Cutting for Stone

shingles; I installed bookshelves. Uprooted from Africa, I was satisfying a nesting impulse. I'd found my version of happiness in America. Six years had gone by, and though I should have visited Ethiopia, somehow I could never quite break free.

One day, when coming out of an ice-cream shop, a tall elegantly dressed black woman, her leather coat dancing above her ankles, brushed past me. I held the door for her, and as she slid past, an intense disquiet came over me. She turned back to look at me, smiling. Another evening, while driving back through Manhattan from a trauma conference in New Jersey, a streetwalker caught my eye as she stepped out from under an awning near the Holland Tunnel. She was ghost lit by car headlamps and reflections off the puddles. She tit-flashed me in the rain. Or I imagined she did. I felt the disquiet again, like the hint of something afire, but one doesn't know where. I circled the block, but she was gone.

At home, I prepared for the next day's work. I could have gone into private practice when I finished my five- year residency, or else I could have gone to some other teaching institution. But I felt a great loyalty to Our Lady. And now, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and Walter Reed in Washington were sending us a few of their senior surgical residents. In peacetime, we provided the closest thing to a war zone, a place where they could hone their skills. I was Our Lady's Head of Trauma; we were blessed with new resources and more personnel. There was no reason for me to be unhappy. But that night, with a fire going in the grate, I felt restless, as if a paralysis would soon set in if I didn't take certain measures.

That weekend, I decided my life needed a dimension that did not involve work. I looked over the Times for events, readings, openings, plays, lectures, and other matters of interest. I forced myself to leave the house on Saturday and again on Sunday.

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I came home after work and deposited my briefcase and the mail in my library. In the kitchen, I lit the candle, set the table, and warmed up the last portion of a chicken casserole that I had cooked the previous Sunday from a Times recipe.

There was a knock on the door.

I panicked.

Had I invited someone over for dinner and forgotten? Other than Deepak coming over once, no one had ever been here. Could it be that Tsige from Boston had decided to take matters into her own hands, since I had failed to call her? I'd picked up the receiver a dozen times, and then lost courage. Or could this be Thomas Stone knocking? I hadn't told him where I lived, but he could have found out easily from Deepak.

I looked through the peephole.

In that convex fish-eye image, I saw eyes, a nose, cheekbones, lips … My brain tried to juggle and rearrange the parts to come up with a face and a name.

It wasn't Stone or Deepak or Tsige.

There was no mistaking who it was.

She turned to leave, went down the two steps.

I could have watched her walk away.

I opened the door. She stood frozen, her body facing the street, her face turned back to the door. She was taller than I recalled, or perhaps it was that she was thinner. She looked to see that it was me, then she dropped her gaze to a spot near my left elbow. This allowed me to study her at will, to decide whether to slam the door on her.

Her hair was straightened, lank, without benefit of ribbons or bows or even a good combing. The cheekbones were intact, more prominent than ever, as if to better buttress those oval, slanting eyes which were her prettiest feature. Even without makeup, hers would always be a stunning face. Although it was summer, she wore a long wool coat tied tight around the waist, and she hugged herself as if she were cold. She stood there motionless, like a small animal caught invading the territory of a predator, paralyzed and unable to move.

I came down my steps. I reached my hand out and tilted her face up. Her eyeballs and lids rolled down just like the eyes of the dolls she used to play with. Her skin was cold to my touch. The vertical scars at the outer edges of her eyes were now seasoned lines, though I recalled the day Rosina's blade gave birth to them, and how they had been raw and choked with dark blood. I jerked her chin farther up. Still she wouldn't meet my gaze. I wanted her to see the scars on my body, one from her betrayal of me with Shiva and another from her becoming more Eritrean than any Eritrean, resulting in the hijacking that drove me out of my country. I wanted her to see my rage through my outer calm. I wanted her to feel the blood surge in my muscles, to see the way my fingers curled and coiled and itched for her windpipe. It was good she didn't look, because if she'd so much as blinked, I would have bit into her jugular, I would have consumed her, bones, teeth, and hair, leaving nothing of her on the street.

I took her by the elbow and led her inside. She came like a woman going to the gallows. In the foyer as I bolted the door, she stood rooted to the mat. I led her to my library—a dining room that I had transformed—and I pushed her down on the ottoman. She perched on its edge. I stared down at her; she didn't move. Then she coughed, a spasm that took fifteen seconds to pass. She brought a crumpled tissue to her lips. I looked at her for a long time. I was about to speak when the cough commenced again.

I went to the kitchen. I boiled water for tea, leaning my head against the refrigerator as I waited. Why was I doing this? One minute homicide, the next minute tea?

She had not changed her position. When she took the cup from me, I saw her unvarnished, chipped fingernails and the wrinkled washerwoman's skin. She pulled one sleeve down, passed the cup over, and repeated the process with the other, so as to hide her hands. Tears streamed down her face, her lips pulled back into a grimace.

I had hoped that my heart would be hardened to such displays.

“Sorry. I work in a kitchen,” she whispered.

“After all you have done to me, you're sorry about the state of your hands?”

She blinked, said nothing.

“How did you find me?”

“Tsige sent me.”

“Why?”

“I called her when I got out of jail. I needed … help.”

“Didn't she tell you that I didn't want to see you?”

“Yes. But she insisted I see you before she would help me.” She glanced directly at me for the very first time. “And I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“To tell you I'm sorry.” She averted her gaze after a few seconds.

“Is that something you learn in prison? Avoiding eye contact?”

She laughed, and in that moment I wondered if, with all she had seen and done, she was beyond being touched by anger. She said, “I was stabbed once for looking.” She pointed down with her chin to her left side. “They took out my spleen.”

“Where were you in prison?”

“Albany.”

“And now?”

“I'm paroled. I have to see my probation officer every week.”

She put her cup down.

“What else did Tsige say?”

“That you're a surgeon.” She looked around the library, the shelves full of books. “That you're doing well.”

“I'm only here because I was forced to run. Forced to leave in the night like a thief. You know who did that to me? To Hema? It was someone who was to our family … like a daughter.”

She rocked back and forth. “Go on,” she said, straightening her back. “I deserve it.”

“Still playing the martyr? I heard you hid a gun in your hair when you got on that plane. An Afro! You were the Angela Davis of the Eritrean cause, right?”

She shook her head. After a long while she said, “I don't know what I was. I don't know who I was. The person I was felt she had to do something great.” She spat out the last word. “Something