Chapter 16

"So you've knownthis guy what, three days now?"

"With seventeen years between each day." Daniel pressed his nose against the living room window. Snow whirled against the glass, its wild dance matching the giddiness inside him. "I feel like I know him better than I know anyone else. Except you and Hailey, of course."

Vanessa's sigh echoed through his phone speaker. "I just don't want you to get hurt again."

"I will get hurt again. We all will. That's part of life."

"Gee, really?"

He flinched. "Sorry." They'd forgiven each other for their mutually inflicted pain, but still… "I'll be careful."

She laughed. "You've never been careful. Did you get your hair cut for your big Zoom date?"

"It's not a date." Of course it was a date. "I trimmed it myself, as usual." He touched the roots of his hair to check for lingering shower dampness. "Thanks to YouTube, I'm finally getting the hang of self-barbering. It's good enough for outdoor photo shoots—when I wear a hat, anyhow. But I don't know if it's Joel-worthy."

"I'm sure he'll love your caveman hair," she said. "Besides, he's probably already seen it in your selfies."

"We made a pact not to stalk each other online yet."

Vanessa chuckled. "Then you're both in for a big surprise."

What did that mean? Had she looked up Joel just now while they were talking?

"What are you wearing for this not-date?" she asked.

"Blue chambray shirt."

"The light-blue one or the dark-blue one?"

"The medium-blue one. I know," he added, cutting off the inevitable fashion lecture. "I'm tragically basic." His phone alarm dinged. "Three o'clock. Gotta go. Love you, my queen."

"Love you, too, buddy-o. Good luck!"

He dashed down the hall and into his office. His laptop screen displayed the Zoom link, which he clicked as he slid into his seat.

One last hair-check in the video preview window gave him a sensory flashback, to the feel of Joel's silky waves between his fingers. Had Joel also grown out his hair during the pandemic? What would that even look like on such an impeccably coiffed man?

His cursor hovered over the Join With Video button, the black arrow trembling with his hand. In a moment, their eyes would meet—as much as eyes could ever meet over Zoom—and those old feelings would swamp him like a tsunami.

And then what? What if Joel didn't feel the same way?

He clicked.

Joel's Zoom box showed a room teeming with life—houseplant vines climbing over floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with small tanks containing logs and rocks. In two of the terrariums, hand-size spiders were plastered against the front glass.

Closer to the screen, an empty black office chair spun slowly.

"Joel?"

"I'm short one tarantula," came a voice offscreen. "Lady Hale escaped again."

"Do you need to reschedule so you can deal with that?"

"Nah, I know all her hiding places." A muffled dog bark sounded in the background. "Not now, Florey! I promise I'm not in danger. Enough with the hypervigilance already."

"Can I do anything?" An absurd question.

"Found her!" The chair shifted away from the screen, and a brown loafer rose from the bottom. "They like shoes. Gimme a sec to put her back in her house."

Joel's torso moved in and out of sight as he retrieved another terrarium and placed it—now containing his upside-down shoe—back on the middle shelf. "There." He sat in the chair and zipped back over to the desk, spinning to face the camera as he neared. "I was cleaning her house and—oh my God, you silver fox!"

Daniel put a hand to his own hair as he stared at the screen. Joel had the same dark, dancing eyes and impish smile as always, with the addition of a full but closely trimmed beard. All these features were accentuated by his completely empty scalp.

"Wow." He exhaled hard. "It's so good to see you. What happened to…"

Joel furrowed his dark brows. "What happened to what?"

"Your hair."

"What about it?"

"It—" Son of a bitch. "You're fucking with me, aren't you?"

Joel's grin lit up the Zoom. "I'm seeing if you can say the word bald, but you're clearly terrified of the concept."

"I'm not—okay, maybe a little. But it suits you." It was true, now that he'd had a moment to adjust. "Especially with the beard. So what made you decide…"

"I didn't decide, not at first." Still smiling, Joel ran a hand over his smooth head, finishing with a friendly pat. "I kinda had cancer."

Daniel's heart flopped over. "‘Kinda'?"

"Not ‘kinda.' I was using that word to soften the blow. Did it work?"

"No! Joel, I'm sorry. That sucks."

"It sucked so much." Joel's eyes bugged out comically, like he was describing a calamitous workday instead of a deadly disease. "My hair started falling out from chemo, and then the follicles felt like pipe cleaners jabbing into my skull, so I had it all shaved off, and when I looked in the mirror I was like, ‘Hello there, real me!' So I kept shaving it." He flapped his hand in a dismissive gesture. "It was thinning big-time before that, anyway. I was just helping things along. Fun fact, though? Having no hair can be a lot more work than having some hair."

"You look different, but also more like yourself. And kind of like Michael Stipe. But much younger." Probably. Daniel hadn't seen a picture of R.E.M.'s lead singer since the band broke up ten years ago. Regardless, Joel was a young-looking fifty, his skin smooth apart from a few laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.

"Hey, did you know he had a song last year with Big Red Machine?" Joel kept talking, something about a lockdown memories lyric, while Daniel drank in the sight of him. Joel's build was still slim and wiry, shown off here by his tight black long-sleeved T-shirt reading Be Kind to All Kinds above a colorful assortment of illustrated insects.

He stopped to take a breath, and Daniel jumped in. "So about the cancer—I mean, if you're okay talking about it."

"I'm very okay talking about it. I had Hodgkin lymphoma."

Had.Past tense. Thank God.

Joel continued, his tone as animated as ever, and his tempo just as rapid. "Most people who get it are way younger than me, so it's basically the cool-kids cancer. And it's very treatable."

"So, you're okay now? You've survived?"

"Technically I won't be a survivor for a few more years. But it's in complete remission, and I feel great." He patted his chest over his breastbone. "If I relapse, there are other treatments that usually do the trick. So overall, the prognosis is excellent."

Despite Joel's buoyancy, Daniel's face felt suddenly hot, and he took a quick sip from his ever-present water bottle. "Now I'm projecting back and freaking out about you dying. What if I'd looked you up on Facebook and there'd been a public post by your sister about how you weren't with us anymore and that in lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to, I don't know, an insect sanctuary?"

Joel's laughter rang out exactly as it had in Daniel's memory. "I should totally put an insect sanctuary in my will."

Daniel had to change the subject or risk passing out. "Speaking of critters, are those all yours back there?"

"Temporarily. When we had to leave campus, the biology faculty took home all the live animals in the department. It was either spiders and scorpions or rats and mice. Rodents would've driven my dogs nuts—they're both part terrier." He sighed. "That was ten months ago."

Luna jumped up on the desk and paraded in front of the laptop.

"Hey, kitty." Joel reached toward the camera and wiggled his fingers. "Virtual scritchies."

"Luna does this during every Zoom call. Every. Single. One." He pulled her favorite flannel blanket off his desk and put it in his lap. "I can't believe it's been ten months since I had an in-person meeting."

"Tell me about it," Joel said. "I had just finished treatment when Covid hit, so I'd already been isolating except to go to work."

Daniel lifted his arm so Luna could step onto the blanket. "Chemo takes a wrecking ball to your immune system, doesn't it?"

"Totally, and having cancer of the lymphatic system—the thing that fights off infections—makes it even worse." Joel gathered up what looked like terrarium cleaning supplies as he spoke. "In 2019 I stayed here while my mom went to Connecticut to see my sister's family for Thanksgiving. I was too tired to travel, and frankly, a giant bird corpse nauseates me on the best of days." He pointed the scrub brush toward his open mouth and made a gagging noise. "Mom didn't want to go without me, but I insisted. Now I'm glad she went." He blinked rapidly. "What about you? Did you go home for Christmas last month or play it safe?"

"No, I—" He brushed a pair of black cat hairs off his keyboard. "My mother's not speaking to me right now."

Joel sat up straight. "Why not?"

He opted for the same softening word Joel had used. "She kinda went QAnon. Only, not ‘kinda.' More like all in."

"Whoa." Joel leaned on his elbows and brought his steepled hands to his chin, his brow creased with concern. "I've heard that's hard on families."

Daniel frowned. It had been a real charge to see Joel the way he'd remembered him: all fired up and bubbling over, even when talking about his own mortality. Now Daniel had gone and deflated him with this news.

"Mom's always been fringe-y, but not in a political way—honestly, I could never tell if she was right-wing or left-wing." He stroked Luna as she turned in a circle on his lap. "She just latched onto whatever sounded good at the moment."

"Like Bigfoot?"

"I told you about that?"

"Back in 1987." Another bark came in the background. "So sorry, be right back," Joel said as he sprang out of his chair. Offscreen, there was a creak of a door, then he reappeared carrying a shaggy black-and-white dog with sharp, serious eyes. "This is Florey. Like her namesake, she's been a lifesaver."

Did he mean lifesaver literally? "Who's her namesake?"

"Howard Florey, one of the dudes who developed penicillin." The dog licked Joel's chin and wagged her tail. He waved one of her paws at the camera, then set her on the floor. "Anyway, I've heard that people who go for conspiracies are looking for a way to make sense of the world. Real science is frustrating because it's all about uncertainty and ambiguity. So it can be tempting to turn to a theory that claims to have all the answers."

Daniel nodded. "And the evil genius of QAnon is that anyone in the community can help figure out those answers. Mom never went to college, but she's super smart—I used to have an A rating in chess and I've never beaten her. QAnon taps into everything she loves and fears."

"That's scary," Joel said. "Also, remind me not to play you in chess."

"Eventually all our conversations revolved around the same topics. Whenever I called her, I'd brace myself for the latest rant about child trafficking or Operation Mockingbird."

"Operation—"

"Don't ask." He scratched Luna's head to calm himself. "At first I would change the subject. That worked until she became like a missionary—she said her job was to make sure everyone in her life was fully informed." The words kept tumbling out in a verbal landslide. "The last straw was me going to a Black Lives Matter protest in Omaha and posting about it on Facebook. She called me, rage-weeping because she'd lost her only child to antifa."

"Holy shit. My mom—" Joel cut himself off.

"Your mom what?"

Joel waved a hand. "Sorry to derail. We were talking about your mother."

They hadn't discussed Dr. Mendel yet. Was she treating patients through the pandemic? No, she'd be almost eighty by now, surely retired.

"About losing you to antifa," Joel prompted.

"Right. Anyhow, then Mom got personal. She said I'd be able to see the truth if I wasn't such a-a degenerate." His throat tightened on the word, then doubly so at the sound of Joel's gasp. "She's never forgiven me for taking up with Corey—destroying her perfect family, she says—even though Vanessa and I were already separated when I met him."

"That's awful, Daniel. No one should be fifty years old and still not accepted by their parents for who they are."

To hear it spelled out like that gave Daniel a pain right between his brows. "Yeah, so…" Where was he? "During the Capitol attack, Hailey and Vanessa and I kept calling and texting my mom to see if she was there. She never answered. Finally that night my aunt texted us to say Mom got my voicemails—she'd blocked my number on her phone but not with her carrier, so I could still leave messages—and no, she wasn't in DC that day, but she wished she was. And not to bother calling again."

"You poor thing." Joel covered his face with both hands. "I'm such an asshole."

"What? Why?"

"I reached out to you during the attack thinking you'd calm me down."

"Why does that make you an asshole?"

Joel dropped his hands. "Because I thought you would care less than I did, less than my other friends did. I made assumptions based on what I saw seventeen years ago. I've changed so much in that time, but I pictured you staying the same."

Whoa. "You thought because I wasn't anti–Iraq War that I wouldn't mind an assault on democracy?"

"I don't know. Maybe? Everyone is so tribal these days. Including me." Joel planted his fingertips against the side of his head and squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm just so…fucking…angry."

"About the Capitol attack?"

"No. Yes. That's part of it." He took a deep breath but didn't continue.

"You want to tell me about the other parts?"

Joel looked so forlorn, the answer had to be yes.

An electronic ding sounded, and Joel glanced away. "Not now. I've got a faculty meeting in ten minutes." He shook his head, as though trying to clear a dizzy spell. "I need to look over some notes before the meeting, plus make a huge cup of coffee."

"So, do you wanna…"

"Do this again? Hell yeah." Joel gave a rueful smile. "Can I make a confession? I purposely scheduled this Zoom call right before the meeting in case we didn't click the way we used to."

"We clicked on the phone."

"But I thought once we saw each other…" Joel looked down, appearing genuinely bashful.

"In case we were no longer hot?"

"You were hotter to begin with, and you've aged better than I have."

"No way. I've got wrinkles."

"From doing interesting things in the sun your whole life," Joel said. "You have cowboy face, which is timelessly hot."

"But you look younger. You still have the face of a—" What number would be flattering yet plausible?

"Forty-year-old?"

"Thirty-nine, tops."

"I'll take it." Joel fluttered a hand against his chest. "I try to stay young at heart."

"Not many fifty-year-olds still say ‘dude.'"

"I will ‘dude' until the day I die. See ya!" Joel's box blooped out.

Daniel quit Zoom but kept his eyes on the screen, constructing the new Joel Mendel in his mind, putting pieces together like a collage until they formed a vivid picture of the man he had become.

Luna bumped her head against his elbow.

"Okay, let's go play."

Out in the living room, a patch of blue sky caught his eye. He went over to the window, winging Luna's jingly ball into the kitchen for her to chase.

The storm had finally passed, heading east over the wide gray Missouri River. Below him, Omaha lay pristine and white and motionless, its grimy bustle scrubbed and stilled by a shroud of snow. A faint, mellow-yellow gleam painted the buildings across the street, the sun putting on a brave face before it set.