CHAPTER 22
Siena
There was a day in the second week of August that I kept empty.
That was the whole of my arrangement. I did not book surgery. I did not go on-call. I got through the day, then it was over and I didn’t think about it again for a year.
Bea and I had never once said the date out loud. We had a grammar built around it. She called in the evening, always, and we talked about nothing for forty minutes, and neither of us mentioned why.
This year she called at seven and I let it ring out.
I couldn’t do it. I’d lied to that girl every day for a month. A gas leak, a building, four men in a car. I could hold that on any other day of the year. Not on that one. She would have heard it in three words.
So, I sat on the floor of the council room with my back against the leg of my father-in-law's table. I let my sister ring. Afterward I sent her a message saying I was in theatre.
That was the first lie I told her that I could not put down.
The house was busy. Busy for four days, since Kolya came back from Gravesend with a dictation machine in his coat and his father's voice on it. It unspooled him, but no one but me saw it.
I
He worked. He hadn’t slept properly since the garage. He was in the council room at five in the morning with the vory list and a map and eleven names. He was courteous to everyone. His hands were steady. And behind his eyes a light had gone out.
Twice this week he said my name in a voice that had nothing left in it.
He didn’t cry. I didn’t believe he could. He sat through a recording of his own father working out that his brother was going to kill him. Then he put the machine down and asked me whether I had eaten.
I knew what that was. I’d been that. It wasn’t strength and it didn’t hold.
So on the eleventh of August, in the evening, I went to find my husband. On the one day of the year that belongs to somebody else.
He was in the study with the lamp off again.
"Come to bed," I bid.
"I have the Baranov thing to—"
"Kolya." I stood in the doorway. "Come to bed. You have slept eleven hours in four days. I'm telling you as your doctor, who is the one person in this house you cannot overrule."
He looked up. His mouth moved, which was the first one of those in four days. "That is not in the paper."
"It's implied."
He came. He lay on his back and I put my head on him. Neither of us said anything for a long while. His hand went into my hair and stayed there.
"Tell me something that has nothing to do with any of this," he said.
So, I told him about a man I operated on in my second year. He had swallowed a house key on a dare. In recovery he asked me to keep it. It was still in a drawer in an apartment I hadn’t seen for a month.
He laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh. It was the first sound out of him in four days that wan’t work.
Then he said, "You have been on the floor of that council room since six o'clock. You did not turn a page."
I went very still.
He had been in and out of that room all evening. I had heard him at the door twice and thought he had gone past.
"I'm tired," I said.
"Yes."
"It's been a long month."
"It has."
He didn’t push. Yuri asked a question with a hand under it. Kolya put the thing on the table and let it lie there. If you didn’t pick it up, he left it and never mentioned it again.
I lay on that man's chest, in the dark, on the eleventh of August, and I came very close.
I had it in my mouth. Twelve years ago tonight.
She was thirty-nine. It was a restaurant.
I was sixteen. I had my hands inside her on the floor between two tables and it made no difference at all.
That is why I do not lose patients. That is the reason under the reason, and you asked me once what was underneath and I said nothing, and I lied to you.
I never said one word of that to another living person. Not to Bea. Not to a single man I had been with. Not to the therapist my chief of service made me see in my first year. She was perfectly nice and got nothing out of me at all.
And I wanted to say it to a Bratva pakhan in a dark room, more than I had ever wanted to say anything.
Trust had nothing to do with it. I did not say it because he could not have carried it.
He had four days of his father's voice in him and eleven names on a list and a council in two weeks.
He was at the exact edge of what a person could hold.
And I spent my entire adult life reading precisely that.
In relatives, in the corridor outside a room where somebody's son was dying.
Knowing which of them can take the next sentence and which cannot.
He couldn’t have taken it. He would have anyway. That was what he did. He would have gathered it up and made room for it, and it would have cost him what he no longer had.
So, I held it in my mouth and let it go, and said a different thing instead.
"I love—" I said.
Then stopped.
It came out on its own, without permission, in the exact voice I use for a diagnosis. It was in the room before I had decided anything at all.
His hand went still in my hair. Neither of us moved. His heart went faster under my ear. I had never in my life been so grateful for the dark.
"Say it," he said.
"No."
"Siena."
"Not tonight." My voice held weight. "Not on this night. Ask me again in three weeks. I'll say it properly, standing up, in the light, when there isn't a council and a clock and a man with a list."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Two weeks," he said.
"Two weeks."
"That is a promise."
"It's a promise."
His arm tightened around me and stayed. I held two things back from the only person I had ever wanted to give them to. I told myself I was doing it out of mercy.
We were both being kind. Neither of us was lying to hurt anybody.
It made no difference at all to what it cost.