the whole transaction.

He pulled a chair from the wall and set it down on the other side of me and sat. Backpack between his feet. Hoodie still on. Like he’d thought about whether to stay before he came in and had already made the decision.

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a version of you didn’t have to come here that didn’t make it into something, so I didn’t say it. The IV line was in my left arm and Chandler had taken the chair on my right, and the distance between us was what it always was.

Lylah was across the room, book in her lap. She’d glanced up when he came in and was already back to reading. She’d been here longer than I had and she knew the infusion room had its own grammar.

Chandler got it.

He pulled out his laptop and opened something and didn’t make the visit into an event, and that was the right move, and I’d known he’d make the right move, but it landed in my chest in a way I hadn’t accounted for.

Noelle and Chandler found a conversational rhythm while I kept my eyes mostly closed and let the room run. She was telling him something about the Environmental Science project, the one due before winter break, and he was asking the specific questions that meant he was actually listening. I knew the difference. I’d always known the difference.

Hanna came through on her rotation. Checked my line, noted something, moved to Lylah. I watched without turning my head. Lylah’s numbers were the same story they’d been telling for weeks, readable in the length of the pause before Hanna moved the cart.

When Noelle got up to find the bathroom, the room went quieter.

Chandler closed his laptop. He didn’t pick up his phone. He moved his chair a few inches closer, not announcing it, just doing it, and the warmth of him settled along my right side the way it had in the bleachers the week before.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

The blanket they’d given me was folded across my lap, the thin hospital kind, pale blue, the fabric worn soft from washing. My right hand was resting on it. Chandler’s hand was on the arm of his chair and then it wasn’t, and then his fingers were overlapping mine on the blanket. One second. Maybe less. Warm and still and then he moved his hand back and we both looked at the wall in front of us.

I did not say anything about that.

He didn’t either.

The IV machine beeped once, adjusted, kept going. Somewhere down the hall a cart was moving. The room did what the room did, and I sat in the middle of it with the specific warmth of where his fingers had been, and I did not look at him, and he did not look at me.

Lylah had been watching. I’d known she was watching the way I always knew when Lylah was paying attention, which was that she’d stopped turning pages.

When Chandler got up to throw something away and didn’t come right back, she said, without looking up from her book: “That one has been in love with you for a while.”

My right hand was still on the blanket.

“We’re not,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were.” She turned a page. “I said he has been.”

I looked at the door he’d gone through. The hallway was visible in the gap, people moving past in the specific unhurried way of a hospital, everyone calibrated to a slower speed.

“You’re seeing someone,” Lylah said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“How’s that going.”

I thought about the party. About Evan’s hand at the small of my back and going through some stuff and the three unread texts and the way I’d said I was fine because I was fine, mostly, and that had to count for something.

“It’s fine,” I said.

Lylah’s mouth did something small. Not a smile exactly. More like the expression she used when she’d gotten what she needed from a conversation and was done.

“Okay,” she said.

Chandler came back. He sat down, same chair, same distance, and picked up his laptop and opened it again. His shoulder was close to mine. I looked at the window. Outside, the December sky was doing the pale grey thing it did before dark, the light going flat and even.

I hadn’t known I needed him here. That was the part that was complicated. I’d had Noelle, who was good at this and present in exactly the right ways. I hadn’t thought there was a gap. And then Chandler had walked through the door and the room had changed by one specific degree and I understood that there had been a gap.

I didn’t examine that too hard. I let it sit where it was.

The session ran long. Hanna adjusted something, ran a secondary check, said everything was fine in the voice she used when everything was actually fine, which was different from the voice she used otherwise. I’d learned to tell.

Noelle had a tutoring thing at four-thirty. She’d mentioned it and I’d told her to go, and she’d stayed until three-fifty and then left with three separate goodbyes and a look at Chandler I chose not to interpret. Chandler stayed.

He stayed through the end of the drip, through the line being removed, through the paperwork Hanna walked me through that I’d done enough times to do on autopilot. He carried my bag to the elevator without asking. I didn’t tell him not to.

The elevator was small and we were both in it and the doors closed.

His shoulder was against mine. Neither of us made more space. The numbers above the doors counted down and the light in the elevator was the flat hospital kind that made everything look slightly more serious than it was, or maybe exactly as serious.

“I should have come sooner,” he said.

The doors hadn’t opened yet. There were two floors left.

“You’re here now,” I said.

He didn’t say anything else. Neither did I. The elevator reached the ground floor and the doors opened and we walked out into the lobby, the hospital smell giving way to the cold air near the entrance, and neither of us said anything and that was exactly right.

Outside, his Jeep was parked two rows over from Noelle’s usual spot. I’d worked that out at some point during the session and hadn’t said anything about it and wasn’t going to now.

He didn’t ask where I wanted to go. He pulled out of the lot and turned the opposite direction from my house, and I didn’t say anything about that either.

The heat came on slow, the way it always did in December. I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the hospital disappear in the side mirror. The sky was already dark, the mountains just an absence at the edge of everything, darker than the dark around them.

He drove for a while, then turned off onto a road I didn’t know and followed it until the city thinned out and there was a reservoir on the right, flat and black in the dark, and he pulled into a gravel lot and put it in park and left the engine running.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

The heat had caught up by then. Outside the windshield, the water was still. A few lights on the far edge of it, too distant to be anything specific. I watched them and didn’t think about the infusion room or the paperwork or Hanna’s voice or the way Lylah had turned her page.

“I’m tired,” I said. Not the chemo kind. I wasn’t sure how to explain the difference without explaining it.

Chandler didn’t say I know, you’ve been through a lot. He didn’t say you’re so strong or it’s almost over or any of the things people said when they needed me to still be okay.

He just waited.

“Everyone keeps telling me I’ve got this,” I said. The words felt strange outside of my head, smaller than they were in there. “And I know they mean it. I just, I’m tired of being the thing they’re rooting for.”

The engine idled. Outside, something moved on the water, or maybe it was just wind.

“I know,” Chandler said.

A beat.

“I don’t think of you that way.”

I looked at the water. The lights on the far edge hadn’t moved. My hands were still in my lap and the heat was running and the quiet of the Jeep was the same quiet it had always been, which was the kind that didn’t ask anything of me.

I didn’t say thank you. I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a version of a response that didn’t make it into something it wasn’t ready to be yet, so I let it sit where he’d put it, and he let me, and we stayed like that until the windows started to fog at the edges.

He drove me home. I looked out the window the whole way. He didn’t turn the radio on.

He pulled into my driveway. I got out. He waited until I was inside, which he always did, which was something I’d stopped noticing and then started noticing again.

I put my bag down. I sat on the stairs.

My phone had two texts from Evan. Both from that afternoon. Both asking if I was okay.

I put the phone on the step beside me and looked at the wall.