Chapter 5 - The Glass Room
Boston Children's Hospital was a city within a city, but the eighth floor didn't look like any hospital I had ever seen.
There were no plastic chairs with gum stuck under the armrests. There was no television mounted on the wall blaring daytime game shows to people who hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. The private surgical wing smelled like ozone and polished copper, its floors muffled by thick, sound-dampening rubber that made every step feel like walking through a dream.
Finn was sitting in the middle of a massive bed with motorized controls, wearing pajamas with small rocket ships on them that still had the store tags tucked into the collar.
"Mave!" he yelled, his face lighting up with a brilliance that made the three cracked ribs in my chest feel like they were splintering into dust.
He tried to scramble over the chrome safety rails, but Marco—the massive man with the broken nose who had driven the car the night before—gently caught the boy by the waistband of his flannel pants and set him back down against the pillows.
"Easy, kid," Marco said, his gravelly voice oddly soft. "You got wires hooked to your ticker. You pull 'em loose, the box starts beeping, and that nurse with the red hair comes back in here to yell at me."
"Marco let me play with his radio," Finn said, his eyes huge as he pointed at the heavy black walkie-talkie sitting on the bedside table between a glass of apple juice and a brand-new Nintendo switch. "It has the channels for the boats! We heard a man talking about twenty tons of frozen cod!"
I walked over to the bed, my right arm pinned against my ribs by the black sling. I couldn't hug him the way I wanted to—not with my bones still hot and fragile—so I just pressed my forehead against his, breathing in the scent of his skin. He smelled like the cheap lavender soap we used at home and the mint toothpaste from the food pantry.
"You okay, buddy?" I whispered, my eyes burning. "Does your chest hurt?"
"No," he said, shaking his head. "They gave me this pink stuff that tasted like cherries. And then this tall doctor with the silver hair came in and looked at my drawings. He said he has a boat too. He said after he fixes my valve, he's going to show me how to tie a bowline knot."
I looked over Finn's head at Dante, who was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
He didn't look like a savior. He looked like an intruder in a place meant for healing. The nurses who passed him in the corridor kept their eyes straight ahead, their shoulders hunched, moving slightly faster until they were past his shadow. He had that quality—the ability to turn seventy degrees of climate-controlled air into a November frost just by standing still.
"Dr. Chen is ready," Dante said, not looking at Finn. "They're prepping the OR now."
Finn’s hand found mine. His fingers were small, thin, the skin translucent enough that I could see the blue branching of the veins that weren't getting enough oxygen.
"Mave?" his voice lost its excitement, dropping into that quiet, frightened tone that always preceded the needle. "Are you coming in?"
"They won't let me in the big room, Finn," I said, kneeling as best I could beside the mattress. "Only the doctors. But I'll be right outside the glass. The whole time. I won't even sit down."
"Don't lie to him," Dante said from the door.
I snapped my head around, my teeth grinding together. "Excuse me?"
"Tell him the truth," Dante said, his voice flat and unyielding. "Tell him it's going to hurt when he wakes up. Tell him he's going to have a tube in his throat and his chest is going to feel like an engine fell on it. But tell him if he fights it, he stays alive."
Finn stared at the tall man in the dark suit. He didn't cry. He didn't look away. For nine years old, Finn had spent more time looking at the machinery of death than most grown men, and he recognized the tone Dante was using. It was the tone of someone who didn't deal in fairy tales.
"Are you Dante?" Finn asked.
"I am," Dante said.
"Marco said you're the boss of the boats."
"Something like that."
Finn looked down at his rocket ship pajamas, then back at Dante's scarred jaw. "Did you fix the money?"
The question hung in the air, heavy and sharp.
I felt my heart stop. I had tried so hard—so miserably hard—to hide the yellow late notices, the final demands with the red stamps, the hushed phone calls in the kitchen where I begged the billing department for another fifteen days. But children have ears like bats for the things that terrify their mothers and sisters.
Dante walked slowly into the room. He didn't stop until he was standing beside the bed, towering over Finn like an iron monument.
"The money is handled," Dante said.
"Did Mave have to pay you?" Finn asked.
Dante looked down at me. His eyes were cold, but there was something moving behind the ice—something old and dark that had nothing to do with ledgers or shipping contracts.
"She already paid me," Dante said.
"With what?"
"With something I couldn't buy anywhere else," Dante said. He reached down and, with a single finger, tapped the small silver medallion of St. Jude that hung around Finn's neck on a dirty string. "Now do what the doctors tell you. Don't complain about the needles. And when you wake up, I'll take you down to the docks to see the big cranes."
Finn’s mouth fell open. "The ones that lift the whole trucks?"
"The ones that lift the whole trucks," Dante confirmed.
The double doors clicked open, and two surgical nurses in pale green scrubs entered, followed by Dr. Chen. The surgeon was a small, compact man with grey hair cut down to the scalp and eyes behind titanium-rimmed glasses that looked like they had seen every variation of human tissue that existed on earth.
He didn't look at Dante with fear. He looked at him with the mutual respect of two men who operated on different kinds of meat.
"It’s time, Miss Donovan," Dr. Chen said gently.
I kissed Finn's forehead. I kissed his nose. I kissed the little scar on his chin from when he fell off the curb when he was five.
"Don't be afraid," I whispered into his hair, my voice cracking into pieces. "I'm here."
"I'm not afraid," Finn said, though his small hand was gripping my thumb so hard his knuckles were white. "I'm going to see the cranes."
They unlocked the wheels of the bed.
The sound of the rubber castors rolling over the linoleum was a sound I had heard four times before, but this time it had the finality of a gavel falling. They wheeled him out into the wide corridor toward the red double doors marked *SURGICAL SUITE — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.*
I followed them as far as the red line painted across the floor.
The doors swung shut, the pneumatic hinges hissing like a serpent, and then there was only the glass panel and the reflection of my own pale, bruised face staring back at me.
I stood there until my knees began to give out.
The pain in my ribs was a dull fire now, spreading into my armpit and down my side. My breath was coming in short, ragged gasps.
A hand caught my good elbow.
"Sit down," Dante said.
"No."
"Mave."
"I said no!" I turned on him, my shoulder screaming as I wrenched my arm away from his grip. "You think you can just come into our lives and buy our rent and buy our doctors and tell my brother he has an engine on his chest? You don't know him! You don't know how scared he gets when the lights go out! You have no right—"
My vision went completely grey.
The floor didn't rush up to meet me; the world simply ceased to have a vertical axis. My good shoulder hit the wood paneling of the hallway wall, and then my knees folded under me like wet cardboard.
I didn't hit the linoleum.
Dante caught me before I could fall, his arms locking around my waist and pulling me against his chest with a force that knocked the last bit of air out of my bruised lungs.
"You're done standing," he growled into my ear.
He didn't carry me back to the room. He sat down on the hard vinyl bench against the wall, pulling me down with him until I was sitting between his knees, my head pressed against the cold wool of his suit jacket. I tried to pull away, but he held my uninjured arm against his ribs with one large hand, his grip like an iron cuff.
"Let go of me," I choked out, the tears finally breaking through the anger, hot and shameful against his shirt. "Please... just let go of me."
"Shut up," Dante said.
His other hand came up, hesitant for a fraction of a second, before his fingers spread against the back of my neck, holding my head still against his shoulder. He wasn't gentle, not really, but he was solid. He was an unmoving, unyielding piece of stone in a world that had been trying to drown me since I was sixteen years old.
"Six hours," he said, his voice rumbling through his ribs directly into my cheek. "That's how long the bypass takes. You can spend those six hours fighting me, or you can spend them breathing. It makes no difference to the boy."
I didn't want to lean on him.
I wanted to hate him with every drop of blood in my body. He was everything my father had warned me about—the men who lived on the water, the men who took what they wanted and left the wreckage for the city to clean up.
But my brother was on a stainless-steel table behind two inches of glass, with his chest cracked open to the bone, and I was too tired to hold myself up anymore.
So I let my forehead rest against the dark wool of his coat.
May you like
I smelled the cedar again. I smelled the cold smoke. And beneath it all, the steady, rhythmic thump of a heart that didn't sound like it was made of stone at all.
***
