CHAPTER 2 #2
The cafeteria is the wide bright cafeteria of any academic hospital. Steam tables. A grill. A salad bar picked over by ten. I sit alone at a small table against the east wall with Earl Grey and an apple I will not eat, because alone is the geometry I need at eleven-forty.
Halfway through the tea Dr. Hayes finds me.
He skirts my table. He walks past the salad bar to the coffee dispenser, stops, looks across the room as if he is locating someone he has been expecting, sees me, lifts a hand, and says my name across the cafeteria like a man pronouncing a word he has been practicing.
"Elena."
I stay seated, chin lifted a quarter-inch, eyes level on him.
"Dr. Hayes."
"Settling in?"
"Settling in."
"Good. " He has his coffee. He walks past my table on the way out and stops for one beat at my elbow, not close enough to touch me, close enough to read what I am reading.
The table offers him nothing — no chart, no phone open, only the tea and the apple.
He smiles as a man smiles when he is filing a fact. "Welcome to the wing, Elena."
He goes. The cafeteria carries on with its forks and trays, noticing nothing — it never notices anything. I watch his back at the door for four beats and then I look down at the tea.
He used my first name twice. Twice in twenty seconds. Like a coin he wants me to know he has in his pocket.
I tuck my left ear behind my hair.
Watch yourself, mija.
---
At two I am pulled for a blood-product run to a cath-lab case the cardiothoracic team is finishing in the annex on floor eight.
The cath-lab annex is half-warm, half-cold, the way any room with a continuous fume hood and an active fluoroscope is half-warm and half-cold.
The light is bluer than OR light. Two perfusion techs at a screen.
One cardiologist in lead at the table behind a glass partition.
The patient under drapes. The monitors beeping at staggered intervals.
I deliver the units to the small fridge at the back counter and I sign the slip and I am turning to leave when I see him.
Dr. Mikhailov has placed himself away from the table.
He stands at the counter against the east wall, in hunter-green scrubs and his white attending coat, stethoscope slung at his neck, the braided leather cord I noted yesterday at his left wrist. He has a journal open on the counter — Annals of Thoracic Surgery, gold spine — and he is reading it the way some men read newspapers, with a forearm against the counter and the other hand flat against the page.
He looks up. He sees me. He nods once. He goes back to the page.
His voice, when it comes, goes past me.
Behind me, at the door I have just come through, the perfusion tech who handed me my paperwork is a woman in her thirties with curly brown hair under her cap. Dr. Mikhailov speaks to the page.
"Doll. The dilution you flagged at eleven — page eleven line six. Two thousand twenty-two update. Use eleven A."
His voice is low and even and warm. The warmth belongs to her — the perfusion tech with the curly brown hair who keeps his pump running — the warmth of a man who has called this woman doll for years because doll is the word he uses for the women he works alongside in the rooms where he is most afraid.
The warmth belongs to her. I know this. I file it.
But the warmth is in his voice. The warmth is a real thing. Two days in this hospital, and the warmth in this man's voice is the first warmth I have heard in a working room.
For her, not me. I file that, too.
---
The elevator on the south corridor of floor eight is the slow one. I take it because the south stairwell is in use and because I am tired in the legs from circulating since six.
The doors open at floor nine for a man stepping out, not in.
The doors stutter open against his right shoulder.
He is taller than the elevator's top rail and wider than its doorway and he is in black scrubs — trauma surgeons at St. Jude's wear black — and he has a white attending coat over them that he has not bothered to button.
The pin at the breast says A. VOLKOV, M. D. / TRAUMA.
He has just come out of trauma. I can see it in the cuffs.
The black scrubs hide blood from the back, but they show the slight darkening at the cuff where saline has dried and the slight hand-wash line below the elbow where his arms are still warm from the antiseptic.
The two-day stubble at his jaw is a four-day stubble today; the smoke-gray of his eyes is gentler than the rest of his face.
The eyes are a lie. The rest of him is alert.
His attention holds on me for the length of one breath.
"Floor."
That is all.
He has stopped the elevator with his shoulder.
He has asked me where I am going. His name stays his own; mine, for the moment, stays mine.
The voice is flat and fast — trauma-bay flat, trauma-bay fast — and the question is stripped of curiosity, friendliness, hostility.
It is the question a man asks at an elevator when he has decided he is the only person who needs to know what floor I am going to.
"Eight."