CHAPTER 13
Elena
◆
The cardigan is on the writing-desk chair, unripe-wheat color, oversized, Stefan-shaped.
The cashmere blanket they brought from the chief's office last night is on the foot of the bed where Stefan left it after he carried me down.
He left after he set me down. The room sleeps me alone; the men sleep elsewhere. I am the one who sleeps in this room.
I get up. The fiddle-leaf fig in the corner catches the lamp at an angle that mimics outside.
The mimicry is good enough to fool a tired eye for half a breath.
The walls are forty by twenty-eight and the ceiling is acoustically padded and the door is painted off-white to look like a utility closet from the corridor side.
I have begun to think of it as my room. Whether to be afraid of that is the question I am still circling.
I shower. I scrub my hands to the elbow because I have done that every morning since I was twenty-two and a difficult morning is the wrong morning to break the habit.
I rinse until the water clears the tremor from my hands.
I cross myself with wet fingers when I am done, very small, at the sink, how my grandmother did before she lifted bread out of the oven.
Per chi mi tiene. For the one who holds me.
The pronoun blurs. I think I mean all of them. I think I mean Sophia, under all of them, the way bedrock sits under a foundation.
I put on a fresh scrub top. I clasp the medallion under the V. I touch it once.
---
The corridor lighting on Sub-basement 2 is the same at any hour and tells me nothing about the weather above.
The intercom by the door is on a low channel; if I pick it up Beatriz comes on within four rings.
I leave it on its cradle. I take the freight elevator three stories up to Floor 11 and the moment the doors open I hear the storm.
It is on the high windows of the West Annex stairwell — a sustained sheeting against the glass, low pressure dropping out of the building like a kept breath.
The drum of it is the deciding kind of rain, the kind that has settled into a verdict before it arrived.
I stand in the elevator a beat longer than I need to and let the sound find me through the open doors.
Wind gust. A clatter at the eave. The building's HVAC pitch drops to compensate.
I cross to the cafeteria for coffee.
The cafeteria is empty at 07:40 because Saturdays at St. Jude's are empty until rounds and because the rain has discouraged the visitors who would otherwise be here for the eight a.m. shift overlap.
I take the cup back to my table in the southeast corner — the one with the chair that faces the door.
I have always faced the door. Sister Mary Catherine taught us to face the door.
You place yourself where ready can find you.
I drink the coffee. I map the windows on the east wall.
Eleven. I register the chairs on this side of the partition.
Twenty-four. I mark the seconds between two wind gusts.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. The counting is a habit older than the war I am inside; I have used it to find the bottom of any room.
Beatriz finds me at 08:55, walking through the swing doors with rain on the shoulders of her cardigan and a clipboard under one arm.
"Mija. The chief gave you the morning."
She stays standing. Sitting would soften an instruction that needs its edge.
"He says you take the call you have been delaying."
I look at her. The call's name stays between us, the way certain names always have. We have lived alongside it for thirteen days; she has watched me carry it without setting it down once.
"You can use Conference Two on Floor Ten," she says. "Nobody is on that floor right now. Door locks. He had it cleared."
"He had it cleared," I repeat. Quietly. To no one.
"He spoke to me at seven. " She taps the clipboard against her hip. "He told me, mija. Past the asking. And then he asked me what I would do if I were you, and he listened to the answer for a full minute, which is the longest he has listened to me about anything outside of a patient's chart."
I close my hand around the coffee cup. The heat is at my palm.
"All right."
She nods. Past the words good luck — they would be too thin for this — she says, "Mija. The number is on the speed dial under MC. He has that ready too."
She walks back through the swing doors. The rain at the high window above the cafeteria's east wall is sheeting hard now. I track it for thirty seconds. Rain refuses the count; the gusts between agree to it. I take the gusts.
Three.
---
Conference Two is a small room off the chief's corridor with one window onto the air-shaft and a polycom phone on a teak veneer table. The chair faces the door. Of course it does.
I sit. I take the phone off the cradle. I press MC. I let it ring twice and then I press the speaker button because fourteen minutes is too long to hold a receiver; I will need both my hands.
She picks up on the third ring.
"Elena."
"Sister."
There is a half-second of breath at her end.
I can hear, behind her, the kettle she has always kept on the burner at the rectory and the soft small noise of a clock she has had since 1991.
The second hand still catches at the four; I have known the sound of that clock longer than I have known any other sound.
"Mija. I have been hoping you would call this week."
"I have been—" I stop. I take Stefan's rhythm. "I have been holding it."
"I know you have. The holding is the work. The setting down is also the work. They are different works."
I press my palm to the teak veneer table.
Conference Two is the room you brought a family into when the news was the wrong kind.
I press my palm into the table as I press my palm into a sternum I am about to do compressions on.
The table holds steady; my pressure passes through it into the floor and the floor takes what the table will not. I press anyway.
"Sister. I have to say her name. I have been carrying it silent for thirteen days, like a chart I have kept closed."
"You have been carrying it for six years, mija."
I breathe in through my nose. I breathe out through my mouth.
I press the medallion at my sternum with the back of my wrist because my palm is on the table and lifting it would be a small betrayal of the pressure.
The chain creaks as it always creaks, faintly, as a small bridge creaks under a single footstep.
"Sophia."
It comes out of my mouth like a thing I have been afraid to swallow, only to find that the shape was always mine. It fits. It fits like a name fits. It is her name. It has always been her name.
I say it again because the first one was too quiet.
"Sophia. My sister was Sophia. Sophia Rossi. June fourteen, ninety-six. March eleven, twenty-twenty. I have her picture in my wallet, Sister. The orientation one. The blue lanyard."
"I remember the picture," Sister says. Soft.
Soft as she has always been when somebody is telling her a true thing for the first time.
"You were seventeen when you took it. You told me she had been embarrassed by the lanyard and you had told her the lanyard was the proof.
You said that to me at the pediatric door in twenty-twenty-one. The name stayed inside you."
"I know it did."
"You are telling me now."
"I am telling you now."
Outside the conference room the storm hits the air-shaft window at an angle the building's geometry was built to refuse and meets anyway; the rain comes down the glass in a sheet, line collapsed into curtain.
I watch one drop take two others down the glass, then four, then a running seam the window cannot hold.
My pulse tries to follow it. I set my thumb against the table edge and keep Stefan's four-beat there, under the skin, because I have caught it from him and intend to keep it.
Sister waits. She has spent forty years waiting in the right place; each wait of hers carries weight, like a held breath inside a long sentence.
"Mija. " After a long moment. "I have to ask you something, and the answer you give can be any answer."
"All right."
"There is a position at Rainbow. Pediatric chief. Cleveland Clinic. A friend of mine — you do not know her, she was a class behind me at Mercy — she runs the recruiting for the inpatient floor. She asked me about you. She asked me by name. I told her I would call her back."
my eyes close.
The closing has nothing to do with surprise; the offer is real, and the real ones demand the dark behind the lid.
The offer is a door. Another woman has polished the handle on the far side and is willing to turn it for me.
The deeper offer underneath the offer is her saying you may leave the room you are in if you tell me you cannot stay in it. The deepest offer is I will not press.
The rain at the air-shaft window is louder now. Gusts to thirty-five at the gauge somewhere on the roof. The building corrects, slow, around us.
I open my eyes. I look at the door. I look at my hand on the table.
"Sister."
"Mija."
"I am not going to Cleveland."
The clock at her end catches at the four.
"I am where I need to be."
The line holds quiet for one full beat. The clock catches again at four.
"Mija. " Her voice has gone very soft. The cadence of forty years of listening; the cadence of a woman who has heard a hundred women say a sentence like the one I have just said and who has heard some of them mean it and some of them not. "Are you safe?"
I think about it.
I think about the standing order signed by four men at the brownstone on Day 9 and the safeword they ratified at the suite on Day 11 and the cashmere thrown over me last night by a man who did not stay.
I think about the storm on the West Annex high window and as the building has held against thirty-five-knot gusts since 1962.