"Yeah."
I walked him to the door. The keys were still on the entryway floor where I'd dropped them last night. He saw them and bent down, picked them up, and set them on the small table by the door without saying anything.
He stopped with his hand on the doorknob.
"Callahan."
"Rhodes."
"I had a good time."
"Don't be cute."
"I'm not being cute. I had a good time. That's all."
I held his look. He held mine. The hallway smelled like coffee from the apartment across the hall. His hand was on the knob. The night was over. We were two people who had agreed it was over.
"Me too," I said.
He nodded once. He opened the door and went through it, pulling it shut behind him.
I leaned my forehead against the wood and closed my eyes.
The thought I had then I chose not to examine.
I went to make coffee.
Two days later, I was back on the floor.
The L&D floor was a place I knew with my eyes closed. I knew which monitor beeped through its battery first, which fetal heart rate cuff lost contact when a mother turned onto her left side, which of the resident OBs would order a section too early, and which one would wait. I knew the smell—disinfectant under the iron-and-warm smell of a body in labor, a baby's specific clean newness after the first bath.
Mrs. Alvarez was in her seventh hour. Her husband had not stopped pacing since five in the morning, and she had asked me three times if she could push, and three times I'd told her no.
I had my hand on the small of her back.
"I want to," she said.
"I know you do."
"My body wants to."
"Your body's almost there. Not yet. Breathe through this one with me."
She breathed through it with me. Her husband stopped at the foot of the bed and stood there with his hands at his sides, useless. I caught his eye and nodded at the chair. He sat down in the chair.
This was the part I was good at. The hand at the back. The voice. Thenot yetthat landed because I said it woman to woman. Six years on this floor. Something like four hundred women through the worst hour of their lives. What I knew about this job I'd not learned in school. I learned it hour after hour, woman after woman, until the competence was a thing I lived inside of.
I checked the monitor. Her contractions were stacking. We were close.
The sound came up from outside.
The lower, longer rumble of a fire truck pulling in under the ambulance bay's overhang, the diesel changing pitch as it slowed, the long sigh as it stopped. Two stories down and acrossthe parking lot, but I knew the shape of the sound. Hartsdale General sat on this corner my whole life, and the firehouses came up that drive for all of it.
I caught myself looking at the window.
It was a half-second. My eyes flicked up over Mrs. Alvarez's head to the window above her bed, and the window didn't face the bay—I knew I couldn't have seen the truck from where I was standing, and I looked anyway.
It was Tuesday. Duke's shift was on Wednesday. The truck out front was not his truck, and the men climbing out of it were not his men.
