CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He came through them fast.
Not running. Mike does not run in buildings. He came down that hallway at the walk he uses on a scene, long and level, and he had his car keys still in his hand.
I watched him the whole length of the corridor.
Jeans. His gray jacket. Under it a navy shirt with a collar, buttoned two down.
Shaved.
That is the first thing I put in the column, at about forty feet, and I want to be precise about it. Not stubble he’d scraped off in a truck with a dry razor. Shaved properly, with something, in a mirror, at some point in the last few hours.
Hair damp at the back.
It was thirty-three degrees outside at five in the morning in November and my husband walked into a children’s hospital with wet hair at the nape of his neck.
Clean fingernails.
I got that one at about ten feet, and it was the one that landed, because I know what that man’s hands look like at five in the morning after a run. I have washed the sheets.
He got to me and went down on one knee.
That’s what he did. Not a crouch. He put one knee on that vinyl floor in front of my chair and reached up for both my hands, and his face was doing everything correctly, all of it, and if you had been standing at the vending machine watching, you would have gone home and told somebody about it.
I stood up.
I did it before his hands got there. I put my weight on my good foot and stood, and he was left on one knee reaching into the air where I had been, and I watched him have to decide what to do with that.
He got up.
“Ren.”
“He’s stable. Thirty-four percent carboxyhemoglobin. They’ve got him in a hyperbaric chamber on the other side of the building. There’s a nurse with him the whole time. Ivy’s asleep in the family room, they cleared her, she inhaled some but not enough to keep her.”
I heard my own voice and it was completely flat and completely useful. It was the voice off a radio.
He blinked.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Good. That’s good.”
“They said we’d know more when he comes out.”
“Who’s the attending?”
“I don’t know his last name.”
“I’ll find out.” He looked past me down the hall, already sorting it. “Which unit did you say, the one on—”
“They’ll tell you at the desk.”
“Right.”
And he went.
He walked down to that nurses’ station and put both hands on the counter and leaned in, and I watched him work. Low voice. Slight lean. He gave them his name and I saw the woman’s face change when he said what he did for a living, and she got up off her chair to go get somebody.
He was back in four minutes with a piece of paper and a name.
“Dr. Ansari,” he said. “Pulmonology’s consulting in the morning. They think about two hours in the chamber, maybe a little more, then he goes up to the PICU for observation. Twenty-four hours minimum.”
I already knew all of that. All of it. A doctor had sat in a chair across from me at two in the morning and told me every word of it and I had signed three pages about it.
“Thank you,” I said.
He didn’t hear it. He didn’t hear it at all.
“They said we can go around and wait outside the chamber. There’s a room.”
“I’ve been in it.”
“Right.” He looked at me. “Right.”
There is a question he did not ask.
He did not ask who was on the box.
I have gone at that from every angle a person can.
He is a company officer. It was his building, his district, his own address.
A man in that job finds out who ran it before he finds out what floor his kid is on, because that is how their minds are wired, and I have heard him do it a dozen times about other people’s fires, at my own table, with a beer in his hand. Who caught it? Who was on the truck?
He stood in that hallway for eleven minutes and never asked me one word about his own crew.
Which means he already knew.
Somebody had called him before he called me.
Between the moment he turned that phone on and the moment my picture came up on it, somebody got to him, and by the time he was on the highway asking me which hospital, he already knew exactly which five men had been standing on his landing at midnight and exactly what had been said out there.
I did not work that out in the hallway. I worked it out in December, in a parking lot, with a folder on my knees.
In the hallway I only noticed the hole where the question should have been, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue.
Jess stood up.
She had been sitting through all of this without moving, holding a paper cup, and she stood up and looked at me, and I looked back at her, and she picked up her parka.
“I’m going to go sit with Ivy,” she said.
She went past him without saying hello to him.
She has known Mike for fifteen years. She has been to his birthdays.
She went past him in a hospital corridor at ten past five in the morning like he was a housekeeping cart, and I saw him register it, and I saw him decide not to say anything about it, and that was the first thing that happened to him that night that he did not control.
Then it was the two of us.
“Sit down,” he said. “You look—”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Ren, you’ve been up all night.”
“So have you.”
The hallway did something. Not much. A little.
“What happened to your foot?”
There it was.
He had gotten within three feet of me and his eyes had gone down to the gauze square taped over my instep, and he asked about it in the exact tone he would use on a stranger sitting on a curb.
He did a size-up on me.
Occupancy, conditions, injuries. That is what my husband does when he arrives somewhere.
He cannot help it and it is one of the reasons I married him, and standing in that corridor I watched him run it on me and I thought, there it is.
There’s the whole marriage. He arrives, he assesses, he assigns, he manages.
“Glass,” I said.
“Did they clean it out?”
“Yes.”
“Did they give you anything for it?”
“Mike.”
He stopped.
And then he came in.
I don’t know if he meant to. He took a half step and put his hand on my upper arm, and his other hand came up toward my back, and for about a second and a half my whole body wanted it so badly that I could feel my shoulders start to drop.
Then he was close enough for me to smell him.
Soap.
Not ours. Ours is the green bar from the four pack. This was something with a name, something sweeter, and it was all over him, on his neck and in that damp hair, and it was three or four hours old.
And under it, very faint, on the shoulder of that jacket, floral. Something that goes in wet hair and stays.
He smelled like a bathroom I have never stood in.
I stepped back.
I did it slowly, which was somehow worse than doing it fast. I took one step backward out of his hands and I did not look away from him while I did it.
His hands came down.
“Ren.”
“Don’t.”
“Whatever you’re—”
“Don’t.”
He stood there in the middle of that hallway at quarter past five in the morning with his car keys still in his right hand, and he looked at me.
Properly, for the first time since the doors.
At my hair pulled back and my clean face and my borrowed cardigan buttoned to the collarbone and my back straight and my hands at my sides.
And I watched it arrive.
It came across him in one piece, from the eyes down, the way weather crosses a parking lot. Everything that had been arranged on his face got very still, and something underneath it stopped.
He knew exactly what he was looking at.
I had spent forty minutes at a sink making sure of it.
“You know,” he said.
It was not a question.