Healing the Pakhan (The Healing Touch #8)
CHAPTER 1
Elena
◆
I keep count because nobody in this borough teaches you how to be afraid quietly.
I learned by myself, in stairwells, in NICU corridors, in the small hour after a code has been called.
The medallion is cold against my sternum until the body warms it; the chain has been resoldered twice; Saint Raphael has a hairline crack across one wing where I dropped him on labor-and-delivery tile six years ago and did not bend to pick him up for forty-one minutes.
Buttons on the cardigan, twice. Five each time.
Spoon in the espresso pot, two scoops. Five thirty-eight a.m. I lift my chin to the chrome above the sink and the woman in it lifts hers back.
Auburn knot at the nape. Yellow pencil through the knot.
The face of a person who does not yet know what she is walking toward, only that she is walking toward it on time.
I touch the medallion once at the V of the scrub top to be sure of him.
I drink the coffee standing.
---
St. Jude's Memorial sits on the corner of East Sixty-Eighth and First, the limestone of the East Tower the color of a chest X-ray at five hours of sleep.
The brass plaque at the ambulance bay reads MEMORIAL TO THE SAINTS OF UNCERTAIN OUTCOMES, and I read it as I have read every plaque in every hospital I have stood at the door of: as a question I am being asked.
South stairwell. Four flights to surgical. Forty-two steps from the stairwell exit to the locker room door; the number lands before my hand reaches the knob.
The locker room is two rows of steel lockers in industrial green, a bench polished by a quarter-century of nurses' weight. Third row down. Second from the end. Two-fourteen. A square of masking tape on the door with my last name in blue Sharpie in a hand that is not mine.
The ceil-blue scrub stack sits on the bench in front of the locker. It has not been unfolded. Someone has set it out as a gesture I am meant to find and not to comment on. I find it. I do not comment.
Above the stack, propped against the locker's vent, a small white index card. Three words in a careful Caribbean hand.
Mija, OR-1, 8:45.
I change. I fold the cardigan onto the bench.
The pediatric pin I have worn for four years is still clipped to the lanyard; I do not unclip it.
I straighten it. The pin is ceil-blue enamel, a teddy-bear silhouette over a red stethoscope, the clasp worn bright where Sister Mary Catherine pinned it to me on my first morning at St. Margaret's and told me children trust what they can touch.
I touched the medallion just now and I will not touch it again until something asks me to.
I tie the scrub top at the side. I put the pencil through the knot. I shrug into the new white lab coat. It still smells of cardboard and starch and someone else's idea of who I am about to be.
---
The autoclaves are humming somewhere I cannot see.
A low frequency. A hum at the sternum, not at the ear; the bone hears it first. I pause at the corner of the scrub corridor and let the hum find its place in the room.
Behind a wall, two corridors over, four chambers running their morning cycle.
The hum sits in the chest as a chest tube sits in a chest — a present, neutral thing that is the room's actual heart, and that you stop noticing because the room would die without it.
Instruments first, exits second, breath last.
Instruments behind me — none, I am not in an OR yet. Exits ahead — three, the south stairwell door I came through, the elevator bank to my left, the badge-locked door at the corridor's far end. Breath, on the third.
OR-1 anteroom. Two scrub sinks in white porcelain, the right basin chipped at the rim. Chlorhexidine soap dispensers. A foot pedal for the water. Above the taps, the chrome plate that shows me my own face in a slight bend.
The woman at the door of the inner OR is round in the hips and short in the trunk, salt-and-pepper bob, reading glasses on a beaded chain.
She has a smudge of Vicks above her upper lip already, which is a sign of a woman who has done this for thirty-two years and knows what is coming at her by ten o'clock.
I scrub. Thirty seconds on the right, thirty on the left, fingers to elbow. The chlorhexidine smells exactly as it should smell, faintly medicinal-sweet. When I lift my eyes to the chrome, my own face stares back at me in the bent metal. I do not look away.
The charge nurse pushes off the jamb and walks toward me with an empty coffee cup that says #1 ABUELA in chipped blue paint.
"Aguilar," she says. "Beatriz. Charge here twenty-one years. You're Rossi."
"Elena."
"Mija, listen. " She steps in close enough that I can smell the Vicks.
"The chief's mortality-and-morbidity is Wednesday at six-thirty.
He'll call on you. He always calls on the new transfer; that's how he reads them.
Have an answer ready. Don't apologize for pediatric, don't apologize for St. Margaret's, don't apologize for being five-foot-six.
He doesn't apologize. He won't know what to do with yours. "
She watches my face for three beats. She nods once.
"Locker stack fits?"
"It fits."
"Then I picked the right size. Move."
She turns. I move.
She unfolded my scrub stack. She told me what the man with the office on the tenth floor is going to do at six-thirty Wednesday morning, and she did it in three sentences. I am not being lied to.
---
The first time I see him, he is across the operating floor and his back is to me.
OR-3 is the trauma main, the one with the glass-walled gallery up on the south wall twelve feet above the floor.
The OR is empty at nine in the morning. The operating lamp at the table is on — three articulated arms folded close, the center bulb burning a soft yellow that is older than the other two, a degree off true white in a way only a person who has stood under operating lamps for years would catch.
The four arms cast quadruple shadows over the empty table.
A man stands at the head of the table with a clipboard.
He is tall — six-three, maybe more under the cap — in navy scrubs cut by someone who knows what to do with the line at the shoulder.
The white attending coat is on over the scrubs.
The hair at the back of his neck is black at the crown and clean silver at the temples.
He stands motionless over the clipboard, reading, four counts in through the nose, six counts out. The rhythm is too deliberate to be rest. He is the stillest moving person I have ever seen.
I look away before I have looked too long.
---
The corridor on Floor 10 is warmer than the corridor on Floor 9. Walnut wainscoting. A row of framed black-and-white photographs of attending surgeons going back to 1962. The chief's office is at the southeast corner.
The door is open by a hand's width. The plate reads NIKOLAI ROMANOV, M. D., F. A. C. S. / CHIEF OF SURGERY.
I knock with the second knuckle of my right hand, three times, evenly spaced.
"Come."
He is sitting behind the desk. Dark walnut, mirrored bookmatch, oiled to a low sheen.
Three monitors angled as a surgeon angles his head over a wound.
A bookshelf along the east wall — a Sabiston's, two volumes of Maingot's, and on the third shelf at eye height a small leather instrument roll laid open the way another man might lay open a tobacco pouch, three retractors and a pair of mosquito forceps and a #15 blade in its paper sleeve, displayed as decoration and absolutely real.
A glass-doored credenza with an electric kettle, a small cobalt-blue tin lettered in gold, two china cups with a thin gold band.
The room smells of leather and paper and the faint trace of bergamot.
He remains seated.
"Sit down, Rossi," he says.
His voice has the precision of a fine-nib pen loop.
Russian-American, the accent worn down to a single edge somewhere in the vowels.
The face above the navy scrub collar is in its late thirties — thirty-nine the directory said — and the pale gray eyes are the color of operating-room steel.
There is an eight-millimeter graze at the right temple, three fingers above the eyebrow, that the silver covers in profile and does not cover head-on.
The Patek at his left wrist is on a navy-leather strap; the crown is a small silver button you would never notice unless you watched his right thumb cross to touch it.
I sit. Hands on the lap, right over left. The medallion stays where it is. I do not touch it. Instruments on the third shelf — eight. Exits — one, the door at my back. Breath on the third.
He watches with an attending's full patience while a resident sews a difficult mucosal layer — not unkindly, not warmly, with the entirety of his attention given to the thing in front of him. Four counts in. Six counts out.
"You are five minutes early," he says.
"I am on time."
"I am five minutes early. You are five minutes earlier than that."
"My grandmother said that on time is late."
"Your grandmother was correct."
He sets the pen down on the open file in front of him.
The pen is a fine-nib steel and the ink is brown.
The file is mine; the top sheet is on St. Margaret's letterhead and the script at the top is in a hand I have known since I was nineteen, looped and warm and Brooklyn-Irish-Catholic and reading me right.
"Sister Mary Catherine writes that you read people accurately," he says. "She uses the phrase she does not look away. I read it twice."
I do not say anything.
He turns the page of the file without looking down; his attention stays on me, the full weight of it clinical and unhurried.
"Four years on pediatric surgical recovery at St. Margaret's," he says. "Two and a half as charge. You transferred to us on October 13. Today is October 13."
"It is."
"Why surgical?"
The question is precise and is also the question Sister Mary Catherine asked me at twenty-two and the question I have been answering to myself in a stairwell every six months since.