Chapter 1 #2
Luckily, I'm the kind of woman who has been told by old ladies in church that my hair looks better when I brush it, so my ego is vaccinated.
“You can thank my mother,” I say. “She trained me with a wooden spoon and a jar of Vicks Vapor Rub. I learned everything else in nursing school.”
“Your mother is a good woman,” he says, and my chest does something I don't give it permission to do.
My mother has been gone four years, and I have not yet gotten used to the idea that strangers can still know her.
“She was,” I say, and I don't look up for a second because I need to see straight when I do.
When I do look up, he is still watching me.
There is a question there I pretend not to understand.
He dozes for a while after that, the drugs like a warm blanket thrown over the worst edges.
He does not snore, which feels like a courtesy.
I check his vitals every fifteen minutes.
His pressure comes up.
His pulse settles under ninety.
The cops give up and leave a card at the desk for our phantom to ignore.
Rizzo tells me she is going to take her break and spend it glaring at the snack machine until it stops stealing her quarters.
I tell her if she wins, I want a Twix.
At 3:10, he wakes and straightens like his body has decided rest is a liability.
I bring water.
He drinks, careful, like he does not trust anything that goes into him.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed and tests the floor with his feet the way people who have been hurt test the first step of a staircase.
He stands. He stays standing.
“Walk to the door and back,” I say.
He does.
He does not sway.
He does not hiss at the pull of stitches.
He returns to the bed and sits like a king who concedes a point, not a man who obeys an order.
I pretend it means nothing to me that he is built like someone who trains for control and not for mirrors.
The muscles in his arms are lean under the sleeve.
The scar on his shoulder is old and clean.
There is a rosary inked there that winds down toward his forearm.
It's good work.
Somebody paid attention.
“Pain?” I ask.
“Four,” he says again, and I roll my eyes for show so he knows I'm not fooled.
We go through discharges like we are both auditioning to be on a safety poster.
I give him the rules because that is how I sleep at night.
Keep the wound clean and dry.
No heavy lifting.
Watch for fever or redness.
Return if pain spikes or if he feels lightheaded.
Rest for at least two days.
He listens.
He nods once.
He does not ask for a prescription for anything that ends in codone, which bumps him up in my private rating system from mysterious to mysterious with good decisions.
“Name to put on the forms,” I say at last, pen hovering.
He looks like a man who has thought about being named.
He says nothing.
I write “Unknown Adult Male” on the line because I was raised to be flexible.
I hand him a copy.
He folds it in half and tucks it into his pocket with the care of someone who has never lost a piece of paper in his life.
“We can arrange transport,” I offer, because the hospital gets twitchy about discharging men who come in with holes. “Friend to pick you up. Taxi voucher. Anything.”
“I’ll manage,” he says.
I would like to suggest that managing alone at three in the morning after losing a liter of blood is a choice for idiots.
I would also like to keep him alive.
What I say is, “Then you get a parting gift.”
I disappear to the staff kitchen.
The pot on the back burner contains coffee that could be used to strip paint.
I pour it into a thick white cup anyway and load it with sugar packets like my mother would have if she were sending a man back into the cold.
On my way back, I snag a packet of saltines and a plastic cup of applesauce because I'm not above bribing people into not passing out.
He takes the coffee.
He drinks half of it standing up.
He looks me in the eye when he says, “Grazie, Angelo.”
The word slips under my skin like heat.
He is not the first man to call me angel in this ER.
Drunks call every nurse an angel if she starts an IV without pain.
Old men call you angel when you speak to them like they are still whole.
The way he says it is not the same.
It sounds like a fact instead of flattery.
“Don't get poetic with me,” I say, because if I make it a joke, it can't plant roots. “I'm only nice because my uncle used to bribe me with cannoli to do my chores. It altered my brain chemistry.”
He sets the cup down with a soft clink. “Your uncle has good taste.”
“Obviously,” I say, and I don't tell him that the bakery has been dark for almost two years, that the ovens still dream of bread when it rains, that I can still smell yeast on the walls if I close my eyes too hard.
I don't tell him anything. That is the point.
By four, he is gone.
I go into the room to change the linens and all that is left is the faintest trace of cologne and a quiet my body does not trust.
His bracelet sits on the tray with the stickers peeled back.
“Unknown adult male” remains unknown.
The lion under his rib is burned into my mind like an afterimage when you stare at something too bright.
The rest of the shift slides by in its usual messy ballet.
A kid with a skateboard meets a curb and loses.
An elderly woman insists her chest pain is only gas until the EKG disagrees.
A man cries over stitches because they are not as bad as the needle in his lip for the piercing he did at home.
Rizzo gets her Twix and offers me one bite that turns into two.
At six, the night begins to loosen its fingers.
The bay smells like old coffee and bleach.
The windows go gray with a new day.
By seven thirty, my double is almost done.
I sign charts.
I tuck loose hair back under my cap.
I think about my apartment three blocks away, which is really my uncle’s extra unit over the bakery.
The hallway is lined with framed photos in black and white, all joy and hats.
My mother smiles in every one like she is daring the camera to catch her looking sad.
If I'm good, I can shower and sleep for four whole hours before the world remembers it needs me.
“Go,” Rizzo says at eight on the dot, swatting at me with a clipboard as if she is shooing a cat off a counter. “If you start another task, I'm locking you in the supply closet to teach you a lesson.”
“I could nap in there,” I say, already untying my mask. “No one would find me until noon. It would be a beautiful story.”
“Goodnight, Marino,” she says, and I wave at her because if I say goodbye it will turn into a conversation about meal prep and we will both die on the spot.
The air outside is not fresh, but it's not recycled.
The corner deli has just opened and is setting out crates of oranges.
The garbage truck is arguing with itself.
Pigeons stage a coup above the bus stop sign.
I tug my jacket tighter and start across the street toward the narrow alley that will shave two minutes off my walk.
That is when I see him.
He is leaning against the brick wall opposite the staff entrance like he belongs to the architecture.
He has a beanie pulled low, no hospital bracelet, no gown, no trace of cot-linen rumple.
The streetlight left over from night catches on the angles of his face.
In daylight, he looks older and younger at once.
The silver at his temples is honest.
His posture says he could stand like that all day.
He has the kind of stillness that makes motion look like a mistake.
For a breath, I think the whole thing was some overtime-induced projection.
Then he lifts his head and those dark eyes find me with an ease that feels unfair.
“Good morning,” he says.
My feet keep moving because they are loyal.
I stop two paces from him and plant my hands in my jacket pockets where my palms can hide their sudden, nonsensical warmth.
“You are supposed to be home with your feet up,” I say. “Preferably watching a cooking show where everyone is polite about salt.”
“I don't have a home,” he says, and normally, that would be tragic.
With him, it sounds like logistics.
“You have a somewhere, though,” I say. “Everyone does.”
“I have many somewheres,” he says, and he follows the words with a half smile that almost makes his face human instead of myth. “None of them are suitable for bleeding in.”
“You are done bleeding,” I remind him, lifting my chin at the line of his coat where the fresh dressing hides. “I fixed that.”
“You did,” he says, and he says it like I performed an old ritual, not a new one.
He dips his head, a gesture that is not quite a bow. “Grazie.”
“You are welcome,” I say and try not to think about the way the word sounds like he just put it in a vault. “You should rest.”
Instead of answering, he looks past me at the doors, then up at the corners of the building.
His eyes skip the way a man’s eyes skip when he is counting cameras.
He stands away from the wall like he is about to move and stops, returning his attention to me as if he remembered what he came for.
“I wanted to speak to you where there were fewer eyes,” he says in Italian, the kind that belongs to the back table at a place with red sauce that stains the tablecloth and a priest who visits on Tuesdays.
I understand every word even though I pretend not to at first on principle. “You were kind to me, Elisa.”
“I was doing my job,” I answer in English, because something about stepping into his tongue feels like handing over a key.
“That is what kind people say when they are kind,” he replies, switching back to English with a smoothness that makes me wonder how many tongues live in his mouth. “I owe you.”
“You owe me nothing except following instructions and not undoing my stitches by being stubborn,” I say, and I mean it. Debts make me itchy. They have too many strings.
He tucks his hands into the pockets of his coat.
His knuckles are raw across one side, not from tonight.
Old scabs.
Newer bruising.
The kind of hands that solve problems directly before they are sent upstairs to be solved officially.