Chapter 20 Elise
ELISE
The hospital corridor was familiar now. Elise had walked it so many times over the past three weeks that she knew its rhythms: the squeak of her trainers on the linoleum, the smell of each section, antiseptic near the nurses' station, coffee near the break room, lilies near the reception desk where someone had placed a vase of lilies that were changed every Monday.
She'd arrived at seven-thirty every morning, without exception, rain or sun or game day, and stayed until the nurses gently suggested she go home, and she'd come back at seven-thirty the next day, and the corridor had become as familiar as the one in the stadium.
Today was different. Today there was a lightness in her step that had been absent for twenty-one days.
Sienna was coming home. The words circled in Elise's head like a song she couldn't stop humming, bright and persistent and real.
Not home to Sienna's apartment, with its spare furnishing and its ocean view and its empty fridge.
Home to Elise's apartment, because Elise had told her, in the tone she used when the matter was not up for discussion, that Sienna would be staying with her while she recovered, end of discussion.
Sienna had opened her mouth to argue, because Sienna always opened her mouth to argue about accepting help, and Elise had said "No" and that had been the end of it.
She turned the corner and pushed through the door to Sienna's room and stopped.
Sienna was standing by the window. Not in the hospital gown that had made her look small and institutional for three weeks, but in her own clothes.
Dark trousers, a loose white shirt, the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
Her dark hair was washed and brushed and fell to her shoulders, a few grey strands catching the morning light.
Her left arm was still in a cast from wrist to elbow, but she held it against her chest with an ease that suggested the pain had faded from acute to manageable.
Her glasses were on her face and she was looking out the window at the hospital car park and the trees beyond and the strip of ocean visible above the roofline, and the sight of her standing there, upright, dressed, alive, made Elise's chest compress so hard and so fast she had to grip the door frame.
Sienna turned. Her face was pale, the bruises from the accident faded to yellow-green shadows on her jaw and forehead, and she was thinner than she'd been, the cheekbones sharper, the collarbones more pronounced beneath the white shirt.
But her eyes were warm and bright and when she saw Elise, the smile that broke across her face was the real one.
The one that crinkled her eyes and softened her jaw and made her look like a woman who had been waiting for exactly this person to walk through the door.
"You're dressed," Elise said.
"I'm dressed."
"You look incredible."
The colour rose from Sienna's collar, up her neck to her cheeks, and the sight of it after three weeks of hospital gowns and pallid hospital light made Elise's throat tight. She'd missed that. She'd missed it with a ferocity that surprised her.
She crossed the room in three steps and wrapped her arms around Sienna.
Gently. Mindful of the ribs and the cast and the bruises and the surgical sites.
She held her gently, mindful of a body still healing, and Sienna's good arm came around her waist and held on tight, and they stood in the hospital room with the morning light falling across them and neither of them let go.
"I'm so glad you're here," Sienna whispered against her shoulder.
"I'm so glad you're standing." Elise pulled back just enough to look at her, taking in every detail. The bruise on Sienna's temple had faded to yellow. The cast on her left arm was covered in small handwritten notes from the team.
"Dr. Mars says I'm a remarkable patient."
Elise wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Dr. Mars says you're a pain in the arse who tries to read your own charts and argues with the nurses about medication dosages."
Sienna's mouth curved. "Both things can be true."
Elise laughed. The sound was real and unguarded and it vibrated through both of them and for the first time in three weeks the tightness in Elise's chest loosened entirely.
The door opened behind them. Dr. Josephine Mars appeared, purposeful in her white coat, her sandy hair pinned back, her reading glasses perched on her nose.
She was carrying a folder and a slightly exasperated expression that Elise had come to associate with Sienna's brand of medical non-compliance.
"Well," Dr. Mars said, surveying the scene with kind eyes. "Don't you look ready to escape."
"I've been ready for a week," Sienna said.
"I know. You've told me. Daily." Dr. Mars opened the folder and scanned the contents quickly, though she clearly already knew what they said.
"Your imaging is clear. The lung is fully reinflated and holding.
The rib fractures are consolidating well.
The surgical sites are healing nicely. Your bloods are good.
You're going to have some residual discomfort in the ribs for another few weeks, and the arm stays in the cast for another four, and I want you in my office for a follow-up in ten days.
" She looked up over her glasses. "But you can go home. "
The three words filled the quiet room and Elise felt them settle deep into her body. Home. Together.
"Thank you, Josephine." Sienna's voice cracked on the name.
Dr. Mars closed the folder and tucked it under her arm. "Don't thank me. Thank your body for being stubborn and your girlfriend for being here every single day." She glanced at Elise with a look of frank admiration. "Every day, Sienna. Seven-thirty on the dot. I've started setting my watch by her."
Sienna's good hand found Elise's and squeezed. "I'm aware," she said, and the tenderness in her voice made Elise's throat ache.
Dr. Mars shook both their hands, reminded Sienna to take her medication on schedule and not to try to read the labels with a clinician's eye, and left.
The room was quiet. The monitors that had beeped for three weeks were silent now, disconnected.
The hospital bed was stripped. The get-well cards from the team were stacked in a neat pile that Sienna had arranged by date received, because she was Sienna.
The biggest one was from Frankie, handmade, with a drawing of a stick figure in a lab coat giving a thumbs up and the caption: "The only person who'd try to diagnose themselves during surgery.
" Below that, in smaller writing: "We love you, Doc.
Come back to us." Sienna had cried when she'd received it.
She'd turned her face to the window and tried to hide it, but Elise had seen and she'd held her good hand and said, "Everyone knows except you.
" The card was on top of the pile now. Sienna had read it every day.
"Let's go home," Elise said.
Sienna looked at the room one last time.
The window, the chair Elise had spent three weeks sitting in, the strip of ocean visible above the car park.
Then Elise picked up her bags, and they moved through the hospital corridor together, past the nurses who smiled and waved, past the reception desk with its Monday lilies, through the automatic doors and into the warm morning air.
They passed through the automatic doors and the open air hit them and Sienna stopped on the pavement and closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun and stood there, breathing.
Just breathing. The air outside the hospital was different from the air inside: it smelled of salt and car exhaust and coffee from the kiosk by the entrance and life.
It smelled of life. Elise watched her and the tightness in her chest was not pain but gratitude, enormous and formless, the kind that had no words and needed none.
The drive to Elise's apartment was short.
The windows were down and the salt breeze came through and Sienna sat in the passenger seat with her face turned toward the open window, breathing in the outside air as if she'd been underwater for three weeks and had just surfaced.
The ocean was visible between the buildings, blue and glittering in the morning sun, and a gull followed them for two blocks before peeling away.
"You look like you've never seen the ocean before," Elise said.
"I haven't seen it in three weeks. I'm reintroducing myself."
The breeze caught Sienna's hair, lifting it from her collar.
"You'll be swimming in it again before you know it."
Sienna's eyes lit up. "Dr. Mars said four weeks until the cast is off, then gradual return. I can do pool walks before that."
Elise glanced at her, shaking her head. "Of course that's the first thing you think about."
Sienna turned from the window, her good hand resting on the cast in her lap. "I am a creature of routine. You knew this when you signed up."
Elise parked outside her building and came around to open Sienna's door.
Sienna gave her a look that was equal parts gratitude and exasperation, the look of a fiercely independent woman who was learning, grudgingly, to accept help.
Elise took the bag and offered her arm and they walked up the stairs together, Sienna moving slowly, her free hand on the railing, her breathing slightly heavier by the time they reached the second floor.
"Welcome home," Elise said, pushing open the door.
The apartment was clean. Not Elise's usual version of clean, which meant the surfaces were visible and the dishes were done, but properly clean, scrubbed and tidied and reorganised to a degree that was frankly suspicious for someone who lived alone.
She'd spent the previous evening on her hands and knees with a mop and a level of determination she usually reserved for faceoffs.