7. Chapter 7 #2
I close the door. I stand in the hallway outside room 421 with my hand still on the handle, laughing once at nothing, at everything, at the intelligence network of this hospital that runs entirely on women in beds and women with carts, and my phone buzzes in my pocket.
Nick: My office. Ten minutes. Bring the Hendricks consult.
There is a Hendricks consult. I wrote it an hour ago. It's the most professional text ever sent, and my whole body reads it like a love letter, which is exactly the kind of symptom I should be reporting to somebody.
His office door is open. He's at the desk with two charts and the residency schedule grid up on the monitor, and Dr. Okafor from the ICU is standing at his shoulder pointing at something on the screen, so it's real, it's actual work, and I stand in the doorway with the Hendricks consult while they finish, and I don't look at the couch with the folded blanket, and looking away from it is its own kind of looking.
Okafor takes her chart and goes. "Mitchell," she says on the way past, friendly, and then it's the two of us and an open door, which is the point, I realize. The open door is the point. Everything we do now happens in front of open doors.
"The consult," he says.
I hand it over. He reads it standing, flips the page, initials the bottom, all business, and then he says, without looking up, at a volume calibrated for exactly the distance between us and not an inch further:
"Whitfield asked to see me after the meeting."
The hallway behind me stays empty. I keep my voice at the same volume, my eyes on the consult in his hands like we're discussing it.
"About?"
"Fellowship recommendations for next cycle. Yours, specifically. Your case volume's ahead of schedule and your old program sent great papers, so he wants me to supervise your research year personally. Trauma fellowship track. It's what you came here for."
The floor tilts a little. It's everything I came here for. It also welds his signature to every page of my future for two more years, and I watch him watch me arrive at that second part.
"There it is," he says quietly.
"Did you say yes?"
"I said I'd review your file and give him an answer Friday.
" He sets the consult down on the desk between us and puts his fingertips on it, and this close, with the door open and the hallway breathing behind me, he keeps his face perfectly professional while his voice drops.
"There's a version where I say no. He assigns you to Okafor, she's excellent, your fellowship is spotless, and I become a man you used to work for, and in eleven months when your year under me ends, I take you to dinner in a restaurant with windows, like a person. "
"Eleven months."
"That's the honest option. I've been thinking about it since eight-forty this morning.
" His fingers straighten the consult so its edges line up with the desk edge, precise, one millimeter at a time.
"The other version, I say yes, because I'm the best trauma mentor in this building and you deserve the best, and we go on doing what we're doing, and every day we do it next to a policy with Carmen's name still wet on it. "
A transport aide pushes an empty bed past the doorway, and we both watch the Hendricks consult until the wheels fade. The office settles.
"Ask me," I say.
"Ask you what?"
"You didn't call me up here to report the news, Nick. You've had the answer since eight-forty. You called me up here to ask me something, so ask it."
He looks at me for a long moment, and I watch him put down the chief the way he'd take off a cap, one motion, deliberate.
"If I take the fellowship supervision," he says, "we disclose.
Whitfield said it himself this morning, disclosed can be managed.
I go to his office before Friday, I tell him, he reassigns your evaluations to Okafor, I keep the mentorship on paper as a co-supervision, and it's out of the shadows before it can be found in them.
It costs us gossip. Everyone in this building will know by the following Tuesday.
Your name gets said in the cafeteria next to mine for a year, and some people will decide things about you that aren't true, and that's the price, and it's you who pays most of it, because Carmen's story is the true story about how these things fall. So I'm not deciding it. You are."
The Hendricks consult sits on the desk between us with its perfect edges.
I came here to disappear into work. That was the plan on the plane, two thousand miles with my knees against a seat back, everything I owned in freight, telling myself the next chapter was going to be quiet, blank, mine.
No audiences. I've been proposed to in front of eighty people, and I burned my life down over it, and the one promise I made myself on that plane was that I'd never again let a room full of watchers into something that was mine.
And now a man is standing behind a desk offering me the exact opposite of a secret, offering me a cafeteria full of my own name, and waiting, without pushing, the same way he waited at a bar with his glass and at a bedroom door with his terms, and I understand something all at once.
The wedding wasn't awful because people were watching. It was awful because the man had arranged the watchers as a trap. This man is handing me the door key and standing back from the door.
"Sarah." His voice stays low. "Wherever you just went, take your time coming back."
"I'm here." And I am, both feet, whole heart, terrified in the specific clean way I feel before a hard case, which is the way that means ready. "Okay. Two things."
"Go."
"One. Take the fellowship supervision. I didn't move two thousand miles to train under the second-best person in the building, and if we're paying for this either way, I'm not also paying with my training."
"Done. Two."
"Two." My voice holds. "We go to Whitfield together.
Not you handling it for me, not you falling on it first so the story becomes the chief and his poor resident.
Both of us, one meeting, Friday morning before you owe him his answer.
If my name's getting said in the cafeteria, it's going to be said next to yours where I put it myself. "
He comes around the desk. He doesn't touch me, the door is open, the hallway is the hallway, and he stops at a distance the whole world could photograph, and what he does with all that discipline is smile, the real one, the bar one, the one that ruins me on schedule.
"Friday morning," he says. "Both of us."
"Both of us." I pick the Hendricks consult up off the desk because I need something in my hands, and I back one step into the hallway, into the light and the noise and the open, ordinary day. "For the chart. Dr. Calloway."
"Dr. Mitchell." He says my name like a fact he checked twice, and I walk back toward the elevators past the station, where Rosa doesn't look up from her cart, and doesn't smile, and moves one saline flush from the left side of the drawer to the right side like she's filing something, and the unit hums on around all of us, keeping every heart on the floor, including mine.
I press the elevator button and my hands are steady. Four other patients. I go be a doctor.