Chapter 1
Marisol
There are three drunks in Bay Four.
Not three separate drunks. One drunk, and two friends who drove him here, who are also drunk, who have spent the last forty minutes insisting they are not drunk while attempting to sit on a chair that is not where they think it is.
"Ma'am," says the tallest one, with enormous dignity. "Ma'am. I need you to know I have had two beers."
"Sure."
"Two."
"Uh huh."
"Over the course of— what time is it?"
"One-fifteen."
"Over the course of my life," he says, and then sits down on the floor.
I have been a nurse at St. Brigid's for nine years. Nine years of Friday nights in a coastal town where the two industries are fishing and drinking about fishing. I could do this shift asleep. Some nights I'm fairly sure I do.
Bay Six has a fishhook in a thumb. Actually through a thumb — in one side, out the other, a nice clean two-hole job on a man named Denny who has done this before and knows the routine so well he brought his own wire cutters.
"I could've done it at home," Denny says.
"You could have."
"Wanda said no."
"Wanda's a smart woman."
"Wanda," he says, "is a tyrant," and lets me push the barb through with the placid patience of a cow.
So it's a normal night. Three drunks, one hook, a kid in Two with an earache, and a mop bucket somebody left in the hallway that I have now walked into twice out of what I can only describe as loyalty.
And then Ghost Amundsen comes through the ambulance bay doors carrying a man who does not want to be carried.
I don't know his name yet. I know the patch — everybody in Ash Harbor knows the patch, a black raven on grey, Ravensworn MC, they've been on the bluff road since before I was born — and I know Ghost, because Ghost has been in here twice with road rash and once with pneumonia he tried to argue with.
What I do not know is who this is.
He's the biggest human being I have ever seen indoors.
I want to be precise about this, because I am a professional.
He's six-five, maybe six-six. Shoulders that come through the doorway at an angle, out of habit.
Dark beard going grey at the chin, hair pushed back off his forehead with one hand, a nose that has been broken and set by somebody who was not a doctor and possibly not sober.
And his right hand is wrapped in a shop rag that used to be white and has entirely given up on that.
"He's fine," Ghost says.
"I'm fine," says the mountain.
"He's not fine, he punched a wall."
"The wall started it."
"Bay Three," I say.
"I don't need a bay."
"Then you can stand in Bay Three."
He looks at me.
There's a beat there. I don't know what to call it. Something goes across his face — not surprise exactly. More like a man hearing a song he knows from a passing car.
Then it's gone and he says, "I'll stand in Bay Three."
"Wonderful. Ghost, sit down before you fall down, you look like a boiled sheet."
"I've been up since Tuesday."
"It's Friday."
"I know what day it is," Ghost says, and sits down, and immediately goes to sleep sitting up, which is the single most impressive thing I will witness all week.
He does stand in Bay Three.
I mean that literally. I pull the curtain, I lay out a suture kit, I turn around, and he is standing in the middle of my bay with his arms at his sides like a man waiting for a bus.
"You can sit on the bed."
"I'm good."
"The bed is for sitting on. It's the entire concept of the bed."
"I'll stand."
"Sir—"
"Bear."
"What?"
"Name's Bear."
"Of course it is." I snap on gloves. "Nobody in that club has a normal name, do they. Ghost. Bear. Is there a Chair? A Stairs?"
"There's a guy called Verse."
"What's he do?"
"Tattoos. Poetry."
"Poetry."
"He'd tell you it's a saga tradition going back a thousand years." Bear's mouth moves about a millimetre. "It's poetry. It rhymes and everything. He did one at a funeral last year that rhymed 'Kenny' with 'plenty' and we've all agreed not to discuss it."
"Sit on the bed."
"No."
Nine years. Nine years and I have learned that you never win these head-on. You go around.
"Fine," I say. "Give me the hand."
He gives me the hand.
Here's what I find under the shop rag.
Four knuckles laid open. The middle two badly — split down to the tendon sheath on the third, which is going to need irrigation and about six stitches and is going to hurt in a way he is not going to admit to.
Grit ground into all of it. A wall, he said.
I've seen a lot of walls. Most walls don't leave this much of themselves behind.
"When did this happen?"
"Little while ago."
"How little?"
"Little."
"Bear, I'm going to need you to develop a relationship with units of time."
"Two hours."
"Two hours."
"There was a thing I had to do first."
"Was the thing 'seek medical attention'? Because you'd have gotten a much better grade on it."
And that's when it happens — the first time.
His shoulders move. Once. Almost nothing.
He's got his face locked down like a bank at closing but the shoulders give him away, and I clock it, and I file it, because when a man that size laughs at you it means he's decided you're not the enemy and that is ninety percent of the job.
"This is going to need cleaning out," I say. "It's going to be unpleasant. Sit on the bed."
"I can stand for it."
"I'm five-three."
"So?"
"So I'm not doing microsurgery on tiptoe at one in the morning for a man who is standing up out of spite."
"It's not spite."
"What is it?"
He doesn't answer that.
He sits on the bed.
I irrigate. He doesn't move.
I mean he genuinely doesn't move. I have irrigated a lot of hands and there is always something — a flinch, a hiss, a knee bouncing, some tell.
He sits there with his forearm on the bed table and his eyes on the ceiling tile and he holds absolutely still, and the only sign that any of it is landing is a muscle going in his jaw like something ticking.
"You can swear," I offer.
"I'm all right."
"Most people swear. Denny in Six swore in two languages and he had a hook in him he put there."
"You want me to swear?"
"I want you to be a person. It's unsettling. It's like debriding a statue."
"Debriding."
"It means scrubbing the dirt out of the wound."
"Huh." A pause. "Sounds like a wedding."
"It's really not."
"Sounds like what happens to the bride."
"You know what," I say, "there it is. That's the joke. You've been sitting on that since I walked in, haven't you."
"Since 'sir.'"
I look up.
He looks down.
He's got brown eyes, which I don't know why I expected otherwise, and up close there's a broken vessel in the left one, a red smear across the white. Recent. Within the day. That doesn't come from a wall.
I get the local ready and I don't say anything about it.
Here's the part I think about later. Not that night — later, weeks later, in a cabin up a river with rain on the roof.
The whole time I am working on that hand, he keeps the other one on the bed rail.
Flat. Palm down. Out where I can see it.
He does it the second he sits, and when he shifts his weight once he moves it and then puts it straight back, and when I lean across him for the suture kit he opens the fingers, deliberately, like a man showing a nervous horse an empty hand.
The whole time.
I've had men in this bay in cuffs. I've had men in this bay who spit. I've had a guy come at me with an IV pole in 2019 and I still can't hear a pole rattle without turning around.
Nobody has ever done that. Not once. Not on purpose.
He is proving something to me, and I have not asked him to, and he is not going to mention it, and neither am I.
"Little sting," I say, and inject the local.
He doesn't flinch at that either.
"So what'd the wall do?"
"Existed."
"Bear."
"It was in the lot."
"The wall was in the lot. Doing wall things."
"Minding its business."
"And you—"
"And I had a disagreement with it about whether it should be there."
"Who won?"
He looks at his knuckles, laid open, my hands in them.
"It's still there," he says.
I start the first stitch.
"You're going to have to be more careful with these hands," I tell him.
"That third one is right over the joint.
You keep splitting it, you're going to end up with a knuckle that doesn't want to close.
Then you're the guy who can't open a jar.
Then you're the guy who has to ask Verse to open the jar. "
"That would kill me."
"That would kill you," I agree. "He'd write a poem about it."
"He'd write two."
"Would they rhyme?"
"'Jar,'" Bear says gravely, "and 'so far.'"
"Oh, that's bad."
"'Bear could not open the jar. He had come so very far.'"
"Stop it, I'm holding a needle."
"'And now he weeps beside the car.'"
"I am going to sew your fingers together."
And he laughs.
Not the shoulders. An actual laugh, low, more of a rumble in the chest than a sound, and it goes through the bed frame and into my hands, and I lose the stitch and have to start it again and I do not mind at all.
It takes twenty minutes. Six stitches on the third, four on the second, glue and a dressing on the other two.
At some point in there the tall drunk from Bay Four wanders past the gap in the curtain, spots Bear, salutes him, and walks into the mop bucket. So at least it's not just me.
"Antibiotics," I say, writing. "You'll take them."
"I'll take them."
"You will actually take them. All of them. Not four days and then you feel better and you leave the rest in a drawer with the ketchup packets."
"How do you know about the drawer."
"Every man on this coast has the drawer, Bear. There's like nine drawers and you all share them."
"That's a bad system."
"It's a terrible system." I tear off the script. "Ten days. Come back if it goes red, hot, streaky, or starts smelling like anything at all. Wounds should be boring. If your hand gets interesting, I want to hear about it."
"Boring hand. Got it."
"And keep it dry."
"I work on bikes."
"Then keep it dry heroically."
He stands up off the bed and the room shrinks around him and he looks at the dressing on his hand for a second like it's a strange thing to be given.
"What do I owe you?"
"Front desk."
"No, I mean—" He stops. Starts again, and it's clumsy, and it's the first clumsy thing he's done all night. "You didn't ask."
"Ask what?"
"About the wall."
I cap the pen.
"You told me about the wall," I say. "Twice. I figured the third time wouldn't be any truer."
He looks at me.
Same beat as the doorway. The song in the passing car.
"Marisol," he says. Reading it off my badge — I watch him do it, watch his eyes drop to my chest with the least offensive intent of any man who has ever looked at my chest, and back up. "That's a good name."
"It's my grandmother's."
"She still around?"
"She's ninety-one and she just got a boyfriend."
"Good for her."
"He's eighty-three. She calls him the child."
The rumble again. He nods once, like a man closing a ledger, and goes out through the curtain — sideways, out of habit, shoulders first — and I hear him wake Ghost by saying up one time and Ghost coming awake like a dropped tool, and then the doors, and then the bay.
I stand there in Bay Three with a needle driver in my hand for probably longer than I want to admit.
Then I go and pick up the mop bucket.
Robin catches me at the desk at four. Robin has worked nights here for twenty-two years and knows everything about everyone and considers this a public service.
"That was Sten Kova?."
"Who?"
"Bear. Ravensworn. Sergeant-at-arms."
"That's a job?"
"That's a job." Robin scrolls something, entirely uninterested in whether I want to hear this. "You know the guy at the Anchor last year who put his hands on that waitress? The one who left town?"
"I remember the waitress."
"He left town," Robin says, "because Sten Kova? stood in the parking lot and had a conversation with him."
"Did he hit him?"
"Nobody hit anybody. That's the thing." Robin looks up. "Guy sold his truck."
I think about a palm laid flat on a bed rail for twenty minutes.
"Huh," I say.
"Mm."
"He tell jokes, usually?"
Robin frowns. "Bear? No. Bear doesn't say twelve words in a year."
I go back to Bay Four, where the tall drunk has, at long last, located the chair.
"Ma'am," he says.
"Yes."
"I want to apologize."
"You don't have to apologize."
"I want to apologize," he says, with the terrible sincerity of a man three hours past his own opinion, "for the two beers."
"It's fine."
"It was more than two beers."
"I know."
"How did you know?"
"It's a gift," I tell him, and get his ride sorted, and send all three of them out into the fog at four-forty in the morning like a bag of cats.
Denny goes home with his thumb wrapped and a lecture about tetanus. The earache in Two turns out to be an earache, which is such a rare and beautiful outcome that I write it up with something close to affection.
And at five-fifteen, when there is nobody left in the department at all, I do the thing I do.
I go out through the north stairwell and up the service ladder onto the roof over the ambulance bay.
It's twenty-two rungs, which I know because I've been counting them for nine years, and there's a folded blanket in the vent housing that I put there in 2019 and that nobody has ever asked about, and there's an air conditioner unit the exact height of a bench.
The fog's in. The harbor's all soft orange. Out past the breakwater there's a crab boat going out with its deck lights on, and I sit up there with the blanket around my shoulders and watch it until it's gone.
Fifteen minutes. That's all it is.
It's the only fifteen minutes in the entire week that nobody has a claim on. Not the department, not my mother, not Eddie, not a single one of the four hundred people who will walk through those doors this month with a thing that is going wrong.
And I sit there, five-fifteen in the morning, at the exact center of my own life, and what I am thinking about — what I am, in fact, unable to stop thinking about — is a man the size of a bus sitting on my exam bed making an extremely stupid rhyme about a jar.
"No," I say, out loud, to the fog.
The fog does nothing. That's the fog's whole position on everything.
I go back down and finish my notes.