9
Polina
I sit in my car outside my building for twenty minutes before I make myself go inside.
The engine is off, and the windows are fogged. I don’t usually cry after losing a patient. I stopped doing that somewhere during my second year of residency. Tonight is different, and I let it happen. No one can see me. I’m too exhausted to shove it down.
He was sixteen.
Two gunshot wounds to the torso and one to the neck. I operated for forty minutes. He died on my table at 11:14 p.m. while his mother screamed in the hallway.
I had to walk out and tell her. I had to use the words we’re trained to use, and none of them were enough. I stripped off my gloves in the scrub room and stood at the sink until I could breathe again.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stare at the steering wheel.
My phone lights up on the passenger seat.
How was your day?
I stare at it. I know who it is without checking the name I saved him under, which isn’t his real one. I should deflect; I’m good at that. I have a perfectly adequate non-answer ready to send. I could go upstairs alone, pour a glass of wine, and sit with this the way I always do.
Instead, I call Lev.
He picks up on the second ring. “Polina.”
Just my name, nothing else, and the way he says it makes my throat go tight.
“I lost a patient tonight,” I blurt out. “He was just a kid who got caught in gang crossfire.”
“Do you want company or silence?” he asks after a moment.
“I think … I think I need some company. If you’re not busy.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He’s there in seven. I buzz him up without going down, and when I open the door, he looks at my face and doesn’t say a word about what he sees. He just comes in, shrugs off his coat, and hangs it on the hook by the door.
I notice his hands when he does it. He’s got such long fingers, and there’s a scar across one knuckle I’ve been wondering about. I think about those hands on me and look away before I do something stupid.
I meander to the couch and plop onto the cushion with a heavy sigh. He doesn’t try to close the foot of space between us, whichis right. He finds the whiskey on the counter without being asked, pours two glasses, and sets one in front of me without a word. I pull up my knees and wrap my hands around the glass.
I open my mouth to talk about the surgery, and what comes out instead is, “Do you carry them? The ones you lose in the line of fire.”
The second it leaves my mouth, I hear it. I’ve just asked him about his body count. I’ve asked him about a part of his life I’m not supposed to know anything about. I watch his face and wait for him to shut it down.
He stills. I watch him register what I’ve asked and what it means that I asked it. We don’t acknowledge it out loud.
He draws in a shuddering breath as he holds eye contact and replies, “Yes.”
He could have pretended not to understand, and he didn’t. For a man like him, in his position, that’s not nothing. I take a long sip of whiskey and keep going.
“I carry all of mine,” I say. “Every single one. Their names, ages, sometimes the time they died. I remember what their families looked like when I walked out to talk to them.”
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t try to soften it, and I’m grateful, because people who haven’t been there always try to fix it, and it never helps.
“Some nights it doesn’t reach me. I close up, go home, and sleep just fine. Other nights, it follows me to the car and just sits there.”
“I know that feeling.” His voice drops in a way that tells me he means it.
