CHAPTER 3 #3
I walk.
The chief's door is open this time. The walnut blinds are half-drawn as they were when I was here at ten, and the kettle is not on, and the room does not smell of bergamot today, which means he has not made tea, which means whatever he has called me for is not the kind of conversation he makes tea for.
He is at the desk. He is in the navy two-piece scrubs with the white attending coat embroidered at the breast — NIKOLAI ROMANOV, M.
D. / CHIEF OF SURGERY — and his hair is silvered cleanly at the temples and his eyes are the color of operating-room steel and he is looking at the page in front of him as if he has been looking at it for a long time.
The tungsten Patek Philippe sits on his left wrist, third strap buckled at the bone. His right hand is flat on the desk.
No chair is offered.
The door stays open behind me by his silence.
The corridor behind me is empty. I stand at the threshold the width of a charting tablet from the desk's far edge and I keep my hands at my sides and I wait.
He looks up.
His attention lands with the same four-second weight as Monday — no expression, the way a senior attending studies a chart he has not decided whether to sign — and then his gaze drops one inch to the lanyard at my chest and registers the pediatric pin in silence.
He says, "Rossi."
I say, "Dr. Romanov."
He says, "Stop by my office tomorrow morning at seven-thirty. We will discuss your placements."
Surgical sentence. No expression. Verb-first when an instruction is forming, as the residents have told me he speaks when he is making a decision someone else is about to dislike.
Stop by. We will discuss. Placements. The word could be generous cover for what we are going to discuss, or it could be the only word a man like this would use for a thing he means to name more particularly in the room.
The question of whether I am being warned, or protected, or whether for a man like this those are the same gesture, is one I am not equipped to answer at a threshold.
I keep my face the face a circulating nurse keeps for the chief at a threshold.
My eyes hold his eyes. The hand stays in my peripheral.
I say, "Yes, Dr. Romanov."
He says, "That is all."
I leave.
The door stays open behind me because the door was open when I came in.
In the corridor outside his office my left ear wants to tuck behind my hair and I keep the ear where the corridor can see it.
The tell stays inside the body where I built it.
I walk back along the runner as I came. I am at the elevator before I let the breath out, and the breath out is a four-count.
The pediatric pin is still on my lanyard. The medallion is warm at my sternum.
I finish my shift.
Hayes stays out of my corridors for the rest of the day, and so does Nikolai. Stefan is in OR-4 for a long mitral case the rest of the afternoon and my route stays clear of the cath-lab annex. Gabriel keeps to Sub-basement 2. The residents' workroom empties at seven. I sign out of my chart.
I take off my white coat and fold it on the back of the chair the way Beatriz folds hers — the right sleeve under the left, the lanyard on top — and the lanyard is the last thing I take off, and the pin is still on it, and the medallion is the last thing under it.
I lift the lanyard over my head.
My right index finger finds the medallion under the V of my scrub top and I let it sit there for one breath, my own breath, the count of one.
The crack across the angel's wing is the same crack it was at six this morning.
The chain has been resoldered twice and it is not broken now.
I am not broken now. I am a circulating nurse who counted a stock short by one and wrote it down.
I am a circulating nurse who was brushed at a scrub sink by an attending and did not give him the tell.
I have been told to come to the chief's office tomorrow at seven-thirty and I do not yet know what is in the sentence.
I have been here three days. The medallion holds a private heat against the corridor air. My phone has three missed calls.
I walk to the corridor.
The autoclaves are humming somewhere two floors up.
I cannot see them. I can hear them through the building's bones — the chamber cycling down, the slow steam release, the four-count breath of a building that has been working since nineteen-sixty-two.
The corridor I am in is the one between the residents' workroom and the south elevator banks.
The chief's corridor is at the far end. I look down it.
The door is closed.
It is the closed door at the end of the corridor and the chief's office is behind it and the appointment is tomorrow at seven-thirty and the word placements is sitting on my tongue with no definition attached.
I keep my hand on the medallion. The left ear stays uncovered.
The autoclaves hiss four times and then are quiet.
The door does not open.
I look at it.
Tomorrow at seven-thirty.