CHAPTER 29 #2
She lifts her right hand from her lap. She extends it toward me, palm up, the same way I have seen her extend her hand for a chart, for a scalpel, for the saline-warmed cloth I handed her in the bay on Day 6.
The right palm is small. The lines on it are the lines on any nurse's palm — work-deepened on the side, soft at the heart-line, the small ridged scar at the base of her right thumb from a marrow biopsy when she was eleven that turned out to be nothing. I have looked at her hand a lot.
I lower the ring into her palm.
The weight goes in. Two grams. Steel. Knurled.
It sits on the lines of her right palm and it stays.
I hold her hand for nine beats. Fives are tonight's count; the nine is a hold.
I hold her hand around the ring inside it and I look at her face and her face does not move and her mouth does not move and the medallion at her sternum does not move. I let go.
She closes her fingers.
She closes them slowly. How she does anything she is paying attention to. I watch the knuckles whiten and then ease. The ring is inside her fist. The metal will warm.
"Alexei."
"Yes."
"Alexei. " She says it the second time and the second time has the verdict in it. I have stood at the head of operating tables waiting for the chief to say my name twice and the second time has always told me whether the surgery is over.
She uncurls her fist halfway. She looks at the ring lying in her palm in the lamp's amber for three or four breaths.
I follow the breaths. The count stays behind my teeth.
Stefan counts aloud; I keep the count behind my teeth because the only clock I keep is her pulse.
Her pulse is even — I can see it at the hollow of her throat above the medallion's chain.
That even beat belongs to a woman who is awake and present and is not afraid of the man on her floor.
The ring stays in her palm.
Her thumb stays at her side. Her fingers stay open. Her left hand stays folded in her lap. She turns the ring once in her palm — once, as I have turned it on my thumb for twenty-two years — and then she leans forward slightly and she slips the ring into the left pocket of the cardigan.
The pocket is the cardigan's standard knit pocket — patch, ribbed at the top — and the ring goes into the pocket and the weight settles at the bottom against the seam and her hand comes back out empty and she sits back against the headboard.
Her eyes find mine.
"Alexei," she says, the third time. The third time is the verdict softened into a name. "Thank you."
I stay on the floor. My knees can complain later. I am thirty-six years old and a woman has just put my ring in her pocket and called me by name three times and I will stay on this floor until she tells me to move.
She leans forward. The cardigan slips on one shoulder; the medallion shifts a quarter-inch and resettles.
She puts her right hand against my face.
Her palm is warm. The skin smells faintly of the unscented soap Gabriel keeps in the suite's shower and of the cotton of the cardigan and of nothing else.
She holds my face for four beats — Stefan's count — and then she leans the rest of the way down and she puts her mouth on mine.
Once.
A kiss. Soft. Closed. Her lips press, hold, release.
She is back against the headboard before my hands have decided what to do with themselves, and my hands have decided to stay on the floor at my own knees because the angle is wrong if I touch her and the angle is what I came here for.
She kissed me once. She put my ring in her pocket and she kissed me once.
I stay on the floor.
"Krasivaya. Thank you."
"Always. " Her voice is lower again. Almost. "Stay a minute."
"I will stay."
The wall clock belongs to the suite, not me.
The clock I keep is the daylight-spectrum lamp's soft amber and as it has held steady for nine minutes.
The clock is the rise and fall of the cardigan's shoulder.
The clock is her pulse steady and mine nowhere near calm because I am not as calm as my hands look.
The clock is the ring in her left pocket against the seam.
I look up at her after a while. Her eyes are open.
Her eyes are dry. She is paying attention.
She is the woman who walked into my bay on Day 4 with a chart and a yellow pencil through her hair and ordered an attending with twenty years on her to put his goddamn ring down because she was right and I was wrong and the patient came first, and that is the woman in the bed in front of me right now in a sub-basement suite at oh-zero-twenty-seven on a Sunday-going-Monday in November with my ring in her pocket and the medallion at her sternum and three vows already in her body and the fourth one due at dawn at the greenhouse.
"Tell me."
She breathes in. The medallion shifts. The cardigan sleeve at her left wrist is folded back twice from kitchen use earlier and the inside-forearm appendix scar from when she was fourteen is a pale crescent in the amber. Her eyes stay on mine for one breath. Two. Three. Four.
"Sophia would have liked you."
I hold still. Twenty-two years of trauma rooms have taught me to hold still when someone is handing you the thing you came in for. I keep my hands on my own knees. I keep my eyes on her face. I keep the floor under me hard so I do not float off it.
"She was the one," she says, "who knew the angry boys with the good hands. She would have approved."
The name in her mouth is the third time her sister's name has been said aloud between any of us.
The first was on a phone call I was not in the room for — Sister Mary Catherine, October twenty-fifth, the storm, Elena saying Sophia like the word would hold her up.
The second was in front of the photograph the four of us looked at on Day 25 — Stefan recognized the trauma room and gave Elena back the night I was three states away from her.
The third is now. The third is to me. The third is the door at the closing of a series.
I keep my hands on my knees.
I say: "Sophia."
I say her name once. Out loud. Inside the room where Elena has just said it. The room takes it.
I nod.