The Last Window

The doors open onto the hospital room.

Not the room as I have seen it from the train window, flattened by distance and night. It is close now. Close enough that I can make out the pale seam in the wall beside Shuyin’s chair, the loose thread on the cuff of her sweater, the half-moon pressed into her palm by the thermos handle.

Beyond the open doors, there is no platform. No tunnel. Only the room and the white light above my bed.

I stand at the threshold.

The passengers remain seated behind me. Their faces are turned toward the light, but none of them move. I cannot see their eyes. I cannot see whether they have reached this place before, or whether they are waiting for someone as I am.

The display above the doors is blank.

For once, it is not counting down.

Shuyin is alone. Shuqiao and Fang have left her the promised hour. A clock above the sink says forty-three minutes remain. I know this because Shuyin looks at it, then immediately looks away, as if refusing to let the hands decide what kind of goodbye she is allowed to have.

The thermos sits on the bedside table. The red hair tie circles its handle.

Shuyin has placed the signed form face down beneath it.

She leans over me and smooths my hair away from my forehead. Her fingers pass through the place where I am looking for her. I am beside her and behind the glass at once. The distance is no longer measured in walls, but it is still there.

“I’m here,” she says.

I read her lips.

She says it again, more quietly. “I’m here.”

I step closer to the threshold. Pain begins beneath my ribs, familiar now, spreading into my shoulders and hands. The train allows me to approach, but not to cross. Something holds me at the line between the carriage and the room.

Shuyin takes my hand from beneath the sheet.

The body she holds is thin and warm. The nails are still marked with the faint gray crescent I got from repairing the kitchen shelf. She turns my palm upward as if expecting to find an answer written there.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” she says. “Fang says you might. Shuqiao says it doesn’t matter because I have to make the decision either way.”

Her thumb moves over the center of my palm.

“I hate that she’s right.”

I want to tell her that being right does not mean being unafraid. I want to tell her that she can stop. I want to tell her that stopping is not the same as abandoning me.

The words have nowhere to go.

She lifts the thermos from the table and places it against my chest, above the steady rise of the machine-assisted breath. The yellow tape faces her. The red hair tie brushes my chin.

“This is ridiculous,” she whispers. “I know it is.”

Her mouth trembles, then steadies.

“But if you’re here, and if you’re still you, don’t tell me whether to keep you. I already understood that.”

She looks toward the door. Toward me, though she cannot see me there.

“Tell me something else.”

I cannot ask what.

She waits anyway.

The thermos rests on the blanket between her hands and my chest. Its base is not flat; it has carried the old dent for six years, the one from the station bench after we missed the last train at Qingshan. If I can move it, even a little, the dent will turn toward her.

I reach.

The pain is immediate. It feels as though the train has become a narrow wire threaded through my bones. My fingers shake. Behind me, the carriage groans against the terminal, though there is no track beneath it that I can see.

The thermos does not move.

Shuyin lowers her head. Her hair falls forward, hiding her face.

“I can’t keep asking you to prove yourself,” she says. “That isn’t love. That’s fear wearing your clothes.”

The sentence enters me cleanly.

I push again.

The thermos shifts over the blanket. It rolls half an inch, then stops against the fold near my shoulder. The dent turns away from her.

I gather everything I have left and try once more.

The thermos rolls back toward her.

It reaches the edge of the blanket and touches her wrist.

Shuyin freezes.

The movement is small enough to blame on the bed, the blanket, the uneven mattress. Small enough that no one else would have to call it anything. But she has watched this object for nights. She knows its weight. She knows the slope of the bed.

She closes her eyes.

Then she turns the thermos so the faded yellow tape faces her and presses both hands around it.

“All right,” she says.

The words are not an answer to a question I asked. They are an answer to the whole impossible exchange.

She lowers the thermos beside my hand.

“I won’t make you decide for me.”

Her fingers close around mine.

“And I won’t make you stay just because I’m afraid to lose you.”

The room blurs. Not because I am crying. I have no eyes here, or perhaps I have too many. The train window, the hospital light, Shuyin’s bent head—all of them waver together.

She brings my hand to her mouth and kisses my knuckles.

“I love you,” she says. “You don’t have to do anything with that.”

For the first time, I understand what she has been asking from the signs. Not proof that I can return. Not permission to wait forever. She wants to know whether the love between us is still ours if it cannot save either of us.

I press my palm to the invisible barrier.

Shuyin’s hand remains around mine.

The clock moves forward.

At twelve minutes, Fang returns. She pauses in the doorway, carrying no tablet this time. Shuqiao stands behind her with both hands folded against her coat.

Shuyin does not look up. “I’m ready.”

Fang’s gaze goes to the thermos, then to the signed form beneath it. She asks something I cannot hear. Shuyin nods.

The doctor checks the lines. Shuqiao sits on the other side of the bed. Her face is wet, though she seems not to notice.

Shuyin keeps hold of my hand.

“I’m not leaving,” she tells me.

I know what she means. She will remain until the room is quiet. She will not turn the decision into a punishment by fleeing from it. She will let the machines stop, and she will stay to witness what stopping means.

Fang reaches toward the equipment.

The train jolts behind me.

I turn, but the carriage doors are already beginning to close. The white room narrows between them. I step forward, straining against the threshold. The last thing I see is Shuyin bending over my hand, the red hair tie now looped around her wrist instead of the thermos handle.

The doors meet.

The hospital disappears.

There is no darkness beyond them. Only the empty terminal, stretching beneath a ceiling lost in white. The train falls silent around me. Somewhere far away, a machine gives one long, even tone, or perhaps I only remember that sound from the room.

I look at the blank display.

For the first time since I woke aboard this train, there is nowhere left for it to take me.

Behind the closed doors, Shuyin is still holding my hand.

Ahead of me, the terminal has no sign, no clock, and no waiting carriage.

I step away from the window.