Was there such a thing as a perfect night?
Light brightened outside of Andy’s eyelids, and she cracked her eyes open. The sunlight drove straight through the white horizontal blinds. It must be early, near dawn, but she couldn’t find a clock.
She was still wearing the huge tee shirt that Cadell had tossed to her after he had come back from the shower. A radio station logo ran across her chest, and the hem was past her knees. It smelled like lavender.
Beside her in the bed, Cadell was still asleep on his back, his leg resting over hers. His face was turned slightly toward where she lay. Sunlight touched his face, but he didn’t wake up. His hair fanned across the pillow, and his lips looked even more full than usual in sleep.
He had a pillow resting on his stomach, and his left arm lay over the pillow, clutching it.
Andy didn’t move. She was irrationally jealous of the pillow.
Usually, Cadell was the hot rock star, glowering and taking up the whole room with his height and his presence, but in sleep, Andy could look at him better. His cheekbones and jawline were parallel slashes, sharp on his face, even though everything about him softened while he slept. His dark eyelashes looked like thick fur feathering from his eyelids.
He might grind his teeth when he was awake, and that would be why his jawline was so prominent under those smoky, dark eyes of his. Even the softness of his beard couldn’t hide those hard lines. If anything, the beard hollowed his cheeks more, emphasizing his cheekbones.
She watched him with her cheek pressed against the cool pillow, memorizing.
Hey, she’d had one perfect night with a hot rock star, something little Dr. Andal Kumar would never have dreamed of.
Andy didn’t dream about a lot of things.
Mostly, she dreamed about her small patients surviving another year.
Other than that, she had always thought that she should have a family to go home to after work, a husband and children, but she hadn’t fantasized about it.
Indeed, after medical school, her residency and fellowship had been so rigorous and demanding that she hadn’t imagined having the time for a family. She was often at the hospital for days at a time and for long hours on the days that she was supposed to have off. The specialty of liver transplantation was not conducive to having a family or any kind of private life. The other two women in the program had dropped out, citing work-life balance as their reasons.
At least she didn’t have to find a husband. As her parents had always told her that they wanted to arrange her marriage as they had been arranged, the idea had not occurred to her to think about it for herself. Andy had had dozens of other courses to plot and decisions to make: what colleges to attend for her undergraduate and medical school, what branch of medicine to specialize in, and where to do her residency and fellowship training.
Who she would marry and her future family life had been some far-future event. She was socking away what money she could for retirement, too, but she wasn’t touring golf villages in Florida.
It took away the pressure of finding a right boy, too, someone of the Brahmin caste, the Ayer sub-caste, the right stars and gotra, and all the things that they had stipulated before they would allow her to marry. The list was endless. Andy’s mother had told her when she was in high school that she could not date American boys, that if she fell in love with one, that they would disown her. In college, Andy’s friend Gayatri had eloped with an American boy, and Gayatri’s parents had immediately disowned her. Andy’s parents had spoken approvingly of their decision at every opportunity, both to Andy and to them, telling them that they had done the only thing they could have under those terrible circumstances. As far as Andy knew, Gayatri had never seen them or her brothers or her cousins again. No one would talk to her, lest their own parents find out.
Andy’s eyes were just closing, drifting off to sleep because she didn’t have to be at the hospital until the afternoon, when Cadell’s eyes fluttered open. He smiled at her. “Hey.”
“Hello.” She didn’t know what else to say. Someone more sophisticated than she would know what to say when waking up next to a rock star.
And she didn’t know why the fact that he was a rock star was suddenly so prevalent in her mind. It never had been before.
Cadell rolled over and found her hand, holding it in his. “You stayed.”
She nodded.
“I’m glad. I hate waking up alone in a strange room, not knowing where I am.”
“You’re in your own home.”
“It doesn’t feel like a home. It came with all the furniture and art. I just nailed my copies of the gold albums on the wall.” He flicked his other hand at the framed albums hanging above the dresser at the other end of the room. “That’s all I did.”
She squeezed his hand, still warm from being under the sheets. “You have no family and no home.”
“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”
“It’s just so different. I can’t get away from mine.” Oops. She shouldn’t have said it like that. “I mean, I am very attached to my family.”
He nodded. “I wish I had more family for Emily. She doesn’t have any cousins or aunts to look out for her if something happened to me. If I were in a bus accident or plane accident on tour—”
Cadell bit his lip, and Andy filled in the blank in her head: or if he overdosed on heroin and died.
“—Emily would go into foster care. There’s no one else to take her. I’m just glad as all hell that her mother told people about me and listed me on her birth certificate. Otherwise, I would have never known, and she would be out there somewhere, alone.”
“I will,” Andy said, a completely impossible proposition. “I’ll take her.”
“You can’t. She’s your patient, not your kid.”
“She knows me. If anything happened to you, at least she knows me.”
“You’re a successful doctor. You don’t have time for a kid.”
“I have a village. My mother and aunts would love to have a little girl to dress up.” Andy could easily imagine coming home from work to find Emily dressed in a tiny silk lehenga choli with gold jewelry braided into her hair, eating sweets, with five ladies cooing around her, every darn night. Indian children can get very spoiled. She knew this from personal experience. That image was less like imagination and more of a memory of Andy’s toddlerhood.
Cadell asked, “What would your husband think about that, about you raising another man’s child?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what he would think. She would be mine, just mine. I think arranged marriages are better. You’re not constantly worrying what will happen if the other person falls out of love with you.”
“So he’d be okay with that.”
“He had better be,” she said.
“If you’re serious, if you haven’t changed your mind in a few days, I’ll call my lawyer and have him draw up the paperwork.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
“I will check in with you later, but I appreciate the thought. Even if you do change your mind, I appreciate that you even considered it. And if you do change your mind, I understand. Completely. It just means that you thought better of the situation.” He squeezed her hand. “You have a big heart.”
“I will tell you in a few days to call your lawyer, but for now, maybe you and Emily should come over and see what you would be getting her into.”
Cadell raised one eyebrow. “You can’t mean what I think you mean.”
“You and Emily should come over to my parents’ house for supper one night this week. My mother asked me to ask you to, even before this.”
“Did you tell them about us?” His small smile curving one corner of his mouth didn’t look nearly as panicked as she would have been.
“Oh, no. I would never.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No. Never. They would never understand.”
“So, this is just sowing your wild oats before you get married,” Cadell let go of her hand, rolled his head away from her, and stared at the white ceiling, far above, “and yet you’re willing to raise Emily if something happens to me.”
Andy touched his shoulder. “I don’t know what this is,” she said. “If I think about it, there are too many things that crowd at me, so I’m not thinking about it.”
Cadell rolled his head back toward her, watching her.
“When I see you, it’s like I step into a parallel universe, where people drop out of college because they’re ready to pursue their dreams, where no family herds you back in if you try to go off by yourself, and where I can eat the lemon Danish.”
He smiled at that.
“I just know that if Emily were ever out there, alone, it would tear at me every day. And that I don’t want to start thinking about this because that might make it end, and I don’t want this to end.”
His smile grew a little. “How about when Emily gets her liver? Wouldn’t it end, then?”
“She’ll need anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. It’s a complicated regimen.”
He reached out and held her hand again. “You’re still talking about Emily.”
“Talking about Emily is easier.”
“Than—” he prompted.
“Than talking about you. Or me. Because when I try, it feels like I’m about to step off a cliff or that the land is dropping away all around me. I’m not just me. I’m the spearpoint of a whole lot of people who have held me up and propel me forward. If I break myself off, I’m just a useless shard, and the spear is broken, too.”
He nodded.
“I don’t want to be alone. You don’t seem to have a choice in the matter.”
He nodded. “Everyone I knew is dead.”
“I am used to being a part of my village. Cutting myself off from them would be like deciding to live in a cave as a hermit. I don’t want to be alone and talk to rocks.”
“I’m not a rock. Neither is Emily.”
“But I could take Emily into the village with me, and no one would bat an eye. They would all take her in. But if I break the other bonds, it’s different.”
Cadell looked at where he still held her hand. “I’m different.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said, “then don’t think about it. Let’s just take it day by day.” He lifted her fingers to his lips and kissed them. “Let’s just enjoy today.”
“But you will need to come to supper.”
“Are you sure?” His eyes searched hers.
Andy explained, “My village wants to meet the man who saved my fellowship, and my mother wants to feed him.”
“Do you want me to?”
She nodded. “I want you to meet them, to see.”
He held her hand a little more firmly. “Then I will.”
Andy said, “Tomorrow, I think. I’ll tell my mother to cook for tomorrow night.” She reached out and lifted a lock of his hair off of his pillow. The obsidian black of the strands seemed natural, but the blue tips seemed sleek, not fried by chemicals. “What conditioner do you use?”
His startled glance was almost fearful. “Why?”
“Your hair is just really in good shape.” She gathered up a handful of her long tresses that hung below her shoulder and gestured with them. “I understand how hard it is to keep this stuff healthy.”
He shrugged. “It’s some stuff that the band’s stylist give me. There’s a bottle of it in the shower.”
She leaned over and combed his hair with her fingers where some of it lay over his shoulder. “You must go through a lot of conditioner.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”