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She keeps the Queen of Hearts tucked between her name tag and her hospital emergency codes, slid neatly into a little plastic pouch on her lanyard, a small reminder that even the hardest days are survivable.
There’s a lull in activity inside the ER, everyone caught in a state of limbo where there’s nothing more they can do but nowhere else to go and it’s making her itch. Everyone’s just waiting, holding their breath, stuck and Noa hates it, so she uses the time to drop onto a chair in one of the empty patient stalls for some quiet. As she settles, Noa tugs the rarely used curtains closed around her and then pulls out the Queen of Hearts to examine it for the first time in a long time.
She’d tried to give the stupid thing back to Johnny as she and Mario were discharging him months ago. The old man had just grinned and shook his head, pushing the card back into her hand with that enigmatic look that said he thought he knew more than she did. “Keep it Dr. Kean,” he’d told her, clearly pleased about something other than his relatively clean bill of health. “Maybe it’ll help you find a little bit of faith.” And then he’d taken one last look between his doctors, wished them well, and left.
Now she stares at the bold lines of colors on the face of the card, fingers tracing them and drawing in breaths that seem to come too slow, even as she takes them more raggedly.
He’s going to be okay, he has to be.
She can have faith in that, she can believe. She doesn’t need proof or logic or reason: she just needs Mario Savetti to walk out of that damn CDC bubble and smile at her.
Noa gives herself five minutes: five minutes to struggle and waiver and lose it. Five minutes to sit in a chair with a playing card clutched in her hand and when it’s over, she gets up, scrubs her face against the sleeves of her undershirt and tucks the card into the pocket of her scrubs, as close to her heart as she can get it.
He’s going to be fine. She can believe in that, believe in him.