3. Chapter 3
Sarah
The alarm goes off at five-fifteen, and the other side of the bed is cold.
Good. That was the deal.
I lie there a minute and take stock of the ceiling in my new apartment, then the rest of it, one thing at a time.
My dress is a puddle in the hallway where I can see it through the open bedroom door.
Two coffee cups I don't remember carrying home are sitting rinsed in the sink.
My shoulders ache in a place I forgot I had a muscle, and when I turn my face into the second pillow there's cedar on it, faint, most of it already gone.
He followed the terms to the letter. He was up and gone before five with no note and no number, exactly the way I asked, so the small drop I feel in my stomach is mine to swallow and nobody else's.
I push the blanket back and sit up. Shower.
Today I put Dr. Mitchell back on, and Dr. Mitchell does not lie in bed thinking about a stranger's hand on the back of her neck like the spot came printed with his name.
Under the hot water I catch myself smiling at the tile like an idiot, so I turn my face up into the spray until I stop.
St. Vincent's sits ten minutes from my apartment, a wide sand-colored complex with a parking garage that defeats me on the first try, because every level is full by six-forty and I end up taking the last spot on the roof.
I take the stairs down with my badge paperwork held flat against my chest in a folder.
The lobby smells the way every hospital I've worked in smells, coffee and floor cleaner.
A woman at the volunteer desk points me toward the surgical education office, and by seven I'm sitting in a third-floor conference room with a temporary badge clipped to my scrub top and my hair pulled into the tightest bun it will let me get away with.
Five of us are at the table, only one other transfer, a lanky guy named Theo with glasses sliding down his nose. He leans toward me while the coordinator sorts a stack of packets.
"Fourth year?" he whispers.
"Fourth. You?"
"Third." He glances at the door, then back. "I heard the trauma attending here makes residents cry."
"Every hospital says that about somebody."
"No, there's a count. Somebody actually keeps a count."
The coordinator sets a schedule in front of each of us.
She's a brisk woman named Pam with reading glasses hanging on a chain against her sweater, and she finds my name on her list with one finger.
"Mitchell. You're starting on the trauma service.
In at the deep end." She looks at me over the top of the glasses.
"Your attending likes it that way. He likes to see what a transfer is made of in the first week.
" Her mouth does something that isn't quite a smile.
"Rounds start at seven-thirty on four. Don't be late. He notices."
Theo turns his head toward me slowly.
"What," I say.
"That's him. That's the one with the count."
"What's his name?"
"Calloway."
The trauma unit is already moving when I step off the elevator at seven-twenty-five, nurses trading off at the station, a monitor complaining somewhere down the hall, a whiteboard crowded with room numbers and last names in blue marker.
A resident I don't know points me toward the far end.
"Rounds are at 412. He's already down there. Move."
I move. There's a knot of white coats and scrubs outside room 412, four or five people bent into a loose half-circle around someone I can't see yet, and I tuck myself onto the back edge of it as quietly as I can.
A voice comes from the middle of the group, low and rough at seven in the morning, the voice of a man who has already been talking for hours.
"So if his pressure drops again, I don't want to hear about it from day shift at nine. I want a page at nine-oh-one. Are we clear."
I know the voice before the crowd shifts enough to show me the face.
Then the group opens, and there he is in dark blue scrubs with a stethoscope looped around his neck and a coffee in one hand, hair still damp at the edges from a shower, telling a nurse something with his chin tipped down at a tablet.
A badge hangs at his chest pocket, and I read it before I can stop my eyes.
DR. NICHOLAS CALLOWAY. TRAUMA SURGERY. DEPARTMENT CHIEF.
The floor does not open up and swallow me, which is honestly a failure on the floor's part.
He hasn't seen me yet. He's scrolling the tablet with one finger, saying something to the resident holding it. I get four seconds to fix my face, and I spend every one of them remembering in full color what I said into this man's ear last night with the lamp still on.
Then Pam's voice carries down the hall behind me. "Dr. Calloway. Your new fourth-year. Dr. Mitchell, transfer."
He looks up.
I watch it hit him the way it hit me. His eyes find my face, his finger stops on the glass, and for one whole second the chief of trauma surgery at St. Vincent's is just a man standing still in a hallway doing math he hates.
"Dr. Mitchell," he says.
The voice comes out level. The eyes do not.
"Dr. Calloway." Mine holds steadier than I've earned, three years of telling families the worst news of their lives in a calm tone finally paying off in the stupidest way it ever will. "I'm glad to be joining the service."
"Are you." He doesn't leave room for me to answer, just hands the tablet back to the resident without looking at him. "You're late."
"Rounds start at seven-thirty. It's seven-twenty-eight."
"On my service, if you arrive when rounds start, you're already behind.
The team pre-rounds at seven. Your patients are seen and examined and known to you before I hear a single word about them.
" He turns back to the group and lifts his coffee an inch toward me.
"Since Dr. Mitchell is new, someone hand her the list. She takes 415, 416, and 418, starting tomorrow, when I trust she'll be standing here at seven. "
A hand puts a printed patient list into mine. My face is hot enough to feel it in my ears, so I keep every degree of it out of my voice.
"Yes, Dr. Calloway."
He's already moving to the next door. The coats trail after him, and I fall in at the tail, and Theo's whisper loops in my head, there's a count, so I decide right there that it's fine.
If he wants to treat last night like a fever dream, that suits me down to the ground, because strangers by morning were my terms. I wrote the rule. I can live inside it.
I spend the next ninety minutes proving that I can. He fires hard questions at the group outside every room, the kind built to find the exact edge of what a person knows, and the third time the silence stretches too long I fill it.
"Room 419, anybody. His creatinine's climbing on day two after the crash repair. Most likely reason."
Nobody speaks. He starts to turn toward the whiteboard to answer it himself.
"Muscle breakdown from the crush injury," I say. "It fits this timeline, and it fits his urine output. I'd send a CK before I blamed the kidneys."
He looks at me for the first time since the hallway, and so does everyone else.
"Sent this morning," he says. "Came back high." He holds my eyes a second past what the sentence needs. "Correct, Dr. Mitchell."
He moves on. I breathe out slow through my nose, and the resident beside me leans in close to my shoulder.
"He never says correct," she whispers. "He says adequate."
Rounds break at nine, and he goes toward the operating rooms without one more word to me, so I spend the rest of the day the way every new resident spends it, drowning with good manners.
I meet the charge nurse, Rosa, who runs the floor like a woman running a kitchen through a hurricane, and who decides inside an hour that I'm worth feeding real information to.
I get lost twice. I find the good bathroom.
I learn the cafeteria kills the grill at two, which the whole unit treats as a standing human rights violation.
At four Rosa flags me down at the station. "Mitchell. You want an easy win? Go see 418 before you leave. He's yours tomorrow, so you might as well say hi." She taps her pen against the counter. "Fair warning. He's a character."
"Character how?"
"You'll see. Walter. Eighty-one. Came off a ladder cleaning his own gutters because, and I quote, the gutter guy is a thief."
Room 418 has the television going with the sound off, tuned to a cooking show, and a small old man propped up against his pillows narrating it anyway. Two broken ribs, a bruise running up his left side like weather on a map, reading glasses shoved up into a crown of white hair.
"You're new," he says before I clear the doorway. "I know everybody on this floor, and I don't know you."
"Dr. Mitchell. I'll be one of your doctors starting tomorrow."
"Mitchell." He jabs a finger at the screen. "This woman is about to put cold butter in a hot pan, and they gave her a television show. Sit down. This is educational."
I have three charts to learn and my new patients to pre-read before seven, so I sit down for five minutes, because you can hear inside one sentence which patients are lonely, and when I glance at Walter's window ledge there isn't a single card on it.
"Fell off a ladder?" I ask.
"The ladder moved," he says.
"Ladders do that when you're eighty-one."
"That ladder," he says, with enormous dignity, "was fine for fifty years.
Somebody softened up my lawn. I suspect the gutter guy.
" He mutes his own running commentary as a nurse passes the door, then tips toward me.
"Now. Tell me about yourself, because the last doctor they sent me had the personality of a parking meter, and I get to approve you. "
"You don't get to approve your doctors, Walter."
"I approve everything in this room. I approved you when you sat down." He eases back into the pillows and winces at his ribs, waving off my hand before it finishes reaching for him. "Married?"
"That's not really—"
"That's a no. Good. Don't rush it. My Edith made me wait four years, and they were the best four years of my life, because I spent them earning her."
I'm laughing when a knock lands on the doorframe behind me.
I turn, and Nick is filling the doorway in his scrubs with a chart folder tucked under one arm.
This close, in the flat afternoon light coming through Walter's window, I see the part I missed at seven-thirty, the shadows sitting under his eyes.
He didn't sleep either. I know exactly why, my whole body knows it right along with me, so I get up out of the chair like the cushion caught fire.
"Dr. Calloway," Walter announces. "This new one is approved. Keep her."
"Is that so?"
"She sat down."
"Dr. Mitchell." Nothing shows on Nick's face. "A word. Outside."
I follow him into the hall. He walks past the nurses' station and past the supply room, then turns into a short dead-end corridor by a window where there are no doors and no people, and he faces me, and we look at each other straight on for the first time since the river.
"You said no jobs," I say, quiet. "Nobody rule. You agreed to it."
"You set the terms. I followed them." His voice stays low and level, but his free hand comes up and drags down over his face, and up this close I watch the control he wore in that hallway this morning cost him something to hold.
"Trauma surgery, Sarah. Out of every service, in every hospital, in every city in this country. "
"You think I planned this?" I ask.
"I think I'm your attending. I write your evaluations.
The program director signs off on my recommendation before you sit for your boards next year.
" He steps in closer and drops his voice to almost nothing.
"And last night I had my hands in your hair, so this morning I wrote you up for arriving two minutes early, because it was that or look at you, and looking at you was not survivable at seven-thirty. "
We stand there. The window at the end of the little corridor looks out at the gray wall of the parking garage, a monitor keeps beeping somewhere behind us at the station, and eight blocks from here my dress is still lying on the hallway floor.
"So we're strangers," I say. "That was the deal already. Nothing changes. It never happened."
"It never happened," he says.
Neither of us moves.
His eyes drop to my mouth, one second, two, and mine are doing the exact same thing to his.
"This is going to be a problem," he says.
"Only if we make it one."
"Sarah." He says my name the way he said it against my ear last night, and my knees go weak. "I've been in this building eleven hours today. You want to know how many of them I spent not thinking about you?"
"Dr. Calloway." I take a step back, and it's the hardest thing my body has done all day, harder than the garage stairs.
"I moved two thousand miles for this residency.
I blew up my whole life to get here. I need your evaluation to be about my hands and my brain, so I need to walk back down that hallway right now. "
He straightens. Whatever had opened in his face closes over, chief again, attending again, and somehow the shut version is worse to look at.
"You're right," he says. "Pre-rounds at seven, Dr. Mitchell."
"I'll be here at six-thirty."
"Of course you will." He walks past me close enough that his arm brushes mine, and neither of us says a word about it, then he stops at the mouth of the corridor with his back to me. "The answer's still yes, by the way."
"To what?"
"Walter. He said keep her." He looks back over his shoulder, and there it is, the smile from the bar. "I intend to."
Then he's gone down the hall, coats and nurses parting around him without being asked, and I stand at the window by the parking garage saying my own rules back to myself like a woman being read her rights.
Strangers by morning. It never happened. Nothing changes.
I wrote those rules for one night. Nobody warned me I'd have to live inside them for a year.