CHAPTER 11
Elena
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I lift my hand and turn it palm up. The scent has settled on the soft inside of the wrist — the place where a stethoscope's diaphragm goes when a man is taking your pulse — not the palm. I leave it. I sit up. I breathe in fours. Stefan would. I have learned to.
The medallion sits in the V where my collarbones meet. I touch it with the pad of my right index finger — once, briefly, the metal already warm from sleep. I am here, I tell Saint Raphael under my breath. I am still here.
The suite is what Gabriel called it the night he handed me the spare key — a room that says nothing about its purpose and everything about its precision.
Galley along the east wall: seven upper cabinets, three drawers, four bottom cabinets.
The bed is queen, slate-gray linen. The writing desk is walnut, one drawer.
The leather club chair is olive, low. The walls hold no window.
A single high transom of frosted glass sits above the door for ventilation; it shows me nothing of the corridor, but it is glass, and the suite has glass, and I know what to do with rooms that have glass in them. I have been on the right side of every window since I was nineteen.
I shower. I towel off. I put the scrubs on. I tie my hair in the low knot at the nape; I put the yellow pencil through. I clip the lanyard to the breast pocket of the white coat. I look at the pediatric pin.
The pin stays on this morning. I am going to take it off. I have known it since 04:00 when Stefan's car turned off the West Side Highway at 96th and the gear-change woke me for nine seconds. The morning belongs to the door. The pin comes after. The door is the test.
I go to the main door.
The card-key scanner above the handle is a small black plastic rectangle the size of a deck of cards, set at eye level.
On the outer face — the corridor side — there is an LED.
From inside, when the door is locked, the LED bleeds a thin red glow through a pinhole gap above the seal, a slow blink at one-second intervals.
I have my hand on the inside thumb-turn.
The pulse is the color of a thing I keep counting against — the running drip of a transfusion line, the blink of a code-cart monitor in stand-by.
Red is locked from outside. Red is also the color of you can leave from in here.
I turn the thumb-turn under my palm. The dead-bolt slides.
I pull the door open one inch. Cold corridor air on my cheek.
My feet stay where they are. I close it. I turn the thumb-turn back.
The LED keeps going about its work on the corridor side; from inside I can only see the bleed of it, the red one-second metronome.
I press my forehead to the door. Four beats carry me.
I open it again. This time I step into the corridor.
The cardkey scanner on the corridor side blinks red — and then, because my key is on the lanyard at my breast pocket and is sensed by the proximity reader as I pass within nine inches, it blinks green.
Slow, twice. Then back to red as I move past it.
Red. Green. Red. The heartbeat I do not own. The corridor accepts me. I let it.
I walk.
I mark the steps from the suite door to the freight elevator at the south end of the Sub-basement 2 corridor.
I have not counted this corridor before; yesterday Gabriel walked me down it and I was counting his pace, not mine.
Today I mark my own. One, two, three. The corridor lights are the cold-cell fluorescents he warned me about.
Four, five. I pass the unnumbered door at the corridor's elbow without slowing — OR-Z; I know the wing's geometry now; I do not look.
Twelve, thirteen. I pass the industrial dehumidifier on the right; it hums at C-flat.
Twenty. The corridor jogs left at the dehumidifier and opens onto the elevator vestibule.
Forty. The freight elevator's call button is between the two cars, brushed steel, no engraving.
I press it. Forty-six. The number lands clean on the button-press.
Forty-six steps from my door to the elevator.
I file the count. I will keep filing it.
The elevator comes. The cab smells like industrial citrus and a man's wet wool from someone's earlier ride. I press Floor 8. The car rises.
I go to work.
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08:00. Locker room. Beatriz is at locker #214's row already, standing midway between the bench and the door — the smell of Vicks is on the lower lip; her reading glasses are on the beaded chain at her chest; her salt-and-pepper bob is freshly cut at the jaw and she has not slept enough.
She sees me. She steps to the bench. She skips the good morning.
She studies me for what cannot be more than three seconds.
"Mija. " The Vicks vowels. "You look different today.
" She leaves it there. She turns to her own locker.
"I'm putting you on the OR-1 board for the morning charge; OR-3 wants you on the gallery rotation at one for Mikhailov's mitral; we're short two on the supply requisitions and I told the chief you'd run them this afternoon.
Co?o, the chief said yes before I finished the sentence.
" She pauses. "You good with all that, mija? "
"I'm good."
"Good. " She bangs her locker shut with one elbow. "And eat. The cafeteria has the cinnamon roll today. Don't make me chase you down with it."
She goes. I open my locker. I take out the pen Stefan left here on Day 5 (cap-clicked, black-ink rollerball, his hand). I clip it to the pocket above the lanyard. I look at the pediatric pin.
I leave it where it is for now.
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10:00. The chief's office. He has called me up at 09:55 on the intercom — the page is short, in Beatriz's relay voice: Dr. Romanov asks you up at the top of the hour.
I walk the chief's corridor. I register steps because I am still me.
Forty-two. The number has not changed since Day 4. The woman counting it has.
The walnut door is open three inches. I knock the back of my knuckle against it once. I hear, low: "Come in."
Inside: the walnut desk, the southeast walnut blinds half-drawn for the morning sun, the leather club chair, the small surgical kit on the credenza like a piece of decoration that has decided not to apologize, the cobalt-blue Earl Grey tin on the credenza beside the kettle.
The kettle is cold; the cups are in the cupboard; this is not tea.
He stands when I come in. Some days he stays seated.
Today he rises. He stays behind the desk. He has no need to come around it.
"Rossi."
"Dr. Romanov. " I hold his first name behind my teeth. He has not invited it; I have not offered it; the protocol of his desk runs separate from the protocol of the night Day 4 ended on. I file the distance as I file the brass lamp at OR-3 — by registering it.
He gestures at the leather club chair. "Sit."
I sit. The leather creaks as it creaked the first time. He stays standing. Behind the desk, his right thumb settles on the crown of the Patek for half a second and then he lifts the thumb. He has decided what he is going to say.
"I am not the only one who watches. " His pale gray eyes do not narrow.
They are level. He has told me this much before by silence; he is telling me now by sentence.
"You will hear this once. You may come to my office at any time.
The door does not lock from the inside. " A small pause.
He has chosen the next sentence by weight.
"The corridor outside the office is camera-monitored at all working hours.
The intercom at the credenza is live to the OR-1 desk twenty-four hours.
If at any time you wish to come up here to a room where you are not in another man's count, you may.
The room is here. The door is open. The door does not lock from the inside. "
I sit very still. The medallion at my sternum sits with me.
He has used the architecture of the call room I have not been told about yet — the rule Stefan taught me on Day 10 in the Floor 11 call room without saying he was teaching me anything; the call-room door's inside-deadbolt is a half-turn the residents have known about for a decade.
The door does not lock from the inside. He has bookended the rule.
He has done it before I had words for it. He has done it now because he knows I am about to need them.
"I understand. " My voice is even. It is a small surprise to me that it is. "Thank you."
"Do not thank me, Rossi. " He does not move. "I would prefer you to use the room. I would prefer you to use it before you needed to."
"I will."
His mouth does not smile. The one-degree narrowing of his eyes does.
He says nothing further. I stand. I go to the door.
At the door I turn — because I am the woman who turns at doors — and I say one sentence I did not plan to say: "Dr. Romanov.
I am going to spend the day on this floor and the next. "
"Yes. " He does not need me to explain what I mean by it. "That is what I would prefer."
I close the door behind me. In the corridor I let one slow four pass. My eyes stay forward, past the door's narrow glass. I walk the forty-two steps to the chief's-corridor elevator. Down to Floor 8. Back to the work.
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13:00. OR-3 gallery. Mikhailov mitral. Stefan operates below the glass.
I am up here because Beatriz put me here and because I asked her to.
The brass surgical lamp is on. The three articulated arms cast their four shadows over the open chest. The four-count of shadows stays in the periphery today. I register something else.
I watch for thirty-four minutes. Thirty-four minutes is eight five-count cycles and one over. I register without meaning to. The cord is on his left wrist. From here I cannot see it. I know it is there. I know my body knows it is.
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