100 Yellow Doors

12:40 p.m.

It had never been this hard to talk to Beck before, not even before he knew the truth about Julien and Iman. Iman kept glancing sideways at him as he drove, his hands taut on the steering wheel, veins popping in his forearms. She wanted him to say something, to look at her, to do anything, but he was eerily focused: eyes straight ahead, reflections of trees and road in his glasses.

    She almost felt selfish, bringing him here. As a kid, he'd watched his own mother die of cervical cancer, her body slack in a hospital bed, her pulse beeping, beeping, gone. It didn't feel right to bring him into another stuffy hospital room, to see another sick person, to watch somebody else...

    Iman shook her head. She would not allow her mind to go there. Not yet.

    The last time Iman had seen her father, after all, he'd been fine. It was June, his fifty-fifth birthday. Iman and her mother had baked him a strawberry cake, his favorite, and then all of them (minus Hana, who was accompanying her husband on a business trip at the time), had gone mini-golfing. Iman searched through that memory, trying to decide if there was something she should have noticed—a cough, maybe, a slight mental lag? But no. She couldn't think of anything.

    The car rolled to a stop; Iman looked up, and realized they'd gotten off the freeway.

    Her eyes zipped to the GPS navigation. "Wait, Beck," she said, with a hesitant chuckle. "We still have another fifteen miles. What are you doing?"

    "Making a stop," he said, without inflection.

    Iman sputtered. She didn't know what to say. Lost, she watched the light above their heads turn green and Beck hang a left. Behind them, the freeway ramp got further and further away. "Beck," she said. "But my dad—"

    He shut his eyes, just for a moment, as if resting them. "I know," he said, glaring at the road again, so intensely it brought Iman to immediate stillness. "But you haven't eaten at all, have you? You've been gone two days and you haven't eaten."

    "Who cares about me—"

    "I do."

    Iman sat up, one hand against the dash to balance herself, as Beck pulled into the parking lot of an unassuming diner. Only when Beck had yanked the keys from ignition, the engine dying underneath them, did Iman speak up again: "What if I don't get there in time?"

    She saw him swallow.

    He reached across the console, taking Iman's hand. His grip was firm, not painful but not gentle, either, and such an un-Beck-like thing that it startled her like a pebble in her shoe. His voice wasn't his own, either; it was lower, darker, a storm cloud against the cumulus which she'd grown used to. This Beck, she realized, was the one of which the world rarely got a glimpse—this was the younger Beck, the sorrowful Beck, the Beck who'd been able to do nothing but watch as the woman who gave him life lost hers.

    "A few weeks is enough time, Immy," he said, "so please don't hate me when I beg you to eat something. It's too easy to forget about ourselves when someone's sick. Trust me; I know."

    Iman squeezed his hand, her eyes falling to the cross necklace settled against his collarbones: silver, just slightly tarnished with age. "You never talk about her. Your mother."

    "Yes," he said, drawing his hand back suddenly and opening his car door. "Because I loved her very much."

    As they walked into the diner, Beck's shoulder against hers, a supporting arm slipped around her lower back, Iman wondered how it could be that you didn't want to talk about someone you loved.