CHAPTER 10 #3
She drinks four small sips, my count. She does not take more than I bring her.
I take the mug away and set it on the shelf.
I lower her onto the bed and lower myself beside her and draw the laundered blanket up over us — over her shoulders, over my chest — and take her hand into mine, palm to palm, the scar against her palm, the cord at her wrist.
"Stay," she says. The first word she has said since the apex.
"I will. The night is yours."
She turns into me. Her ear lands on my sternum as it landed at the start of the scene, and her hair falls across my collarbone, and the medallion lies between her sternum and mine because she has rolled to her side and the chain has slipped down.
I lift the medallion on the back of my left index-finger knuckle for a half-second.
I look at the hairline crack across the angel's wing. I lay it back where it lives.
I track her.
— — —
The radiator runs through the small hours, twenty-two cycles a minute, and the wall clock ticks audibly across the room, and the building settles around the warm tube light.
She sleeps on my chest. Her breath finds the loop without her asking; the four-count is a thing she has now.
I do not sleep. I have not slept in twenty-nine hours and I will not sleep tonight. The hours go by in a tempo I know.
At three-twelve she stirs. I do not move. She finds my sternum with her ear again, as a small animal finds the warm thing in a cold room, and she settles. I keep counting.
At four-forty the morning begins. Not light yet — there is no east window in this room; the call-room window faces an air-shaft and the building's south face — but the corridor at the suite's level has warmed, and the radiator's loop has steadied, and the fluorescents I traded out give the room the color of a kitchen lit at dawn.
Her hair is across my collarbone. The medallion is between her sternum and mine.
Her right palm is in my right palm with the scar at the center between us, and the cord at my wrist is at her wrist, and her breath on me is at one-oh-four, four cycles to the loop.
I touch the cord with the side of my left thumb. The third of the three touches. The morning of the night.
I have made a promise tonight. I will not say it aloud — the word does not belong in a chapter neither of us has reached — but I have made it, and the man I keep at my wrist saw it, and the boy I keep in my chest was the witness I asked for.
I press my mouth to the crown of her head and I keep one more set, quietly, as a man at a head of a bed counts under his breath in fours so that the patient knows the room is still being kept.
"One. Two. Three. Four."
A measurement of being here, not a vow. The difference matters because vows ask the future to stand still.
— — —
At five-thirty I move. I roll her gently onto her right side.
I replace the cotton off-duty shirt on her body — the man who removes it puts it back applies to the shirt as much as to the medallion — and draw the drawstring linen pants on her by lifting one knee, then the other.
She does not wake. I gather her hair off her face with the side of my hand.
I dress. I put my white oxford back on her over her shirt because the corridor is cold; she is in two layers now, mine over hers.
I take the heavy ceramic mug from the shelf and tuck it into the marked bin under the bed where the residents will not move it.
I leave the Moscow surgeon's Gladstone on the shelf.
I lift her. The corridor is empty at five thirty-six.
The cleaning crew has finished; the runner is rolled.
I carry her on my hip as the men in Murmansk carry sleeping daughters home from late visits.
She half-wakes at the elevator and I set her down against me and she half-walks.
The freight elevator drops three stories to Sub-basement 2.
The corridor at the bottom is the colder eight degrees of the West Annex.
She does not feel it under my coat. I card the suite door open.
I lay her on the queen bed and draw the gray cashmere throw up over her. The medallion is at her sternum. I leave the spare physical key on the bedside table.
I bend over her once. I lay the open palm of my right hand under her right hand, palm to palm, the scar against her palm. She is in her own room now. She has chosen the closing of the lock-in arc with my mouth on her sternum and my palm under hers. She has all four of us, in our first claims.
I am thinking of a sister whose name I do not yet know I will know, and of a window I do not yet know I was on the wrong side of, and the thought lays itself down on the hollow of my mouth and waits.
I turn the thumb-turn behind me and close the door.
Outside, the West Annex corridor's industrial dehumidifiers run their constant low hum, and the cold dry air finds behind my teeth where the four-count waits, and I walk to the freight elevator with the warmth of her still inside my coat.
The cord at my wrist is the warmth of a man I keep.
The next four are hers. Every four. For as long as the chest under her ear keeps doing what it has been doing since the night a man I miss put it together for me.
I take the elevator up.