“Maybe your wife should step outside,” said Renee.
“She’s not my wife. She’s my sister. My older sister.”
The woman sighed dramatically. “Fine, bleed to death, see if I care. I’ll be in the waiting room.”
Renee continued working on the cut. The sister was right: Jonathan bled copiously. Renee was concerned about his inability to clot, and so she recommended he be admitted for further tests.
“Admitted?” he said.
“I’m afraid so.”
“I’m sure you’re very good at your job. But I’ll be fine.”
Renee released his hand. “Hold it up like this,” she directed. “Listen, at the very least you’ll need stitches. Quite a few. And probably physical therapy so you can keep full mobility. A wound like this can cause the hand to curl inward as it heals.” Renee made her hand into a horrible claw shape. She was exaggerating, but she hated this brand of skepticism. Sometimes male patients asked how old she was or if her superior was available to give his opinion.
“What do you do for a living?” Renee asked.
“I’m a carpenter. I make furniture,” Jonathan answered.
“So you work with your hands.”
“Yes, but I have an assistant. A really excellent assistant.”
“Tennis, then?”
“Do I look like a tennis player?”
Renee stepped back. “You do, actually.”
“No tennis. I box.”
“Box?”
“I’ve broken my nose twice.”
Jonathan’s nose was straight as a blade. “Doesn’t look broken to me,” Renee said.
“Okay.” Jonathan smiled. “But I’ve always wanted to be a boxer. Real tough-guy stuff.”
“You don’t look like a tough guy.”
“I do have a bleeding hand.”
“True,” said Renee. “But it’s from cutting a bagel.”
In six months’ time, Renee would learn that Jonathan liked to pretend, to put on characters the way other people put on clothes. He wore a fake mustache three days a week. He entertained casual friendships with at least a dozen people who knew him as Fodor Leyontiev, an émigré from the former Soviet Union, a poor violinist who still longed for the borscht of his childhood. This was not to say that Jonathan was dishonest. To the contrary—he was honest to a fault, and this was precisely the sort of complexity that later Renee would value so highly in him. Renee arrived at honesty through the usual route—a good heart, a sensible mind, a fear of making mistakes—while Jonathan’s route meandered, stopped to photograph the view and buy some candy. But their ultimate destination remained the same.
After Renee’s jab about the bagel, Jonathan quieted down. He coughed into his good hand.
Renee regarded the bloom of blood on his trousers. The frayed laces of his running shoes. The wound was his own doing, yes, but not one of reckless disregard. A hunger pang, a newly sharpened knife, a wily bagel. Simply an accident. No one was to blame. Certainly not Jonathan. He wasn’t the sort of person to act carelessly. Already Renee knew this about him.
She pulled Jonathan Frank’s chart from the slot at the end of the bed.
“You may have reached a tendon,” she said. “I’m going to hold off on the suture until we know if you’ll need surgery.”
“Trust me,” he said. “I don’t need anything.”
Renee had been writing in his chart, but now she stopped. “Nothing?” she said. “There’s nothing you need?”
“Not a thing,” said Jonathan Frank. He blinked. “Except your phone number.”
Renee had been hit on many times in the ER. The place had an air of perpetual disorder and diminished expectations, and there were some people who believed that such conditions also required sexually inappropriate behavior. These kinds of people always ended up in Renee’s care. She’d been mooned, flashed, asked out, grabbed by patients more times than she could count. Never before had she reacted to it with anything other than a quick shake of the head or, on a few notable occasions, a call to security.
But with Jonathan Frank she hesitated. He was holding his injured hand up as she’d instructed. The discarded dishcloth was stained a deep red and edged with little yellow ducks.
On the day she met Jonathan Frank, Renee was thirty-four years old, a fellow in general surgery with top marks from the attending physician, already in talks for a transplant fellowship next year. Brett Swenson was sixteen years behind her, the man in the car twenty-one. Jonathan was attractive and intelligent and had asked for her phone number. The fact that he was her patient should have prompted Renee to answer with a simple, straightforward no.
Instead she wondered if there was any Chinese food left in the staff fridge. She wondered if Jaypa’s girlfriend, the nurse from Arkansas, had ever wanted to be a doctor. She wondered if she wasn’t the kind of person who did better on her own, someone who was meant to lead a solitary life. Someone for whom a profession, the most noble of professions, would provide a vast, singular joy. She realized that this man here was not Brett Swenson or the man in the car, but someone else entirely. Someone who perhaps, with his neat, clean hands and dark, intelligent eyes, might widen her world, not because it needed to be wider but because the opposite, a narrowing, might otherwise be inevitable. And she did not want that. Alone or not, Renee wanted to expand. She had always wanted more than herself. Medicine gave her that; maybe this man could, too. One did not necessarily preclude the other. For a brief, blazing moment, she hoped that this was true.
Without looking at Jonathan, Renee ripped a scrap of paper from the chart and wrote down her name and phone number.
“A nurse will take up you up to X-ray,” she said, and handed him the paper.
* * *
It had been a Sunday morning in April when Joe called Renee from the Alden College dean’s office. Renee was a second-year medical student and had slept four hours the night before. She’d been studying for the national board exam, a punishing full-day test.
When she picked up the phone, Joe said, “Renee, I need your help.” His voice was rough and low.
Renee did not speak. Briefly she considered hanging up on him, turning the phone off, returning to her books. Her roommate Lydia was still asleep; Renee could hear faint snores emanating from the closed bedroom door.
“What is it, Joe,” Renee said without inflection. “What’s happened?”
Joe explained the situation: the party, the alcohol, the police. Renee said very little. She whispered, “Okay, okay, I understand,” trying not to wake her roommate.
“You need to come here,” Joe said. “They wanted to talk to Noni, but I told them you.”
“Yes,” said Renee. “That was the right thing to do. Don’t let them call Noni. I’m leaving now.”
At Alden College she was greeted by Joe’s coach, the college registrar, and, she realized only as he introduced himself, the college dean. The meeting was tense but photogenic, held in a room of wood-paneled walls and chairs upholstered in supple leather. The large leaded-glass windows offered a view of the grassy quad cut through with the silvery gray of paved walkways.
The baseball coach began. As he spoke, Renee gazed just above his head, out the window. She watched a knot of tousled young people shouldering serious backpacks travel from one corner of the quad to the next. There were four of them, all deep in conversation, hands working as they spoke, debating, it seemed, some question of great significance. Each appeared so clean and shiny-haired, so focused and brilliantly backlit by the late-morning sun that Renee wondered if perhaps a photographer followed them, taking snaps for the college brochure.