The Queen of Hearts(31)
“What are you doing home so early?” I smiled. “It’s not even midnight.”
“Ha-ha,” he said, pushing his glasses up and rubbing the bridge of his nose. Drew had deeply etched symmetrical laugh lines bordering a strong chin, thick dark hair, and agreeable green eyes, which crinkled into half-moons when he smiled. In college, he had been vaguely embarrassed by his myopic vision, but someone had gotten him a pair of those dark-rimmed rectangular nerd glasses that really suited him; they brought to mind an intellectual but still sexy male model, perhaps reading the New York Times while smoldering postcoitally amid rumpled silk sheets in some trendy loft.
“I would have been home hours ago”—he grimaced—“but I got McGuired on the way out.” Reginald McGuire was one of the upper-echelon partners at Elwood Capital, and his propensity to corner colleagues and underlings and talk until their ears bled was much feared around Drew’s division. Reginald adored meetings and would produce elaborate multipage agendas with various subheadings about the most trivial issues, which absolutely tortured the shit out of everyone else. Resistance was useless though, because any attempt to tone him down resulted in him taking such miserable offense that the fallout was worse than just gritting your teeth and enduring the original McGuiring.
“I’m sorry, darling,” I said, coming over and rubbing his neck. “Was it very terrible?”
“It was,” Drew said happily. He loved a good rub. “He’s all over me about the securitization of the French thing, which, frankly, looks a little sketch.” Sometimes Drew lapsed into gangsta speak, which I found hilarious, given that he had been born in some lily-white suburb of DC. I reflected that I lived in a world where suburban moms were trying to sound like bankers, bankers were trying to sound like rappers, and the privileged offspring of the moms and the bankers were trying to look like gangsta-rapper football players.
“Anyway, I said how about we run this by Edgar? And Edgar said—Oh, that’s good, Zadie. I’m forgetting all about Edgar, actually. I can’t believe I even brought this up while I’m getting a massage from my hot, naked wife.”
I smiled. “But you aren’t naked.”
“I can fix that. Prepare to get lucky.”
Really, men were very impressive in the biological-urge department. If I got as little sleep as Drew did at this age, sex would disappear right off the radar screen. But he managed to rally, taking advantage of the rare night where he was home and I was awake and the kids were asleep all at the same time.
Afterward, Drew immediately lapsed into a postcoital semicomatose state that we referred to as being whammified. Since he was whammified—drooling, fetal-positioned, unable to respond—there was no point in babbling to him about Delaney’s biting, or Rowan’s girl drama, or the fact that Finn had appeared at school today without shoes. And there was certainly no point in waking him up to tell him the awful news about Eleanor Packard. I patted his face—in whammified mode it had relaxed into an expression of unfiltered peace—and with tremendous effort he grasped my hand and kissed it.
Now thoroughly awake, I wandered back into the bathroom. The iPhone still waited, lurking innocently in its little pink case. I pushed the home screen button and saw the call from the unknown number.
I punched the button to listen to the message and immediately dropped the phone onto the marble floor, shattering what remained of the already-cracked screen into a spiderweb of shards. But even so, I could still hear the inflection in that voice: the piercing intelligence, the razor-edged note of humor. I knew who it was as soon as he said my name.
Zadie, it’s Nick. Any chance you would have lunch with me tomorrow? I really need to see you.
Chapter Thirteen
A LATE SIGN OF DOOM
Emma, Present Day
Our unnatural quiet from the ER carried over to the OR. The worst trauma cases are often desperate affairs, but rarely were they this solemn and silent. Just before the case started, Eleanor’s blood pressure finally dropped—a late sign of doom in children; they tended to maintain their pressure until just before the end—and we all held our breaths as she was positioned on the table. I had a great scrub nurse, with experience in both trauma surgery and pediatric surgery, and she handed the correct instruments to me and Sanjay even before we could ask for them.
Despite the urgency, a sense of calm engulfed me. The only sounds I could hear were the whoosh-hush of the ventilator and the nasally breathing of the medical student peering over my shoulder. The subdued sounds, along with the sea green color of the tiled walls, combined to create an underwater, otherworldly ambience, and I felt my breath slowing as my focus narrowed. Ever since I was a resident, I’ve had a ritual in the seconds before a case starts: I close my eyes and visualize the anatomy I’m about to see.
I opened my eyes. In front of me, Eleanor Packard’s vulnerable little form gleamed in the brilliance of the OR lights: a shining fish caught in a shaft of sunlight. She was swathed in blue OR towels, framing a yellowish sheet of sticky film clinging to her abdomen.
Sanjay, his hand steady, made a deft incision down the length of Eleanor’s tummy, curving around her little outie belly button. I followed with the cautery. Without needing to confer, we manipulated our instruments with balletic intricacy, elevating and snipping through the lining of her abdomen. Even though I expected it, I exhaled behind my mask as a torrent of blood gushed out at us. The anesthesiologist, peering over the sterile blue curtain dividing Eleanor’s face from her body, took one look at the red lake we’d uncovered and called to the circulator for another unit of blood to hang. Sanjay and I rapidly packed OR sponges into the little girl’s abdominal cavity, trying to stem the hemorrhage long enough to get her stabilized.