Chapter 16Second Opinion

Santos, Baxter

At four in the afternoon, standing in front of the mirror in her cabin, Adelina Santos discovered that she didn't know how to ask anyone for anything.

It was the XO's fault. Pike had stood in her doorway on the night of the party, with icing on her sleeve, and said I can't do it. I don't know how. So I'm ordering you, which was as close as Jessica Pike had ever come to asking for help. Santos had spent three days looking for any answer but the one she'd written on a referral sheet that night. This morning she had taken the sheet out from under the blotter again. It still said Baxter.

She was a doctor. People came to her, for god's sake. They came with blisters and fractures and things they couldn't sleep for, and sat in the low chair, and she told them what she could do and what they would have to do themselves. She had been doing that since she was twenty-five, and she couldn't remember asking anyone for anything that wasn't a lab result or a bed.

She had only come in to change her shirt. She took out the newer one, which fit better at the shoulders, and found a crease straight across the chest like a surgical scar. She hung it in the shower and ran the hot water at it for ten minutes, on the principle that steam was steam, and put it on damp.

Then she took the pins out of her hair, meaning to put it back more neatly, and two of them went down the drain of the sink, which she watched happen as if from a great distance. There was a gray hair at her left temple. She pulled it out. There was another one behind it. She decided, with dignity, that she had not seen that one.

It took her three attempts to put it up again. The second looked like a woman caught in a helicopter downdraft. The third was loose and low on her neck, and looked as though somebody had chosen to put it there. She held her breath in case it heard her and fell down.

In the bottom of her leave bag there was a dark red lipstick she had bought in Theve in the spring, on the last leave anyone had before the war, and never worn. The woman at the counter had said it suited her; Santos had bought it just to get away from the interaction. She put it on, and looked like a woman who had been eating a patient. She wiped it off and put it on again with the concentration she gave a suture, and this time it was fine. Her pulse, she noted, was perhaps ninety.

This is ridiculous, she told herself. You are thirty-three years old. You are a lieutenant commander in the Medical Corps. You are going to ask a man to do you a favor.

She tried it out loud, to the mirror.

“Professor, I wonder if I might have a word.” That sounded like a summons to a disciplinary hearing. It also sounded like office hours, which was worse.

“Lieutenant Commander, I have a—” That sounded like a diagnosis.

“Baxter. Hello.” That sounded like nothing at all, and also like a woman talking to a mirror, which somebody in the next cabin seemed to agree with, because they knocked twice on the bulkhead.

Some part of her had decided that if she had to go and ask, she would go looking as though she had a right to.

She put a little scent on her wrists, from a bottle so old the label had worn off. The atomizer stuck, and then unstuck all at once, and she spent the next five minutes with the hatch open, flapping a towel at the passageway, while an orderly walking past slowed down, sniffed, looked at her, and very wisely kept walking.

Then there was the offering. Between sick call and lunch she had found herself in the medical stores, signing for a box of twelve red felt-tip pens, which she had seen him go through in the ready room the way other men went through cigarettes. She had written departmental use on the chit: the first lie she had told on a stores form in eight years. She had wrapped the box in the only paper she had, which was a sterile drape, and taped it with surgical tape, and it looked exactly like what it was.

She took it anyway.

Then she put her white coat on over all of it, because she was a doctor and she was going to see a colleague. Then she took it off, because it looked as if she were hiding.

Then she put it back on, because she was.

She went to find him.

Baxter was in the wardroom, at the end table under the clock, with a stack of paper and a red pen.

There was still a paper streamer from the Faith Park party caught in the vent above the coffee urn, which nobody in three days had been able to reach, and it lifted and settled every time the fans came around, like something breathing. The room was almost empty. Two supply officers were playing chess at the far end in a silence so intense it amounted to a third player.

He was writing a quiz for Tasha. Navigation, mostly; she had a habit of finding her way home by following Coster, which worked beautifully right up until the day it didn't, and he had decided to cure her of it before that day came. He had got as far as question six, which involved a tanker, a crosswind and a deliberately misleading compass, and was enjoying himself rather more than was dignified, when somebody sat down across the table from him without asking.

He looked up, and said “Doctor,” and then stopped.

She put a small parcel on top of question six. It was wrapped in what he was fairly sure was a sterile drape, and taped shut with surgical tape, very neatly, in the manner of someone closing an incision.

“That's for you,” she said.

He opened it. It took some time; the tape had been applied by a professional. Inside was a box of twelve red felt-tip pens, the good ones, the ones the sickbay used for charts and nobody else could get.

Baxter looked at them. He had been rationing his last two since November. He found that he was absurdly, disproportionately moved.

“Doctor,” he said, “these are wonderful. Where on earth did you—” And then he looked up from the pens, properly, for the first time, and lost the end of the sentence.

The hair was different. It was still up, but it was softer, lower, with a piece at the temple that had come loose and been allowed to stay loose. She was wearing lipstick. He was nearly sure he had never seen her in lipstick. There was a scent, faint, something warm and old-fashioned that he couldn't have named under oath. Under the coat, her shirt was new, and creased, and, unless he was much mistaken, slightly damp.

He formed two hypotheses, quickly, out of long habit. In the first, she was going somewhere else afterward, and had stopped for him on the way. In the second, she was not going anywhere else.

There was nowhere else to go. They were at sea.

“You've done something,” he said. He heard himself say it and decided, since it was out, to commit to it. “Your hair. And, if I may say so, the rest. It looks very nice. I noticed. I thought I ought to say that I'd noticed, since you'd plainly gone to some trouble, and it seemed a pity for it to go unrecorded.”

Santos went pink. He had not known she could.

“I changed my shirt,” she said.

“Yes,” said Baxter. “I noticed that too.”

She put both hands flat on the table and looked at them. Then she looked up again, and he saw her gather herself, the way he had seen her gather herself in the doorway of the infirmary before going in to tell somebody something.

“I need to ask you something,” she said. “It isn't official.”

She was lovely. The thought arrived fully formed, and Baxter, who was a scientist, examined it and found nothing wrong with it. He had thought her a handsome woman in a general sort of way since the day he met her, and had filed it, because she was the medical officer and he was a pilot with a flight to run, and that was what a sensible man of his age did with such thoughts.

He had never seen her like this.

And from twenty years off, with the clarity of a proof falling into place, came Desmond, at a barbecue the summer before flight school, a beer in one hand and the other on Baxter's shoulder. A word of advice, Ellington. Beware of pretty Latinas bearing gifts.

“Beware of pretty Latinas bearing gifts,” said Baxter.

He heard it a fraction of a second after it left him.

Santos stared at him. She had only just stopped being pink. Now she went red, properly, scarlet; it started at her collar and went all the way up to her hairline, and kept going, as far as he could tell, into her hair, and she looked down at the table, at the pens, as if she would have liked to climb into the box and close the lid.

“Pretty,” she said, to the pens.

“That—I mean—that wasn't meant to be out loud.” He took his glasses off. There was nothing wrong with them. He began, helplessly, to clean them on his shirt. “I—sorry about that.”

At the far end of the room, one of the chess players moved a bishop with enormous care, and did not look round.

Baxter put his glasses back on. They were no cleaner. He took them off again.

He was blushing. Santos watched it happen with an interest that was only partly professional. It went up from his collar exactly the way hers had, and darkened his face to the ears, and he could do nothing about it at all; he sat there polishing perfectly clean glasses on his shirt, a lieutenant commander, a professor of twenty years' standing, a man who had flown in space, and he could not look at her.

It was, she thought, the most endearing thing she had seen in a year.

She ought to have been offended. She knew the sort of men who said that sort of thing, and she had heard a great deal worse in her time, in hospitals and wardrooms and once from a surgeon general. She waited for the offense to arrive and it did not. What arrived instead was the knowledge, clear as a test result, that Ellington Baxter had looked up from a box of pens and called her pretty without meaning to, and knew it, and was now dying of it in front of two supply officers and a chessboard.

Her own face was still hot. She found she didn't mind.

She looked at him properly, then, while he couldn't look back. She had his flight physical in a drawer two decks down and could have recited most of it. Forty years old. Resting heart rate in the fifties. Blood pressure a cardiologist would frame. She had never before put the numbers together with the man, and she did it now, at a wardroom table, with the honesty she would have expected of a first-year resident presenting a case.

He was a very good-looking man. There was no use pretending otherwise; she had eyes, and they had been working the whole time, and she had simply declined to read the results.

He had a broad, calm face, and close-cropped hair just beginning to go gray above the ears, and a mouth that looked as though it spent most of its time trying not to smile at something.

Without the glasses his eyes were dark and unguarded, with the faintest suggestion of laughter.

His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, as a pilot's always were by evening, and his forearms were the forearms of a man who still did what the flight surgeon told him. His shoulders filled the khaki in a way she had noticed in her office and refused to write down.

His hands, turning the glasses over and over, were long and steady and careful, and she thought about the things a pair of hands like that might be careful with, and then about the rest of him, the considerable height and breadth of him, and she had a sudden, vivid and entirely unclinical picture of herself climbing him like a tree.

She did not say so. She would sooner have died. But she felt it go up her face all the same, a great slow scarlet tide from her collar to her hairline, worse than the first, and there was nothing whatever she could do about it but sit there and burn.

It was a mercy he was still looking at his glasses.

“Professor,” she said. It came out lower than she had meant it to. Oh, no, she thought. Not again.

“Doctor.” He didn't look up from the glasses.

“The glasses are clean.”

“Are they?” He looked at them as though he had never seen them before, and put them on. “So they are.”

Marlow came out of the pantry with two cups of coffee, which nobody had asked for, and put one in front of each of them, and went back into the pantry without a word, which everyone in the room took as confirmation of something.

Santos wrapped both hands around her cup and took a large, steadying swallow, and it was scalding, and she held it in her mouth with her eyes watering and swallowed it anyway rather than let him see. Then she put the cup down.

“I want you to keep an eye on him,” she said. “On Ray. Off the books. Not as his flight lead and not for me. I can't put it in his file, and I can't order you to, and I wouldn't if I could.”

Baxter's face changed. The color didn't go, but the man behind it came back, all at once, as if somebody had called his number over a radio. He put the coffee down.

“I've been keeping an eye on him since the day he came aboard,” he said. “It's rather the job.”

“I know. I don't mean the job.”

“Then what do you mean?” He leaned forward. “Why? Why now? What's happened?”

She thought about how much to tell him. She thought about the low chair and the water, and the things Ray had said in it, which were his and not hers to give away. And she thought about the XO in her doorway, the night of the party, saying I can't do it. I don't know how.

“Nothing's happened,” she said. “That's the point. Nothing's happened, and something is going to.”

He waited. He was good at waiting; she had noticed that in her office. He waited like a man who expected the answer to be worth it.

“He comes to me every week, you know,” Santos said. “He's never been late. He's lost weight since October, too. Not a great deal. Enough. He doesn't sleep. His light's on at two in the morning; the admiral's seen it. He answers every question I ask him, and he's polite, and he's patient, and he tells me nothing. I've had men in that chair who wouldn't talk. This isn't that. He's not hiding something from me. He's holding something up.”

“Holding what up?”

“Everything.” She turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. “I asked him once, a few weeks ago, to imagine coming back from a sortie when somebody didn't. Just to imagine it. It's a standard question. Most people go blank. They won't let themselves picture it.” She looked at Baxter. “He didn't go blank. I watched his face, and he wasn't imagining it. He was remembering it. He'd been there. Whatever it was, wherever it was, under all that black ink, he's already lost people. And he's built himself back up around one idea, and the idea is that it won't happen again. Not might not. Won't.”

Baxter didn't move.

“When I was a resident,” said Santos, “I had a man carry people out of a burning building for four days on a broken ankle. He didn't know it was broken until he sat down.” She was quiet a moment. “Your lead hasn't sat down since October. He's fit to fly. He'll be fit to fly right up until the day somebody doesn't come back, and then I don't think there's a doctor in the Navy who could put him back together.”

Baxter took his glasses off again, and this time he didn't clean them. He just held them.

“And you want me to see it coming,” he said.

“I want somebody to. I can't. I see him for an hour a week, in a room with the door open, and he's had two months to learn what my face looks like when I'm worried.” She shook her head. “You fly with him. You eat with him, when he eats. You're the one he'll let near. I want to know if he stops eating. If he stops drawing. If he starts sleeping, because that would mean something too. If he looks at anyone on this ship the way he looked at that roster in my office.” She stopped. “And I want you to tell me before you tell anyone else. Not the XO. Me.”

“Before the XO?”

“The XO will act on it. I want to think first.”

Baxter looked at her for a moment over the coffee, with the glasses in his hand and his face still faintly warm. Then he nodded, once, the way she had seen him nod at Ray on the deck before a launch.

“All right,” he said. “Off the books.” He put the glasses on. “I'll need to compare notes with you. Regularly. For the patient's sake.”

“For the patient's sake,” Santos agreed.

“Weekly, I'd have thought.”

“Weekly would be sensible.”

“Here?”

“Here's fine.”

He picked up the red pen, and looked at question six, and put the pen down again.

“Doctor,” he said. “I don't believe I know your first name.”

“Adelina.”

He nodded slowly.

“Good night, Adelina,” he said.

Nobody had called her that in two years. Now Ellington Baxter said her name once, in that unhurried lecture-hall voice, as though he were putting it down somewhere safe, and something in her chest turned over like a patient waking.

She hated how much it pleased her. She hated it with real professional fury. She was thirty-three years old, she had done amputations by lamplight, and a man had said four syllables across a wardroom table and she wanted to hear him say them again.

So she did the only thing she could think of to take the advantage back.

“Good night, Ellington,” she said.

It was a mistake. She knew it as soon as it was out. His name was long and old-fashioned and a little absurd, and it sat in her mouth like something warm, and she liked the shape of it far too much, and then she watched it land on him. He went still, the way a man goes still when he's been touched somewhere he didn't expect, and the color came back up into his face, and his mouth did the thing it had been trying not to do all evening.

That was worse. That was a great deal worse. She had meant to even the score, and instead she had found out exactly how much she enjoyed watching him hear his own name from her, and there was no taking that back either.

She left him with the quiz and the coffee and the streamer breathing in the vent. In the passageway outside she stopped, and put her hand to her face, and found it was burning, and stood there with her back against the bulkhead until it wasn't.

Then she went back to her office, and took the referral sheet out from under the blotter, and under Baxter, in her own small hand, she wrote: Second opinion obtained.

She looked at it. Then, because the sheet was hers and nobody else would ever read it, she wrote a second line underneath, about the consultant and not the patient, and read it over, and crossed it out so thoroughly that not even she could have said afterward what it had been.