5. Chapter 5
Sarah
Two weeks in, and I've learned the rhythm of this place the way you learn a language by drowning in it.
I know that Rosa hides the good coffee filters in the cabinet under the crash cart paperwork.
I know that Theo hums when he's scared, one long tuneless note under his breath, and that the louder the hum gets the faster I should walk toward whatever room he's in.
I know that the vending machine on four eats dollar bills but respects quarters.
I know that Dr. Calloway takes his coffee black, drinks half of it, then abandons the cup on whatever flat surface is nearest when a pager goes off, and I know this because there are little cold half-cups of him all over this unit by noon every day, and I've started clearing them without thinking about it, which Rosa has absolutely noticed.
We are professionals. We're so professional it's become its own full-time job on top of the actual job.
He says Dr. Mitchell in a voice that's flat on purpose, and I say Dr. Calloway back the same way, and twice a day we stand on opposite sides of a patient's bed with our eyes on the chart, on the monitor, on the incision, on anything, while the rest of me keeps a running map of exactly where he's standing without any permission from my brain.
Today is Walter's discharge day.
I'm in his room at six-forty with his paperwork, and he's dressed in real clothes for the first time since I met him, pressed slacks and a cardigan the color of oatmeal, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees like a man waiting for a train.
"You're here early," he says.
"You're leaving today. I wanted to beat the rush."
"There's no rush. I've got one visitor in two weeks and I'm looking at her."
I set the folder down on the tray table and pull the chair around so I'm facing him, close, knee to knee. His color is good. The bruise down his side has gone the yellow-green of the end of things. He watches me watch him, and his mouth pulls sideways under his glasses.
"Go on," he says. "Say the doctor part."
"Ribs take six weeks. You'll feel better before you are better, and that's the trap. No ladders, Walter."
"The gutters—"
"No ladders." I put my hand over his on his knee, and his hand is cool and papery under mine, and he goes quiet. "Hire the thief. I mean it. I'd rather you get robbed a little than come back through those doors on a board."
He turns his hand over under mine and pats the back of my fingers twice, a grandfather move, older than both of us.
"Edith used to hold my hand like that when she wanted something," he says. "It worked every time. All right. The thief gets the gutters." Then, without changing tone at all, "I called Phoenix last night."
I keep still. Two weeks of five-minute visits, morning and night, and I've never once said the word daughter to him. I only wrote it in a part of the chart he'll never read.
"Rang four times," he says, to the window more than to me.
"I was about to hang up. She answered out of breath, like she ran for it.
" He takes his glasses off, folds them, holds them in his lap.
"We talked about nothing for an hour. Her dishwasher's broken.
There's a boy, her boy, he's nine now, plays the trumpet, badly, she says the whole street knows.
" His eyes come back to me, wet, and furious about being wet.
"Three years I sat on that phone number like it was going to dial itself. "
"Walter."
"She's flying out next month." He puts the glasses back on, clears his throat, and picks the folder up off the tray like we've concluded the emotional portion of the program. "Now. Which of these do I sign so I can leave before the lunch they're threatening me with?"
I show him the lines. He signs with a fountain pen he produces from the cardigan, and when the transport aide comes with the wheelchair he stands up on his own first, slow, pressing a hand flat to his ribs, waving me off before I've moved.
At the door he stops the wheelchair with a hand on the frame.
"The tall one," he says. "Calloway."
"What about him?"
"He came by at night. Twice that I know of, late, when he thought I was asleep. Stood at the door a minute, checked the numbers on my machine, left." Walter looks up at me over the top of his glasses. "A man checks on what he cares about when nobody's watching."
They wheel him out. I stand in the empty room with the stripped bed, and there's a card on the window ledge now, one, a get-well card with a trumpet drawn on the front in a nine-year-old's hand, overnighted in an envelope postmarked Phoenix, and I take a minute before I go back to the floor.
The day runs long and exhausting. Two operations back to back, then a floor consult that turns into a third, and by eight at night I'm at the station finishing notes over a dinner of vending machine crackers when my phone lights up on the counter.
Dana: Wine Thursday. Non negotiable. I haven't seen your face in nine days.
Me: I know. Thursday. I'll bring the good cheap one.
I turn the phone face down on the counter. Rosa is three feet away restocking the drawer with saline flushes, and she doesn't look up.
"You're smiling at the counter," she says.
"I'm smiling at my crackers."
"Mm." She shuts the drawer with her hip. "Trauma's still up in three. Went in at five. It's running long."
I didn't ask. She tells me anyway, the way she's been telling me things for two weeks, little updates about a man neither of us says by name, and I've stopped pretending I don't want them, and she's stopped pretending she doesn't know why.
At nine-fifteen the doors at the end of the hall swing open, and he comes through them still in his cap with the mask hanging off one ear, and I catch it from thirty feet away, the wrongness in how he's walking.
He moves like the floor tilts up at him.
He passes the station without a word to anyone, shoulders a door open, and disappears into the stairwell, and the door hisses shut slow behind him.
Rosa's watching too, both hands gone still on the supply cart.
"The five o'clock," I say. "Who was it?"
"Kid off a motorcycle." She says it low. "Seventeen."
I close the chart in front of me. I wrote my rule in a hallway two weeks ago with my chin up, and it was an easy thing to write on that day, because I hadn't watched him for two weeks yet.
I hadn't cleared his cold coffees off the counter.
I didn't know yet that he checks on old men at night when he thinks nobody's there to see it.
"Mitchell." Rosa keeps her voice down, and she isn't looking at me now, she's looking at the stairwell door. "The landing between three and four has a broken camera. Been on the work order list two months." She pushes her cart off down the hall. "Terrible, the maintenance in this place."
He's sitting on the fourth step of the flight going down, still in the cap, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose between them, staring at the wall the way a person stares at something that isn't there. The door clicks shut above me, and he doesn't turn around.
"I'm fine," he says.
"I didn't ask."
"Then you're lost. The good vending machine's on four."
I come down the steps and sit on the same one, on the far end, a full arm's length of concrete between us, and I don't say anything. The stairwell smells like cold paint. A light buzzes over our heads, and below that there's nothing, no voices, no cart, just the two of us and the hum.
He pulls the cap off. His hair is flat and damp where it sat, and he pushes a hand back through it once, then lets the cap hang from his fingers between his knees.
"Same corner," he says. "Fourteenth and Grove.
Same as the last one. The road bends and drops right there, and they come off the bridge too fast." He turns the cap over in his hands.
"Seventeen. I had his heart in my hand. I'm telling you that because it's technical, it's a thing we do, it has a name.
But I'm standing there with this kid's heart in my hand, and it wouldn't go. "
His thumb runs along the seam of the cap, back and forth.
"His father kept his voice down," he says. "In the family room. He kept apologizing for crying. I've done this eleven years, and I don't know what to do with the ones who apologize."
I slide along the step, not all the way to him, halfway, and I lay my hand flat on the concrete in the space that's left, palm down, an offer with a way out built into it.
He looks at my hand a long moment. Then he covers it with his.
That's all of it. His hand over mine on a cold step, his fingers curling under my palm, and we sit there under the buzzing light not being strangers.
"Walter went home today," I say, because he needs somewhere else to put his mind. "He called his daughter."
His head comes around. "He what?"
"Phoenix. They talked an hour about a broken dishwasher. There's a grandson. He plays trumpet." His hand tightens over mine. "She's flying out next month."
"How'd you get him there?"
"I didn't. I never said one word about her. I just sat down every day, and I think the quiet did it eventually." I look at the wall he was staring at. "He told me something before he left, though. He said you came by at night. Twice. Checked his numbers when you thought he was asleep."
His hand goes still on mine.
"He was my patient too," he says, to the wall.
"That's what I figured you'd say."
"Sarah."
"I know." I do know. I know the whole shape of it, the evaluations, the boards, the year, the complaint waiting for a date stamp.
I've had two weeks to turn it over from every angle, lying awake in an apartment where the boxes are finally gone, and the one fact it keeps leaving out is sitting on this stair holding my hand like he needs it to stay upright.
I turn my hand over under his so we're palm to palm.
He breathes out through his nose, slow, and his fingers slide through mine and lock, and neither of us looks at the other, both of us staring at the concrete wall like it's doing something worth watching.
"This is a bad idea," he says.
"We're holding hands in a stairwell. Fourteen-year-olds do this."
"Fourteen-year-olds don't have licensing boards."
"You should report us to the camera." I tip my head toward the corner of the landing. "Oh. Broken. Two months. Terrible, the maintenance in this place."
He turns his head and looks at me, and I watch him do the math, that I checked, that Rosa checked, that this whole floor is quietly working the space where the rules can't see, and something loosens in his face.
He laughs, low and short and half against his own will, and it's the thing I told him about in his office doorway, the one that makes a person feel like the only one who heard it.
"Come here," he says.
"You come here. I came down the stairs. It's your turn to move."
He moves. He closes the space on the step until his thigh comes warm against mine, and his free hand comes up and takes my face, his thumb along my cheekbone and his fingers curved behind my ear, tilting me up, and he stops there an inch out with his eyes going back and forth between mine.
"Last chance to be smart," he says, rough.
"We were smart for two weeks." My hand finds the front of his scrub top and closes in the fabric. "Look where it got us. A stairwell."
He kisses me, and it isn't like the river.
The river was two strangers with a good excuse.
This is fourteen days of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Calloway coming apart at once, his hand sliding back into my hair and gripping, my fingers twisting his scrub top, a sound low in his throat that I feel down in my own chest. I come up toward him without deciding to, onto my knees on the step, his arm wrapping my waist and pulling me in until I'm half across his lap with the cold rail at my back and his mouth moving down my jaw to my throat.
"Two weeks," he says against my neck, like it's a charge he's reading me.
"You held the door for me one morning and I forgot my own patient's name."
"You wore your hair down once." His teeth graze the spot under my ear, and I grab his shoulder. "One day out of fourteen. You knew exactly what you were doing."
"I was testing a theory."
"Publish it." He pulls back enough to look at me, both of us breathing like we ran the stairs, my hair loose from the bun where his hand's been, one piece falling across my face.
He tucks it back with one finger, slow, tracing the line of it to my ear, and the softness after all that grip undoes me worse than the kissing did.
"Not here," he says. "Not on concrete next to a broken camera like something we'll deny later. "
"Then where?"
"My car's on the second level of the garage." His thumb moves across my lower lip, and his voice drops until I feel it more than hear it. "My house is twenty minutes out. It has doors. Food. A shower that'll make you cry. Nobody's been inside it but me for three years."
"Nick." His name comes out of me for the first time in two weeks, and his eyes go dark at the sound of it. "If I get in that car, I'm not coming back tonight."
"I know what I'm asking."
Two floors up a door bangs open, and feet come fast down the stairs.
We come apart on instinct, quick, a whole surgical team's worth of reflex, me back onto my step smoothing my hair, him leaning against the rail with the cap in his hands, and Theo rounds the landing above us at speed, sees us, and grabs the rail.
"Oh thank God, I've been looking everywhere, your phones are dead down here—" He's out of breath, and scared past scared. "Both of you. They need you in the bay. Bus versus car on the interstate, they're calling everyone in, it's bad."
Nick is up before Theo finishes the sentence, cap going back on, the chief coming down over his face like something dropping into place, and he takes the stairs up two at a time with me one step behind him.
At the door he stops for half a second with his hand on the push bar, and he looks back at me.
"Stay with me tonight," he says. "Whenever this ends. However it ends."
The door swings open onto noise and light and running.
"Yes," I say, and we go through it together.