9. Chapter 9
Julian
The case this morning is a mitral repair, a fifty-two-year-old high school band director named Paul who told me in pre-op that he conducts with his whole body and asked if I could keep him able to do that.
His leaflet is prolapsed. We're going to fix it, not replace it, which means an hour of small precise sutures in a moving target and no margin for a wandering mind.
My father is across the table when I make the first stitch on the posterior leaflet, and my mind wanders anyway.
It wanders to a lobby with a revolving door and a woman who told me she was fine in a voice built to end a conversation.
It wanders to a voicemail she deleted, which she admitted to me herself, which I have decided is information and not a wound.
It's been over a month since the trip and I still can't get her off my mind.
"Suture," my father says.
I'm already loading it. My hands know this even when the rest of me is somewhere on the north side of the city.
The repair goes in. We test it with saline and the line of closure holds, no regurgitant jet on the field, and the perfusionist calls a number I like. My father bends in over my hands the way he does, reading my work at a distance of four inches, and I wait for him to tell me to redo something.
He doesn't. He straightens up. "Where are you right now?"
"OR four."
"You hesitated." He says it flat, the same register he'd use to read a potassium level. "You've never hesitated like that in your life. Close. I'll see you in my office."
He strips his gloves and leaves the room, and Derek, at the head of the table behind the drape, doesn't say a word, which from Derek is louder than anything.
We come off bypass clean. Paul's heart picks the rhythm back up and the line on the monitor settles into something a band director could conduct to, and for the length of that I'm fully here, the way I'm always fully here at the exact moment a heart decides to keep going.
Then the field is dry and the chest is closing under the resident's hands and I'm thinking about her again, which is precisely my father's point and precisely why I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of saying so.
His office is on the third floor with a window that faces the parking structure. He's at the window when I come in. He doesn't sit, so neither do I.
"The repair was good," he says to the glass.
"I heard you not say so in the room."
"The repair was good. The hesitation wasn't." He turns around.
He's got his glasses off, folded in one hand, which is the tell I learned to read before I could read an echo.
Glasses off means he's about to say a true thing and he'd rather not be able to see my face clearly while he does it.
"I don't know what happened at that lake.
I don't want the details. I approved the time, I'll own that.
But a man took your transplant patient to the unit while you were gone and you came back, and you're still gone.
You're standing at my table thinking about a woman. "
"You introduced an auction where people bid on me. You can't be surprised one of them stuck."
"The one who stuck spent nine thousand dollars and then sold you a weekend at arm's length.
" His voice doesn't rise. That's the thing about him.
The worse it gets, the quieter he goes, and right now he's very quiet.
"I watched your mother run this hospital's pediatric fundraising for nineteen years and I watched her do it while I was unreachable in a room like the one you were in this morning.
I know exactly what it costs a marriage to do this work. I paid it. She paid more."
"Don't put her in this."
"She's in everything." He sets the glasses on the desk. "When she got sick you were a resident, you wanted to take a year. You remember what I asked you."
I remember. I've spent six years not letting myself remember in any room with daylight in it.
"You asked me to stay the course."
"I asked you to become what she already saw.
Because if you'd taken the year, you'd have spent it watching her die instead of becoming the reason other people's mothers don't." He says it without flinching and I hate that there's truth in it, the kind of truth that doesn't make a thing right, just makes it complicated.
"You made me a promise on the worst day of my life and you kept it, and you are the best young heart surgeon in this city because you kept it.
I'm not going to apologize for the size of what that bought. "
"It bought more than you think."
He looks at me. He waits, the way he waits at a table for a measurement, and I almost say it.
I almost tell him the name of what the promise cost the spring after my mother's funeral, when I sat on a bench outside the anatomy building and ended the only thing in my life that wasn't this hospital, because he'd looked at me across this same desk two days earlier and asked me if I was serious about the path or if I was going to let it get diluted.
I don't tell him. Because it isn't his to carry and it isn't his to forgive, and because I'm done handing him pieces of my life to grade.
"I have a patient to check on," I say.
"Julian—"
"The repair was good, Dad. You said so twice."
I leave him with his glasses on the desk.
I go to Paul, who's waking up and already trying to lift his hands like he's in front of an orchestra. I tell his wife he'll be conducting by spring, and she laughs the way they laugh, the cry-laugh that somehow always lightens my mood.
My last case is a pericardial window that runs late, and by the time I'm changed and out the door the lot is half dark.
The Land Cruiser starts on the second turn, the way it has for fourteen years, and I sit in it for a minute with my hands on the wheel and my mother's car around me, smelling like coffee and the inside of a glovebox she packed.
She'd have driven me to Christina's herself. She'd have gotten the address out of me at a red light and turned the wheel before I finished saying it.
I put it in reverse.
The truth my father wanted is a thing I should have given to the woman it was actually about.
Not on a couch at a lake, where she'd already decided the ending.
Somewhere real. Tonight, on her step, with no plane to catch and no audience and no twenty dollars set on a bar to end the conversation early.
I drive north. I don't call ahead, because if I call she'll have an answer ready before I'm out of the car, and I've already heard her ready answers. I want the one she hasn't built yet.
Her street is the kind where you circle twice for parking. I find a spot a block down, feed a meter that takes my coins like it's doing me a favor, and walk back in the cold with my hands in my pockets and absolutely no idea what I'm going to lead with.
The buzzer panel by her door has her last name on a strip of label tape, hand-printed, a little crooked. I press it.