Chapter 6
SURGERY DAY
Surgery is on Tuesday.
I know this because Dr. Tremblay told us last Tuesday, and since then I've been counting days the way I used to count hours in that first waiting room — not because counting helps, but because my brain needs something to do with its hands.
"T'as déjà mangé?" she whispers, because Ethan is still asleep, or performing sleep, which with him is sometimes the same thing.
"I'm fine."
She gives me the look — the one that means I heard you and I'm choosing not to believe you — and hands me a Tupperware.
Crêpes. Still warm. She made crêpes at 4 AM on her son's surgery day, and she brought them for me, because Ethan can't eat — nothing before anaesthetic, the nurses reminded us twice yesterday — but she needed to feed someone.
I take the Tupperware and I don't argue, because I'm learning that the fastest path through Maman's love is compliance.
At 7:10, they come for him — pre-op prep, the nurse explains, first case of the morning.
Two orderlies and a nurse I recognize — Jocelyne, the one who always calls him mon grand even though she's taller than he is.
They make him confirm his name, his date of birth, his allergies.
He answers everything in the flat, cooperative voice of a person who is being very calm about the fact that strangers are about to open him up and bolt metal to his bones.
Maman holds his face. Kisses both cheeks. Says something in his ear that I can't hear and don't need to.
He nods. His face is set at the angle that says I'm fine so that no one in the room has to feel responsible for the fact that he isn't.
He looks at me as they wheel him past.
"See you," he says. Like he's clocking in for a regular shift.
"See you," I say. Like I believe him.
The doors close. It's quiet.
Maman sits down in the chair next to me. She folds her hands in her lap, interlacing the fingers how people do when they need their hands to be doing something and there's nothing left to do. She stares at the doors. I stare at the doors.
Then she reaches into her purse and pulls out her knitting. A half-finished scarf in dark green wool — a project that exists not to produce a scarf but to produce a reason for your hands to move while your brain is somewhere you can't follow.
"C'est pour Camille," she says. "Noel prochain."
It's January. Christmas is eleven months away. But I understand. You knit what you can control.
I open my laptop. Close it. Open it again.
This is not the same waiting room.
The ER was downstairs — ground floor, different wing, different life.
This is the surgical floor, third level, and the chairs are a different shade of beige and the wall has a painting of a sailboat that someone chose specifically because it's too neutral to provoke any feeling, which is its own kind of violence.
But it feels the same. That particular quality of hospital waiting — the kind that stretches time until it's thin enough to see through to all the worst possibilities on the other side.
I sat in chairs like these the night of the accident, when I didn't know his middle name and I told a nurse I was his girlfriend.
That was a week and a half ago. It feels like a different person.
I try to work. Derek has sent revision five.
He wants the font changed again — he sent a screenshot from some website and wrote something like this?
clean and modern but also classic, you know what I mean?
I do not know what he means. The screenshot is a real estate ad in Georgia.
I type three sentences of a professionally patient reply.
Delete two. Save the draft. Close the laptop.
I can't do this. My brain keeps drifting back to the doors at the end of the hall — the beige double doors that don't have windows, behind which a surgeon is currently putting metal inside a person I've kissed twice, and I don't know how to hold both of those facts in the same thought.
Maman's needles click. Steady. Patient. Click, click, click. The scarf grows by half an inch.
Marc arrives at 8:15 with two coffees and the expression of a man who got up early on his day off and is determined to be useful.
"Hey," he says, handing me one. Tim Hortons.
Double-double. He nods at Maman — "Bonjour, Madame Morin" — and she lights up as she does with anyone who shows up when it matters, and within thirty seconds she's pressing cold crêpes on him and he's eating one standing up, crumbs on his jacket, looking genuinely delighted.
Marc sits down next to me. He's the reason Ethan and I met — the vernissage on Saint-Laurent where he introduced us over plastic cups of wine and a fifteen-minute conversation that was supposed to be forgettable.
Two weeks later, I landed a community safety branding project and needed someone who could walk me through fire safety procedures — and I remembered the firefighter from Marc's show.
I texted Marc. He sent me Ethan's number with a winky emoji I ignored.
I called it a work meeting. I changed my outfit three times.
Marc holds his coffee with both hands and looks at the doors.
"He's going to be fine," he says. Not like he knows. Like he's decided.
"Yeah."
We sit for a while. Marc drinks his coffee. I hold mine. Maman knits. The sailboat painting watches us with the serene indifference of art that was chosen by committee.
Then Marc says something I wasn't expecting.
"You know he texted me about you."
I look at him.
"After the vernissage. The next morning — and you have to understand, Ethan doesn't text before noon about anything that isn't an emergency or hockey.
But he messaged me at seven-something and asked if you were — and I'm quoting — 'seeing someone, or just like that generally.
'" Marc does a very bad impression of someone trying to be casual.
"'Just like that generally.' Those were his words. "
He says this with the very specific delight of a man who has been waiting to tell this story for weeks.
"I told him I didn't know. He asked me two more times in different ways over the next few days. Then you texted me asking for his number, and I almost threw my phone across the room."
I stare at my coffee. It's too hot to drink, which is fine, because my throat has done something that would make drinking difficult anyway.
I'd thought I was the one who reached out. I'd thought the work question was my initiative — professional, practical, a reason to see someone I'd been thinking about since a vernissage and a pair of laugh lines. I'd thought I was the one taking the step.
But he'd been asking about me for days before I ever texted Marc. He was already there.
Marc's phone buzzes. He glances at it. "J-S is on his way up. Just got off shift."
Jean-Sébastien arrives ten minutes later, still smelling faintly of smoke — not bonfire smoke, something sharper, more chemical.
He's tall, quiet, the kind of person who takes up physical space but not conversational space.
He's wearing his station jacket, the SPIM logo on the chest, and he crosses the waiting area to Maman first — "Bonjour, Madame.
Jean-Sébastien. Je travaille avec Ethan.
" A formal hello, his name, and the explanation that he works with Ethan.
Maman grabs his hand with both of hers. Her knitting slides off her lap. "Merci d'être venu." The words are formal — thank you for coming — but her grip isn't.
J-S sits down on my other side. He doesn't fill silences the way Marc does. He just sits in them, steady and unhurried — not decorative, just present, the way a column holds up a ceiling without anyone thinking about it.
After a while, without any buildup, without turning to face me, Jean-Sébastien says:
"He's the one we put on the radio."
I glance at him. He's looking straight ahead, at the doors.
"When a call goes bad — when it's a structure fire and the roof's compromised, or there's someone trapped and you've got ninety seconds — he's the one they put on the radio to talk to the crew inside.
Because his voice doesn't change." J-S pauses.
"Everyone's does. Mine does. You can hear it — the pitch goes up, the breathing gets tight.
Control can hear it through the radio and they know.
But Ethan—" He shakes his head. "Same voice.
Same cadence. Like he's reading you directions to the dépanneur, the corner store.
And when you're inside and the ceiling is making sounds it shouldn't be making, that voice is the reason you keep moving. "
He says this how you'd say the weather is cold. Factual. Unremarkable to him.
Marc nods beside me. "Station voted him worst poker player though. Can't bluff for shit."
"Different skill set," J-S says, and there's the ghost of something that might be a smile.
I add these to the file. Not the one on my laptop — the other one, the invisible one, the one I've been building since the first night.
The file that includes: the way he watched cat videos at 1 AM and pretended he was checking the time.
The way he said you don't have to and meant I don't know how to need you.
The religieuse from the bakery on Rue Saint-Denis — the one where the old woman opens when she feels like it and almost didn't sell it to him.
And now this — a man whose voice doesn't change when the ceiling is falling, who can't bluff at cards, who texted Marc at 7 AM the morning after we met because he couldn't wait until a normal hour to ask if I was single.
These don't fit together. They make a shape I don't have a reference for — not symmetrical, not balanced, not any of the things I know how to arrange into something that looks right. But I keep the file open anyway.
At 10:17, a nurse comes through the doors.
"The surgery went well. Dr. Tremblay will come speak with you shortly, but everything is as expected. He's in recovery — you can see him in about twenty minutes."
Maman puts down her knitting. Her eyes are wet but her voice is steady when she says, "Dieu merci."
Marc squeezes my arm. J-S nods once, stands, says, "Bon, je vais dire aux gars," already on his way to tell the guys, and walks to the stairwell, pulling out his phone.
We wait the twenty minutes. Maman redoes her lipstick. I don't know why that detail stays with me, but it does — the particular care of a woman putting on lipstick before her son sees her, so he won't know she's been crying.
They let us in two at a time. Maman goes first. She comes back four minutes later with mascara streaked and her hands clasped and says, "Il a fait une blague. Il va bien." He made a joke. He's fine.
My turn.
The recovery room is quieter than I expected. Curtained bays, machines, that particular hush that settles over rooms where people are surfacing from places they don't remember going. The nurse brings me to the third bay on the left.
He's there. Eyes closed. Paler than usual — the anaesthetic has taken the color out of him, left him looking younger, softer, like someone erased the lines he draws around himself every morning.
The hospital gown is askew. There's tape on the back of his hand where the IV is, and his hair is flat on one side from the surgical cap, and he looks like a person who had something done to him that he couldn't control and is still finding his way back from wherever the drugs took him.
I sit down. The chair scrapes.
His eyes open. Not fully — halfway, the lids heavy, the focus swimming. He looks at me like he's checking something against a list he made before he went under.
"You're still here," he says.
Not you don't have to stay. Not I'm fine. Just: you're still here. Like a fact he's verifying. Like he'd written it down somewhere and now he's reading it back.
"Where else would I be?" I say. I mean it to sound light. It doesn't.
He blinks. The anaesthetic is still pulling at him — I can see it in how his gaze drifts, then comes back, then drifts again, like he's on a tide and the tide keeps winning. His guard is somewhere the drugs put it. I don't know where. Wherever it is, he can't reach it from here.
"Les chats," he says. His voice is thick, the consonants soft at the edges.
"What?"
"Did someone — are they —"
"Marc's got them," I say. "Bagel bit him. Poutine refused to acknowledge his existence. Standard operating procedure."
"Sounds right," he murmurs. His eyes are closing again. The drugs are pulling him back.
But his hand — the one without the IV — moves on the blanket. Toward the edge. Toward where I'm sitting.
My heart does something stupid — my own hand shifting forward on the blanket before my brain has authorized the motion — an inch, maybe less, a reflex I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
His fingers reach the edge of the blanket.
Close to mine. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his skin — that same warmth from the wrist, from the pillow, from every accidental contact I've been filing away.
And then they stop. Hovering. Like they ran out of whatever courage the anaesthetic had loaned them.
The gap between our hands is small. Smaller than any distance I've calculated in this room, in this hospital, in any of the spaces where I've been measuring how close is safe.
And my hand is already there — already a little too far forward, already past the line I'd set for myself — because I moved first. I moved before I could perform the decision not to.
I don't close the gap. Neither does he.
His fingers twitch. Once. Like a reflex reaching for something the conscious mind hasn't authorized.
Then he's asleep. Real sleep this time — the kind where the face goes slack and the rhythm deepens and the person isn't performing unconsciousness but actually living in it.
I sit there. The machines beep. The recovery room hums its quiet, institutional hum.
My hand stays where it is. His hand stays where it is. The gap between them is the width of a breath — too small to mean nothing, too wide to mean everything. But I can feel the warmth crossing it, the way it does in all the spaces we haven't closed yet.
And I don't pull back. That's the part I'll think about later. Not that I moved — but that I didn't retreat.