Waiting

The surgery lasted eleven hours.

Camille did not sit through all of them. For the first two she stood in the hallway of the farmhouse with her hands under a tap in the kitchen sink, scrubbing, scrubbing, while the water ran from red to pink to clear, and then to red again where the skin had torn. A woman in a faded flannel shirt, who said she was Dr. Raman's sister and did not give her name, wrapped a clean dish towel around her palms and led her to a chair.

After that she sat.

She sat in a kitchen chair, at a scarred pine table, with a mug of tea going cold in her bandaged hands, and listened to the house. It was an old house, creaky and warm, smelling of woodsmoke and lavender and iodine. From behind a closed door at the end of the hall came the faint sounds of the operating room: the beep of a monitor, the clink of steel, the low murmur of voices speaking in the clipped shorthand of people who had done this in worse places.

The clock above the stove said 8:15. Then 10:00. Then 1:30.

Outside, the sun came up on a field of snow, and went down again. A crow landed on the porch rail and stared in at her.

She did not cry. She had cried in the tunnel. She was empty of it now. What was left was a hollow, ringing, polished calm, like the inside of a bell, in which one thought rose and fell and rose again:

Please.

At 7:20 that evening the door opened and Dr. Raman came out.

She was a tall woman in her fifties, with iron-gray hair cropped close and a long, weathered, patient face. Her scrubs were stained to the knee. She pulled off her mask and cap, and looked at Camille across the kitchen, and said in a low, unhurried voice:

"He's alive."

The world went white at the edges.

"The bullet went through, below the collarbone. It nicked the subclavian artery and collapsed the lung. We repaired the vessel, drained the chest, transfused six units." She sat down heavily across the table. "He's lost a great deal of blood. His pressure was in the sixties for most of the procedure. I won't lie to you. It was close."

"Is he going to..."

"I think he'll live. I think. The next seventy-two hours will tell." Her gray eyes held Camille's. "He's in a coma. Induced, partly. I'd rather he stay under until the swelling in the chest goes down. When he comes up, he'll be confused and in pain. He'll need weeks of rest."

"Can I see him?"

"In a little while. He needs to settle." A pause. "You carried him."

Camille looked at her bandaged hands.

"I dragged him."

"Four hundred feet?"

"Maybe less."

"Hm." Dr. Raman's mouth moved at one corner. "In my experience, a person who drags a man through a tunnel with a punctured lung is generally a person who has already decided what to do with the rest of her life."

Camille said nothing.

"Drink your tea," said the doctor, rising. "And then go and sit with him. I won't have you fainting on my floor."

…

He lay in the upstairs room that had been a child's, once. There was a faded quilt on the iron bed, and a window that looked out over a snowfield, and a rocking horse in the corner with one ear chipped. Machines stood about him in the lamplight. A line ran into his arm. A tube emerged from his side and drained into a plastic canister. A heart monitor drew a slow green hill on a black screen, over and over, up and down.

Camille drew a chair to the bedside and sat.

She had thought she was prepared for it. She wasn't.

He was so still. The man who had never in his life been still, who had stood for hours in doorways, who had taken on a stone's patience in training rooms and diner booths, lay with his arms at his sides and his face turned toward the window, and the stillness was of an entirely different kind: the stillness of something being held in suspension, waiting for a verdict.

His skin was gray-white against the pillow. His lips were pale. The scar through his left eyebrow stood out like a pencil mark. Someone had washed the blood and snow from his hair, and it lay soft and dark and slightly wet across his forehead, and she wanted desperately to push it back, and was afraid to touch him.

She touched him anyway.

His hand lay on the quilt, palm up. It was warm. Not as warm as it should be. She laid her own bandaged one in it, and curled his fingers, one by one, around hers.

"I'm here," Camille said, softly. "You're not allowed to be alone in this. Remember? We agreed."

The monitor drew its green hill.

"I'm going to stay until you wake up. I don't care how long it takes. I'll sit here and read you the newspaper. I'll tell you about the eggs." Her voice caught. "I'll tell you how stupid you were. How you walked into the doorway like it was a stage, and stood there with your back to a man with a gun, because you wanted to be sure I was down the ladder. You idiot. You complete idiot."

The monitor beeped.

"I'm so angry at you," she whispered. "And I love you so much I can't breathe."

She laid her forehead on the edge of the bed, beside his hand, and stayed there for a long time.

…

Sunday passed. Then Monday.

She learned the rhythm of the house. Dr. Raman checked him at six, noon, and six, adjusting a drip, listening to his chest, writing in a small black notebook. The sister brought food. Camille ate it. Rafael had been installed in the downstairs study with a hospital bed and a view of the barn, and on Sunday afternoon Cole wheeled him up in the lift, and the old man spent an hour at Julian's bedside without a word, one hand resting on the coverlet.

Teague and Ruiz came and went. Okonkwo slept on the sofa with her glasses on. Cole slept in the hall, across the door, with a rifle on his knees.

Marcus came on Sunday night, from Alexandria.

He did not say anything when he came in. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hat in his hands, and looked at the man in it, and his face did a thing that Camille had not seen it do: it crumpled. Just for a second. Then he straightened, and took a long breath, and pulled the other chair up beside hers.

"The depot's empty," he said.

"Empty?"

"By sunrise, they'd cleared it. Presses, vats, paper stock, all of it, in forty-two trucks. We watched the road from the ridge. By eight a.m., there was nothing left but a warehouse full of dust and a sign on the gate saying Closed for renovation." His voice was dry. "That's the power of the Executive Office. In six hours they made a six-year operation vanish."

"We have the tape."

"We have a tape, and an annex ledger, and a Kastellan with a bullet in him. We don't have a plant. We don't have a witness." He rubbed his eyes. "And Gray's story is already out. Federal insurgents attacked a secure installation. The Capitol Police have a warrant for Julian's arrest."

Camille's breath caught.

"For what?"

"Trespass. Assault. Theft of government property." He gave a thin, tired smile. "I admire the speed. They didn't even wait for the sun to come up."

"Then we..."

"We wait. And we think." He turned his face to the bed. "But not tonight."

They sat in silence for a while, the old agent and the young woman, with the green hill rising and falling between them.

"I've known him since he was twenty-two," Marcus said at last.

She looked up.

"The academy sent him to me for fieldwork. A tall silent kid with a very good brain and an ugly temper. His instructors said he was the finest natural investigator they had ever seen." His eyes were fixed on the monitor. "They also said he'd never last. That kind of mind doesn't stop. It can't. It drives itself into the ground."

"What did you think?"

"I thought he was the loneliest human being I had ever met."

Her throat closed.

"He never went to the cafeteria. He never took leave. At Christmas he stayed in the office, and when I asked him why, he said, 'I don't celebrate.' He did not have friends. He had assets. He had cases." Marcus smiled faintly, without humor. "The first time I saw him laugh was in his thirties, and it was at something a dog did."

"Why?"

"Because he was afraid." The older man said it simply. "Not of danger. He'd walk into a burning building to get a file. He was afraid of wanting things. His whole life he'd been taught, by what happened to him, that to want something is to hand the world a lever. So he took the levers off. One at a time. Until nothing could be pulled."

The monitor beeped.

"And then a girl came along," Marcus said, "with a nail kit and a mouth on her, and told him he was a bastard, and he came to my office the next day and asked me what it meant when you couldn't stop thinking about someone's hands."

Camille laughed. It broke in the middle.

"He did not."

"He did. Word for word. I nearly died." Marcus shook his head, smiling now, truly. "I told him he was in trouble."

"What did he say?"

"He said, 'I know. Is it always like this?'" The old man's voice softened. "I said, 'No, son. Only when it's real.'"

She turned her face away. Her shoulders shook.

Marcus did not touch her. He only reached over, very slowly, and laid his big gnarled hand over the bandaged ones in her lap, and sat there, saying nothing, while the winter dark deepened beyond the window.

…

Monday, 2:10 AM.

The house was asleep. A single lamp burned in the upstairs room. Camille sat in her chair with a blanket around her shoulders, staring at nothing.

She was not alone.

There was a soft, uneven, dragging sound in the hall, the sound of a wheelchair propelled by one good hand. The door opened a few inches. A gray head appeared. Rafael wheeled himself in, slowly, a little crookedly, and stopped by the foot of the bed.

"Papa. You should be asleep."

"Could... not."

He had grown steadier since the tunnel. His speech was slower than before the stroke, but clearer, and each day it seemed to come with less effort, as though the terror of that night had burned some stubborn knot out of his tongue. He folded his good hand over the other in his lap and looked at the man on the bed.

"I... was... wrong," Rafael said.

"About what?"

"The... interest." He took a breath. "I said. The powerful. They never give. They lend. The interest, it is always more."

"I remember."

"This one..." The dark eyes moved to Julian's still face. "...paid... it... himself."

Camille's lips trembled.

"He began with a lie," the old man went on, in Spanish, slowly, as if to be sure of every word. "A cruel lie. I will not forgive that, and neither should you. But I watched him in that tunnel, mija. A man with a bullet in his lung, who could not breathe, who asked first whether you were hurt. I have been afraid of men my whole life. I know the faces. I know the ones who lie, and the ones who lie to themselves." He shook his head. "That one lies to nobody now."

"He did terrible things, Papa."

"Yes."

"He still might."

"Yes." He smiled, crooked and gentle. "So might you. So might I. The question is what a man does when he has seen himself."

He reached over and laid his hand on hers.

"You decide, mija," said Rafael Duarte. "Not me. Not him. But I will say, if you ask me, I would be proud to call him my son."

She wept.

She wept the way she had in the Hartwell sun room, silently, helplessly, with her head on her father's shoulder and his good hand stroking her hair. The lamp burned. The monitor drew its green hill, up and down. And in the quiet, so soft she almost missed it, the rhythm of the machine changed.

A little faster.

Camille raised her head.

…

The fingers closed on hers first.

Not much. A flicker. A tightening of the knuckles against her palm. Then the eyelids trembled, and a faint rasp came from the pale lips, and the hand in hers moved again, stronger.

"Julian?"

His head turned, slowly, on the pillow.

His eyes opened.

They were unfocused at first, glazed and gray as water. They moved about the room, the lamp, the sloping ceiling, the chipped rocking horse, without seeing. Then they found her face and stopped. Something in them cleared, as a window clears when the fog is wiped.

His lips moved.

She leaned in, her heart in her throat, and did not breathe.

"Camille," said Julian, in a cracked whisper, barely a breath. "Are you... hurt?"

The question went through her like a bell.

Of all the things he might have asked, of the case, of Wallace, of the plan, of whether he was dying, it was the one thing in the world that she had known he would say. It was so absolutely and entirely him, this proud, cold, impossible man, who lay on a child's iron bed with a tube in his side and a hole in his lung and asked, first, whether the woman he loved had a scratch.

Her face crumpled.

"No," she said. "No. I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt at all."

"Good."

"Julian..."

"Your hands," he murmured. His eyes moved to the bandages. "...Those are..."

"They're nothing. A scrape."

"...Terrible liar."

A sound broke out of her that was half laugh and half sob. And then every wall she had built in twenty-three years, every careful, patient, necessary defense, the ones she had lowered one by one, over months, to let him through, came down all at once, and she bent over the bed and buried her face in his neck and cried like a child.

His hand came up, weakly, and rested on the back of her head.

"Shh," Julian whispered. "Shh. I've got you."

"You idiot. You idiot."

"I know."

"Don't you ever."

"I won't."

"You promised."

"I'm... here." His voice was a thread. "I'm here."

At the foot of the bed, Rafael Duarte smoothed the blanket over his knees. He turned his chair, very quietly, with his one good hand, and rolled it out of the room and into the hall, and drew the door shut behind him.

He sat in the dark corridor for a long time.

And Cole, who had been asleep across the threshold with a rifle on his lap, opened one eye and saw the old man's face, and did not say a word.