CHAPTER 10
Stefan
◆
The cord on my left wrist is a habit older than the kettle, older than the warm tubes, older than this country, and I have been sitting on the edge of the twin bed turning the cord between my finger and my thumb for nine minutes by the wall clock that ticks audibly above the chipped basin of the sink. The radiator releases. Ssssssh.
A slow tick at the valve, the warm wet metal sound, the breath of the pipe meeting the cold air through the corridor's vent in a low loop I have counted at twenty-two cycles a minute since I was a resident.
She will be at the door in three minutes.
She will be there because she has chosen to be there, and because I have left the door unlocked for her.
I know about the medallion at her sternum as the building knows about my standing reservation of this room: a fact one keeps from professional courtesy without having to be told.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I touch the cord.
The wall clock skips a half-second; the second hand sticks at the eleven for a breath, then catches.
I have not slept in twenty-six hours. The day was the standard surgical day: cath-lab annex at ten, chamomile for her at eleven, corridor at fourteen-hundred ("If you would.
Six o'clock. Call room. " She nodded), pharmacy ledger at sixteen-thirty, then the call room at eighteen-hundred, the kettle, the P?rt liner-note read aloud, the sandwich she ate, the surgeon's-prayer story I told her without naming the man I told it about.
I told her he died on a Tuesday in October. I told her he gave me the cord and his medical kit and a six-line prayer I do not pray, I say. I did not name him. The name belongs to a chapter neither of us has reached yet.
A knock. Two beats — pause — one. Her count. Three beats, separated by her thinking.
"Doll. " I rise. The cord goes flat to my wrist as I turn the door's bare brass knob. "If you would, come in. The door does not lock from the inside. We are choosing this. Color."
She steps over the threshold. Her hair is down for the first time in the nine days I have seen her in this building.
The yellow pencil is gone; the knot at the nape is gone; the strands fall at her shoulders, and the medallion lies along the line of her sternum where it has lain since the night she came to St. Jude's.
She is in the cotton off-duty shirt and the drawstring linen pants she keeps in her locker; over the shirt, the long white attending coat she borrowed from the call-room hook because the corridor was cold. The coat is mine. I left it for her. She did not ask whose it was.
"Green," she says.
"Perfect, doll. " I close the door behind her, and the latch gives a small, clean click, quiet enough not to startle a patient coming out of sleep. Ssssssh — the radiator releases at twelve-thirty-one, the same loop, the same warm wet metal, the count of twenty-two — and the room contracts around the warm-tone light and the kettle’s last whisper of steam.
She crosses to the sink. She runs the back of her right hand under the faucet without turning the water on, as she does in the OR scrub corridor when she is composing her vitals. I have seen the gesture twice this week. She is composing them now.
"I have been counting your steps from the freight elevator," I tell her. The voice is mine; I am not sure I had decided to use it. "Forty-eight. The corridor is two longer at night because the cleaning crew leaves the runner out."
She turns from the sink. Her eyes have gone darker in the warm light; here they read brown. The freckles across the bridge of her nose are present.
"Stefan. " She has said my first name twice tonight. the count has been with me. "I came up."
"You came up."
"I have been thinking about whether I came up because I wanted to or because I was asked.
" She presses her right index finger to the medallion at her sternum — the pad, twice, a half-second each, her count.
"I came up because I wanted to. The asking made the door I walked through. The walking through is mine."
"That is what I was hoping to hear, doll. " I keep my hands open, palm-side up. The midline transplant scar on my right palm is pale and faintly raised under the warm light, a 4 cm white line that has been on me longer than this country has had me. "If you would. Come here."
She comes. The space between the door and the twin bed is four paces, and she takes them at her own tempo, and I mark them in fours because that is the only count I have.
The white coat slips down off her shoulders.
I catch it on my wrist and lay it over the chair beside the bed, and the lavender soap on her wrists rises up between us; the suite's soap is the soap I sent down in the first care package the morning of Day 9.
"I would like to take this," I tell her, lifting the cotton shirt's hem between my finger and my thumb. "If you would tell me yes."
"Yes."
I draw the shirt over her head. The medallion lifts with it for an inch and falls back to her sternum.
Her breath catches at the bottom of the inhalation and releases at the top.
I touch the back of her neck with my right palm, the scar against the small bones at the top of her spine, and I listen for the fourth beat.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She is here.
— — —
The twin bed is narrow, mattressed with thin foam, fitted with a laundered sheet that smells of the institutional softener and, faintly, of the sandalwood-and-clean-wool of my standing reservation.
The window beside the bed faces the air-shaft, and the glass is fogged because the radiator has been running for an hour.
Above the bed on the painted plywood shelf there is the Moscow surgeon's leather Gladstone — I brought it up tonight because I wanted it here — and beside it the heavy ceramic mug I made in a pottery class in my second year of residency, glazed in a pale green the instructor told me would crack if I fired it too cool, fired it too cool anyway, never cracked.
I draw the drawstring of her pants. She steps out of them.
The medallion is the last thing on her body, and I know this without anyone having told me.
I run the pad of my left thumb under the chain at the hollow of her throat; the chain lifts a quarter of an inch; I do not take it off.
The man who removes it puts it back, and I am the only one of the four who has not removed it yet, and I am not going to be the first.
"On the bed, doll. If you would. On your back. Yes."
She lies down. The single window casts a thin trapezoid of fluorescent corridor light along her left flank, and the medallion's silver catches it.
The radiator releases. Ssssssh. Twelve-forty-one.
Her breath finds the loop without my asking — three breaths to two cycles, and then four, and then the loop holds.
I undress slowly because I have decided to. I keep the cord at my wrist; the scar on my palm I will keep face-up, palm open, all the way through. I undo the oxford from the top down; I fold it once and lay it on the chair over her coat. I take off the trousers.
I lie down beside her on the narrow bed.
There is no room for me to be polite about how I take up the room I am in.
I gather her up onto my chest first — a beat I have been wanting for nine days — and her ear lands over my sternum where the silver line of the sternotomy lies under the skin.
She is quiet for four of my breaths. She is listening.
She knows what to listen for. I keep time for her, in my head, and let her find it.
One. Two. Three. Four.
"There it is," she says. Almost not aloud.
"It is older than I am. " I keep my voice at bedside volume, the one I use when a patient needs the truth and the next breath at the same time.
"I was thirteen when it was put in. The boy whose family let me have it died the same morning.
He was fifteen. He had a TBI. He was AB-negative; so am I.
The team said the match was one in a thousand.
I think of him in the four-count. The fourth beat is his. "
She lifts her head. Her hand finds the cord at my left wrist. The braid is dark cognac brown, four-strand plait, the leather worn smooth on the outside and rough on the inner edge. She runs her thumb along it. She does not ask.
"The man who gave me this gave me the count," I tell her. "He held my right hand inside his. How I will hold yours."
She looks at the scar in the center of my right palm. She turns her face and kisses it: the pad of her mouth on the silver line, three seconds, no question in it. Then she lays her own palm along mine, and I close my fingers around her hand as the Moscow surgeon closed his around mine.
I touch the cord at my wrist with my free thumb. Twice tonight: at the door before I opened it for her, and now. The third touch is for morning.
— — —
I turn her on her back. I lift her thighs around my hips with the open span of my right palm beneath her knee, and she lifts the other thigh herself; she settles me at the cradle of her body without my having to ask. She is slick already. The slow want has been in the room since the kettle was on.
I press the heel of my right hand against the inside of her left thigh and slide my fingers through her, slow; the wet of her runs against the side of my hand; I take the first of her on the pad of my thumb at her clit.
"Doll. " I match the radiator loop. Ssssssh — twelve-fifty-three; cycle eleven of the next set; I hear it without looking. "I am going to take a long time. If you would."
"I would."
"Say yes."
"Yes."
I touch her with the pad of two fingers. I learn the map of her by response — where she opens, where the ridge swells, where the wet tells me the pace is right — and I keep the touch unhurried. I have spent my professional life lengthening other people’s seconds. I am going to lengthen hers.