Part Three: The Setup
It required two weeks of preparation and the cooperation of three people: Maro, a colleague at the hospital whom Maro trusted absolutely, and a lawyer named Tigran who had done work for Ani’s studio and who listened to her requirements for forty minutes without expression and then said, “This is unusual,” and then: “What day do you want to start?”
The story they constructed was this: a car accident on the Kotayk road, where the curves were sharp enough to make it plausible. A collision, a vehicle off the road, emergency services called. Ani would be admitted to the hospital. The injuries were serious. She was unconscious.
The actual Ani was in a private room at the far end of the internal medicine ward, comfortable, with a book and her phone and meals brought by Maro. She wore the oxygen mask when people who were not Maro or the trusted colleague entered the room. She lay still and she breathed and she waited, which was the hardest part — not the waiting itself but the waiting with the possibility that she was wrong, that Arman would come through that door and she would see in his face the pure alarm of a man who loves someone and has been told she is dying, and she would have to find a way to live with what she had done to find that out.
Arman was called at seven in the evening on a Thursday in mid-July. Maro made the call, using her professional voice — the voice of someone delivering difficult information as clearly and as carefully as possible. There had been an accident. His wife had been brought in. The situation was serious. He should come.
He arrived forty minutes later. Maro met him in the corridor outside the room — she had positioned herself there specifically, because she needed to see his face before he had time to prepare it for an audience.
His face, when he came through the corridor, was arranged in the expression of alarm. It was a good approximation. But Maro was a physician and she had spent fifteen years reading faces in the context of genuine crisis, and she knew the difference between an expression that is happening to someone and an expression that someone is producing. She was not certain. But she was not reassured.
She told him the situation was extremely serious. She told him there was nothing he could do tonight. She told him she would call with any update. She watched his face as she said these things.
He left without asking to sit with his wife.
Maro went back to the room and sat down in the chair beside Ani’s bed and said nothing for a moment.
“He left,” Ani said.
“Yes.”
Ani looked at the ceiling. “What did his face do?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Maro said honestly. “Come back tomorrow.”
