CHAPTER 2 #3
He nods once. He steps in. He hits the close-door button with his left thumb — left-handed; I file this — and the doors shut.
His attention moves to the wall ahead. He stands at the front-right of the car with one shoulder against the wall and his hands loose at his sides.
There is a knurled steel ring on his right thumb that I notice in the half-second before I make myself stop noticing.
The car moves. I am at floor eight. He is going up — to ten, his thumb has hit ten, the chief's floor.
The doors open at eight. I step out.
"Rossi."
It is the trauma surgeon's voice, not the chief's. He has read my badge in two seconds. He says my last name as the chief did, flat, no warmth, no edge, and his eyes stay forward as he says it.
"Doctor."
The doors close. The elevator goes up.
I stand in the corridor on floor eight for two breaths and then I walk to the OR-1 station and I sit in the empty chair and I chart and I hold my hand steady.
You count well.
Watch yourself, mija.
Welcome to the wing, Elena.
Doll.
Floor.
Rossi.
Six lines from five mouths in seven hours. I know what each line is, individually. Together they are still in pieces in my head, and the picture they will make once they fit is one I am unsure I want.
---
I take the long way around floor eleven at the end of the shift because I need to know the wing's geometry.
The fluorescents at the corridor's east end are softer than the ones on eight — someone replaced them, the residents say, with warm-tone tubes — and the smell at the east end is laundered cotton and a faint sandalwood I am going to remember without knowing why.
The corridor's west end is what I have come to look at.
The badge-locked door at the west end is solid steel painted the same off-white as the corridor; it has a card reader at chest height and a small green LED above the reader that is dark when no card is presented.
There is a small label on the wall beside the door, not at eye height, the kind hospitals put on doors that they do not want to be looked at: a single typed line that reads RESEARCH WING — RESTRICTED ACCESS.
My badge stays dumb to this door for now. The orientation packet said so on Monday. When it will clear — whether it will at all — remains an open question.
I stand in front of the door for four breaths. My hand stays at my side; the steel stays untouched. The corridor is empty. The card reader's LED stays dark.
Someone is behind that door. Who, and what they are doing, I cannot say.
I know — I know without knowing — that I am being read in this building from more than one direction, and one of the directions is from behind this door.
I turn. I walk back down the corridor as I came. The badge-locked door stays closed behind me. The green LED stays dark.
My eyes stay forward. Sister Mary Catherine taught me, a long time ago, to keep my face away from a door I have not chosen to open.
---
The Murray Hill walk-up at nine-fifty has the smell of the building's old steam radiators and cilantro from the bodega downstairs and the autumn night air through the kitchen window I left cracked an inch. The elevator in this building has been broken since August. I take the stairs two at a time.
I unlock my door. I lock it again behind me. I drop my bag at the small console by the entry and I stand in the kitchen for one beat in the dark.
The phone is on the counter. I plug it into the charger. The screen lights when I press the side button. Two missed calls.
Both from Sister Mary Catherine.
The first one is from yesterday at eight-forty-seven, the one I saw last night and left to its silence.
The second is from this evening at six-eighteen.
I would have been in the corridor with the door I cannot badge through.
I would have had the phone in my locker.
The phone rang to the inside of a steel door; the locker kept the news to itself until I came home.
She calls once. She waits. She calls again at the appointed time. In six years, twice in a week has never happened.
She has called twice in two days. She is asking me a question I am going to have to answer.
I put my right palm flat on the counter.
I look at the phone. I look at her name on the screen.
I look at the second missed call's time stamp.
Six-eighteen. I think about pressing the call-back button.
I think about hearing her voice. I think about what she will ask me when I say hello.
Are you the one in the room, my girl? That is what she will ask.
That is the question she has asked every nurse she has ever supervised, before every difficult bedside decision, for forty-one years. That is the question I have not yet known the answer to.
A lie to her is the one thing I refuse. Tonight, without an honest answer, I refuse the call.
I take my hand away. I leave the phone on the counter. The screen dims to black against the formica.
Tomorrow. I will call her tomorrow.
That is the only thing I let myself decide tonight.