CHAPTER 13 #2
I think about my grandmother's hands lifting bread out of the oven and the small Sicilian phrase she said when she gathered me up after I had run into the table corner: ti tengo.
I have you. I hold you. I keep you. Three meanings under one held breath, how my grandmother's whole life was three meanings under one held breath.
"I am held," I say.
The word she asked for has a different shape; what I give her instead is the true one, in place of the easy one, and she takes it for what it is.
The pause that follows is the longest one of the call.
"Then I will not press."
The silver at my sternum has warmed against me. The crack across the angel's wing is the same crack it has been since I was twelve.
"Thank you, Sister."
"Mija. You will call me. Not because I have asked. Because you will need to."
"I will."
"And mija. " A breath. "I am proud of you. The pride is in the choosing itself, not the destination of it. I am proud because you have chosen, and you have told me clearly, and you have spoken the truth of what you are doing. That is the work. The lying is the wound."
The words go out of me for a moment. The rhythm steadies me.
"Thank you, Sister."
We say goodbye. Fourteen minutes on the call timer when I press end.
She has held me on the line for the precise number of minutes Sophia took to die plus the minute it took the surgical team to walk out of OR-2 and find me at the gallery window.
Whether Sister chose the duration is a question I cannot ask.
I think she might have. I think the choosing might have happened beneath the level at which she would name it.
I sit for two more minutes. The storm-rain on the air-shaft glass is the only sound the room makes. I cross myself once, very small. I get up. I walk back to the elevator.
---
The leak in Lab B does not announce itself; Stefan finds it.
He is the one who notices, as he notices anything that the building is doing that the building should not be doing.
He is on the cath-lab annex side at 13:20 — I have come down to the corridor to return a sealed sample envelope to the Lab A inbox, a small errand Beatriz has handed me as a courtesy to let me out of my own head — when he steps out of Lab B with a folded towel over his arm and says, "Doll.
The high window. The west one. It is letting in the storm. "
He says it as a room confides in him, in the flat register of a fact already accepted.
"How bad?"
"A meter of floor wet. The seal at the upper sash is finished.
I have placed two towels. I would like another pair of hands and a third towel and a wet-vac if we have one.
The wet-vac is in the supply closet down by C, on the left, second shelf.
There is also a roll of plastic sheeting I would like to use to make a small dam at the cabinet base while the maintenance crew is finding their way through the building to me. "
Past the do-you-want-to-help and the if-you-would, he has chosen this version of the asking because he has decided that today the asking is harder for me than the doing. He has put the asking in the form of an inventory and offered me the inventory.
I take it.
"I will get the vac."
"Thank you, doll."
The supply closet is colder than the corridor.
The wet-vac is heavier than I expected and the roll of plastic is awkward under my other arm.
I carry both. He meets me at the Lab B door and takes the vac and lets me bring in the plastic.
Inside, the rain is loud — louder here than anywhere I have been in the building today, because the high window of Lab B sits in the brick of the West Annex above the cabinetry and the storm-rain has found the seam at the upper sash and is running down the inside of the bricks in two slow curtains.
The floor at the west wall is dark with it.
The fume hood is running at full draw and the whine of it under the rain is a strange pitch, two notes that do not quite agree.
We work for thirty-eight minutes.
He kneels at the floor; I stand at the wet-vac. He lays the plastic. I drag the hose to the corner. He talks while we work, low, as he talks when he is making the room easier for me to be in.
"There were storms in Moscow that were lighter than this. The pressure would drop and the rain would come down quietly and you could walk home through it without hurrying. The storms here are the city's mood. They arrive when the city has decided to feel something."
"You moved here in twenty-fourteen."
"Yes. Eleven Octobers, doll. I have learned to read the pressure off the windows."
"Your hand," I say.
He has set his right palm flat on the wet floor for balance; the midline scar is white against the pink of his hand. He looks at it. The hand stays where he placed it.
"The hand is fine. The hand has done worse than this."
We work. He blots. I vacuum. The rain at the high window stays sustained; the high window remains the loudest thing in the room. The wet-vac overtakes it for thirty-eight minutes and then we are done and the rain reclaims the loudness.
He stands. He takes the towel off his arm — clean; he had been waiting to give it to me — and hands it to me. My hands are clean but he watches me dry them.
"Doll."
"I know."
The I know covers everything he leaves unspoken; the covering is the gift. I know what it covers. I know he knows I named Sophia today. I know he was four floors away from Conference Two and present inside it anyway.
"Eat something," he says. "There is a sandwich in the chief's small fridge. He had it brought down. He will not be angry that you ate it; he had it brought for you."
"All right."
He walks me to the door. He touches the back of one of his knuckles to my wrist as he steps out — there and gone, as he has been touching me since the call room, as if to say I am still here at the count.
The corridor outside Lab B is the same temperature as it always is. I walk back to the suite and eat half a sandwich.
---
Gabriel's office at 16:40 is the warmest room in Sub-basement 2.
He sits at the desk in his lab coat. The strap is folded in the left pocket.
The Calvino — Le Cosmicomiche, the slim paperback he handed me three nights ago after the Italian novel — sits on the corner of the desk where I have put it, returned.
I have read it. He has not asked me to. I have read it.
He studies the book, then me, and keeps his seat.
"Elena."
"Gabriel."
"Sit if you would like to sit. Stand if you would like to stand. The room will hold either."
I sit. The leather chair takes my weight; the right armrest is the side worn down to the under-leather and I rest my forearm on the smooth seam, where his arm has rested every day for two years.
"You read it."
"All of it."
"Tell me one story."
The line opens the door. I can feel the hinge in it. I have thirty seconds to choose which story.
"The one about the moon."
"Which one. There are two."