7: The Hospital Window

The Suzhou clinic was the same low cream-colored two-story building it had always been, with the same rusted bicycle rack at the entrance and the same hand-lettered sign behind the receptionist's window — *Quiet, Please, Patients Resting* — that I had read for the first time on a winter afternoon in old timeline when I had come back from Hangzhou too late and had sat on a bench outside the room my father had been lying in waiting for the doctor to come tell me what we both already knew.

I had walked past that bench three times before the doctor came that day. I knew the bench. The bench had a small cigarette burn on the wooden slat closest to the wall, where some other patient's son had set down a lit cigarette during a similar wait.

I sat on a different bench today. The bench in the small ground-floor waiting area, by the window that looked out onto the camphor tree in the courtyard. My mother was sitting beside me. She had taken off her coat and folded it across her lap. She was wearing the dark blue sweater she always wore on clinic days, the one with the small mended patch at the elbow that had been mended so long ago neither of us remembered when it had torn.

She had not spoken in five minutes. Neither had I.

In the consultation room behind us, with the door closed, my father was undergoing his moved-up first proper examination by Doctor Yan, the senior physician who in old timeline I had not met until October, by which point my father had been on a hospital bed and not on a clinic bench. Doctor Yan in old timeline had been a thin upright man in his early sixties with a habit of reading X-rays at arm's length while pacing the corridor. The Doctor Yan I would meet in twenty minutes was the same man, two months earlier in our shared timeline, with two more months of margin still on his hands.

My mother leaned her shoulder against mine. She did not say anything. She did not need to.

I had taken the train from Hangzhou to Suzhou on the seven o'clock evening high-speed, eaten a cold pork bun on the platform between connections, walked the three kilometers from the Suzhou north station to the family flat with my coat collar up against a stiff late-summer wind, and arrived to find my mother packing a small overnight bag for the morning's clinic visit and my father sitting in the armchair watching the news with one hand pressed against the right side of his ribcage in the small unconscious gesture I knew he made when his liver was bothering him and he did not want anyone to see.

He had not pretended pleasure to see me. He had grunted, set the remote down, and said, *you didn't have to come.*

*I had to come,* I had said.

He had grunted again. He had not argued.

That had been last night. This morning was today. The clinic had taken him on a same-day appointment because my mother had called Auntie Wang at the receptionist's desk, who had been my mother's classmate at the Suzhou No. 4 Middle School, who had moved a non-urgent appointment off the morning slot. *Quiet, please. Patients resting.*

The door of the consultation room opened.

Doctor Yan came out first. He was a tall thin upright man with rimless glasses, the kind who looked five years younger than he was from the front and ten years older from the side. He had a clipboard. He had a small folded piece of A4 paper between two fingers.

I stood up. So did my mother.

"Mrs. Ye," Doctor Yan said. He did not look at me. "Could we speak for a moment in my office. Your son can come if you wish."

"He should come," my mother said.

We went.

***

Doctor Yan's office was a small windowless room with one desk, two chairs across from him, and one filing cabinet with the top drawer slightly open. The clipboard went on the desk. The folded paper went beside it. Doctor Yan sat down. He folded his hands. He looked at my mother.

"Your husband's liver function," he said, "is significantly worse than I would have expected for a man his age presenting with no acute symptoms. ALT is elevated. AST is elevated. The ratio is concerning. The ultrasound shows nodular changes consistent with early cirrhotic activity. We need a more detailed workup — biopsy, hepatology referral, a longer panel — but I want to tell you very honestly, Mrs. Ye, that I am glad you brought him in today rather than next week."

My mother did not move.

I did not move.

The thing I had already known sat on the desk between the three of us with the quiet civic weight of a large stone someone had finally put down where everyone could see it.

"I see," my mother said, after a moment. "How serious."

"Serious enough that we should not delay the workup. I am going to recommend we admit him this afternoon for the biopsy and the panel. Forty-eight hours. We will know more on Thursday morning. Mrs. Ye." Doctor Yan tipped his head a fraction. "I also want to gently ask. Has there been a history of hepatitis. Has he taken any long-term medications. Has there been heavy alcohol use."

"He had hepatitis B in his twenties," my mother said. "Treated. He hasn't had a drink in fifteen years. He takes blood-pressure medication."

"Mn." Doctor Yan made a note. "The hepatitis is the most likely contributor. Sometimes it sits for decades and then expresses. We will know more after the biopsy."

He looked, then, at me. His eyes were kind behind the rimless glasses. He had decided, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, that I was the kind of nineteen-year-old whose mother could afford to lean on him a little, and he was now performing the small respect of including me as an adult in the room.

"I want to also be honest about the financial side," he said, quietly. "Tests of this kind, in this clinic, can be done at the public-insurance rate. The eventual treatment options — depending on what the biopsy shows — may not all be covered. There are pathways. There are also private pathways, if it comes to that. I am telling you this now because the conversation is easier in the first hour than in the third week. If finances are a constraint, we will work within them."

"Thank you," my mother said. The two words were small and even and her voice did not shake.

I said, "How much, ballpark, for the workup."

Doctor Yan glanced at the folded paper between his fingers, opened it, and slid it across the desk. The numbers on the paper were the public-rate estimates for the workup he had just described. The total at the bottom of the paper was a figure I had been preparing myself for; the figure was a quarter of one of my night-shift months.

"We can manage that," I said.

Doctor Yan's eyes went up briefly to mine. His mouth moved in the small way that older doctors' mouths moved when a young man across a desk surprised them with a sentence.

"Can you," he said.

"Yes."

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he folded his hands again.

"Good. Then let us not waste time. We will admit your father this afternoon. Mrs. Ye, the receptionist will help you with the paperwork. Young Ye." He nodded to me. "I will look after him."

"Thank you, Doctor."

***

We admitted my father at three in the afternoon. He did not protest. He had already known, sitting in the armchair last night with his hand on his ribs, that this morning's clinic visit was the visit at which the doctors were going to begin to stop letting him pretend.

He took it the way he took everything. He folded his clothes on the bedside chair with the same neat sharp creases he had used to fold his work shirts when he ran the repair shop. He let my mother arrange his slippers under the bed. He let the nurse take his blood pressure with the small black cuff that buzzed when it inflated. He looked out the window at the camphor tree and did not look at me.

The room was a four-bed ward; only one of the other beds was occupied. The ceiling fan turned on a low setting. Late afternoon light came in through the window in long warm bars. My mother sat in the chair beside the bed and held my father's hand without commenting on holding it. My father let her.

I stood at the window with my back to the room for a minute. I looked at the camphor tree. The tree had been there for forty years. It would be there for forty more. Its leaves were a particular shade of dusty green that I had not seen for a long time. Across the courtyard, on the second floor of the building opposite, an old woman in a flowered nightgown was sitting up in her own bed eating an orange a wedge at a time.

"Cangtian," my father said behind me.

I turned.

His eyes were still on the camphor tree, not on me. His hands were folded over the blanket on his lap. He looked thinner under the hospital blanket than he had in the armchair last night. He was forty-seven. He had been forty-seven in old timeline, of course, on this same date; he had also looked thinner than a man of forty-seven ought to look, and the looking-thinner had been a thing my mother and I had been pretending not to notice for two years.

"Mn," I said.

"I have a question." His eyes shifted, then, to me. They were the eyes of a man who knew things were less negotiable than they had been the day before, and who had decided not to pretend they were still negotiable. "How."

"How what, Pa."

"How can you manage the workup."

I felt my mother's eyes on me too. I had not yet told either of them about the game money. I had not yet told either of them anything about the game at all. The unopened SOHO box was still in our small flat, in the corner of the kitchen where my mother had set it last night when I had walked in with it under one arm — she had assumed it was a school computer-lab kit. I had not corrected her.

I took the panda mug out of my coat pocket. I had brought it in a paper bag, because I had wanted to sit beside my father and drink something out of a cup that was not the hospital's pale green plastic. I set it on the bedside table.

"There's a game," I said. "Tianyu Tech. The new release. I bought a starter helmet last week."

My father's eyes did not move.

"It pays."

"It pays."

"Some players make money. The ones who are good at it. I am — I have been very good at it. I have already made a small amount, two days in. I will make more. It will cover the workup. If it covers more, it will cover more. You don't have to worry about the costs."

He looked at me for a long beat.

He said, finally, "Study. Don't worry."

I felt, for one immediate ridiculous moment, the small flush of a nineteen-year-old boy whose father has dismissed his offer with the same eight syllables he had dismissed it with at fifteen and at seventeen and at every age in between. Then I let the flush go. He was not dismissing me. He was — he was the man he was. He could not say *thank you* to a son who had walked in with a financial answer to a financial question; he was a Pingjiang Road shopkeeper and he had been a Pingjiang Road shopkeeper for thirty years and the shopkeepers of Pingjiang Road did not say *thank you* for that kind of thing. He said *study, don't worry* instead, and the *don't worry* was the thank-you.

"I won't worry," I lied.

He grunted.

My mother's hand on his hand tightened briefly. She did not look at me. She knew, the way she knew everything she did not say, that the conversation she had just witnessed was something to be filed and not to be commented on.

She said, quietly, to the camphor tree, "Cangtian, fetch your father a thermos of warm water from the nurses' station. He will need it later."

I went to fetch the thermos.

In the corridor I passed the bench with the cigarette burn. I did not sit on it. I walked past it to the nurses' station and waited my turn behind a young man in a black jacket who was negotiating with a nurse about a different patient. He had a notebook in his hand and a pen tucked behind his ear. I noted his face out of habit. I would not see him again — he was nobody, a nephew or a son's friend on an errand — but two years from now I would learn to do these small file-and-release glances at every face in every corridor of any building that mattered, because every face in every corridor was potentially a face I would need to remember in a courtroom or a press conference, and the habit had to start somewhere.

The nurse handed me a thermos. I thanked her. I went back to the ward.

My mother was leaning her head briefly against the pillow next to my father's shoulder. Her eyes were closed. My father's free hand had come up to rest, very lightly, on the back of her head. The afternoon sun came in through the window and laid a long warm bar across both of them.

I stood in the doorway with the thermos for the small space of three breaths.

Then I crossed the room quietly, set the thermos on the bedside table beside the panda mug, and went to the window.

The camphor tree rustled very faintly in a small wind.

Across the courtyard, on the second floor, the old woman in the flowered nightgown had finished her orange and was wiping her hands on a tissue.

I did not turn around. I stood at the window and did not breathe particularly hard, but the cradle band against my ribcage — I had not removed it since the morning, more out of forgetfulness than intent — registered a small sustained climb in my heart rate that lasted for two minutes.

"Cangtian," my father said behind me, after a while.

"Mn."

"The window is open."

"It is, Pa."

"Close it. There's a draft. Your mother feels the draft."

I closed the window.