9. Chapter 9 #2
Nobody says it to me, because that's not how hospitals work.
What happens is that two conversations stop when I come around the corner of the station.
What happens is a scheduler looking from my badge to my face like she's confirming a photo.
What happens is an ortho resident I've never met congratulating me for nothing in the elevator and then getting off two floors early.
In the cafeteria at one, a whole table does the wave, the one where everybody looks at everything except you. I buy the grilled cheese. I eat it standing at the end of the counter with my chin level, and nobody says anything to me at all.
Theo finds me at the computer bank after lunch and drops into the chair beside me like he's been running.
"So I've been doing damage control," he announces. "Correcting timelines. You met before your first day. That's the real timeline and nobody wants it."
"What timeline do they want?"
"You don't want to know."
"Theo."
He pushes his glasses up his nose. "There's a version where Whitfield caught you this morning.
In his office. Which, having seen Whitfield's office, is the least romantic room in this hemisphere.
There's a version where Okafor's just the name on the paperwork and he's writing every word.
I've been killing that one the hardest."
"With what?"
"Math. The disclosure's timestamped and the gossip isn't." He says it with real satisfaction, then wilts a little. "It's not working. Gossip hates math."
"Keep doing it anyway."
"Obviously," he says, offended that I'd wonder, and I could hug him, so I don't.
I pass Nick once in the main corridor at two, walking with Dr. Okafor and a tablet. We do the flat voices, Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Calloway, and they don't work at all anymore, and Okafor looks up from the tablet and reads the entire situation in one pass.
"Mitchell," she says, without stopping. "I read your file twice. Don't make me regret the second time."
That's the whole welcome. She's walking again before I finish saying yes, and Nick holds a straight face for exactly three steps past me, and I don't have to turn around to know where it breaks.
Rosa doesn't say anything until the middle of the afternoon, when I'm signing off a med rec at the station and she starts restocking the drawer beside me without being asked to be there.
"Carmen called me this morning," she says, to the saline flushes.
I put the pen down.
"News crosses town faster than it crosses a hallway.
She heard a resident and a chief walked into Whitfield's office carrying their own paperwork.
St. Luke's took her. Nights. Fourteen years of seniority and she's starting at the bottom of somebody else's list, so don't let anyone tell you the math balanced. It didn't."
"Rosa—"
"She told me to tell you something." Rosa shuts the drawer and looks at me for the first time. "Tell the resident she did it right. That's the message. Word for word."
She's gone down the hall before I can find anything to say, which I suspect was the point of her timing.
The afternoon case runs long and clean, a colon that behaves itself, and by the time I've scrubbed out and showered it's past six and the locker room is down to stragglers. I'm behind the second row with my hair wet when two voices come in with the door.
"—signed before she even unpacked, that's what I'm telling you. Fellowship, protected year, the whole package."
"Must be nice." Water runs at the sinks. "Two thousand miles and three weeks in. I've been grinding here six years."
"And Okafor's just the name they parked on it. You think he's not writing every word of that research year?"
I sit down on the bench with one shoe on.
My hands are very still on my knees, which is how I know they want to shake.
There's a door eight feet away, and a stairwell past it, and two thousand miles behind me that started at a door exactly like it.
I know this feeling all the way down. It packed four boxes once and labeled them in neat handwriting. Kitchen. Books. Winter.
I put the other shoe on and come around the lockers instead.
They're at the sinks. A fifth-year I know by face from the ortho lounge and a tech from the second-floor ORs. The tech goes red. The fifth-year goes still, chin up, ready to stand behind it, which is honestly the only thing about her I like.
"It's Mitchell," I say. "Since you'll be saying it a lot."
Nobody answers. The water keeps running until the tech remembers to shut it off.
"His name came off my paperwork at eight o'clock this morning.
All of it. Okafor signs my evaluations, Okafor runs my research year, and Okafor gets to fail me if I earn it.
It's filed. You can check." I shoulder my bag.
"And whatever version you pass along next, say it to my face first. I have a loud voice. It's catching."
I'm through the door before either of them finds a sentence.
I make it to the supply alcove around the corner before my hands get their way, and I let them have it, both of them shaking while I stand there counting suture boxes.
Thirty seconds. That's what I give it. Then my pager goes off, 418, a question about a med rec for whoever lives in Walter's old room now, and the nice thing about this job is that somebody always needs you back in a room.
I call Dana at seven from the roof of the parking garage, with the whole city going orange behind the rails.
"Tell me everything," she says.
I lean on the concrete. Then the part I've been carrying all day. "I gave it away, Dana. The mentorship. The reason I picked this fight in the first place. It was sitting on the table and I cleared it myself, nobody made me."
Saying it out loud lands different than doing it did. Dana's quiet for a second.
"Do you regret it?"
"No. That's the strange part. I keep checking and the regret isn't there."
"Good. Okay. One more thing and don't turn it into a moment." I hear her switch the phone to her other ear. "People from home texted me this week. He's engaged."
The wind moves across the roof. "Huh," I say.
"That's it? Huh?"
"I'm looking for where it's supposed to hurt. It's not there." And then, because it's true and because it's funny and because a year ago it would've been neither: "I hope she likes audiences."
Dana laughs so hard I have to hold the phone away. "Go," she says finally. "He's waiting somewhere, isn't he. I can hear you smiling."
"You can't hear smiling."
"Nine years, Sarah. I hear everything."
I hang up, and when I turn around Nick is twenty feet away by the stairwell door, jacket on, hands in his pockets, watching me like he's been there a while.
"How long have you been standing there?"
"Since 'I hope she likes audiences.'" He pushes off the door. "Come on. There's somewhere we haven't been in three weeks."
We leave my car on the roof and take his, and he drives us down to the river with my hand resting on his thigh the whole way, not moving, just the weight of it, and neither of us mentions that it's the same drive with everything different.
He takes my hand on the river path. In the open, under the lamps, no camera checks, no hallway math.
A man with a dog passes us and doesn't look twice, and that's the whole event.
Nobody looks twice. I spent a year of my life bracing against being looked at, and the actual thing, when I finally stand in it, is a man with a dog not caring.
Ray leans on his counter like we've interrupted a nap he'll deny taking.
"You two again."
"Two coffees, Ray."
"It used to be you and the insomniacs," he tells Nick, working the machine. "Now there's a whole situation at my window. This is how it starts. First it's couples. Then it's strollers. Then I'm a landmark."
"You'd hate being a landmark."
"I'd love it," Ray says darkly, and hands the cups through.
We take them to the railing. The water's black and moving, the lamps laying their long yellow stripes on it, the same as the first night, and I hold my cup with both hands even though it's warm out, because apparently that's just a thing I do that a man in this city keeps a list of.
I lift the cup.
"To Carmen," I say.
He doesn't ask who. The whole hospital knows who. He touches his cup to mine, and his voice comes out low. "To Carmen."
Then he leans in and kisses me at a coffee window, in public, slow, one hand coming up to the side of my face, with Ray right there muttering that his counter is a place of business.