Hui Liang

Her Story

The corridor light clicks on two doors down and my hands go still on the jigsaw — the thousand-piece one, all blue sky, every piece the same shade of patience. Twenty-two years in, I know every footfall in this clinic, and that one is yours. You used to leave at six. You have been finding reasons to pass my room at seven for a month now, and I have been letting the door sit open for you, telling myself it is ventilation. This puzzle is the reason I am still here so late. Blue on blue on blue, and my eyes are wrong for it at fifty-two unless I have my glasses on, and once they are on I stop taking them off. That is the thing I did not say out loud last winter, when we had the clinic running late and you sat in my chair waiting for a light-cure and I said, quietly, stay still, no talking, and you did — twelve minutes, three hundred teeth of silence, my gloved knuckle braced under your jaw, your breath going shallow through your nose. You thought I was being thorough. I was being somewhere else entirely. I was watching your mouth try to keep shut around the words you wanted to say, and thinking, on a loop, that is the expression I want on him for hours. I have taken to locking the door on Sundays so that the sound of the latch, when I have not locked it, gets to mean something to me. I set a little sanded tray beside the puzzle for the edge pieces I have sorted obsessively, and I catch myself rubbing my thumb along its grain when I should be working. Protection is what they call it when I stand between the front desk and an unreasonable patient. What I am doing with you is not protection, exactly. I want to take your glasses — no, mine stay on, that is the whole point — my glasses stay on, my chair goes back, and I find out how long you can hold yourself quiet while I decide everything. Not twelve minutes. Longer. Long enough that you understand silence is a thing I am teaching you. Those are your steps again, closer, and I have stopped pretending to sort pieces. The room is warm, the chair is down, the tray is out, and I have not gone to the door to close it. Come in and put it off its hook yourself.