CHAPTER 5 #2
Stefan strips the gown and the gloves at the bin and walks out into the scrub anteroom with me three steps behind. He is at the second sink before I am at the first. Silent, working. He turns the water on and he soaps his hands. I scrub mine.
The chlorhexidine again. The dispenser at my left elbow.
The brush, the gluconate packet, the apricot lather.
The water warm. My wrists tingling already where they tingled this morning.
Three minutes for the post-case scrub is overkill — we are out of the field — but he is doing it and so I am doing it.
I borrow Stefan's four-beat. The second pass steadies in my wrists before it reaches my breath.
His right hand turns palm-up under the water at the second minute. The scar is there in the same place. The lather climbs over it. The water sluices the lather off. The scar stays. He turns the hand back. He says, conversational, low, eyes on his own hands and not on me:
"Doll. Step over here when you are done. I have a thing in my pocket for you."
"A thing."
"A thing in my pocket. Two minutes."
I scrub the last minute and I do not look at him because if I look at him I will laugh and the only people I have ever laughed with in this kind of room are people who have stopped working there for one reason or another. I rinse. I step over.
He has a square of dark chocolate in his right palm. The wrapper is gold foil with a thin black line around the edge. He is offering it to me with the palm up. The scar is under the chocolate.
"From the pocket of the coat. The pocket is clean. I sterilized the wrapper. That is a joke. The wrapper is fine."
"Are you offering me a chocolate."
"I am offering you a chocolate."
"At the scrub sink."
"At the scrub sink. I keep one in the pocket. I eat one between cases. It gives my pulse something quieter to follow. The fourth hour is the worst. If you would, eat it. The next four hours will be long. The fourth hour is the worst. The chocolate slows the worst hour."
He says it as he counts. Conditional. Comma-rich. Quiet. He has not raised his voice once.
I take the chocolate. My fingertips brush his palm at the wrapper.
His skin is warm. The water is still running in the sink behind us.
The lights overhead hum. The scar under the chocolate holds more heat than the rest of his hand, which is a thing I should not be able to tell through a wrapper and which I tell anyway because my fingertips have been awake since last night.
"Doll. " He says it again. He says it like a man checking a count. "Are you with me."
"I am with you."
He nods. He goes back to his sink. He turns the water off. He shakes his hands twice. He walks out into the corridor with a towel he has folded once and his mouth doing the small private smile a man does when he has gotten to do a thing for someone he did not know he would get to do a thing for.
I unwrap the chocolate one-handed at the sink. I eat it in two bites. It is bitter and it is sweet and it tastes like the inside of a room I have not been let into.
Beatriz is at the anteroom door with her mask pulled down. She has been there for thirty seconds at least. She watches me chew. She watches me swallow. She watches me put the wrapper in my pocket.
"Mija," she says. "Watch yourself with the doctor with the heart."
Silence is the right answer; she knows it. She nods at me. She walks past me to the OR.
The double meaning lands at the count of two.
The chain at my sternum stays where it is and so does my hand. The thought passes.
---
The gallery is empty when I pass under it on the way to the supply closet at two-fifty.
The gallery is not empty when I pass under it at three-twelve.
Nikolai is at the back of it, ten feet from the glass, his hands loose at his sides, his white coat buttoned, the tungsten Patek catching the overhead at the inside of his left wrist where the cuff sits. He is watching the next case set up.
He watches the case setup and me in the same unbroken line, a double attention that tells me more about him than either gaze alone could have.
He stands there for ten minutes by the wall clock.
He leaves. His eyes stay on the glass on the way out — a courtesy of avoidance that is itself a way of being seen.
The standing order from last night — the one he left unnamed and still made plain — is at my sternum where his palm was. I feel it there as you feel a bruise that hasn't shown yet.
---
The page comes at four-forty.
A delivery to Lab A. Sample for Dr. Castellan from the cardiothoracic side.
The sample is in a small biohazard cooler with a paper-tag I sign.
I take the freight elevator from Floor 11 down.
The corridor on Sub-basement 2 is cold by the eight degrees the building's HVAC keeps it cold, dry to the lining of the nose, lit overhead by tubes that buzz at a pitch lower than the ones on Floor 9. The cooler is in my left hand.
The paper-tag is in my right. The walls are poured concrete. The corridor smells of nothing — that is how I know I am off the hospital's surgical floor; surgical floors smell of chlorhexidine and cardiothoracic floors smell of bone-burn and orthopedic floors smell of cement. Down here, nothing.
The badge-locked door at the corridor's end has a black metal frame and a card reader at chest height. I lift my badge. The reader does not read it. I lift it again. The reader does not read it. I exhale.
The door opens from the inside.
He is in his lab coat. The coat is heavier than a surgical coat — longer, denser at the shoulders, the cotton a slightly different white.
His black hair is tied back at the nape with a black elastic.
He has the elastic tight. The thin gold chain at his throat is just visible at the collar where the coat is open one button.
For two seconds he is silent. His gaze checks the cooler, the paper-tag, and finally me.
He opens the door wider with his left hand and steps back.
"Take the corridor straight. The third door. Do not turn left."
The voice is lower than the corridor's hum and slower than the corridor's rhythm. Flat. Unbent. The statement is a statement and it has been said and it is what it is.
I nod. Thank you is the wrong currency, so I swallow it.
I walk past him into the corridor. He holds himself still — no touch, no shift of weight.
The coat smells of nothing, which is also a thing I file — the man wears no cologne in the lab; the cleanest man I have stood next to in this building has no use for being cleaner.
The corridor on the other side of the door is the same poured concrete with the cable-trays overhead.