Nurse After Hours

The door to exam room three clicked shut behind me, and I knew before I turned around that it wasn't the doctor.

She stood by the sink with her back to me, snapping a pair of blue nitrile gloves onto her hands. The sound was crisp, clinical, the kind of sound that shouldn't have made my pulse jump the way it did. Her scrubs were the color of dark wine, fitted at the waist, and her hair was pulled up in a knot that had given up on itself about an hour ago. Loose strands curled against the back of her neck.

"You're early," she said, without turning around.

"Traffic was kind."

"It never is." She turned then, and there it was, that look she gave me, the one that started at my shoes and worked its way up like she was reading a chart. "Sit."

I sat on the edge of the exam table. The paper crinkled under my thighs. I'd been in this room a dozen times, but never with her. Usually it was Dr. Patel, a wiry man in his sixties who asked about my sleep and my stress levels and never once looked at me like I was a problem he was looking forward to solving.

"You're not Dr. Patel," I said.

"No." She pulled a rolling stool from under the counter and sat down across from me, close enough that her knees almost touched mine. "He's at a conference in Chicago. I'm covering his panel this week." She picked up a clipboard I hadn't noticed. "Renata. I'm the nurse practitioner on rotation."

"Renata."

"Don't wear it out." She flipped a page. "It says here you've been having trouble sleeping. Chest tightness. Occasional shortness of breath."

"That's right."

She set the clipboard down on the counter behind her and turned back to me. Her eyes were the color of weak coffee, and they didn't blink as often as they should have. "When did it start?"

"A few months ago."

"Before or after your wife left?"

The question landed in the middle of the room and sat there. I looked at the poster on the wall, the one about hand hygiene, and counted the steps in the diagram. Six. Lather, rinse, repeat.

"After," I said.

She nodded, like she'd already known. She probably had. Everything's in the chart. "Take off your shirt."

I did. The room was cool, and my skin pulled tight across my shoulders. She stood and pressed two fingers to the side of my neck, checking my pulse. Her touch was light, almost absent, but she held it a beat longer than she needed to.

"Pulse is elevated," she said.

"I'm nervous."

"I can tell." She moved her fingers down to my collarbone, then to the hollow of my throat. "Breathe in."

I breathed in. She watched my chest rise. She didn't step back when I exhaled. She was close enough that I could smell her, something clean and faintly sweet, like soap and a perfume that had worn off hours ago.

"Again," she said.

I breathed again. This time her hand moved lower, flat against my sternum, feeling for something under the skin. Her thumb brushed the edge of my pec and stopped there, resting, warm through the thin glove.

"Any pain here?"

"No."

"Here?" Her hand slid down to my ribs, and her fingers spread wide, spanning the space between my sternum and my side. The glove was cold at first, then not.

"No."

She pulled her hand back and wrote something on the clipboard. I couldn't see what. She had the kind of handwriting that leaned forward, like it was in a hurry to get somewhere.

"You're tense," she said.

"I told you."

"You told me you were nervous. That's different." She sat back down on the stool and crossed her legs. The movement pulled her scrub pants tight across her thigh, and I looked away, at the hand hygiene poster again. Six steps. I was on step three.

"Dr. Patel usually asks about my diet," I said.

"I'm not Dr. Patel."

"I noticed."

She smiled then, just at the corner of her mouth, and it changed her whole face. Made her look younger, or maybe just less like she was about to write me a prescription for something I didn't want. "You're deflecting."

"I'm making conversation."

"You're deflecting." She stood up again and walked to the counter, where a blood pressure cuff hung on a hook. She unwrapped it and held it out. "Arm."

I gave her my arm. She wrapped the cuff around my bicep and pumped it tight, watching the gauge while she pressed the stethoscope to the inside of my elbow. Her fingers were steady. Mine weren't. She noticed, because of course she did.

"Your hands are shaking," she said.

"It's cold in here."

"It's seventy-two degrees." She let the air out of the cuff and peeled it off my arm. "You can put your shirt back on."

I reached for it, but she didn't move out of the way. She stood there with the cuff in one hand and the stethoscope around her neck, and she looked at me the way you look at a door you're trying to decide whether to open.

"How long has it been?" she asked.

"Since what?"

"Since someone touched you."

The question was quiet, almost clinical, but it wasn't. There was nothing clinical about it. I thought about lying, about saying I didn't know what she meant, about putting my shirt on and walking out and finding a different clinic, a different nurse, a different life. But I was tired. I'd been tired for months. And she was standing there, waiting, with her head tilted slightly to the side, like she had all the time in the world.

"Eight months," I said. "Give or take."

She nodded slowly. "That's a long time."

"Yeah."

She set the blood pressure cuff down on the counter and took a step closer. Her knees brushed mine. She didn't apologize. She reached out and put her hand flat on my chest again, skin to skin this time, no glove. Her palm was warm. Her fingers curled slightly, testing the muscle underneath.

"Your heart's going fast," she said.

"I know."

"Is it because of me?"

I could have said no. I should have said no. Instead I said, "Yes."

She didn't smile. She didn't pull her hand away. She just stood there, feeling my heart beat against her palm, and after a moment she said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly."

"Okay."

"Have you ever thought about me before today?"

The question should have surprised me. It didn't. I'd thought about her every time I walked past the nurses' station and saw her charting, every time I heard her laugh at something someone said in the hallway, every time I sat in this room and waited for a doctor who wasn't her. I'd thought about her in ways that would have made Dr. Patel recommend a therapist.

"Yes," I said.

She took her hand away and stepped back, and for a second I thought I'd misread everything, that she was going to write me a referral and send me on my way. But she didn't. She walked to the door and turned the deadbolt. The click was louder than it should have been.

"Lie back," she said.

I lay back on the exam table. The paper crinkled under my shoulders. She walked around to the head of the table and stood there, looking down at me, and her face was unreadable in a way that made my throat tight.

"I'm going to examine you now," she said. "Properly. And you're going to tell me if anything hurts."

"Okay."

"And if anyone asks, this is a routine checkup."

"Okay."

She leaned down, and her hair fell loose from its knot, and I stopped thinking about the hand hygiene poster, and the deadbolt, and the fact that I had a wife who'd left me and a life that had stopped working months ago. I stopped thinking about everything except the warmth of her breath on my neck and the weight of her hand on my chest, and the way she said my name, quietly, like it was a secret she'd been keeping for a long time.

The door was locked. The room was quiet. And for the first time in eight months, I wasn't tired at all.