CHAPTER 25
Elena
◆
The first thing is the weight of the coat.
Heavy at the shoulders. Light at the cuffs, the cuffs rolled twice over my hands, the sleeves past my knuckles.
The wool smells of the loft — vetiver and smoke and the soap he uses on his own skin.
I touch each button of the coat under my chin.
Five. I press my palm to my own wrist. The beat is low and even. I open my eyes.
A slant of pale window-light at the head of the bed. A small square of brass from the bedside lamp at its lowest setting. Between them I find his hand.
His left hand is flat on the headboard above my head, fingers slightly spread. He is awake.
"Elena."
"Here."
The hand comes down from the headboard. It hovers an inch above the wool at my shoulder, then changes course.
He sets it on the bedside table beside the silk strap folded into its rectangle, beside the leather notebook, beside the yellow pencil parallel to the lamp's base.
The order of objects is the order of instruments on a tray.
"You slept six hours."
I answer with the hours. Twenty-three thirty to five thirty. Six. He has been awake the whole time. I touch the medallion at my sternum, pad of my right index finger against the silver, the hairline crack of the angel's wing under the chain. Once. I let it go.
"There is one more thing," he says.
His left hand goes into the lab-coat pocket I am wearing — into my own pocket, the pocket containing whatever he put there for me to find when I woke. He takes out a small object. He places it on the flat of his palm. He holds the palm at the height of my chest and waits.
The pediatric pin.
Ceil-blue enamel. The teddy-bear silhouette over the stylized stethoscope.
The clasp. Sister Mary Catherine pinned it to me at St. Margaret's on my first morning on the pediatric floor in twenty-twenty.
I took it off my ID lanyard the morning of Day Eleven and put it in the writing-desk drawer and did not put it back on.
He has had it — for some count of days I will only ever guess at. He is offering it back.
"It is yours," he says. The Naples-prison clip on the consonants. "I have been keeping it. You will decide whether you wear it. I am giving it back because today is the day you have decided about a thing the pin is part of."
I take the pin. The enamel is warm; he has carried it against his body. I close my hand around it.
"Thank you, Gabriel."
He nods.
I put the pin in the right pocket of his coat — the left already holds the strap and the notebook. I want my own pocket for it.
"I am going back to the suite," I say. "I want a quiet hour by myself. Then I would like the four of you to come. All four. After lunch. I have something to show you."
His eyes hold mine for nine seconds. He waits for me to finish; the question stays in his mouth and goes back down.
"Yes. We will come at fourteen hundred."
He plants his right palm on the headboard above my head, fingers slightly spread, the architect's tell, and waits. The silence stretches long enough to feel chosen. After a long moment he takes the hand away and walks out of the room.
I close my hand around the pin in the pocket of his coat. I breathe the room back into shape. The wool is warm where my hand has been.
---
Kostya holds the door at the curb of Lispenard Street. The charcoal kid gloves are snapped at his wrists. He keeps his eyes on the corner of Church Street because his eyes on the corner are how he keeps them off me when I am in the kind of morning I am in.
I get into the back. He pulls out.
"Pakhan will be at the suite at fourteen hundred," he says, the first words. "Dr. Mikhailov will be with him. Dr. Volkov says he will come from Long Island City. Dr. Castellan will come last."
"Thank you, Kostya."
He nods at the rearview without meeting my eyes. He has been doing this for me for two weeks — speaking the itinerary without meeting my eyes — and I have come to understand it as care.
The drive east takes us onto the FDR. The river is on our right. The water is the color of slate. I name the bridges between us and the East Tower. Williamsburg. Brooklyn. Manhattan. Three.
I keep my hand in the right pocket of Gabriel's coat. The pin is at the bottom. The clasp is closed against my palm.
I think of Sophia.
I have been thinking of her since the morning I opened the writing-desk drawer last week to take out my cardigan and found the empty wood where the pediatric pin used to live, and asked no questions, and let the silence sit.
One of them had taken it for a reason and the reason would arrive when the reason was ready.
Today the reason has arrived.
She is the older sister who took my chin in her hand on the funeral parlor in Bensonhurst and said the words I have been saying back to her in my head ever since.
Elena. Look at me. You are still here. That is the work.
I touch the medallion at my sternum. Twice. The reason stays under my tongue, where it lives.
Kostya lets me out at the East Tower bay. I walk through the bronze revolving doors. I take the elevator down to Sub-basement Two. I let myself into the suite with my own card-key.
The circadian lighting has come up to morning. The bed is made hospital corners. The cardigan is folded on the chair.
I sit at the writing desk.
I take my wallet out of the bottom drawer. I open it. The first slot at the front of the bill compartment is where she lives. Two weeks since I last lifted her into the light. I take her out.
Three by five inches. Matte finish. Plastic-sleeved.
The corners faded at the right edge where my thumb has touched it for four years.
Sophia in a white coat — the Cardozo orientation jacket, the lanyard around her neck, the navy and silver of the school.
Twenty-two the next month. The year before she died.
Auburn hair pulled back. The Fifth Avenue building behind her.
She is laughing at something I said behind the camera.
I was seventeen. I had said something about the speed of her walk. She is laughing at me.
In the background past her right shoulder, just visible through the doorway of the building, is a slot of an interior I have never looked at carefully. Pale tile. The corner of a wall clock. The arm of a brass lamp.
The slot waits for its turn. What matters now is the act of taking her out of the wallet and setting her on the desk.
I track her breath in the photograph because the photograph has caught her at the exhale. I keep the rhythm. The count stops there.
I take the pediatric pin out of the right pocket of Gabriel's coat. I put it on the desk beside the photograph. Ceil-blue against the wood. Silver-edged against the wood.
I light a small candle Beatriz has been keeping for me in the drawer. White, three inches, smokeless. I light it with Stefan's lighter from October.
I sit. The tears stay where they live, behind my throat. I wait.
---
They come at fourteen hundred. Alexei first.
"Krasivaya."
"Hi."
He stays at the doorway with one hand on the frame. He has done this kind of waiting at the trauma bay's threshold a thousand times — the moment between the gurney coming in and the moment he steps to it.
"I am going to come in," I say.
"Yes."
He steps in and leans against the wall opposite the writing desk. He turns the ring once.
Stefan and Nikolai come together at fourteen oh four. Stefan has a small tray — the heavy ceramic mug, hot water, a sachet of the Earl Grey he keeps for me at the chief's office. He sets the tray on the kitchen counter. He brings me the mug. He stands at the corner of the desk and waits.
Nikolai is at the door. The Patek catches the lamp at his wrist. His eyes go to the photograph. He breathes — four in, six out — and stands at the wall closest to the door, opposite Alexei.
Gabriel comes last at fourteen oh seven. He has been in the corridor for two minutes, I think. He sees the photograph and the candle and the pin and comes to the desk and places his left hand flat on the wood beside the photograph, fingers slightly spread. He waits.
Four men. One room.
"I want to show you my sister," I say.
The room goes still.
I pick up the photograph. I hold it at the height of the desk lamp so the candle and the photograph are next to each other in the light. I look at her. I keep my hand steady.
"Her name is Sophia."
The word in my mouth is the word I have said aloud once in all the years since she died — once on a phone call with Sister Mary Catherine a week and a half ago — and now twice. I say it again, because saying it twice is what the room has asked of me.
"Sophia."
Nikolai holds his face still; his throat moves once — the small flush at the hollow above his collar, the keloid scar there, just the one beat of color. Alexei is turning the ring. Stefan has gone very still.
I hold the photograph across the desk. Stefan is closest. I hold it where his hand can find it on his own count.
He takes it. His fingers at the corners of the plastic sleeve. He brings it close to his face. He has his reading glasses on — he put them on in the corridor — and he looks at her through the lenses.
The inhale.
It is small. Quieter than a gasp; a four-count breath drawn in instead of his usual six-eight, the rhythm pulled tight by a beat his chest cannot hold.
His shoulders stay set. His mouth stays still.
The breath comes in through the nose and stops at the top of the inhale and stays there for a fraction of a second longer than his rhythm allows.
He holds the breath.
He releases it slow.
"Doll."
"Yes."
"I want to tell you something about this photograph. I would like to tell you sitting down."
"Sit."
He sits in the desk chair. I am standing. Nikolai is at my left, his palm hovering at the small of my back without touching. Alexei has come off the wall and is at the door. Gabriel is at the desk with his hand still flat beside the photograph.
Stefan takes off his glasses. He sets them on the desk beside the photograph.