CHAPTER 29 #3
The words I am sorry stay in my mouth because at thirty-six I have learned them for debts that can be paid, and the debt to a sister who died on a trauma table at twenty-three while her brother stood nineteen and frozen in the lightwell across the way is a wound, not a debt.
My hands close wounds with stitches. They close them by being the man at the door of a bay that takes everyone.
"Thank you."
She nods. Her hand goes to the medallion at her sternum, pad of the right index finger, the count she keeps. She touches it once. The finger drops back to her lap. The cardigan settles.
We stay like that for a minute.
I think about Yuri once. The thought is a private thing and I keep it private.
Yuri at eleven on the Murmansk pier, the Polaroid, the print faded silver-pink at the edges.
Yuri would have been thirty-three this year.
Sophia would have been twenty-nine. They would have known each other if the world had been built differently — through her and through me, and the bay I run would have taken Sophia at twenty-three on an evening in March instead of a hospital across town that ran out of platelets, and Yuri would have walked through the doors of the hospital that turned him away because the director had been bought.
The world was not built differently. I have to live in this one. I am going to live in it.
I let him go for the night.
"I will go in a minute."
"Stay another minute."
We stay another minute. The clock is the lamp.
The lamp holds its amber. Her right hand finds my left hand without looking — she does not have to look; we have done this in three rooms now — and she rests her fingertips against the back of my knuckles.
The cross-hatch impression on my right thumb is fading already. The thumb is naked. The hand is hers.
At zero-zero-fifty I shift my weight off my heels and onto my left hand on the floor.
My knees crack. She smiles. The smile is small.
I have not seen it more than four times in thirty-six years and I am keeping a count of those four times against my will because they are the only count I keep in addition to her pulse.
"I will go now."
"Go."
I rise. I rise as a man rises off a floor he has not been on in twenty-two years — slow, knees, a hand braced on the bed frame because the bed frame is there and I am not too proud to use it. She watches me rise. She stays in the bed.
I stand at the bed.
I look at her in the cardigan in the lamp's amber with her sister's photograph on the desk behind her and the ring in her left pocket and the medallion at her sternum and her bare feet tucked under her and her hands folded on the cardigan's hem.
"Don't lose it."
She smiles again. Twice in five minutes. I will have to start a new count. "I will not lose it."
I cross to the door. I unlock it. The reinforced steel kisses its frame the other way this time.
I open it. The corridor is dim. Stefan's card-key in my pocket.
Nikolai will be awake at the brownstone.
Gabriel will be at the loft writing a letter he will not send.
The vow stack is at three. The morning is hours away.
I turn at the door. I look back across the suite. She sits where she sat through all of it, against the headboard. Her right hand is in the left pocket of the cardigan. She is holding the ring through the wool. The amber lamp is on her face. The medallion is at her sternum.
"Krasivaya."
She nods.
I close the door.
I close it as I close trauma-bay doors after a good case — soft, the latch only, no slam. The reinforced steel kisses its frame for the third time and the magnetic lock catches with the little click I have been listening for since I crossed the rug.
I stand in the corridor for five beats.
Then I walk. The cement floor is cold under my boots.
I will not sleep tonight. I will go to the brownstone.
I will sit in the kitchen and drink coffee with Nikolai who will also not be sleeping.
Stefan will be at the loft with Gabriel because the four of us have arranged ourselves in pairs tonight as we arrange ourselves in the four corners of a room when there is work. The work is the vow.
The vow is mine and done. The next vow is Gabriel's. The morning is at the greenhouse and the first snow is due at dawn per the timeline Nikolai keeps in his head.
The thumb on my right hand is bare. The impression of the cross-hatch is gone. The thumb is a thumb. The ring is in a pocket in a cardigan on a woman in a bed in a sub-basement under a hospital I run a trauma service for. The ring is hers. The hand is hers. The trauma bay is hers. I am hers.
Suka, I love her.
My heart is loud. My breathing stays even.
Thumb bare. Sister Sophia's name on the air between me and a woman I will see in five hours at a greenhouse on the Upper West Side, where Gabriel will speak the last vow and she will give the answer she has been holding for twenty-eight days.
The bay is clean. The ring is in her pocket.
The medallion is at her sternum. Yuri would have been thirty-three.
Sophia would have been twenty-nine. The world was built like this. I am going to live in it.
Krasivaya.