“My name is Martin,” I said. “I’m — I’m a friend of Maya’s. Is she all right?”
Another pause. Then the woman exhaled, and something in the sound made my chest unlock.
“She’s all right. She’s asleep. I’m her mother.” A beat. “She told me about you, Martin. She talks about you all the time.”
I sat down on the porch steps. The flowers for Elena were still in the truck.
“Maya’s in the hospital,” her mother said. “Appendix — it ruptured yesterday morning. She’s fine, she’s going to be fine, but she’s been asking for two people.” A small laugh, wet around the edges. “Me. And you.”
I don’t remember driving. I remember the parking lot, and the smell of the elevator, and a nurse pointing down a hall.
She was sixteen the way sixteen looks when it’s asleep in a hospital bed — smaller. Tubes, monitors, a stuffed rabbit I hadn’t known about. Her mother stood up when I came in.
“She said you’d sound like her grandpa,” her mother whispered. “She was right.”
Maya’s eyes opened. She looked at me for a second like she was still dreaming. Then she grinned — the full, gap-toothed grin I’d only ever heard through a phone.
“You’re shorter than you sound,” she said.
I laughed, and it came out as something else, and her mother put a hand on my shoulder like we’d known each other for years.
“My grandpa died the March before your Elena,” Maya said, half-asleep. “That’s why I picked up. That first Sunday. You breathed like he breathed.”
“She asks about Elena a lot,” her mother said quietly. “I think she likes having grandparents again.”
We stayed until the nurse kicked us out. Her mother walked me to the elevator.
“She kept your number as ‘Martin,'” she said. “No last name. Just Martin. When the ambulance came yesterday, she told me — she said, ‘If Martin calls, tell him I’m okay.'”
In the parking lot I sat in my truck and called Elena’s number. It went to voicemail — Maya’s voicemail now, her voice bright: “Hey, it’s Maya, leave it!”
I didn’t leave a message. I just listened, and for eleven seconds nobody was gone.
I still call on Sundays. Some weeks Maya answers. Some weeks I get the greeting, and I listen to it twice.
My daughter came with me to the hospital last week. She brought Maya soup and stayed an hour, and on the way home she said, “Okay, Dad.” Just that. Okay.
Elena’s contact is still in my phone. I’m never deleting it.
Some numbers you keep because of who’s gone. Some you keep because of who answered.
This is a work of fiction, written with AI assistance.
