Tomas

Tomas is Cima’s husband, a musician whose death during the pandemic left their shared future unrealized. His story reaches the reader through Cima’s memories: a marriage organized around postponed plans and small rituals, then broken when he died calling for her in a hospital ward. The distance between the life they expected and the absence she carries becomes central to his place in the novel.

Identity and Plans

Tomas had completed his dissertation and passed his oral examinations just as the first cases appeared in Newark. He was waiting to become a full-time faculty member; he and Cima were also waiting to have a child. These ambitions were not distant abstractions but the next steps they expected their life together to take. The pandemic arrived at the point when those plans seemed close enough to shape their days, yet remained unfinished.

Cima describes him as a musician and her husband, and remembers their home in Brooklyn Heights, on Cranberry Street. They could see the skyline and bridge from their windows. In retrospect, that apartment and the workaday routines around it belong to a world that feels almost impossibly secure, although at the time they were often stressed. Tomas’s life is therefore recalled not as a public biography but through the intimate scale of a marriage: shared decisions, familiar places, and a future they assumed was still ahead.

A Life in the Waiting

Before the pandemic, Tomas and Cima spent weekends in the mountains near Keene Valley. They stayed in a white clapboard cottage with a view of Noonmark, climbed its ledgy trail on Saturdays, and rode their single-gear bicycles to a cold-water swimming place. The repeated excursions were part of their life together, not grand occasions. Their ease came through the habits they returned to while waiting for Tomas to finish his degree and for Cima to have a child.

That waiting acquires a different meaning after his death. Cima remembers believing they were postponing the real work of living until their circumstances changed. Looking back, she sees the supposedly provisional years—the rides, the climbs, the weekends—as a particularly sweet life already in progress. Tomas’s death makes their plans impossible, but it also changes the value of what they had: the ordinary interval they treated as preparation becomes the part of the future they actually got to share.

Death and Separation

When Tomas became ill, Cima was in New York with her mother and father. Her mother was dying, and, before the scale of the crisis was understood, Cima decided to stay with them rather than fly back. Travel home was no longer possible by the time she knew what was happening. Tomas died in the ward calling for her. Joel, a doctor who ran the hospital wing, contacted Cima and offered to have Tomas cremated and hold his ashes until she could return.

Cima was grateful for that arrangement and imagined going upstate to scatter the ashes in John’s Brook, where she and Tomas had spent weekends. The plan links his death to a place associated with their shared life, but the account does not say that she carried it out. His absence is marked both by the call she could not answer and by the intended journey she could not yet make.

Memory and the Dream of Tomas

Later, Cima tells Hig that she repeatedly dreamed of Tomas dying and calling for her. In the dream, she imagines herself present but unable to help, and then imagines ending his suffering herself. This is Cima’s dream, not an account of what happened in the ward: the stated circumstances of Tomas’s actual death are that he died calling for her while she was away.

The dream gives form to the guilt and grief attached to that separation. Its return brings the lost moment into Cima’s present, but does not change the known facts of Tomas’s death. When she recounts it, her composure breaks and she collapses into Hig’s arms. Tomas remains absent from the scene, yet the memory of his call shapes the encounter between the living: Cima’s private grief becomes something another person must witness.

Narrative Significance

Tomas is established through a contrast between an ordinary life that had begun to feel like a prelude and the irrevocable interruption of the pandemic. The dissertation, hoped-for faculty position, imagined child, city apartment, and mountain weekends make his death more than a biographical endpoint: they specify the future that Cima and Tomas expected but never reached together. His story also shows how loss persists in a survivor’s account—not as a recovered scene of his final hours, but as a known fact repeatedly re-entered through memory, plans for his ashes, and a distressing dream.