33. Arielle
ARIELLE
Icome back to myself in pieces, the way you wake from anesthesia, in a room that is too bright and too quiet and that smells like the inside of a clean machine.
The first thing I am sure of is the weight on my stomach.
Not pressure. Weight. A monitor band stretched across the curve of me, and under it, faint and steady and faster than my own pulse, the small urgent gallop I have been listening to in Dr. Ellis's office since October, looping out of a speaker on a cart beside the bed at a volume somebody has turned down so I can sleep.
She is still in there. She is still in there, and she is still going.
I make a sound that is not a word, and a hand closes around mine before I have finished making it.
"You're awake. Don't move fast. You're okay. She's okay. You're both okay, Arielle. I need you to hear that first, before anything. You're both okay."
Nolan's voice is wrecked. It comes out of him like it has been dragged over gravel, which, I will learn later, is more or less what happened to it.
I turn my head on the pillow. He is in the chair pulled up against the rail of the bed, and he looks like a man who has been in a fire, because he has been in a fire.
There is an oxygen cannula looped under his nose that he is clearly ignoring.
There is a white dressing taped along the side of his neck and another on the back of his right hand.
His shirt is gone, replaced by a set of hospital scrubs two sizes too big that someone must have fought him into.
His eyes are red-rimmed in a way that is only partly the smoke.
"You stayed," I say. My voice is worse than his.
"Of course I stayed."
"There are reporters."
"There are reporters in the lobby, in the parking structure, and, I am told, one enterprising young man who attempted to come up the service elevator dressed as a food delivery, who Malcolm is currently having a long and educational conversation with downstairs.
I have not gone out to any of them. I am not going to.
Devon is handling the statement. Carla is handling the firm.
Claire is handling my company. Your mother is on a flight from O'Hare that does not exist, by which I mean Bianca has chartered her a plane, by which I mean your cousin spent my money without asking me and I have never been prouder of anyone in my life.
Everyone who needs to be handled is being handled by someone who is not me, so that the only thing I have to do tonight is sit in this chair. "
"Dr. Ellis."
"Was here forty minutes ago. She'll be back at the top of the hour.
The contractions stopped on their own once they got fluids in you.
She is calling it irritable uterus brought on by acute stress and exertion, which is a phrase I have written down so I can say it correctly later.
You are not in labor. You were in a building that exploded, and your body did what bodies do, and then it stopped.
The leg is a deep laceration along the right shin, no fracture, no tendon involvement, twenty-two stitches.
Smoke exposure under three minutes for both of you.
She used the word lucky four times. I counted. "
I lie there and let all of it land. The monitor beeps its slow steady gallop into the quiet.
My leg is a far-off ache somebody has wrapped in gauze and good drugs.
My throat feels scraped. My hand is in his, and he is not gripping it, I notice.
He is holding it the way you hold something you have been told you are allowed to hold but have not been told for how long.
"You haven't tried to fix anything," I say.
"What?"
"In the last five minutes. You've told me what happened.
You've told me who is handling what. You have not told me what is going to happen next.
You have not told me where I'm recovering, or who's driving me, or what we're naming her, or which of your seven apartments has the best air filtration for a newborn.
You have not, Nolan, made a single decision out loud since I opened my eyes. "
"No."
"Why not."
"Because it's not my turn." He says it simply, without any of the strategy I have heard in his voice across eleven years of boardrooms I have read about and seven months of boardrooms I have sat in.
"I have spent my whole life going first into rooms so I would not be the one left in the hallway.
I went first into that building this afternoon and I would do it again tomorrow and I am not sorry about that one, sweetheart, that one I will fight you on until I die.
But this room. This bed. What happens next.
That's not a room I go first into anymore.
I'm waiting. I've gotten better at waiting.
I've been practicing for two months. I'm going to wait until you tell me which way the next door opens, and then I'm going to honor whatever you say, and that is the entire plan. That's all of it."
And then Nolan Ashford, who does not cry in conference rooms, who did not cry at his mother's funeral, who I have watched hold an entire empire on his back without his face changing, puts his forehead down on the rail of my hospital bed, on the back of his bandaged hand, on top of my hand, and breaks.
He does not do it loudly. He does it the way a building comes down, slow at first and then all at once, his shoulders going in a way I have never seen them go, and the sound that comes out of him is not language and is not performance and is not a man asking me for anything.
"I'm sorry," he says, into the blanket. "I'm not going to defend any of it this time.
Not the security. Not the buildings. Not Holcomb.
Not the calls. I'm not going to give you the file folder version where it was all love.
Some of it was love and some of it was fear wearing love's coat and I knew the difference the whole time and I did it anyway because I was nine years old in a hallway and nobody ever taught me another way to keep someone.
I'm sorry, Arielle. I'm sorry I made you fight me when you were already fighting everyone else.
I'm sorry I made you do it alone in a glass office and a trailer and a kitchen.
I'm just — I'm sorry. That's the whole sentence. There's no second half this time."
I lie there with my hand under his forehead and the monitor going and the reporters somewhere twelve floors down, and I feel something I have been holding closed since I was old enough to watch my mother eat a sandwich over a sink come quietly unlatched in my chest.
"I never thought anybody would stay, Nolan."
He goes still.
"That's the part underneath my part. You showed me yours in the trailer.
This is mine. My father left before I was born, and my mother spent thirty years teaching me that the way you survive being left is to need so little that leaving doesn't cost you anything.
I built my whole life out of needing nothing.
I built my career out of it. I built my body out of it, the way I stand in rooms, the way I drive myself to appointments in snowstorms. And then you came along and you needed everything, all at once, out loud, and the worst part was not that you were too much.
The worst part was that some piece of me had been starving my whole life and you were the first person who ever offered it a full plate, and I could not figure out how to eat from it without believing you'd take the plate away the second I admitted I was hungry. "
"I'm not going to take the plate away."
"I know. I'm starting to know. You went into a building that was coming down on top of itself, Nolan. People don't do that for a plate they're planning to take back."
He lifts his head. His face is a mess and he does not try to fix it, which is, somehow, the most changed thing about him in the whole room.
“Ask me to stay,” I say. “Not because I need you to save me. I just saved myself. I dragged my own leg out from under a wall and crawled forty feet toward a door I made them install, and I was getting out of that building with or without you. Hold that part first, because it matters to both of us. I don’t need you.
I’ve never needed anyone, and I’m not starting tonight just because it would make a good story.
Ask me to stay because I want you here. Because the bed is too quiet without you in the chair.
Because she likes your voice — she does, she settles when you talk, I’ve felt it. Ask me like that, and I’ll say yes.”
"Stay, Arielle."
"Yes."
"That's it? Yes?"
"That's it. Yes. Now hold my hand the loose way you've been holding it and stop being afraid I'll let go. You can hold it the whole way. I'm telling you you're allowed."
He keeps my hand in his the entire way. The monitor maintains its small, steady gallop. And I fall asleep in a room with another person, untroubled by the old instinct to calculate when he’ll leave.