| |
No.
No, no, no.
Iris crouched on the floor beside her grandmother’s twisted body, her heart in her throat. Someone was saying something behind her, but she wasn’t paying attention to his words. She was only looking at Ngin Ngin.
Her grandmother’s bony hand reached out and encircled Iris’s wrist.
“Fell on stairs,” Ngin Ngin said, her voice frail. “Much pain...can’t move.” Her face contorted. “Hurts.” She mumbled something else, but the words were unintelligible.
Iris felt like weeping. She wasn’t sure whether it was relief that her grandmother was alive and conscious, or sadness that her grandmother was very hurt.
Someone knelt beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I called the ambulance. They’ll be here any minute.”
Alex. Right.
She couldn’t look at him. Her eyes stayed on Ngin Ngin.
“How long ago did you fall?” Iris asked.
“Don’t know.” Ngin Ngin was silent for a while. “Maybe one hour.”
One hour! Thank God it hadn’t been longer, but Iris should have been here.
“I’m so sorry,” Iris said in a whisper. “So, so sorry.”
Ngin Ngin mumbled something in Toisanese, and then there was the wail of sirens outside, and Alex went to the door. A moment later, paramedics rushed in, and Iris felt like she was watching the scene unfold from above. She didn’t feel like she was really present. Didn’t feel like this was her life, and yet she knew that it was.
* * *
A few minutes before midnight, Iris entered the house again, Alex behind her.
They’d spent several hours at the hospital. Ngin Ngin’s hip was broken, and her surgery was scheduled for tomorrow morning.
Iris had spent too much time reading about hip fractures on her phone. Many elderly people who broke their hip never regained their independence. The road to recovery would be long. A lot of physical therapy.
And Ngin Ngin was ninety-one years old.
There was a good chance she would never live in this house again. The three steps up to the porch, all the stairs inside, the narrow hallways... It was an old house, not built to accommodate mobility issues.
Her grandmother loved this house, so close to Chinatown and Kensington Market, that she and Yeh Yeh had bought fifty-six years ago, after scrimping and saving for years. She had lots of friends in the area.
She would be heartbroken.
On the way to the hospital, Iris had called her parents, who arrived downtown within half an hour, and Rebecca. Dad had called Uncle Howard, who would come in from Mosquito Bay tomorrow morning.
Mom had finally gotten to meet Alex. How about that.
Alex had stayed the whole time, rubbing her shoulders, bringing everyone coffee and food. He hadn’t said much, but he’d been there, a solid presence she could lean on. She’d always thought she would be better in an emergency than she’d been tonight.
As she walked through the house now, her gaze landed on the place at the base of the staircase where her grandmother had been lying, practically motionless, in unbearable pain.
Iris should have been here when it happened. She should have come home right after work. In fact, maybe it wouldn’t have even happened if she’d been here. Perhaps Ngin Ngin would have asked her to fetch something from upstairs rather than going herself.
Iris collapsed on the first step of the staircase and put her head in her hands.
Now her grandmother was in the hospital and would probably never get to live in the house she loved again.
“Why didn’t you come home until seven o’clock?” Mom had asked her.
“I was...with Alex.” Iris had choked out the words, and she’d seen the judgment in her mother’s eyes.
She’d moved in with Ngin Ngin almost two months ago; she was supposed to help her aging grandmother around the house. Instead, this had happened.
She sobbed, and Alex sat beside her and put a hand on her back.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“No, it’s not.” He wrapped his arms around her. “I’ll stay with you tonight. I need to wake up early to go home and get ready for work, but I can stay the night.”
She shook him off. “I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can, but let me be here for you.”
It was tempting, but she quickly brushed those thoughts aside.
“You need to leave,” she said.
He frowned. “If you insist, but—”
“You need to leave, and I don’t ever want to see you again.” She trembled as she said the words, but she meant them. She did.
“Iris, what the hell? You’re just in shock because of what happened.”
“It’s all because of you. If I hadn’t been with you, I would have heard my grandmother fall, or maybe she wouldn’t have even gone upstairs and this whole thing could have been avoided. If it hadn’t been for you, I would still be working on the East Markham Hospital job, rather than having to tell my boss that I’d developed a personal relationship with the site supervisor. It was humiliating, and I can’t bear to imagine what he thinks of me now.” She poked him in the chest with her finger. “It’s all because I let myself get involved with you, against my better judgment. I don’t do relationships, and yet somehow I’ve found myself in one. All they do is bring pain and stifle your independence. So, no, I don’t need to see you again. We’re done.”
She kept her head held high. She refused to show him how painful those words were for her to say.
Because she had grown attached to Alex, against her better judgment.
He shook his head. “No. That’s not all relationships do, and I confess I never really understood the appeal before I met you. But with you, it’s different. Like I said, you make me feel like I’m alive again.”
“You said that right after you’d come inside me.” She couldn’t help being crude.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“It means you weren’t thinking clearly.”
He scrubbed his hand through his hair, clearly frustrated. She hated doing this to him, but it was necessary.
“I love you,” he said, anger in his voice. “Don’t you dare tell me I’m not thinking clearly now.”
She just laughed.
“Why are you laughing? I love you. Do you think you’re not lovable? What’s so funny?”
She stared at him and shook her head. “I can’t believe we’ve come to this. It was supposed to one fun night of sex, and now it’s a fucking mess.”
“Maybe it’s a bit of a mess, and I wish some things had happened differently, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be together. There are good times and bad times, and I want to be with you for all of them.” There was a bit of wonder in his expression, as though he’d surprised himself by that sentiment, but he didn’t take anything back.
“Are you going to propose now?” Iris asked flippantly.
“Don’t think about the future. Just let me stay the night and hold you. That’s all I ask.”
She stood up and pointed toward the front door.
“Leave,” she said.
After staring at her for a moment, he nodded and went to the door without a word.