Page 59 of Go First
She tucked it back.
“I have to talk to my boss again later,” she said.“About… work.”
“Is that Winnie the Pooh?”Cheryl asked, a little dazed.
“Is that what Marcus calls her?”Kate chuckled.It was the least appropriate nickname for Winters, which, of course, made it absolutely perfect.
They sat, and the machines made their small, reassuring space noises, and Marcus’s right hand moved again, less of a hint this time, with more intent.A crease appeared between his brows: like he was disagreeing with some invisible traffic cop.
“Here he comes,” Cheryl whispered, and reached for his fingers without quite touching them.
Kate watched the monitor spikes, thought of mountains and how much she’d like to be up one.She’d told Winters she would think.And she meant it.She would give the question the dignity it deserved.She would hold it up to the light and turn it and admit the parts of herself that wanted to say yes for the wrong reasons and no for the right reasons and everything in between.
She would do all of that.
And if, at the end of seven days, the answer was the same, it would be because it had passed her own standard and not anybody else’s.
Marcus’s mouth twitched.It might have been a memory of a smirk.It might have been a dream.
“Okay,” Kate said, softly, to the room, to herself, to whatever was listening.“Okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The bell would come first.
Elijah lay still and waited, eyes closed, counting the half-breath before the almighty roar—the steel chorus of locks letting go, doors on every tier thudding open at once.The sound was a building exhaling.You felt it in your teeth.
He waited for it the way a man waits for his name in a will.
Nothing.
No roar, no shouted insults ricocheting down a corridor, nocabron, nopendejo, noputa.No hyena laugh from the cell two over.The silence had shape: a humming square of it.The light was wrong on his eyelids, too.Not fluorescent-police-station blue, but a thinner, meaner strip of frost.
He opened his eyes.
A low ceiling stared back.Painted once, painted over, painted cheap.A window at the far wall: a letter slot of daylight close to the ceiling, the view a slice of dirt and shoe sole and weeds that had survived on spite alone.Basement.He knew a basement when it breathed on him.
The air smelled of bleach and hand soap and money.
He turned his head and felt a clean, controlled pain bloom along his side.It was not the dull, angry heat he had cultivated in the jail; this had edges and a purpose.He let the pain tell him the news: here, here, not here.He lifted the sheet and inspected the work.
The crude prison sutures—their drunken railroad of catgut and hope—had been replaced.Unpicked, cleaned, restitched.Somebody with skilled hands had done this.The skin around the line looked quiet.Cool to the touch, as if someone had laid a coin there.The self-induced inflammation he had courted like a lover was gone, chased off by whatever good stuff a struck-off doctor stashed under the floorboards.
He let his head fall back.For a moment, he let himself own the trinity.
I am alive.
I am getting better.
I am free.
He moved to sit and the world told him no.It wasn't dramatic.His arms took the order, his ribs said absolutely not, and his stomach folded like bad scaffolding.The attempt left a buzzing in his forearms and a taste in his mouth like pennies.He swallowed it away and breathed until the room stopped tilting.
“Not yet,” he told himself.“Later.”
He made an inventory.White walls.No pictures.One metal IV stand with its little flag of saline and a second, smaller bag with a label he couldn't read without his glasses; the drip line trembled at his pulse.A folding chair.A plastic bin with a red lid, biohazard symbol like a cartoon threat.A rolling cart with instruments that gleamed.In the corner, a dorm fridge.On the fridge, a sticker advertising a car wash in a neighborhood that no longer existed.
And the window, that stingy slit.A shoe appeared, paused.Someone walking by above him, crossing his borrowed sky.