Chapter 1 — Leftover Pizza

I am a surgeon. Today I saved a nineteen-year-old boy who nearly bled to death on my operating table.

When I got home, my husband only asked if I had eaten.

The boy was an app-based motorcycle taxi driver named Rizki. His bike had skidded out on the Casablanca flyover at two in the afternoon while the asphalt was still slick from the rain. By the time the ambulance rolled him into the ER, his abdomen had gone rigid and his blood pressure was dropping every time the nurse wrote it down.

Tucked inside his jacket pocket were two boxes of sweet stuffed martabak pancakes that never made it to the customer. Right before the anesthesiologist put him under, Rizki caught hold of my scrub sleeve. “Doctor, please text the customer and tell them the martabak order is canceled. Tell them I’m sorry. I can’t afford a bad rating.” Unlocking his phone with a trembling thumb, he pressed it into my hand. I sent the text before scrubbing in.

At three o’clock we wheeled him into the operating theater. At the table were just me, a junior resident whose hands shook slightly, and Nurse Ratmi, who had been handing surgical scissors to three generations of surgeons without once picking up the wrong instrument.

Inside an open abdomen, blood never tells you where it is coming from. For nearly an hour we searched while the numbers on the monitor kept sliding down. Then my fingertips found it, a laceration hidden behind the right lobe of the liver, before my eyes ever saw it.

“Sponge,” I said.

Nurse Ratmi was already holding it out.

At ten past seven, the anesthesiologist’s voice changed pitch. “Pressure is coming back up, Dr. Nadia.”

Nurse Ratmi didn’t say thank goodness or brilliant work. She just said, “There.”

That single word carried me all the way down the hospital corridor, through the locker room, out to the parking garage, and into the driver’s seat of my car.

The inner-city toll road was backed up for miles. A red river of brake lights stretched all the way to the Semanggi interchange while the car radio played a song my husband Damian and I used to belt out together during our first year of marriage, back when I could still fall asleep in the passenger seat beside him without keeping score of which one of us was more exhausted.

Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I rehearsed how to tell him the story.

The full version had too many medical terms, and Damian’s eyes would drift back to his laptop screen before I reached the part that mattered. The short version sounded like a two-line filler item at the bottom of a news portal, and Damian would only ask whether the kid had been wearing a helmet.

The final version was a single sentence. Today I found it with my hands. At the Kuningan red light, I tried saying it out loud to the windshield. A motorcycle rider idling beside my car turned his head to stare through my window. Reaching forward, I turned up the radio.

What I really wanted to tell him was only five seconds long, the five seconds when the pad of my index finger brushed the ragged edge of that tear and my body knew what it was before my brain caught up. You cannot explain five seconds like that at a traffic light.

Down in the basement parking garage of our apartment tower, I sat in the car for a minute after cutting the engine. Flipping down the sun visor mirror, I looked at the red pressure crease across the bridge of my nose from my surgical mask and my hair flattened damply by the scrub cap. After running my fingers through my hair to fluff it up, I laughed at myself in the dim glass for primping just to tell my husband about a torn liver.

Twenty-third floor. The front door of our unit clicked open with the electronic chime of the digital lock, a sound that always reminded me of someone swallowing hard.

Damian was sitting at the dining table with his laptop open and a headset resting over one ear. Without turning his head, he raised one index finger to say hold on a second. Six years of marriage had made that raised finger as familiar to me as my own name. This month he was on the weekend rotation for remote IT support, which meant support tickets kept pinging even on a Saturday night.

“Try closing the application first, sir. Yes, all the windows. Now open it again. I’ll stay on the line.”

Setting my bag down on a chair, I glanced at his laptop screen, where an orange support ticket window sat open beside the profile photo of a bespectacled middle-aged man who looked furious even in his ID portrait.

“There, it let you in, right? You’re very welcome, sir. Have a good evening.”

Sliding the headset off his ear, Damian finally turned to look at me. His smile was wide and completely genuine. Damian was always happy to see me come home. That part had never changed.

His eyes flicked to the clock in the corner of his screen. “You said earlier you’d be home by six.”

His tone wasn’t accusing. It was the flat, even tone of a man logging water jugs and prepaid electricity tokens.

“Have you eaten? There’s leftover pizza in the fridge.”

“I ate,” I said.

Nothing had crossed my lips since a slice of bread in the hospital pantry at eleven that morning. Still, the lie slipped out on its own, light and automatic, as effortless as pulling the front door shut behind me.

“Okay.” His fingers tapped a quick note into his laptop. “Just one last ticket in the queue, then I’m all done.”

Walking over to the refrigerator simply to give my hands something to do, I paused in front of the small magnetic whiteboard Damian had stuck to the freezer door the week we moved in. It was covered in his neat handwriting. Water jug Monday. AC service on the 14th. Mom’s birthday (gift?). The question mark after gift was my assignment. That question mark had been sitting there for three weeks.

Inside the fridge, three slices of pizza lay stacked on top of one another in their cardboard box, the cheese congealed into a stiff yellow crust. Standing in the open door with cold air washing over my knees, I ate one slice cold. Salty and rubbery. Behind me at the dining table, Damian was already speaking in his endlessly patient voice to another stranger whose computer refused to cooperate.

Reaching back into the box, I ate a second slice.

By the time I came out of the shower, Damian had moved to the sofa with his feet propped up on the low coffee table and his phone in his hand. On the wall, the television was on with the sound muted, displaying the home grid of a streaming app where nothing had been selected.

“Come here,” he said, patting the cushion beside him.

As soon as I sat down, he lifted my legs onto his lap without looking up from his screen, his right thumb going straight to the exact knot of tension at the side of my heel. Six years together, and he knew the map of my sore feet as well as he knew where the wall switches were in the dark. Letting my head fall back against the arm of the sofa, I closed my eyes.

“Long day,” he said. Not a question.

“Pretty long.”

“Busy shift?”

There it was. He was asking. Opening my eyes, I parted my lips.

“We had a kid come in from a motorcycle crash, and…”

“Hold on, hold on, look at this first.” Tilting his phone screen toward my face, he showed me a video of a fat orange cat trying to squeeze all four paws into a tiny shoebox, failing, trying a second time with deadpan determination, and finally settling on top of the crushed cardboard with a smug squint. Damian laughed until his shoulders shook.

I laughed too. Half a second late, though he didn’t notice.

“What is wrong with cats, honestly?” he said, still chuckling as his thumb already flicked up to the next video. “Go on. Kid in a motorcycle crash?”

“Yeah. Internal bleeding. Took us forever to find the source.”

“Man.” His thumb kept working the arch of my foot in steady circles. “Did he make it?”

“He made it.”

“Thank God. You’re amazing, babe.” Giving my ankle an affectionate squeeze, he glanced over. “Was he wearing a helmet?”

Out of everything that had happened in that room today, a helmet was what ended up sitting on the sofa between us.

“He was. The helmet didn’t make a difference, the impact was to his abdomen.”

“Brutal.” Right then, the phone in his hand buzzed. One glance at the notification banner turned his face back into his work face. “Ugh, Mr. Hendra again. Give me two minutes, honey.”

Lifting my calves gently off his lap onto the cushion, he walked back to the dining table and slipped the headset over his ear. “Yes, Mr. Hendra. Still locked out? Okay, let’s walk through it together.”

From the sofa, I stared at the silent grid of movie posters on the television screen. Half of them were movies we had already watched three times, and the other half were movies we had scrolled past three times. Behind me at the table, Damian explained how to reset a password using the exact same phrasing, slowly, a second time, and then a third. Never once did his voice sharpen with these people.

Twenty minutes later he came back, dropped onto the sofa with a sigh, and lifted my feet back onto his thighs.

“Sorry about that. What were you saying earlier?”

“Nothing. It wasn’t important.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.” His shoulders sagged half an inch, and I couldn’t even blame him for giving up. Reaching for the remote, he aimed it at the screen. “What do you feel like watching? The series we didn’t finish yesterday, or that other one?”

“Whatever you want.”

He picked the series from yesterday. We made it through half an episode before his chin dropped toward his collarbone and his breathing turned slow and even. Slipping the remote out of his slack fingers, I switched off the television and sat in the dark for a little while with my feet still resting in the lap of a very good man.

A little past eleven, we climbed into bed. Damian was asleep within three minutes. Falling asleep had always been that easy for him. Early in our marriage, I used to envy that gift. Now I only timed it.

Our bedroom was dark save for a thin blade of city light slipping between the curtains. Turning my phone brightness all the way down, I opened my notes app. Inside sat my grocery list, pediatric drug dosages I always blanked on, the AC technician’s bank account number, and a note titled Mom’s Gift that was still completely blank.

Tapping the icon in the corner, I opened a fresh note.

For a long time my thumb hovered motionless over the glass keyboard. Then, without deciding to do it, I typed three words.

i am bored

All lowercase, no period at the end.

I deleted it.

The screen went blank again, the cursor blinking in the dark.

Starting over, I typed something else.

today i found a tear behind the right lobe of the liver, with my fingers, before i saw it. Nurse Ratmi said there.

I hit save. The note dropped into my folder list under an automatic title pulled from its opening words, wedged neatly between Water Jug and Mom’s Gift.

Beside me, Damian shifted in his sleep. His arm reached across the mattress, found my waist, and settled there, warm and heavy. I waited until his breathing grew slow and rhythmic again.

Then I opened one more blank note and typed those three words a second time, just to look at their shape in the dark.

“Still awake?”

Damian’s voice came out thick with sleep. His eyes were half-open, looking straight at the pale glow between us. My phone screen was shining in the dark with those three words sitting right in the center, black letters against white glass, six inches from his face.

My thumb clicked the side button. The screen went black.

“What were you typing?”

“Grocery list,” I said. “We’re out of body wash.”

“The lavender one.” His eyes had already drifted shut again. “I’ll pick some up tomorrow.”

His palm patted my hip twice, slow and reassuring, and then went still. Within three minutes his breathing was deep and even again.

Lying flat on my back, I held the darkened phone face-down against my chest. The bottle of lavender body wash in our shower was still half-full. In this apartment, Damian was the one who tracked when the five-gallon water jug needed replacing, when the electricity meter ran low, and when every bottle on the bathroom shelf dropped below a quarter. He knew we weren’t out of soap.

He didn’t ask anything.

And I didn’t know how long his eyes had been open.