CHAPTER 20 #2
The suite has a single high transom of frosted glass set into the south wall for ventilation.
Gabriel installed it three years ago as a small kindness against the sub-basement's logic; the glass is one-way, the channel above it routes through a fiber-optic light tube to the West Annex roof, and the moonlight tonight has found the tube and come down.
The pane at the end of the bed is a small bright square against the off-white wall — silver, stable, the size of a folded handkerchief.
The moon, tonight, has been a surprise; the route to it more so — a way for one to come into a room with no window. I see it and I stay quiet.
Gabriel sees me see it. He marks his place with a finger and lifts his chin a quarter inch to follow my line. He nods, once, low, like a man confirming a chart entry. He goes back to the Italian.
Stefan tips the mug to my mouth again. "Sip, doll. If you would."
I sip. I rest.
Time moves at the pace of the medication.
I have always known what an opioid drip will do to time and now I am the patient on the receiving end of it, and the difference between knowing and being is the small distance between the chart and the bed.
There is no paper chart in this room. The real chart is in Epic, in the hospital that thinks this suite is a private step-down bed, and Stefan has the folded printout in his pocket because paper is what a man like him trusts when the body matters.
I lift my right hand — slowly, because the IV is on the back of the hand and the line will tug — and Alexei follows the motion without me asking. He places his free hand under my elbow and supports the lift so the line does not catch. I reach to his right shoulder. His shirt is stiff at the seam.
He lets me.
I slide my fingers under the cotton.
The butterfly closures are four small white wings against the deltoid. The graze line under them is the bright pink of clean tissue and the muscle is hot under my fingertip. I am briefly furious. The fury comes in a clean, surgical wave that I have not been allowed since the corridor.
"You did not tell me."
He holds my eyes. "You were on the table. I was not going to tell you."
"Next time, put it in my hands sooner."
He shakes his head — refutation rather than refusal. "There will not be a next time."
"There will be. " I keep my hand on his shoulder. "Promise you will put it in my hands. Say that."
He pauses long enough that Stefan moves the mug an inch away from my mouth and Nikolai's hand on my scalp tightens half a measure and Gabriel marks his place with the ribbon. Three reactions from three men. They are reading him through me.
He says it. "I will tell you."
"Out loud."
"I will tell you. Krasivaya. Out loud. The next graze. The next time anyone puts a round in my deltoid, you will hear the bullet's distance from yourself in my voice."
I take my hand off his shoulder. I put it back inside his.
"Green," I say.
He laughs once. It is the smallest sound. He turns the ring with his other thumb so I will feel it through the steel in my palm. His grip stays.
Stefan offers the mug. I sip. He sets it down.
He places his right palm against my forehead — the open palm with the midline scar across the right palm, the Moscow surgeon's scar, the scar that has been at my hip and my sternum and now is at my brow.
He listens with his fingers. He nods. He picks up the mug again.
"The hours get lighter from here," he says when the count comes back around. The repetition is still the count, but the words change under it.
"All right," I say. I am very tired.
The pharmacist comes at nineteen hundred.
He is a man of middle age in a long white coat with the Lab B keys on a lanyard at his hip.
I have seen him on the floor twice and not learned his name; on the chart he signs as the consulting pharmacologist and I have never been told that the Practice keeps three sworn lab-side employees under a separate medical oath.
I know it now. I am being told by his presence rather than by his words.
Stefan steps to the doorway. They speak in low Russian for nine minutes.
The pharmacist scans the cartridge against the eMAR on the tablet at his wrist. Stefan reads the label twice.
The PACU nurse at the foot of the bed reads it back.
The pharmacist leaves only after the waste count has a second signature.
After he is gone, Stefan watches the nurse switch the locked cartridge and reset the basal rate under the pain-service order.
He works without touching what he cannot legally touch; his control is in the numbers he made them write.
The discarded ampoule goes into a tamper bag with two initials and a barcode, not a pocket. He sits back down. He picks up the mug.
"That was a swap to a cleaner regimen for the night," he says, and as he says it is as he has learned to talk to me when the chart-line and the room-line are the same line. "Less anti-emetic burden. You will be less foggy in the morning."
"Thank you," I say. Then: "I did not know there were three of them."
"Three on this side of the curtain," he says. "There are four on the other. I will tell you about the other four when you can sit up for an hour without the room moving."
"Tomorrow," Nikolai says, in a voice that does not raise. "Not today."
"Tomorrow," Stefan agrees.
I file the knowledge the way Nikolai files mine. It lands and stays. I am inside the structure that has all the curtains in it. I would rather know where the curtains are than not.
The medallion is still at my sternum.
I touch it once. The pad of the right index finger to the silver.
The hairline catches the print of my finger as it always does and the small caught place is the one I have been touching since I was nineteen and standing at a NICU window.
Sophia stays unnamed. She has been touched and she has settled.
The room is the room I am in. The men in it are the men in it.
The window I cannot reach is letting the moon in. That is enough.
I let the medallion go. I let my hand find Alexei's again.
I keep my eyes open for another hour because Gabriel has stopped reading and started speaking and the speaking is in English and the English is the small things I have missed about the day I missed.
He tells me what time the surgery began.
He tells me the gauge of the lap pad count and that it came out clean.
He tells me Beatriz was at the table the whole time and ran the count herself because she would not let anyone else do it.
He tells me that Beatriz came up to the suite this afternoon for ten minutes when I was asleep — that she had brought my wallet from my locker on Stefan's instruction and checked that Sophia's photograph was still in the first slot.
The pediatric pin was not in the wallet. It was still where I had chosen to leave it, in the writing-desk drawer, waiting for a day when I could decide what wearing it meant.
It had slipped past me.
I look.
It is at the corner of the bedside table beside the heavy ceramic mug. Small. Blue. The little bear on the little stethoscope. Beatriz has set it on the table with the catch facing up, as you set a pin you intend to be picked up again rather than worn again. I leave it where it lies. I look at it.
I think — quietly, to myself — that the woman who pinned that on a lanyard at twenty-two is the same woman in this bed at twenty-five, still standing inside her own name. I am her, and I am here, and the count holds.
"Beatriz said to tell you she will come back tomorrow afternoon if Stefan allows," Gabriel says. "She said: mija, listen. The chief gave you the morning."