No Visitors

"I came to get the stitches out," you say.

"They're due out on Sunday."

"I'm here now."

"So is the man with the dislocated shoulder." She points her pen at the cot without looking away from you. "He has an actual reason."

"Popped it back myself," says the man with the shoulder. "She just likes to look at it."

Dru laughs so hard she has to sit down.

Gwenllian closes her notebook. She stands, and you realize she's nearly your height, long-legged in black jeans and a gray sweater with the sleeves shoved up again. She takes a pair of gloves from a box and snaps them on, and the sound goes straight down your spine.

"Sit, Ethan," she says. "Since you're here. Since you're apparently going to keep being here."

You sit on the steel table. She pulls the gooseneck lamp down until it's a hot little sun six inches from your face.

"Two days early won't kill you. Most things won't. That's the problem with men like you, you've survived enough things to think it's a skill." She tilts your head with one finger under your jaw. "Hold still."

"How did you know my name?"

"Fallon writes the card on the whiteboard by the bar. Your name, your weight, your odds." Snip. "You were eight to one against the welder. Somebody made a lot of money."

"Not me."

"No. Never you." Snip. "Never any of you."

The stitches come out with small tugging stings. Each one she drops on a square of gauze, black threads curled like eyelashes. You look at her face because there's nowhere else to look. Up close she has a tiny scar at the corner of her mouth and a smudge of tiredness under each eye that she probably hates.

"You're staring," she says.

"You're six inches away."

"Close your eyes, then."

You don't. She doesn't make you.

"Why do you do this?" you ask. "This. The back room. Dru said you don't get paid."

"Dru talks too much."

"Dru's right here," says Dru.

Gwenllian ignores her. "I do it because if I don't, they get carried out to the alley and put in a car and driven to a parking lot near an emergency room, and dumped, and by then it's too late. Or they go home and lie down." Snip. "Your turn. Why do you do this?"

"Money."

"Everyone says money. What for? A motorbike? A girl? You don't look like a man with a gambling problem, but they never do."

"My father."

Her hands stop.

You hadn't meant to say it. You've never said it out loud to anybody but Tino. But she asked like she wanted the true answer, and you're tired, and her hands are cool on your face.

"He had a stroke last year. Then his heart. They did a bypass at Tremont Harbor. Good surgeons, everybody said. They saved his life." You keep your voice level. "Then the bill came. And then the hospital sold the bill to some company, and the company added interest and fees, and now it's a hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars, and they want his house by the middle of October."

She's very still. Her eyes are on the cut, not on you.

"Which company?"

"Harbor Recovery Partners."

Something happens in her face. It's fast. You wouldn't have seen it if the lamp weren't six inches away. A flinch, the inside kind, the kind she said everybody has.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly.

"It's not your fault."

"No." Snip. Last one. She drops it on the gauze. "No, it's not."

Then she straightens and pulls off her gloves and her voice goes back to frost, as if someone opened a window.

"So you'll get yourself killed for a debt. That's your plan. Your father has a stroke and a bypass, and his son gets his skull cracked on a basement floor, and the company still gets the house, because dead men don't make payments. Excellent. Very efficient. Have you told him?"

"No."

"Of course not." She throws the gloves in the bin with more force than gloves need. "You'll let him find out from a police officer."

"You don't know anything about it."

"I know exactly about it." It comes out sharp and too loud, and the man with the shoulder looks up. She breathes in through her nose. Lowers her voice. "I know what it looks like when the police officer comes. Don't make me say it twice."

The room is quiet except for the generator humming somewhere behind the wall.

"Okay," you say.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, you know. I believe you." You touch your eyebrow. It feels strange, smooth and tight. "Thanks for the stitches."

"Don't touch it."

"Sorry."

"And don't come back." She turns away to the tackle box. "This isn't a café, Ethan. No visitors. You want to see someone, see a therapist."

Dru catches your eye over the patient's shoulder and mouths something that looks a lot like she likes you. Gwenllian, who cannot possibly have seen it, says, "Dru, I will put you in the harbor."

Fallon is waiting at the bottom of the balcony stairs, like she knew exactly how long you'd be.

"There he is, Ethan. The face." She falls into step beside you. "I've got something for you."

"I just fought."

"Not now. Three weeks. A real card. Saturday the twenty-fifth." She looks at her clipboard as if the number's written there, even though you know it isn't. "Fifteen thousand to fight. Not to win. To fight. Win and there's a bonus."

You stop walking.

Fifteen thousand dollars is three Harbor Recovery payments. Fifteen thousand dollars is October and November and December, and your father's house standing in January.

"Who?"

"Dimitrije Kovach."

You've heard the name. Everybody at the Ropewalk has heard the name. Six-foot-four, shaved head, a man who fights like the bell is a suggestion. You've never seen him lose. You've seen two men leave on stretchers.

"Why me?"

"Because you sat for seven stitches without a needle and then knocked out a kid in forty seconds, and people are talking about you." Fallon shrugs. "Because the money people want a story. Think about it. Tell me by Monday."

Behind you, the steel door is open.

You don't know how long it's been open. Gwenllian is standing in it with a roll of tape in her hand, and she's looking at Fallon, not at you. Her face has gone the color of the paper sheets on the cots.

"Kovach," she says.

Fallon smiles at her, thin as a razor. "Evening, Doctor."

Gwenllian looks at you then. She opens her mouth. Closes it. Then she steps back and shuts the steel door, and you hear the bolt go across from the inside.

You walk home over the Tobin Bridge in the wind because you can't afford a cab and you need the cold.

You lie in your old bedroom with the Patriots poster from when you were twelve and the radiator banging. You think about fifteen thousand dollars. You think about two men on stretchers. You think about her face going white.

At 1:12 a.m. your phone lights up on your chest.

The contact name is just a number. You haven't saved it yet. You haven't known what to save it as.

It's her. And for the first time, you didn't text first.