Chapter 6 — The Night She Cried

It was a Wednesday, three weeks and two days after the first night, and Inaaya had had the kind of shift that existed to remind doctors that human beings were fragile and medicine was limited.A patient she'd been managing for six weeks — a fifty-eight-year-old man named Harold, who had three grandchildren whose names she knew and a terrible habit of skipping his medications and an extraordinarily kind wife who brought him pastries he wasn't supposed to eat — had gone into acute respiratory failure at 4 PM and despite everything the team had done, he had died at 7:23 PM.This was the work. She knew it was the work. She had lost patients before. You didn't survive three years of residency without loss becoming something you could metabolize, not without pain but without being destroyed.Harold had been different. Not because she was unprofessional — she was rigorously professional — but because he had been her patient through the worst months of her personal life, and his small ordinary family with its pastries and its medication arguments had been something she'd held on to, visiting his room, as evidence that ordinary families existed and were worth it. And now he was gone and the ordinary family was going to be different from now on and she had done the thing you do, which was support his wife and say the things that needed to be said, and then she had gone to the call room and sat on the narrow bed for eleven minutes and not let herself cry because she had four more hours of shift and crying would take something she didn't have.She had cried on the walk to Manny's instead. Cold November rain, and she was crying the specific contained way of a person who has held it for eight hours, and by the time she got to the diner she had stopped, mostly, but her face was still doing the thing that faces did after crying, and she pushed open the door and Arjun was there and he looked up and he knew immediately.He didn't say anything. He signaled Dana, who — with the wordless competence of a twenty-two-year-old who had seen a lot at this counter — brought a mug of chamomile tea instead of coffee, which Inaaya hadn't ordered and didn't know Manny's had.She sat. She put both hands around the mug.He was quiet.She appreciated the quiet. She appreciated that he didn't ask what happened and didn't say it was going to be okay and didn't do anything except be present, which was what she needed.After a while she said: "I had a patient.""I'm sorry," he said."He had a very nice wife," she said. "She used to bring him things he wasn't supposed to have. He always ate them anyway. I used to pretend I didn't notice."Arjun said nothing. He was leaning slightly toward her — not intrusively, just in the specific way of someone who was paying full attention."I know this is the work," she said. "I know how to do this. But he was my patient during a time when everything else was—" She stopped. "He was a constant when other constants had gone.""And now he's gone too," Arjun said."And now he's gone too."She felt the tears again, the same tired tears she'd already cried for eight blocks in the rain, and she let two of them go before she pressed them back, because she was in a public place and she had limits.Arjun's hand moved across the counter and covered hers.Just that. His hand over hers, still, warm.He didn't squeeze. He didn't say anything. He didn't make it into a moment. He just put his hand over hers and let her sit with what was in her, and the weight of the day went from something she was bearing alone to something she was bearing in the presence of another person, which was not the same as less but was meaningfully different.They stayed like that for a long time.At some point she turned her hand over and held his.He let her.At five in the morning she said: "You should sleep.""I'm alright.""You have work.""So do you." He paused. "I'll walk you home."She should have said no. She said: "Okay."They walked four blocks in the quiet city, their breath making small clouds in the cold air, not talking, which felt right. At the door of her building she stopped."Thank you," she said.He looked at her. The streetlight was making everything slightly gold. "You don't have to thank me.""I know," she said. "I'm thanking you anyway."He nodded.She went in. She slept for four hours, which was the most she'd slept in weeks.She dreamed of something warm, and when she woke up she didn't remember what it was, but the feeling of it stayed.