Chapter 2 #2
The nurse leaves and I lie in the quiet and look at the bandages on my arm.
The wrapping is clean and white and professional, and underneath it is something I haven’t seen yet and am not ready to see.
I know the grades of burns — I’ve read enough clinical literature to know that second-degree means blisters and pain and healing, and third-degree means the nerves are gone and the skin needs grafts and the healing is measured in months, not weeks.
I know this the way I know everything: in the abstract, in the data, at a distance.
The distance is closing. Soon I will have to look at what the fire did to me, and when I do, the data will become a body. My body.
Not yet. Not today.
Auden arrives forty minutes later. I know it’s been forty minutes because I’ve been watching the clock on the wall — the analog kind, with a second hand that ticks instead of sweeping, each tick a small reliable sound in the quiet.
She comes in without knocking. That’s Auden — she has never knocked on a door in her life if she thought someone she loved was on the other side of it.
She is carrying a paper bag from the bakery near the university and a hardcover book and her face is the face of a woman who has been crying in her car for the entire drive and is done now.
“Oh, Cal.” She says it quietly, standing at the foot of the bed, taking me in.
Her eyes move from the bandages on my arm to the dressings on my shoulder to the IV to my face, and I watch her catalog the damage the way I would catalog a dataset — systematically, completely, before allowing herself to react.
“It’s bad,” I say. “But I’m here.”
“You’re here.” She sets the bag and the book on the side table and pulls the chair — Langston’s chair — closer to the bed.
She sits down and takes my right hand, the good hand, and holds it in both of hers.
Her grip is firm and warm and exactly the right pressure, which is something Auden has always been good at: knowing exactly how hard to hold on.
“He was here,” I say. “When I woke up.”
“I know. The nurses told me he’s been here since they admitted you. Sleeping in the chair.” She pauses. “They also told me they had to ask him to leave the room during your dressing changes because he was scaring the staff.”
“Scaring them how?”
“Standing in the corner and staring. Apparently he looked like he wanted to fight someone and there was no one to fight.”
That sounds right. Langston without a problem to solve is Langston at his worst — all that drive and certainty and no target. He would have stood in the corner of the burn unit and radiated helpless intensity until the nurses couldn’t do their jobs.
“I sent him home,” I say.
“Good.”
“Auden.”
“Yeah.”
“He saved Rowena first.”
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look surprised.
She nods, once, a small tight movement that tells me she already knew this, or guessed it, or understood it the moment she heard what happened because Auden has been watching Langston Merrifield for five years with the clear cold eye of a woman who was never dazzled by his name.
“He told me the staircase collapsed,” I say. “That he couldn’t get back in.”
“And?”
“And that’s probably true.”
“Probably.”
“He went to Rowena’s room first. He picked her up and carried her out.
He didn’t come to our bedroom. He didn’t check on me.
He didn’t even —” My voice cracks. It’s the first crack since the fire, the first time the flat clinical tone I’ve been using breaks, and I hate it.
I hate that the crack comes now, with Auden, and not when Langston was sitting in this chair explaining the physics of his instinct.
“He didn’t even call my name, Auden. I called his. Three times. He never called mine.”
She squeezes my hand. Doesn’t try to fix it. Doesn’t offer an interpretation. This is why I love Auden Falk — she doesn’t fill silence with comfort when silence is what you need. She holds your hand and sits in the wreckage with you and waits.
“I want a divorce,” I say.
She looks at me. Studies my face the way she studies a manuscript — looking for the weak points, the places where the logic doesn’t hold, the spots that need more data.
She has been my friend for fifteen years.
She knew me before Langston, before the Merrifield name, before the foundation dinners and the Hamptons house and the clinical-trial philanthropy circuit.
She knew me when I was Calla Thorpe, a graduate student with a bad apartment and a good mind and no patience for men who thought their certainty was a substitute for listening.
“Okay,” Auden says.
“You’re not going to argue?”
“No.”
“You’re not going to tell me it’s too soon? That I’m in shock? That I should wait until the morphine wears off and think clearly?”
“Cal.” She leans forward. “You are thinking clearly. You’ve been thinking clearly since you woke up. You’re the clearest thinker I know, and right now you’re lying in a burn unit because your husband left you in a fire, and if you say you want a divorce, then you want a divorce.”
I close my eyes. The tears come. I don’t fight them because fighting takes energy and all my energy is going to the left side of my body, which is trying to decide whether to heal or give up.
I cry quietly, the way I’ve always cried — without sound, without drama, just water on my face that I can’t stop.
Auden doesn’t shush me. She holds my hand and lets me cry and when I’m done she reaches into the paper bag and pulls out an almond croissant and sets it on the tray table beside me.
“I also brought that new book on adaptive trial design,” she says. “The one you wanted. It’s the hardcover.”
I almost laugh. Almost. The sound gets stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat, caught on the bandages and the burns and the knowledge that my best friend brought me a croissant and a statistics textbook in a burn unit because she knows me — knows that what I need right now is not comfort or hope or a plan.
What I need is something real and small and mine.
I pick up the croissant with my right hand. It’s still warm.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Eat,” she says. “And then tell me who your divorce lawyer is, because if you don’t have one yet, I have three names.”
She has three names. Of course she has three names.
Auden has been holding the list of divorce lawyers in her back pocket for five years, waiting for the day she might need it, and the fact that she never brought it up before — never once said what she thought of Langston’s priorities, never once pushed against the marriage — tells me everything about the kind of friend she is.
She waited. She watched. And now that I’ve said the word, she’s ready.
I eat the croissant. It tastes like butter and almonds and the part of my life that exists outside this bed, outside the burns, outside the marriage that ended in a fire.
Outside all of it, somewhere, there is a woman who eats pastry and reads about adaptive trial design and has a best friend who brings her both.
I’m going to need that woman. I’m going to need her very much.