If I Stay: 7:13 p.m.–9:06 p.m.

It was Kim who must have braved any number of intimidating bouncers and hipsters to find Adam.

His face, illuminated by the lights, is blank, like someone vacuumed away all his personality, leaving only a mask.

Adam knows Gran and Gramps and the cousins, and I imagine he’ll join the waiting-room vigil later.

So when Adam’s voice reverberates from the hallway outside the ICU, it really wakes everyone up.

“I’m sorry, young man, but visitations are restricted to immediate family.”

I reach for him, on instinct, even though I cannot really touch him.

Kim, who was hovering near the wall, is suddenly at his side, her arms encircling his falling form.

Adam has about a foot and fifty pounds on Kim, but after stumbling for a second, she adjusts to the added burden. She bears it.

“Dad went through the five phases of grieving—denial, anger, acceptance, whatever—in like one day. I think he’s more freaked out that he is old enough to have a daughter who has a boyfriend.”

Unlike me, she cared about the myriad pop musical distinctions: punk, indie, alternative, hard-core, emo-core.

One other category that Kim and I devised was people who tried to be cool and people who did not.

I rode my bike over to Kim’s house to vent. She listened to my diatribe, her expression purposefully blase.

He and Kim remained cordial but distant, no matter how much I tried to sell them on each other.

The funny thing was, I never really bought into Kim’s notion that they were somehow bound together through me—until just now when I saw her half carrying him down the hospital corridor.

It’s only after they disappear around a corner that I rouse myself and trail after them, but they’ve already gone inside the elevator.

I can touch things, even manipulate door handles and the like, but I can’t really feel anything or anybody.

One party is just fine and the other suffers catastrophic injuries .

But whatever and whoever he was early this morning, he isn’t that person any longer. His life has changed irrevocably, too.

Besides, I still have no idea what I will decide, still have no clue how I would determine to stay or not stay in the first place.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t just go to her family?” asks Kim, pragmatic as ever. “I’m sure her grandparents could explain, could get you in to see Mia.”

But I also know that sometimes Adam needs to do things the dramatic way.

He is fond of the Grand Gesture. Like saving up two weeks of pizza- delivery tips to take me to Yo-Yo Ma instead of just asking me out on a regular date. Like decorating my windowsill with flowers every day for a week when I was contagious with the chicken pox.

I’ve seen him get like this before, when he’s writing a new song or is trying to convince me to do something I won’t want to do—like go camping with him—and nothing, not a meteorite crashing into the planet, not even a girlfriend in the ICU, can dissuade him.

It was a different kind of music than I’d played before, challenging, and strangely invigorating.

I looked at her, the nervous look in her eyes betraying the “you wanna piece of me?” smirk on her face, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude to be friends with someone who often seemed to understand me better than I understood myself.

I already missed my parents, Kim, and especially Teddy. He was at that fun stage, wanting to try new things and constantly asking “What’s that?” and saying the most hilarious things.

I’d always believed that the cello was a solitary instrument, but now I was starting to wonder if maybe I was the solitary one.

After dinner and before lights-out every night, Simon and I had been bringing our cellos outside to hold impromptu concerts in the long twilight.

The sheer noisiness of them, of their heavy boots, and loud voices, buzzed on by their sense of urgency, ricochets through the quiet hush of the hospital and breathes some life into the place.

Maybe all hospitals should import groups of rabble-rousing punk rockers to kick-start the languishing patients’ hearts.

“I’m here to offer some rock-and-roll succor to all the people of Portland.”

I’m amazed by their resilience, by their hidden pockets of strength.

Suddenly I think of our first kiss after the Yo-Yo Ma concert, how I didn’t know how badly I’d wanted his lips on mine until the kiss was imminent.

I didn’t realize just how much I was craving his touch, until now that I can almost feel it on me.

I’m so busy celebrating Willow’s arrival that the implication of her being here takes a few moments to sink in, but when it does, it hits me like a jolt of electricity.

Mom went into labor three days before Christmas, and she insisted we go holiday shopping together.

Don’t be scared, she’d whisper. Women can handle the worst kind of pain. You’ll find out one day.

The midwife held the cord taut and told me where to cut.

“It’s like those goslings,” Mom joked. "Imprinting on a zoologist, not the mama goose, because he was the first one they saw when they hatched.”

And when he’d skin a knee or bump his head, if I was around he would not stop crying until I bestowed a magic kiss on the injury, after which he’d miraculously recover.