When He Finally Chose Me I Was Gone novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Sixty Percent

In Duluth, a hand surgeon gives her a sixty percent chance of playing again and asks if she could be pregnant, and she says yes aloud for the first time.

Elin drove north with the heat on high and my splinted hand propped on a folded coat.

I watched the highway signs go by.

Every few miles my phone lit up on the dashboard.

Soren, Soren, Soren.

By Hinckley it had rung thirty-one times.

"You could pick up," Elin said. "Just to hear what he says."

"I know what he says. He says I never saw you."

"Then I'll turn it off for you."

"No," I said. "I'll do it."

I held down the button with my right thumb until the screen went black.

Neither of us said anything for a long time.

At Moose Lake she said, "Where am I taking you, exactly?"

"Where did you say your cousin's surgeon works?"

"St. Brendan's, in Duluth. His name is Koski. He did my cousin's wrist and she plays the flute again."

"Then that's where."

We got there at nine in the morning.

My father used to say you could tell a good hospital by how bad the coffee was.

The coffee at St. Brendan's was terrible.

They put me in a small room with a window that looked out on the harbor and a gray ship waiting at the ore dock.

I watched the ship until the door opened.

The man who came in wore a blue fleece over his scrubs and wire-rimmed glasses.

He had dark hair going gray at the temples, and he was holding my X-rays in one hand and a cup of the terrible coffee in the other.

"Ms. Holm," he said. "I'm Anders Koski. I'm going to look at the hand, and then I'm going to tell you the truth about it. Is that all right?"

"Please."

He sat on a stool and unwrapped the splint with great care.

The fingers were purple and swollen to twice their size.

He did not wince or say anything soothing.

He turned the hand over and pressed along each knuckle.

"Cellist," he said. "Left hand."

"How did you know?"

"The calluses. Also your friend told the front desk three times that you're a cellist."

"That was me," Elin said from the corner.

He nearly smiled.

Then he held up the first picture and pointed to the light shapes at the end of my hand.

"You broke the ring finger, the middle finger and the little finger. All three tendons on the underside are torn. I can fix them today, and I'd like to."

"Will I play again?"

"I think you might. I'd put it at sixty percent for concert level, after a year of very boring work."

"And the other forty?"

"The other forty you'd play for pleasure."

I looked at the ship in the window.

I had practiced six hours a day since I was eleven.

My first teacher had told me I had the hands for it.

I thought of Soren's face on the livestream, and I thought of the truss, and I said, "Then let's do the sixty."

Dr. Koski nodded and wrote something on his chart.

"One more thing, and you don't have to answer. Is there any chance you could be pregnant? I need to know before I choose the anesthesia."

Elin went completely still.

I had not said it to anyone.

I had planned to say it to Soren first, over a table, with the test in his palm.

I had pictured his face for weeks.

"Yes," I said. "Seven weeks. I took a test yesterday morning."

The words sat in the quiet room.

I had said them to a surgeon with bad coffee and a ship in the window, and it did not feel like a loss.

It felt like mine.

"Thank you," he said. "That's very safe for what we're doing. I'll talk to the anesthesiologist myself. Does the father know?"

"No."

"Do you want him to?"

I looked at my wrapped, ruined hand.

"Not yet," I said. "Maybe not for a while."

"Then he won't hear it from this building," Dr. Koski said. "Not from me, not from a nurse, not from a billing office. I'll put a flag on your chart that says no information goes out to anyone."

"Can you do that?"

"I can do a surprising number of things when I'm annoyed," he said, and he got up. "Eat something. They'll come for you at noon."

Elin held my good hand until the orderly came.

The surgery took four hours, and when I woke up my hand was in a fiberglass cast to the elbow.

I felt hollow and thirsty and strange.

Then I felt a small, low ache under my ribs that had nothing to do with the cast, and I put my right hand over it.

Elin pulled her chair up to the bed.

She had been crying, and she had fixed her face badly.

"Hi," she said. "You did great. They said I could stay."

"Thank you."

"Lin, something happened while you were under."

"What?"

"Two police officers came to the front desk an hour ago."

I felt cold from my scalp to the soles of my feet.

"For me?"

She nodded.

"Soren filed a missing person report," she said. "They're in the lobby now, and they want to see you."

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