I heard eomma's voice. "Suzy!"

I sat up quickly, before I was fully awake. I felt wonderful, like I'd slept for hours, or taken a nap on the beach. The light of the hospital room was blinding, but it didn't bother me. It took me a second to remember where I was and why, and even after I did, the feeling of peace did not disappear.

How could I feel so amazing? I couldn't have been asleep long. Or at least, Jin couldn't have, because the nurses would have come in to wake him two minutes after I'd failed to do so.

"Your shoes," eomma said, frowning in disapproval. I looked down. I was wearing black ankle boots that weren't the cleanest, and yet here they were, defiling a hospital bed. Eomma doesn't like dirty shoes anywhere - but especially not in a setting that's aiming for sterile.

"Oops," I said.

"The nurses told me the Kims are in some kind of big meeting with all the doctors and they'll be back any minute," eomma hissed. "Get off the bed."

I slid down. Jin slept on. It was probably getting close to the time when I should wake him, I thought. Eomma brushed the dirt from the bed with her palm.

"You came back?" I asked.

"I was worried about you," she said. "I left work a little early. I thought I'd check in."

At this, I felt like Eomma had snatched off a warm quilt I'd been cozily sleeping under. "A little early?" I said. Last time I'd checked the clock, it was 2:23. Eomma leaves her office at five. What time is it now?"

"Three-thirty. Actually, a little after."

"How long did we sleep?" I screeched. Eomma just stared at me, afraid of my voice. She didn't understand. it was impossible for her to be right about the time.

"Jin!" I said, rushing to the side of the bed. "Jin, wake up!" I shook his shoulder. Gently, because of how weak he was. Then more firmly, because I was panicking. I pressed the button to call a nurse. Then I stepped into the hall. I shouted, "Nurse! Nurse!" because nothing was happening. Jin wasn't opening his eyes.

No one came for what felt like forever. I remember eomma's voice: "What's going on?" I remember thinking, How does she not know? She's my mother. She's supposed to know everything.

Then the nurse with the puppies on her scrubs was frowning, running. The room filled. There were questions with no answers. Someone was on a phone, paging doctors, requesting medications, supplies. A nurse I'd never seen before attached a syringe to the port in the tube coming out of Jin's arm.

"What are you doing to him?" I asked, though I knew I should just let them work. "What is that?"

"A stimulant," the nurse said. She was calm, with her hair brushed neatly into a bun at the base of her neck.

And just as Mrs. Kim burst into the room trailing Jin's team of doctors, all at a run, Jin shot up in bed.

Bolt upright. For an instant, I swear, even his messy hair straightened. He gasped for air like someone had held him underwater nearly to the point of drowning. His eyes were open wide. His fingers - I remember noticing them - were straining, his arms extended like he was grasping for something out of reach.

He let out this noise. I hate to even think of it. It was part moan, part strangled cry. It was a noise I can only describe as . Internal. It was the kind of noise you make when you are rolling a two-hundred-pound rock off her own crushed leg.

"Jin!" Mrs. Kim shouted. While Mr. Kim hung back, gripping the chair rail on the wall behind him, she charged to the bed and grabbed Jin's hands, moving quickly, in the way of a nurse used to handling patients. "You're here. You're here," she repeated. "Stay with us, baby, stay here." Mr. Kim was shifting from foot to foot, as if he wanted to run but couldn't look away.

Jin's straight back relaxed and his eyes found his mom's. Then his dad's. He shook his head as if he'd been swimming and was getting the hair off his face. Then he slumped forward into his mother's strong arms.

"You're here," Mrs. Kim repeated.

A pair of orderlies rushed into the room with a gurney. And then a nurse with a bucket of towels and shaving scream. I learned later she was tasked with shaving Jin's head in preparation for emergency surgery. "What, him?" she said. She looked at the nearest nurse, then at Jin. "I thought this was a Code Seven."

Eomma was the one who explained. "He just sat up," she whispered. "Something the other nurse gave him."

Yet another nurse pushed past the orderlies, this one wheeling a cart with what I thought was a cash register on top until I realized it was a machine I'd seen used a million times in that TV show Grey's Anatomy. A crash cart.

I actually thought for a second that the nurse with the crash cart was just storing it in Jin's room, that she had used it on another patient and was returning it. That made more sense than what I learned later.

You see, Jin hadn't been sleeping. He's been flatlining. Not for long - thirty-five, forty seconds. not enough time for brain damage, but not enough to scare everyone on the floor half to death. Enough for his mom, hearing the coded announcement and knowing what it meant, to believe that Jin had died.

Mr. Kim elbowed his way through the crowd to lay a hand on the rail of Jin's bed. Mrs. Kim was crying, gasping for air, as if relief was choking her. The nurses had stepped between her and Jin. They were making Jin lie down. Eomma moved behind them. She put a hand on my arm.

A doctor I didn't recognize was paging through Jin's chart, and Dr. Kat was just watching the whole scene unfold with one hand on his chin.

I learned later that during a shift change at the nurses' station, someone had accidentally turned off the timer on Jin's monitor, so when he and I were lying on the bed together, he had fallen deeper into sleep than he was supposed to.

Later, Jin would tell me his mother thought the deep sleep was what saved him, but I knew it wasn't. I went so far as to re-create the timing, repeating every word we'd spoken and pacing out steps I'd taken. This convinced me that Jin had slipped away - started to flatline - only after I'd let go of him and climbed down from the bed. His heart had stopped and his breathing had ceased only when I'd gotten up. He must have been holding on because of me, and when I'd let go of him, he had died.

Dr. Kat shone a light in Jin's eyes, asked if he knew where he was. "The hospital," Jin replied easily, all traces of slurred speech gone.

"How long have you been here?"

"I'm not sure. I remember the team dinner. I wasn't feeling well."

"I'm going to palpate your skull. Please let me know if you feel any tenderness or pain." He put his thumbs under Jin's jaw, pressed the base of his neck with his fingertips. "Anything?" he said.

"Not a thing."

He moved his thumbs to Jin's temples. "Here?"

"No."

"Who was president the year you were born?"

"Bush."

"Who's president now?"

"Michael Jackson?" No one in the room laughed except Mr. Kim, who immediately apologized. Jin rolled his eyes. "It's Clinton."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

For the first time during this series of questions, Jin paused. He looked over at me. "Suzy," he said, as if he was remembering me from a long time before. "I didn't know you were here." He furrowed his brow. "The last few days . . . I don't remember them all that clearly. It's not that I don't remember being here. It's just . . ."

"Your body was in a state of severe distress." Mrs. Kim was leaning down from behind, the closest she could get to him in the sea of nurses and residents measuring, checking, updating. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

"What happened to me?" Jin asked. He looked around the room, which was rapidly clearing out - the orderlies with the gurney and the nurse with the crash cart departing, floor nurses getting called into other rooms, residents and med students checking their pagers, stepping out to use the phone at the nurses' station. Finally, it was just Dr. Kat, the nurse with the puppy scrubs, Jin's mom and dad, eomma, and me.

"We don't actually know," Dr. Kat said, looking Jin in the eye in a way that I had to assume was reassuring to him. "There may have been a bleed, or at least some swelling, in your cranium that caused you to be symptomatic. No concussion was observed from your fall on the stage, and though your behavioral response concerned us enough to order scans, we found nothing unusual. Clearly someone was going on with you. We just don't know what."

Jin's gaze strayed to me again. "I fell on stage?"

I stared.

"Appa?" Jin said. "You're back?"

If he didn't remember the fall . . If he didn't remember that his dad had been here for days . . . If he didn't remember me either . . . What did he remember?

Then Jin laughed.

It was a nervous laugh. I'd seen Jin nervous before, but I'd never seen him laugh in response to that feeling. Usually he'd do the opposite, looking at whatever he was afraid of straight on, willing himself to stay calm, tell the truth, get what he wanted.

I walked to the bed, put a hand on the mattress next to him. I didn't touch him. But I leaned over, close to his face, so that even if everyone else in the room could hear us, there would at least be the illusion of intimacy. "Do you remember that dream you've been having?" I said. "About the war?"

"Dream?" Jin said.

"It's no unusual to lose memories in a situation like this," Dr. Kat dipped in to explain. "In situations of trauma."

I looked at Jin. He met my gaze and then quickly looked away. but it was enough for me to pinpoint what was missing: it was in his eyes. before, they had always flashed and sparkled, suggesting that he knew more than people might assume. Now his eyes were flat, staring, fixed forward in the way of someone who can't see. Younger, less knowing eyes.

"Stop looking at me like that, Su." He laughed that nervous laugh again.

"You can lose a memory," Dr. Kat continued. "No one yet has a precise, or even rough, understanding of how memory works. All we know is that the memories are likely still there, stored in various regions of the brain. What you lose is your ability to reassemble them."

"You don't remember the dream?" I asked Jin again quietly.

He shrugged. "I guess I kind of remember that I had a dream," he said. "Was it intense?"

"She told us that you were convinced this dream was real," Mrs. Kim said. Using "she," as if I weren't in the room. "She said you had delusions about predicting the future."

Jin looked at me again. "I did?"

"You weren't exactly seeing the future," I said. "It was more like you could remember it."

"Did I think -" he began. His face, gray only moments earlier, was now nearly scarlet with embarrassment. "I thought I had time-traveled?"

Mr. Kim drew his head back and shuddered, like he was recoiling from the sight of something revolting.

"You have no memory of that now?" Mrs. Kim asked. I half believed she had her fingers crossed behind her back, begging the universe for the return of her firstborn son from the land of crazy. Just as I had mine crossed as I prayed, Please remember, please, please.

"No," Jin said. He looked at me, as if I would tell him if that was the right answer.

And I guess I smiled. Maybe I shrugged.

How do you react when a face you have touched with your hands, your mouth, eyes you have memorized, imagined, stared into, watched watching you - how do you react when it's become the face of a stranger?

"If you don't mind," said Dr. Kat to Jin, "I'd like to continue my exam."

Jin nodded as Dr. Kat asked to him the fingers on his left hand together with those on his right and follow Dr. Kat's penlight with his eyes again and again and again.

Watching Jin alive and healthy in that moment did nothing to comfort me. I knew without question that somewhere, at some point in the future, my Jin was gone.

I backed out of the room, saying goodbye to no one, not even waiting to hear what more Dr. Kat would say. I couldn't stay here, surrounded by everyone's joy, a moment longer.

I'd forgotten about eomma, though. She caught up to me as I was heading to elevator. "Suzy?" she said.

How much of what I felt inside showed on my face? Could she read what was there?"

"You're leaving now?" she asked. I opened my mouth to make some excuse - that I was sick, that I suddenly remembered some homework I'd left undone - but I came up with nothing. Like Jin, I felt myself gulping air, gasping with the effort to breathe. I collapsed into tears.

Eomma held me as I cried. She's shorter than me, and I stopped to lay my head on her shoulder, the finger of her delicate hands smoothing my hair as my body shook. I never told her - not even years later - why I was crying. But I believe on some fundamental level she knew.

Maybe she, like Jin, had been able to see into the future. Maybe that was what she'd been trying to tell me all year, that my heart was going to be broken, and that I could have no idea how bad it would feel. But that she did. She'd known what was coming and she was there for me. I didn't have to be there alone.

I couldn't have imagined I would need that kind of comfort from her. And perhaps pride would have prevented me from accepting it if I had been in a position to hold back.

I wasn't.

The sobs seemed to come from a bottomless well. I felt them stretching my mouth until I thought my lips would crack. My jaw ached. Eomma held me tight, her tiny body surprisingly strong, murmuring over and over, "I know, sweetheart, I know."