CHAPTER 26 #3
I open my eyes once and he holds me with his gaze. He looks as he looked the night he carried me out of trauma bay six with the saline-warmed cloth around me. He kisses the inside of my left wrist and lays my arm back into the water.
Nikolai stands from the stool.
He kneels at the right side of the tub. He cups both hands around my face and tilts my chin up an inch with the heel of his right hand and wipes my left cheek and then my right cheek with the soft folded cloth Stefan has handed him.
He is washing the salt I did not know I had cried at some point in the long hours. He wipes my forehead. He wipes my nape.
"Elena."
I say, "Yes."
He says, "We will sleep in this room. You will walk under your own feet to the bed because you wanted to. I will be at your left. Alexei will be at your right of me. Stefan will be on the other side of you. Gabriel will be on the other side of Stefan. Acknowledge."
I say, "Yes."
He says, "We have told you we are yours.
We have said it without saying it for twenty-six days.
We will say it in the order the men have decided.
Stefan first. Then me. Then Alexei. Then Gabriel.
Each man will say it in his own time. The order is not negotiable.
The timing is mine. The words are theirs. "
I say, "When."
He says, "Stefan tomorrow morning. The greenhouse-apartment. You will know when you hear it. The next three will follow."
I say, "Yes."
He wipes my mouth with the cloth and leans down and kisses me on the forehead and the medallion at my sternum at the same time. He says, "Elena. Good. Stay."
Gabriel kneels at the foot of the tub.
He has my feet. He has lifted them out of the water in turn and rested them on the brass rim of the tub one at a time and is washing them with both his hands.
The ankle. The bridge of the foot. The arch.
Each toe. He washes as he restrains — load-bearing, deliberate, architectural.
He has held more pressure in his life than any of the four and he is the gentlest with my feet.
He kisses the inside of my left ankle. He kisses the inside of my right ankle. He sets both feet back into the water.
He stays kneeling at the foot of the tub.
He says, as he says everything, with no question in it, "Elena. Mia."
The Italian goes through the room. The other three hear it. They keep their heads where they are. They know how rarely he spends it. They know the count holds. They know it will return only after Naples is closed and the closing arc has had its time.
Gabriel says, "Look at the whole of you. All of it. Look."
I look. The candle is small at the windowsill. The four men are around me. The water is at my collarbones. The medallion is at my sternum. The carved double-eagle on the headboard is visible through the open doorway. The bed waits.
Gabriel says, low, deliberate, "Mine. Yours. Ours."
The line is for the four and for me. The grammar is the thesis. I have heard it before and I will hear it again at the close. Tonight the line is here. Tonight it is the bath.
Stefan whispers, soft to Gabriel first across the tub, "Brother. You kept her safe."
Gabriel says, "She held herself."
Stefan turns to Alexei, who is still on his knees at my left elbow. "Brother. She was safe in your hands."
Alexei says, "She held herself."
Stefan turns to Nikolai, who has his thumb at the line of my jaw. "Brother. You kept her safe."
Nikolai says, "She held herself."
I have heard the praise lines tonight and the praise lines have been the words for me, but these belong to each other.
The four men say the words because the room requires that they say the words and because the witness function is what the architecture is.
They have done their work. The work is honored aloud.
They put it on the air the way Nikolai puts the chi-seal on the wax. The line is logged.
The bath water cools by the slowest count.
Stefan lifts me out of the tub. The cashmere blanket is on his forearm.
He wraps me in it and dries me. Alexei takes the medallion in his right hand for one breath, lays it against my sternum, and settles the chain at my nape as I have been closing it for sixteen years.
Gabriel holds the door open. Nikolai walks behind us with the small enamel tin of bath salts back to the bedside.
I walk to the bed under my own feet.
I climb onto the four-poster between the four of them.
The double-eagle is at my back when I turn over once and look at it.
The carved capitals stand at the four corners — clamp, needle driver, retractor, probe.
I have my hand on the needle-driver capital for one breath because Stefan commissioned it for me before I existed in this room.
I lie down on my back.
Stefan slides in at my right. Gabriel slides in on the other side of Stefan.
Nikolai slides in at my left. Alexei slides in on the other side of Nikolai.
The pattern is what Nikolai said in the bath.
Stefan and Gabriel on my right; Nikolai and Alexei on my left.
I am between the four. I mark the men: four.
I mark the medallion: one. I follow breaths.
Stefan is breathing first.
He is at four in.
I am at six out.
Gabriel skips the count and holds. Alexei skips the count and holds. Nikolai counts vitals only when active; tonight he is at rest. He breathes through his nose at six.
my eyes close.
Sleep takes its time. I lie inside the architecture and I let it hold me. The candle on the windowsill burns slow and the foghorn calls at intervals and the radiator hisses its long four-count and the bed sits on the brass castors, dead still. The room has been built for this. The room is mine.
Tonight my counting stops at four. The exits go uncounted. The instruments go uncounted. Every old tally I have run my whole life to ground myself goes still. I am at the ground. I am the ground.
Sometime later I open my eyes. The candle has burned to a thumbprint of wax on the sill.
The window is dark. The fireplace is down to embers.
The bath water in the next room has gone cool.
Stefan is asleep at my right, his palm on my hipbone.
Gabriel is asleep at the other side of Stefan, his hand around Stefan's wrist where Stefan is holding mine.
Nikolai is asleep at my left, his hand on the back of my neck.
Alexei is asleep at the other side of Nikolai, his ringed thumb against the line of Nikolai's spine.
The four men breathing.
I mark them. Four. I mark the medallion. One. I follow my own breath. Six.
It is four-thirty in the morning.
I sit up once. Slowly. I let them sleep. I take the medallion in my palm and I hold it. The hairline crack across the angel's wing under my thumb. Saint Raphael. The angel of healers. The angel of travelers. The angel of fish in old books and arrows in older ones.
I say it very quietly.
"I am yours."
I lie back down.
The radiator hisses. The foghorn calls. The brass castors stay silent. The bed holds still.
Stay.
I stay.