CHAPTER 19
Elena
◆
I touch buttons on the ceil-blue scrub top.
Six. I follow breaths. Four. I check the folds of the pants.
Three. The pencil is yellow through the low knot at the nape.
The Hokas are at the door, worn at the right heel a quarter-inch more than the left because I stand at the patient's left when I scrub.
I let ten beats pass before I stand. The reason is something my body knows ahead of my head.
The corridor on the way to the elevator at six is empty in a way the dictionary lacks a word for.
Halloween morning. The day shift will trickle.
The lunchroom will pull half the floor at eleven.
The wing will breathe slow today. I file the empty corridor as fact.
I file it as fact only. The lesson that emptiness is a warning waits for me at eleven.
---
OR-1, seven o'clock. Hernia repair on a sixty-two-year-old man who jokes about pumpkins.
Beatriz is across the table. Her reading glasses are on the beaded chain.
Her Vicks is already under the upper lip and the salt-and-pepper bob is neat as if she ironed it.
She catches my eye over the mask once and the look she gives me is the look she gave me at the door of OR-1 on my first day — twelve seconds of triage.
"Mija. Your day is going to be long," she says when we step out at eight-forty. "Take a sandwich."
"I will."
"Mija. Take it now."
I take it now. Grilled cheese from the cafeteria.
I eat half. The pepper across the bridge of my nose is sharper because the lights in the cafeteria are colder today; cold weather pulls the freckles up.
I study the sandwiches on the warming tray because if I do not count something I will count the empty stools and they are too many.
At nine-thirty I am at the charge desk. The candy bowl is there. Three mini Snickers. Two Reese's. One generic peanut butter cup with a faded wrapper. Six pieces total. I file the six.
"Mija. " Beatriz again, low. Her hand on my forearm one beat. "Listen. Look both ways."
"At what."
"At everything."
She walks. The reading glasses click against the chain.
I file her sentence as Beatriz being Beatriz.
The other filing — the one I will need — waits on the far side of an hour I have already entered.
I am twenty-five years old. The lesson that the people who love me say in three words what other people say in ten — that the three are usually the warning — comes later, at the cost of a spleen.
---
Ten-forty-five. OR-3 corridor. I have a chart for Beatriz — the next case's pre-op acknowledgments — folded under my left arm.
The autoclaves at change of shift down on the OR-1 corridor end whistle once. The chamber-cycle. The hiss. I listen through the hisses without meaning to. Four. The same four I counted on Day 3. The same four I have held the count since.
Hayes is at the end of the corridor. The wing's schedule has him elsewhere — and yet here he is.
The French cuff is buttoned at the wrist. He has checked his watch twice in the time it took me to clear ten paces.
The eyes that read warm at the gala read pewter under the surgical fluorescents.
He is six minutes early to a case the board never put under his name.
What the buttoned cuff is hiding stays hidden a little longer.
I am six paces from him when the corridor breaks.
---
A second man is at the south end. His face is a stranger's.
He has come through trauma intake at a slow stagger.
A knife is in his right hand. The grip is wrong — palm-up, fingers loose — a man who has held a knife twice in his life.
The intake desk is at his back. The intake clerk's chair sits empty.
Halloween nurses' lunch. The cafeteria. The corridor is empty.
He says: "You killed him."
His eyes go past Hayes, past me, into the space between us — the trauma bay three door behind my left shoulder.
The bay where his father bled out six years ago.
The intake form Hayes signed as attending.
The man's hand under his jacket comes out with a gun he had pocketed for the knife he could not commit to.
The metal is matte-black and too small for the hand around it.
A snub-nose. I have time to register that the snub-nose looks wrong in his palm.
I have time to register Hayes's face. Hayes stands in for the target — the available reflection of the doctor who signed an intake form. I am five feet from Hayes. I am six feet from the man at the south end. I am at the patient's left of the geometry as I stand at the patient's left when I scrub.
Surgical-side preference. I shift left.
The first round leaves the barrel.
The medallion at my sternum catches my finger as I fall.
The hairline crack across the angel’s wing snags on the pad of my right index finger and the chain bites in.
The round enters the left flank under the lower ribs.
There is no exit I can find. Copper-iron heat under the tongue.
The taste is what blood tastes like from the inside when you have inhaled at the wrong second.
I bite down on the inside of my left cheek without meaning to.
I am on the floor on my right side.
I map tiles. Twelve to the bay three door.
Twelve to the south stairwell door. I track the man's footsteps.
Two. His angle is toward Hayes — past me, around me, the shooter's geometry sliding by.
The second round goes high and to my left — the wall by the autoclave whistle — and the third leaves the barrel into a doorway I am already losing because the south stairwell door is already opening and someone is in it.
Alexei.
He is left-handed. The draw is the kind of draw I have only seen at the bay when he opens a chest at bedside — economy, no warning, the wrist following the shoulder by a fraction.
His off-arm comes up to the gunman's knife hand.
The knife goes. The right wrist breaks under Alexei's left palm — I hear the snap two beats after I see the wrist bend. The gunman goes down on top of the gun.
The man whose father bled out six years ago survives. He is alive on the corridor floor under Alexei's knee. He is shouting the same sentence. "You killed him. You killed him. You killed him. " He is crying. I hear the shouts. Three. Four. The fifth is muffled into the tile.
The hospital security door at the north end opens and three uniforms come through it. Alexei lifts off the gunman without looking at him. The uniforms take the man. He is arrested. He is alive.
Alexei is on his knees beside me.
"Krasivaya."
His left hand is at my left flank. The blood is wetting his cuff to the wrist. The knurled steel ring on his right thumb rests at my jaw — there, only there, the touch a balance, not a press. He drew with the left, as he always does. He is breathing fast. He keeps his voice low.
"Color."
I have to swallow before I can. "Green."
The word is a lie and we both know it. I say it because I want to be on the green side of whatever room he is going to put me in.
I say it for Sophia, whose chance to say it ran out at eleven-forty-seven.
I say it because I am twenty-five and I have spent nine years on the window side of every glass I could find — and tonight the window is above me.
Stefan is at my head. He arrived between two heartbeats — silent, already in motion.
The cord at his left wrist is at my temple.
He is on the wall-phone — Code, OR-3 corridor, GSW left flank, get the cart, get the room, O-negative on standby, Beatriz to OR-3 — and his palm at the cord then at my forehead then at the cord again.
The four-count is in his breath. One. Two.
Three. Four. He is counting at me and into the phone and into Alexei in the same rhythm.
By the time he hangs up the wall phone, the overhead has caught up: Trauma One, OR-3, massive transfusion protocol, security to south corridor. The words come out of the ceiling in the hospital voice, flat and female and late by only three seconds. Late still counts.
Beatriz is in the corridor in eleven seconds. I hold to eleven before I see her. Her hands are inside a pair of nitrile gloves already and her sleeves are pushed.
"Mija. Stay with me. STAY."
"I'm not leaving."
"You are with me. You are with me. Ay dios. You are with me. Mija. Eyes on me."
I keep my eyes on her. The reading glasses on the beaded chain click against the snap of her scrub top as she leans over me. I hear the clicks. Four.
Nikolai comes through the south stairwell door at the twelfth click.
He moves straight to me without breaking stride.
He goes to his knees once — the only sound is his cuff against the tile — and he has me up against his chest before I have time to register that I am being lifted.
His right shoulder. He is breathing four counts in six counts out as he has always breathed.
Twenty-three years he has spent forbidden the luxury of fear.
The luxury arrives tonight. The word for it stays behind his teeth.
"Bystro," he says to Stefan. Then to me, in English: "Elena. You are with me. Eyes here. Count for me."
I take inventory: the brass surgical lamp arms above the corridor's overhead light fixture — I have never noticed the corridor has a lamp like the OR's, but it does, in the corner above the cabinet of code carts, three arms. I register three. He carries me.
He carries me to OR-1 first — the closest — and Stefan says no, three, because OR-3 is the open trauma room, the laparotomy tray is already cracked from the morning drill, anesthesia’s machine is checked, and the charge board has it held for the next ambulance.
Lighting is not the reason. Readiness is.
Nikolai pivots mid-stride, the redirection folded into a single step.
He carries me the extra twenty-two paces.
Twenty-two lands, precise. The number is precise.
---