CHAPTER 22
Nikolai
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I came back to this desk because the work is the work, and because after eleven years my hand does not know how to be in a house at four in the morning and not be writing.
I set the pen in the tray. The watch has crossed into morning.
Coffee. I go down. Kostya has set the pot and kept the study door alone — he never knocks at this hour. He is on the back terrace with a cup of his own. I pour. I carry it up.
She is asleep on her right side. The medallion lies at the hollow of her throat.
My pillow has the impression of her cheek on it and not of my head; I did not sleep with my head on a pillow last night.
I sat in the chair by the window with my hand on the back of her neck and counted her breaths until the foghorn called the third time, then I went down to write.
I set the coffee on the bedside table. I leave the room quiet around her. I go down again.
By mid-morning in the brownstone foyer, the clock reads 10:30.
Stefan finds me in the foyer.
"Sister Mary Catherine called."
"At what hour."
"Ten. The pediatric chief at Rainbow has the position open again. The flight could be tonight. She offered."
"Elena."
"Refused. " He gives it back to me in her cadence; he has it from the monitor. "I am where I need to be. The pediatric chief at Rainbow can find someone else. I am the one with her."
I have heard her say that last line once before, last week, on a call to the same sister. It was a count then. The count is the same one I have been keeping silently since I watched her stand in this foyer eleven days ago with my father's volume in her hands.
"She passed."
"She did not need to pass. She was already in. The phone was the form."
I look at the gallery glass. The leaded panel reflects me — gray at the temples, dark in the eyes, the line of my jaw three years older than my mouth admits.
Behind the glass: thirty-two volumes of pen-and-ink standing in chronological order, marbled endpapers, oxblood quarter-binding.
The volume I have been carrying down at dawn this past week is Q4 1989 — V. Romanov. It is at eye height.
It is the volume she pulled down on the day she was meant to wait three minutes in this foyer. I left it ajar in the glass that morning. I would do it again.
"Stefan."
"Pakhan."
"Bring her down at twenty hundred. To the foyer."
"You want her against the glass."
"I want her in front of it. I will decide what comes after when she is in front of it."
"You have decided."
"I have."
He counts in fours. He goes upstairs.
Late morning holds in the foyer at 11:00 when Rourke makes his first approach.
Kostya admits Damon Rourke under the standing truce.
The federal agent stands in the foyer in his gray off-the-rack suit with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the gallery glass and he does not pretend not to see what he is seeing.
He has been on the case for eleven years.
He knows what is behind the glass; he does not have the leverage to open it.
He is here, at this hour, to make an offer I have already heard her refuse twice this morning to a different listener.
I stay on the second-floor landing, hand on the rail.
Stefan walks her down at her pace; the dressing makes her slow on her left side; she keeps her right hand on the banister.
She is in her own clothes — soft linen pants, the cardigan over a heather T-shirt — the medallion at her sternum, her hair in the low knot at the nape with the yellow pencil through it.
Even slowed, she is the most observable person in this house.
Rourke speaks first. "Ms. Rossi."
"Agent Rourke."
"I can give you a door."
"You offered that door last month. It was a door out of a room I have asked to be in."
"This one has a clock on it. " His eyes stay on hers.
He does not look up at me on the landing.
That restraint is either manners or training; with Rourke it is both.
"There is a flight tonight. A position in Cleveland.
New credentialing under federal protection.
The affidavit is drafted. My AUSA will hold the package for twenty-four hours and not longer. "
"There is a position here. I am here. I would like to stay in it."
"If you are here by choice, I leave. If you are being kept here, I come back with a material-witness order and a different kind of door."
She is quiet for one count. Stefan’s hand stays open at her elbow and does not touch.
"I am here by choice, Agent Rourke."
He looks at her for two seconds. He nods. "Then I leave by mine."
He takes his coat from the brass hook. He goes.
Kostya turns the bolt. Stefan helps her to the leather chair in the foyer's east corner and brings her water. She drinks half.
I come down in silence and sit on the arm of the chair. I put my hand on the back of her neck — three fingers at the hairline, the thumb at the medallion's chain. She closes her eyes for one second. She opens them. The beat comes back steady.
"He came here," she says.
"He will come by paper next. Not by hand."
"And the sister?"
"She loves you. She would prefer you in a Cleveland ward. She accepted the refusal because she trusts your count more than her preference."
"Her count is mine," she says. "I learned to count from her before I learned to count from the medallion. The medallion was second."
The line is hers, and I let it stand. I lift the chain on the back of one knuckle. I lower it. The hairline crack across the angel's wing catches the lamp once.
At noon, in the brownstone study, the house narrows to the desk and the door.
She comes up at noon. She finds me at the desk. For nine seconds I keep writing. The pen scratches. I lift the nib. I look at her.
"You came up to watch me write."
"I came up to be in a room with you that is not the master suite or the foyer or the kitchen."
I set the pen down.
"Sit, Elena."
She does. The club chair is the chair my father sat in. That history stays with me alone tonight. She tucks her left ear behind her hair, as she does when she is being lied to, and waits to see if I will lie to her. I will not.
"I am going to show you something this evening."
"In the foyer."
"In the foyer. Behind the glass."
"You showed me the volume in the foyer twelve days ago. I read three pages."
"You read enough. I am going to show you the page my father wrote first. Not the volume he died with. The one he started. Q4 nineteen-eighty-nine. The first off-book entry. Entry seven, the witness needing surgical care. His hand. The iron-trace ink."
"And then."
"And then you will choose. I have done four hundred and twelve. He did the first. You have read three pages. You have read enough. You may choose."
"And if I choose to stay."
"You have already chosen. I would like to see you choose again with the page open in front of you."
Her eyes hold mine, the ear left where it lives. She sets her hands flat on her knees as I have set mine flat on this desk for fifteen years.
"Twenty hundred," she says.
"Twenty hundred."
She stands. She walks to the doorway. She stops.
"Will you carry me up after."
The question is one this house has never heard, and one my life has never offered.
My ribs are the same number of ribs that I was born with and the chest under them is the same chest that has run a six-mile treadmill at five fifteen every morning for the eleven years I have been Chief of Surgery in a hospital my father built a wing of and the chest answers without language.
"I will carry you up."
She goes.
Night brings the foyer back at 20:00, with the ledger open.
The foghorn calls. The first call of the evening.
The brownstone has been built into the corner since 1971 and the foghorn has been calling from the bay since before that and the wall of the foyer is the wall the sound carries against. I have lived with it.
I don't hear it as sound. I mark it as time.
The ledger is open on the console table beside the gallery glass.
Volume Q4 1989 — V. Romanov. Spine quarter-bound oxblood.
Marbled endpapers. The first off-book entry — entry seven of the quarter — is on page nine.
Vincent's hand. Looped Cyrillic-trained English script. Brown ink with a faint iron-trace.
She comes down the stairs at her pace. Stefan does not come with her tonight. Kostya is in the kitchen. Alexei is at the loft. Gabriel is at the lab. I have asked the house to be ours.
She is in a dress. Soft black, the one Stefan chose for her last week, the dress that hits two inches above the knee and lies kind against the right side of her hip.
The cardigan is upstairs. The medallion is at her sternum.
Her hair is still in the low knot with the pencil through it.
She is barefoot. The parquet under her soles is cold; she will feel the Bukhara runner under the arches of her feet when she comes off the last stair.
She comes off the last stair. She stops two feet from the glass.
I am behind her by two paces. I have set the tie on the console beside the ledger — undone, folded once, the silk a dark wine the color of the cover of my father's last volume. I leave it folded there and walk her to the console first.
"Look."
She looks. The page is open. The entry begins with the three-letter cipher my father designed in 1972 — F-3-X, the X my father used for standing charity.
F-3-X. Patient: witness, R-coded; gunshot, left abdomen, through-and-through; arrived 23:40 via the back terrace; care provided by V.
R. at the kitchen table; surgical kit borrowed from Dr. M.
(descriptor only); discharged 04:00 to courier; column 1 cost — none; column 2 cost — eleven dollars and seventy cents for sutures, gauze, alcohol; column 3 — pro bono.
She reads it. She reads it twice. Her right index finger comes up and touches the page above the ink, not on it; she has been a nurse long enough to know not to put oil on a thirty-five-year-old line. She reads it a third time. She turns her head to me.
"I am yours."