Keep Him Breathing

The knock came at eleven, which was how she knew who it was.

Nobody else in Coldwater knocked at eleven at night. Emergencies pounded. Drunks leaned on the glass until the frame rattled and the card in the window — WALK-IN 8–4, CLOSED 12–1, hand-lettered in her own square capitals and taped up so long the tape had gone the color of weak tea — peeled another quarter inch off the pane. Priya had been meaning to redo that card for three years. It had said the same thing since before Rochelle Shreve's mother died, and she had a superstition about it now, the way you get about a light bulb that refuses to burn out.

But the Kings knocked. Twice, low, with a knuckle, like they were apologizing to the door.

She put down the chart she hadn't been reading and went up the hallway with her sleeves already going up her forearms.

Cold came in with him. That flat first-week-of-November cold that comes down off the pass with a smell of wet rock in it, and behind him the street was black and shining and empty, the laundromat dark, the shuttered insurance office darker. He filled the doorway the way he always did, which was completely, and he had one hand cupped under his own ribs like a man carrying something he'd been told not to drop.

"Doc."

"Room two."

She got two seconds to triage him and used all of them. Split left brow, still weeping, the blood dried in a fan down his cheek and gone tacky. He was holding himself off-square through the middle — ribs, then, and more than one, or he'd have walked in normally out of pure Finnish stubbornness. Right hand hanging loose with the knuckles laid open across the second and third, which meant somebody's teeth. Color bad but not shock-bad. Breathing shallow and even. He'd driven himself here.

Seventh time. Fifteen months.

She flicked the light on in room two and it did what it always did, buzzed and thought about it and then committed, and Jarvinen sat himself down on her exam table one vertebra at a time with his jaw set and made no sound at all, and the paper crackled under two hundred and fifty pounds of him.

"Cut off," she said, meaning the shirt.

"It's a good shirt."

"It's a rag with buttons. Off, or I cut it."

He got it off himself. It took him the better part of a minute and cost him something; she watched the sweat come up along his hairline, ash-blond going gray at the temple, and she watched him decide not to let it show on his face. Then the shirt was in his lap and there it was — the left side going the color of a bad plum from the nipple line down, the swelling already up under the skin like something rising in a pan.

Priya put her hands on him.

That was the part she never let herself think about, and she never did think about it, because there was nothing there to think about. Palpation. Sixth rib, seventh. She pressed and he breathed out through his nose and the muscle under her fingers went to iron and did not flinch.

"Sharp or dull?"

"Dull."

"When you breathe in?"

"Sharp."

"Cough for me."

He coughed. It was a small, careful, insulting little cough and she gave him a look and he gave her a real one, and his face went white around the mouth and he did not make a sound then either.

"Two," she said. "Six and seven. Nothing's floating and your lung's up. There's nothing I can do about a rib except tell you it's a rib. You don't tape them anymore, whatever the guy at the yard told you."

"Nobody told me anything."

"Somebody always tells you something."

She washed her hands. The tank hummed in the waiting room behind her, the way it did all night, every night — forty gallons, an aerator, a light on a timer, and no fish. Patients had asked about that tank for years and she had never once answered, and by now it would be a lie to say she remembered the reason herself.

She came back with the tray. Lidocaine, 6-0 for the brow, 4-0 for the hand, the sharps box already half full on the counter and the whole room going over to that smell — plastic and alcohol, the smell that meant nothing bad had happened yet.

"Look at the ceiling."

He looked at the ceiling. She got in close to the brow with the light swung down, and this was the part where they usually talked, patients, all of them, the whole babbling town — where they told her about the cousin and the truck and the eighteen dollars and whose fault it was. Jarvinen looked at the ceiling and shut up. He always shut up. It was, she had decided somewhere around the fourth visit, the single most restful thing in her professional life.

The needle went in. The brow numbed. She started stitching.

"Is anybody going to be looking for you?"

She asked it the same way every time, flat, with her hands still moving, and she made it clear in the asking that it was the only question he would ever get out of her. Not what happened. Not who. Not why a thirty-eight-year-old man with a foundry town's whole history in his shoulders kept presenting to her table like a subscription. Just: is this going to walk through my door behind you.

"No," he said.

"You're sure."

"It's finished. It finished in the lot."

"Because I've got a woman on Toole Street coming in at eight with a kid and an ear."

"Nobody's coming, Doc." A pause. The ceiling seemed to hold his attention. "That's what I'm for."

She stopped for exactly one stitch's worth of time and then went on.

Six in the brow. Neat, small, tight to the line of the old scar tissue, because there was old scar tissue, two ridges of it, and a third she hadn't put there. She did the hand next — four across the second knuckle, three across the third, and the left hand lying open on the table beside it, the one that didn't close all the way, the tendons underneath it like cable that had been pulled once too hard a long time ago and never gone back.

"That one still doing what it does?"

"It does what it does."

"I could send you to a hand surgeon in Kalliston."

"With what," he said, not unkindly, and she let it go, because that was the whole town's answer to everything and she was not going to pretend to be surprised by it at eleven forty on a Friday.

She dressed the knuckles. She wrote him up. Ice, twenty on and twenty off; sleep sitting up in a chair the first two nights or he'd wake at three unable to breathe and think he was dying; no lifting, which he would ignore; come back in ten days for the brow or find scissors and do it himself, which he would do. She said all of it in her flat voice with her back to him, filing.

Then she turned around and he had the money in his hand.

He'd got it out of his jeans while she was writing, and he was holding it the way men held money in this town — folded once, offered on the flat of the palm, so you could see he wasn't going to make you take it out of his fingers.

"Hundred and ten," he said.

"Put it away."

"That's what you charged Ronnie Shreve."

"Ronnie Shreve has a job at the Works." She capped the pen. "Put it away, Mr. Jarvinen."

"Boone."

"Put it away, Boone."

He didn't. He sat on her table half-dressed with his ribs going purple and a hundred and ten dollars flat on his hand, and he looked at her with those pale eyes that gave up nothing at all, and Priya felt her own pulse in her throat and was annoyed about it.

Here was the thing she had never said out loud, not to anyone, not once in six years: there was a board on the wall behind her window. NAME, AMOUNT, PAID, in her own capitals, and the names down the left in four columns, twenty dollars a week. Merle Pratt. Verna Stroud. The Sayler boy, who paid ten and apologized for it every single time and did not need to. Half of Coldwater was on that board and she would sooner have cut her own hand off than take it down, because a name on that board was a person she was owed by, and a person she was owed by was a person who was staying, and who could look her in the eye at the drugstore.

And owing ran both directions. That was the part. You could not hold one end of a rope.

So the board got the town, and the Kings got her Fridays and her two a.m.s and her sutures and her supply cabinet and every single thing she had, off the books, for free, forever — and not one of them got a line on that wall. Because the day she wrote Jarvinen up there in her own hand next to a column of weeks was the day she was in it. Not a doctor they came to. Theirs.

Never theirs.

She had never said it. She was not going to start saying it at midnight to a man with two broken ribs.

"I've got nothing to put it toward," she said instead. "There's no bill. I didn't run anything. Nothing came out of a box with a number on it except the sutures, and the sutures came out of a box that came off a truck that nobody's ever going to ask me about. Put it in your pocket."

"You paid for the sutures."

"I did not pay for the sutures."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The distant relative of one.

"Then take it for the hour," he said. "It's eleven-forty on a Friday and you're up because of me. That's not a favor I want to have off you." He turned his hand slightly, so the bills sat nearer her. "Second time asking. I won't ask a fourth."

The tank hummed.

She thought: he counts. He'd counted the times he'd asked. He had almost certainly counted the times he'd been on this table, the way she had, and the fact that they were both carrying the same number around and neither of them had ever said it aloud sat in the room now like a third person, and she wanted it out.

She took the money.

She took it fast, the way you take a splinter out, and put it in the drawer with the paper clips and shut the drawer, and said, "There. Argument's over," and heard how it sounded and did not soften it.

He put his shirt back on. It took longer than getting it off had. She stood there with her arms folded and did not help him, because helping him would have been a favor, and they had just established what they thought of those.

At the front he stopped with his hand on the door and the cold coming in around him.

"Ten days," he said.

"Ten days. Or scissors."

"Scissors." He nodded once. He looked at the four chairs, and the rack of pamphlets about diabetes, and the tank with its light on and nothing in it, the way he looked at that tank every time, like a man reading a page he wasn't finished with. Then he said, "Night, Doc," and went out, and the door swung to, and thirty seconds later the bike came up off the curb and went down Pike toward Main and she heard it long after she couldn't see it, all the way to where the sound turned up Quarry.

Eleven forty-eight.

Priya stood in her own waiting room with her sleeves still up.

He'd gone when she told him to. He'd paid what she said the price was. He had done, precisely and without argument, every single thing she had asked of him, and she was standing here in the dark at eleven forty-eight on a Friday night feeling — and she made herself use the word, because she had never in her life had any patience for a woman who wouldn't name a thing — disappointed.

She turned the light off in room two.

"Well," she said, out loud, to a tank with no fish in it. "That's new."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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