Gravity Shift

Jules leaned against the door frame of the radiology suite and watched Lea fight with the lead apron on the hook. The apron had a bent hanger and a mind of its own, and Lea was forty-two years old and losing to both.

"Left side goes first," Jules said.

"I know how an apron works."

"Sure you do. You're winning so hard right now."

Lea got it off the hook and it swung around and clipped her on the arm. She said a word Jules didn't repeat at work, and Jules laughed, and the whole hallway smelled like antiseptic and wet fur and the soup Britney had nuked in the break room again. That soup smell was just part of the building now. Jules figured she'd smell it in her sleep for the rest of her life.

"You've been on shift for ten minutes and you've already been beaten by equipment," Jules said.

"Twelve minutes. And the equipment started it." Lea got the apron squared away and turned around, and there she was, short dark hair, glasses pushed up on her head, the same face Jules had been staring at through phone screens for a year. Three years since the conference in Denver where they'd met over a bad buffet lunch. Two years since Jules had worked up the nerve to say something about it. A year of Lea flying back and forth across the country every chance she got.

Jules had meant to keep it together tonight. She'd meant to be cool about the whole thing, the locum tenens placement, six weeks in the same building, no airports. She'd had a plan. Small gestures. Flowers in the break room fridge. Maybe some stuff for later at the apartment that Jules was not going to describe to anyone.

What came out instead, while Lea was still arranging the apron on the hook, was:

"You have no idea how stupidly happy I am you're on the other side of that wall."

Lea stopped with her hands on the apron. "What wall?"

"The wall. Radiology. Between your suite and surgery. Instead of between your suite and my phone."

Lea turned around. She had that look she got when Jules said something too honest too fast, half pleased and half like she wanted Jules to slow down. "Jules."

"What?"

"You've been holding that in all shift, haven't you."

"Since four. It's four forty."

"Forty minutes. That's a personal record for you." Lea came over and stood close, and Jules could see the little crease between her eyebrows that showed up when she was amused but trying not to show it. "You're ridiculous."

"Yeah, well. You flew eleven red-eyes last year. I counted. Somebody should be stupidly happy about it."

"Eleven. It was eleven."

"It was eleven. I keep the boarding passes."

"You keep my boarding passes?"

"I keep... some boarding passes." Jules looked at the ceiling. "There may be a shoebox."

Lea pressed her lips together and looked away toward the x-ray bay, but her shoulders were doing the thing they did when she was laughing and didn't want to commit to it. "A shoebox."

"In the closet. It's organized. It's not weird."

"It's a little weird."

"It's romantic. It's romantic weird."

Lea looked back at her. "Fine. It's romantic weird. Come here before I have to read a CT."

Jules went, and Lea kissed her, brief and dry, right there in the hallway where anyone could walk past. That was new too. A year of airports and hotel lobbies and never once standing in a hallway at work because they'd never worked in the same building. Jules's chest did something she decided not to examine.

"Okay," Lea said. "Go be a surgery gremlin. I've got a Tigger with a suspicious stomach."

"The cat or the customer?"

"Cat. The customer is fine. The cat ate something that is showing up bright white on the films and I don't want to guess what it is."

"Sewing needle?"

"Too big for a needle. We'll see."

* * *

At six, Britney caught Jules in the surgery prep corridor. Britney Hawthorne had been lead nurse for as long as Jules had been at Columbia River, eight years of it, and she managed the whole evening shift the way other people managed weather. Unbothered, mostly.

"We got a thing," Britney said. "Supply cage needs a full restock before the weekend. Both of you."

"Both of who?"

"Both of you. You and the radiologist." Britney squinted at Jules's face like she knew exactly why Jules had asked. "Katy's on cage duty for inventory, she's learning the counts, and I need your hands on it because you know where everything actually lives. Lea too, because I need every level checked on the contrast and she's the only one who knows what's expired without looking it up."

"Lea's got a stomach case."

"She'll be done in twenty. I'm putting the three of you on the cage at six thirty. Katy can walk you through the new tags." Britney was already walking away, talking over her shoulder. "And if the soup's still in the microwave, one of you needs to deal with it, it's been in there since Tuesday."

"It's Thursday, Brit."

"I know what day it is. That's the problem."

Jules went to find the supply cage. It was a wire mesh room at the back of surgery, floor to ceiling shelving, everything labeled in Britney's handwriting except the newer stuff, which was labeled in Katy Redding's handwriting, which was neat and small and slightly uptight, like Katy herself. Katy had been with the clinic eighteen months and still stood up straight when a lead came in the room. Jules liked her. She also knew, because she wasn't blind, that Katy watched Britney the way people watch a fire they'd like to sit next to.

At six twenty-five Lea showed up with her glasses down on her nose and a film folder still under her arm. "The Tigger ate a hair tie. Owner was thrilled. Cat was thrilled. Everyone's thrilled."

"Great news all around. Katy, this is Lea. Lea, Katy."

"Hi. Britney says you're the expiration oracle." Katy shook Lea's hand like it was a job interview. "I have the tags color coded. Green is fine, yellow is this quarter, red is out."

"Green, yellow, red," Lea said. "I can handle that."

"Most people just look at the date," Jules said.

"The date is on the tag," Katy said. "The color is faster."

"Can't argue with the system," Lea said, and Katy wrote something on her clipboard looking satisfied, and Jules caught Lea's eye over the clipboard and Lea very nearly smiled.

They worked the shelves. It was the kind of job that should have been boring, suture packs on the second shelf, gauze on the fourth, IV kits, drapes, the big box of sterile gloves that never fit anywhere right. The cage was warm and close and the three of them talked about nothing, the new tag colors, Britney's soup, whether the weekend would bring another parvo outbreak or just the usual Saturday mutilations. Katy counted out loud under her breath, which turned out to be how she kept from freezing on cases, Jules realized. Counting. Poor kid.

Then the gloves came down and the work got complicated, because the box was heavy and the top shelf was high and Jules was the one with the step stool. She took the box off the shelf and held it out, and Lea reached for it, and Jules, deliberately, on purpose, with malice aforethought, slid her fingers over Lea's wrist when she did it.

Just that. Fingers across the inside of her wrist, where the pulse is, and held a half second longer than the box required.

Lea looked up at her. The cage was quiet for a second except for Katy still counting somewhere behind the gauze.

"You dropped something," Lea said.

"I didn't drop anything."

"I think you did. I think you dropped something on purpose."

"Prove it."

Katy's head appeared around the shelf. "Did somebody drop something? I'll get the mop."

"No mop," Jules said quickly. "Nobody dropped anything."

"It looked like somebody dropped something."

"Nothing was dropped, Katy."

Katy withdrew, unconvinced, and went back to counting her gauze. Lea took the box the rest of the way and set it down, and stood there with her hand flat on top of it.

"Forty minutes," Lea said quietly.

"What?"

"That was your record for holding things in. This one took you about four. You're getting worse, not better."

"I had a good run while it lasted."

"You did." Lea pushed her glasses up and looked at her, and the look went on a beat past comfortable, the way it did when Lea was deciding something. "Jules."

"Yeah."

"You're going to have to be patient with me this week. Before you start... whatever this is. The gestures. I can tell you've got gestures planned. You've got a face on like a kid before a birthday."

"I don't have gestures."

"You absolutely have gestures. You've had gestures since you picked me up at the airport. Is there something in the break room fridge that isn't soup?"

Jules said nothing. The fridge said everything.

"I knew it." Lea laughed, low, so Katy wouldn't hear. "Look. I love the gestures. I do. But I've been running on airports and phone calls for a year, and I don't want this week to go by like a checklist. I don't want us to cram everything in like it's the last flight out."

"That sounds wise and terrible."

"It's both." Lea picked up the box of gloves again and turned toward the shelf, and her voice came back over her shoulder, ordinary as anything. "Ask me again Saturday. Saturday I'll have opinions about your gestures."

"Saturday," Jules said, and took the next box down, and did not touch her wrist that time, and found that not touching her was somehow worse.

Thursday kept going, because Thursday shifts don't care about anybody's feelings. At eight a truck brought in a Great Dane named Buford who had eaten half a sock and was mad about it. Buford weighed about as much as a refrigerator and had the temperament of a wasp nest, and he made it known in the lobby by growling at a Pomeranian until the Pomeranian's owner picked it up and left.

"Buford's going to need a full sedation," Britney said, reading the chart. "He's already bit one tech at his regular vet. Fair warning, he aims."

"I'll take him," Jules said.

"Of course you will."

They got Buford into the back treatment room and up on the big table, and it took four people to hold him there, which was really three people and Katy, who was counting under her breath again, one two three four, steady as a metronome. Jules drew up the sedation while Britney kept a hand and a forearm clamped on the dog's shoulder like she was pinning a mattress.

"Buford, buddy, settle down," Britney said. "This is going to feel great. Better than the sock, I promise."

Buford did not believe her. Buford snapped at the air and the whole table shook and Katy's counting sped up a little.

"You're doing fine," Jules told her, without looking away from the syringe. "Just keep counting."

"I'm counting."

"I know. It's helping."

She found the vein on the first try, which was a small private victory she'd have been embarrassed to admit she was proud of, and pushed the sedation slow and easy, and Buford's growl wound down like a motor losing power. His head came down on the table. His eyes went half shut. The room got quiet.

And that was when Jules looked up, out of pure habit, toward the doorway of the radiology alcove across the hall, because Lea was there. Lea had drifted out to see what the commotion was, film folder under her arm, glasses down on her nose, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, just watching.

Jules grinned. She didn't mean to, it just happened. And then, while Britney was checking the dog's jaw tension and Katy was still counting out of reflex even though the emergency was over, Jules mouthed one word at her over the top of Buford's big unconscious head.

Tonight.

Lea laughed. Right there, in the middle of the hallway, at a sedated Great Dane's expense, she laughed out loud, a real one, and had to turn it into a cough and pretend to check her pager.

"What?" Britney said, looking around. "What's funny? Is something on the monitor?"

"Nothing," Lea said. "Internal joke."

"With who? We're all here."

"With Jules."

"What's the joke?"

"There's no joke," Jules said, flattening Buford's lip back to check his teeth. "Britney, focus on the dog."

"The dog is sedated. I've been doing this eight years, I can look away from a sedated dog for four seconds. What's the joke?"

"Nothing is the joke," Lea said again, and walked off down the hall toward radiology, and Jules could hear her still half laughing when she got around the corner, and it did something warm and stupid to the whole back half of her shift.

* * *

The interesting cases came in later, like they always do. A cat with a blocked urethra at ten. A hit by car at eleven, a shepherd mix, and that one turned into a surgery that Jules worked until nearly two in the morning while Britney held retractors and said nothing useful and everything necessary. Lea read the films off her from the alcove, calling out through the doorway in that calm voice she used with everyone, and Jules operated better for hearing it, which she was never going to tell her.

The shepherd pulled through. Around two-thirty the clinic finally went quiet, and that was when Katy came down the hall with a film folder of her own and stopped in the alcove doorway, where Lea was working the viewing station.

"Dr. Lea? Can I ask you about one?"

"Sure. Which one?"

"The beagle from Monday. The coughing one. I pulled the film because I thought I saw something and I wanted to check before I bother Dr. Stein about it."

"Let's see it."

Katy hung the film and pointed at the shadow, and she was wrong. She was wrong in the specific, identifiable way that meant she'd looked hard and just hadn't been taught the trick yet, and Lea didn't say wrong. Lea leaned in next to her and tilted her head.

"What did you see?"

"That patch, upper right. It looks dense to me. Like a mass."