6. Chapter 6
Julian
I wake at five fifteen because my body doesn't know any better, and for a full minute I lie still in the gray light trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.
Nothing. The answer is nothing. There's no case board, no rounds, no resident with my cell number, and the realization doesn't relax me, it makes my hands restless on top of the blanket, and then Christina shifts against my side and the restlessness goes somewhere else entirely.
She sleeps on her stomach with one arm under the pillow and her face turned toward me, hair across her cheek, mouth soft, one bare shoulder out of the blanket with the strap line from a summer of sun still faintly on it.
I lie there and look at her in the early light for longer than I'd admit to anyone living.
My father called twice last night. He left no voicemail, which is its own kind of message.
I slide out of bed without waking her, find my shorts, and take my phone down the stairs and out the front door into air that smells of cold water and pine. The driveway gravel is sharp under my bare feet. I call him back leaning against the Land Cruiser because some habits go where I go.
He picks up on the first ring. He's at the hospital. I can hear it behind him, the specific hum of the third floor corridor.
"You didn't answer."
"I'm off, Dad. Signed, covered, approved. You approved it."
"Hayes took your transplant patient to the unit overnight. Pressures dipped. He handled it." A pause with paper shuffling in it. "He handled it adequately."
"That's why we have Hayes."
"I'm just keeping you informed."
"You're checking if I'd come back early."
The corridor hums behind his silence. Somewhere on his end a monitor alarms twice and stops.
"The Brennan house," he says, instead of answering. "Howard sits on the board. Whatever you're doing up there, remember whose roof it is."
"I'm being a model guest."
"Mm." Another pause, and then, in exactly the same flat tone he uses for post op labs: "The photo in that column.
The one of the stairs, at the auction. Your mother would have cut it out and put it on the refrigerator.
" And he hangs up before I can do anything with that, which is the most him thing that has ever happened.
I stand in the driveway holding the phone against my chin for a while.
My mother used to translate him for me. Thirty years married to a man who issues lab values instead of sentences, and she could read him in the dark.
He just told me he misses her and that he's glad I'm here, all inside nine words about a refrigerator, and there's nobody left to translate it, so it sits where it lands.
Inside, I get coffee going in a machine that has more settings than a ventilator, and I take a mug down the sixty one steps to the dock and drink it with my feet hanging over the water while the sun comes up the shoreline.
A fish breaks the surface twenty feet out.
I have nowhere to be. I keep waiting for the catch in it, the pager, the phone, the tap on the shoulder, and it doesn't come, and somewhere near the bottom of the mug I stop waiting.
She comes down the steps at eight in one of the house robes with her hair loose, carrying her own coffee, and she sits beside me on the dock edge and puts her head on my shoulder without a word, and we watch the lake do nothing together for half an hour, and it's the best half hour I can remember having on dry land.
"There's a boat in the boathouse," I say eventually.
She lifts her head. "What kind of boat?"
"The kind Howard Brennan owns."
"Let's go," she says.
The boat is a wooden runabout, varnished to a shine, and the key is on a hook with a float shaped like a duck.
I back it off the lift slowly, very aware of whose roof and whose boat, and then we're out on open water with the morning sun hard off the chop and the wind taking her hair, and she stands beside the windshield with her hand on top of it and laughs at nothing, at speed, at the spray, and I drive farther than I need to just to keep her doing that.
We anchor in a sand bottomed cove around the point.
The water is completely clear, ten feet to the sand bottom, cold enough to make her shriek when she jumps and surfaces with her whole face shocked, and then I'm in too, and the cold knocks my own breath sideways, and we tread water and splash each other in a fight neither of us wins until our lips go faintly blue and we haul out over the swim platform.
She lies on the bow deck in the green swimsuit with her eyes closed and droplets drying on her stomach, and I sit against the windshield and watch her, the rise and fall of her, the curve where her waist becomes her hip, the small scar on her knee I don't know the story of yet, and I want her with a steadiness that has nothing to do with the swimsuit.
"You're staring again," she says, eyes still closed.
"There's nothing else out here to look at."
"There's an entire lake."
"It's a mediocre lake."
She opens one eye. "It's a spectacular lake."
"Everything's relative."
She throws her rolled towel at my head, and her aim is excellent.
"What's the scar?" I ask. "Left knee."
She lifts her head off the deck and squints at me. "You inventoried my knees?"
"I inventory everything. Medical habit. Also you're in a swimsuit on a boat, what else would I be doing."
She lies back down, smiling at the sky. "Roller rink.
Eleven years old. There was a boy named Danny DeLuca and a limbo contest, and I had a strategy that was all confidence and no physics.
" She holds her thumb and finger an inch apart.
"Four stitches. My mom let me pick the thread color and told the nurse I won the contest, which was a lie, and the nurse gave me a sticker anyway.
I went to school the next morning and told everyone I won. "
"Did Danny DeLuca believe you?"
"Danny DeLuca moved to Ohio and broke my heart at a very manageable size." She turns her head, shading her eyes with one hand to find me against the sun.
We eat sandwiches on the boat and get back to the dock by late afternoon, salt dried and sun heavy, and the chef arrives at five in a small white van.
Maritza. She takes over the kitchen with two coolers and a knife roll, banishes us to the deck with a plate of cheese, and tells us dinner is at seven thirty and to stay out of her way in a tone I recognize from every scrub nurse I've ever respected.
Christina showers first. I shower second, and when I come down she's on the deck in a blue sundress with her hair still damp at the ends, leaning on the railing in the gold light, and I stop on the bottom stair and look at her until she feels it and turns around.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Julian."
"You look like the reason men buy lake houses."
She rolls her eyes, and the color coming up her neck says otherwise.
Maritza feeds us on the deck while the sun drops.
White fish she bought off a boat this morning, blistered tomatoes, bread with burnt edges, a chilled white she opens without asking, and a chocolate thing at the end that makes Christina put her fork down and sit back and stare at the lake in silence for a full minute as a sign of respect.
Halfway through the wine she lifts her glass an inch off the table.
"To the pediatric cardiac unit," she says, completely straight faced.
"You're going to ride that donation forever."
"Nine thousand dollars, Julian. I'll be bringing it up at every meal for the rest of my life.
Maritza, this is the best fish I have ever eaten and I grew up in the Midwest." From the kitchen, Maritza points a pair of tongs at her in acknowledgment without turning around.
Maritza packs out at nine, waves off help twice, and tells Christina, not me, that the kitchen is hers now, and the van crunches away down the gravel and leaves us with the crickets.
We end up on the big couch in the great room with the windows black and the lake loud through the screens.
She scrolls the house's movie list lying down with her calves across my lap, and she takes the job seriously, narrating her shortlist, vetoing my input on the grounds that I once told her I'd never seen her favorite movie, an offense she clearly never dropped.
She picks an old heist movie. "We need popcorn," she announces first, already up off the couch, and I get a tour of her in my sweatshirt going through Howard Brennan's cabinets without shame, opening doors and closing them, narrating the search, until she comes up with a dusty box of microwave popcorn from above the refrigerator.
She holds it overhead with both hands, champion of the cabinets.
The microwave runs. She eats the first handful standing at the counter then comes back over the back of the couch instead of around it, landing half on me, settling the bowl between us.
"It's expired," she says, eating it.
"How expired?" I ask.
"Don't worry about it."
She knows every line of the opening scene and says one of them along with it, quietly, before catching herself.
I watch maybe a quarter of the movie.
The rest of the time I watch her. The screen light moving on her face.
Her laugh arriving a half second before the joke because she knows it's coming.
Her toes flexing against my thigh during the vault scene.
At some point her head migrates to my chest and my hand finds her hair.
Her hand settles flat in the middle of my chest, dead center, holding nothing, holding everything, and I sit in a stranger's house with this woman breathing against me and understand with complete clarity that I am not going to be able to do the arrangement.
The credits roll. She doesn't move. I think she's asleep until she speaks into my shirt.
"You stopped watching forty minutes ago."
"The movie was fine."
"It's a classic, and you missed the whole twist." She tilts her head back to look up at me, chin on my chest, and whatever she finds in my face makes her go still.
"What?" she asks.
"I don't want this to end at the airport.
" Her whole body goes careful against me, and I keep going, because if I stop I won't start again.
"I'm not talking about a weekend. I want to take you to dinner in the city.
I want to come up those stairs to your office with sandwiches until Kate stops being surprised by it.
I want the version where I drive you to your mom's and fix the water heater myself and she tells me embarrassing stories about you.
I want it slow, public, normal. I want to do it right, which I'm aware I have not earned, and I'm asking anyway. "
She sits up. She moves to the far cushion, tucks her feet under herself, and the screen behind her goes to menu, throwing blue light along her shoulder.
"No," she says.
"Christina."
"You agreed. There was an arrangement, and you sat in my conference room and you didn't argue with it, and I checked, and you didn't argue with it because you'd already decided to do this.
Out here. Where it's pretty." Her voice isn't angry.
It's worse, it's even. "Here's what you don't get to know, because you weren't there.
After you, I didn't just lose a boyfriend who was never officially my boyfriend.
I rebuilt my whole life around a different career, a different neighborhood, a different version of myself, and it took me years, and it worked.
It finally works. I have a job I'm good at and a boss who respects me and savings I just set on fire for one weekend with you, and the weekend is wonderful, and that's all it gets to be. "
"Why?"
"Because I watched you choose." She holds my eyes across the couch.
"Six years ago, when it was me or the career, you chose in about ninety seconds on a bench, and you were kind about it, which made it worse.
" She breathes in slow through her nose.
"So this is me making sure. We have one more day.
We'll have a wonderful time. Then we land, and we go back, and you will never have to choose between me and your career again, because I won't be one of the options.
I'm taking myself off the table. That's a gift, Julian. You should say thank you."
"It wasn't..." I stop. The whole truth is sitting right there behind my teeth, my father in his office with his glasses off, the things he said the spring my mother got sick, the deal I made and the size of what it cost.
"It wasn't what?" she says.
If I tell her here, on a couch, on day two of a weekend she's already decided is the whole story, it becomes an excuse. A bid. One more man explaining why the thing he did to her wasn't the thing he did to her.
"Nothing," I say. "Okay. Your terms."
She watches me for a long moment, looking for the trap in it. I keep my face honest, which is hard, because somewhere underneath I'm aware that I just agreed to terms I have no intention of honoring, and that she'd walk into the lake before believing how much I mean the rest of it.
"Okay," she says slowly. "Good."
"One more day. Wonderful time."
"Starting now," she says, and crawls back across the couch into my lap, facing me, her knees on either side of my hips and her hands flat on my chest, and the sad thing in the room clears out all at once.
She pulls my lower lip through her teeth, lets it go.
"The kitchen's mine now. Maritza said. You're in my kitchen. "
"I'm on a couch."
"It's an open floor plan, everything's the kitchen.
" Her mouth moves along my jaw, down, and my hands fill with the blue sundress and the warm shape of her under it, and the lake keeps coming in through the screens, and for a while there is no arrangement, no city, no airport, just her hair falling around my face and her voice low against my ear telling me exactly what she wants, and I have never followed instructions so well in my life.
It's past one when she falls asleep, in our bed this time, hers and mine for one more night, her back tucked against my chest and my arm dead under her pillow where it can stay forever as far as I'm concerned.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I reach over her, careful, and turn it just enough to see.
Dianna.
Then a second buzz. A third. The screen stacking notifications in the dark.
Call me when you land tomorrow. Before you do anything else.
Don't panic.
It's Chicago Confidential again and this time they used her name.