He didn’t know. Neither she nor the others had told him, not at Guleed’s, and not on the long flight when they’d all slept. “But we found the hilt.” She fumbled in the overnight bag Ivar had handed her. “Here.” She held out the crucifix.
He held it like a new baby, with both hands, and stared, but the plastic bag she’d wrapped around the relic obscured the red gem.
Her fingers hovered over his shoulder, but she wasn’t sure he’d like to be touched.
“I have leased laboratory space. Equipment is ordered. And I’ve sent for someone who can acquire the arm bone for you.” Headlights reflected on the sheen of his eyes. “Wait for Wulf at my home. He will come there for you.”
She refused to consider other endings.
Through the windshield, the bright lights and right angles of Manhattan posed a direct contrast to the snowy hills of Lejre. The city was where she wanted to hide, where she felt safest, and where she had ideas to test and promises to fulfill. Ivar might believe Wulf would appear soon, but she couldn’t forget the inferno they’d left in Denmark. And she knew from experience that immortal Vikings had a very different sense of time.
A clipboard and questions helped Theresa control her anxiety. If she focused on the patient in the opposite chair, she might forget for a moment that Wulf hadn’t returned or phoned for over a week. The woman, a refugee from Africa, had a yellow pocket of pus on the back of her hand that would have to be lanced and drained by a doctor at this women’s clinic fifty blocks north of Ivar’s town house.
“Dr. Chiesa, she doesn’t speak Amharic or Arabic.” The college student who helped as an interpreter flipped through a phone roster. “Maybe it’s Tigrinya, from the north of Ethiopia or Eritrea? Our interpreter list doesn’t include an Eritrean.” Her wide brown eyes sought guidance.
“Try a calendar. Maybe she’ll point to the day she was injured.” Until New York verified her board certification and issued her a license to practice, her volunteer work was limited to patient-intake interviews.
“There’s one in the next cube.” The student jumped to her feet. She hoped to attend medical school.
Theresa acknowledged a different goal. She hoped helping the flow of women, twenty an hour through five exam rooms, would fulfill the promise she’d made to Meena and herself back in Afghanistan. She wanted to make a difference, and she had to balance the isolated world of Ivar’s research lab and mansion with the hum of human contact.
While she waited, Theresa stared at the women’s health posters covering the tan walls of the cubicle she used. Hope is not a method. Please let Wulf be free, not locked under stone like Ivar had been. Are you pregnant? ¿Estás embarazada? She’d trade the chance to look like that big-bellied woman to hold Wulf in her arms. Chlamydia is not a flower. That one was mind-blowingly awful, and not the calendar she needed.
The door jingled. Unseen women in the waiting area burst into giggles. Must be a baby.
Her interpreter returned to the cubicle, smiling. “Here’s the calendar.”
“Thanks.” She turned to the patient in the dark skirt. “This is today.” She pointed to the date. Ten days since she and Ivar had returned. Ten days without a word from Wulf. “Your sore?” She pointed to the patient’s arm and ran her pencil over the week before. “What day?” While the woman answered with a burst of language and pointed to three different squares on the calendar, the waiting room giggles grew. This should be easier, but how?
“Last Tuesday I was cooking injera when the hot clay plate slipped from the stove burner and hit my hand.” The voice she heard in her dreams washed over her from the other side of the cubicle partition. An interpreter had arrived, one called by her heart. Wulf was here.
She started to rise from her chair but couldn’t depend on her knees, couldn’t even breathe.
“The next day a neighbor gave me a paste to cover the burn.” The thunder of her heart almost eclipsed his smooth cadences. “By Friday my hand was much worse, so now I am here to see the doctor.” Wulf paused. “I was stuck in an air-cargo crate for a week.”
Clearly the last sentence had nothing to do with the patient. “You could have phoned.” She rested her clipboard on her knee so neither the patient nor the volunteer saw her hands shake. “Please tell my patient that coming to the clinic was very wise. We can’t risk a staph infection.” Remembering Wulf’s instructions from Afghanistan, she addressed the woman directly. “Can you tell me what was in the paste your neighbor gave you?”
While Wulf and the patient exchanged words, she concentrated on breathing in and out.
“Avocado and boiled plantain leaves and honey. Also butter.” Wulf recited the ingredients in the home remedy as fast as she could copy them to the intake form. “Sorry, but my freight pallet didn’t have cell service and I didn’t think I should show my face at an airport.”
Realizing the man she loved was a few feet away and they were on the verge of arguing instead of kissing, she stood and smoothed her hands down her new cargo pants. If she’d known he was coming, she would have dressed...but no, these were clothes she’d bought for herself. They represented the real her. She touched her hair, but didn’t have a mirror.
“My Puerto Rican neighbor says honey and plantain heal anything.” Wulf’s voice vibrated, as if he too was unsteady. “But I’m not so sure now. Maybe the doctor has something better.” The space dividers were thin enough that she heard him clear his throat. “Maybe the doctor will marry me?”
Ohmigod. She reached for the wall. Could she stagger around it without falling?
The openmouthed student nodded like a bobblehead, and even her patient understood something larger was happening.
Theresa realized that she had her other palm over her mouth and the waiting room had dropped into complete silence. Ohmigod again. She wobbled out the door and met him in the narrow space between intake rooms.
The gray carpet and beige walls disappeared at her first sight of him in two weeks. When he smiled, it was different from the cocky grin he’d first given her in the mess hall, different from the smolder when he zipped the boots on her feet or the sexy flirting grin in her mother’s kitchen. This smile made her hands damp. It made her want to cry and hug him and laugh all at the same time. He lifted her to her toes, and his kiss traveled from her lips to her heart. She flew, or felt as if she did, and opened in flight for him. Arms wrapped around her, he spun her through the hall. Every cell sang to touch him. His hair was as soft and dense as she remembered, his shoulders as strong, his mouth made for hers.
Most important, he was here, with her, and he was safe.
He set her on her feet and withdrew to look at her face. “You haven’t answered my question.”
The collectively indrawn breath from all the women in the waiting room must have taken the oxygen away, because she felt dizzy, but she knew what to say. “Yes, of course, yes.” She threw her arms back around him, because any distance was too far. “I love you.”
Her prosthetic, a stray folding chair, a miscalculation and they staggered. Wulf’s legs tangled with hers, but his arms didn’t let go to find balance, and his lips never released hers. She heard the thunk as he hit the wall and they stopped moving.
Then he was kissing her ear and her neck and her cheek and repeating her words. “I love you.” No interpreter needed.
The women in the room jumped and cheered. He grinned, and this time he shouted, “I love you!” to the drop-tile ceiling while the patients clapped.