1. Under the Stars #2
The front door opened and two guys in fire station t-shirts walked in. They went straight to the counter, said something to the waitress, and waited. Pickup order.
"I saw that."
"Saw what?"
"You're looking at them."
"At who?"
"You were looking at those firefighters that dropped off that guy this afternoon too."
I picked up my water. "Was I?"
"You have a thing for them." She leaned forward. "Come on, Nora. You're gorgeous! Why don't you just go ask one of them out?"
"I don't have time for that. You know I don't have time."
"You're working now. You're a real nurse in a real ER. You're not juggling school and work anymore." She pointed at me across the table. "You deserve to have some fun."
She was right. For six years I'd been running on two tracks at once: school during the day, CNA shifts at night. There was no off switch. No weekend that was actually a weekend. Just the next shift, the next exam, the next bill, the next thing Ian needed.
And now I was here. One job. A real schedule. Days off that were actually days off. I should have felt lighter. Gracelyn could see it, even if I couldn't.
The problem was I had no idea how to stop.
You run that hard for that long and your body forgets what rest is supposed to feel like.
I'd sit on my couch on a day off and feel guilty for sitting.
I'd look at the clock and think I should be somewhere.
Six years of barely holding it together, and now that I didn't have to, I couldn't figure out what to do with my hands.
I looked down at the menu the waitress had left on the edge of the table.
"I think I'll order another to-go for Ian's lunch tomorrow."
The house was dark when I got home. Ian's shoes weren't by the door.
I put the paper bag with his chicken tenders in the fridge and pulled out my phone.
NORA
What time are you coming home?
I waited a few seconds. No reply. He was probably still at Jesse's, deep in whatever project they were working on. I set the phone on the counter.
The shower was the first quiet I'd had to myself all day. I stood under the hot water until every bit of the shift washed off me. The blood, the noise, the screaming kid on the pavement. All of it down the drain.
I pulled on a t-shirt and shorts and turned on the TV, kept the volume low. The house felt too still without Ian in it. I was used to coming home and finding him on the couch with his feet on the armrest and the remote balanced on his chest. Without him there, the rooms felt bigger than they were.
I opened the fridge and checked the meal prep I'd done on Sunday. Containers lined up on the second shelf, labeled and dated. Enough for the rest of the week. Everything accounted for.
I closed the fridge, sat down on the sofa, and waited.
A cartoon was playing on one of the cable channels. I almost changed it, but then the theme song started and I stopped.
Ian used to love this show. He'd sit on the living room floor with his cereal bowl balanced on his knees and watch three episodes back to back before school.
He was five. I was fourteen, already running late, shoving textbooks into my bag while he sat there laughing at a cartoon fox who couldn't figure out how to cross a river.
We were nine years apart. I'd spent years begging my parents for a little brother or sister, and when Ian was born, I was the happiest kid. I carried him around the house like he was mine. Changed his diapers, fed him his bottle, read to him until he fell asleep on my shoulder.
Now that baby boy was turning seventeen.
I left the cartoon on.
The front door clicked. "I'm home!"
"Hey! Have you had dinner?"
"Yeah, Jesse ordered pizza for the group." He dropped his bag by the door and kicked off his shoes.
"What project are you working on?"
"Something for history."
"Cool." I pulled a blanket over my legs and muted the TV. "I brought you some chicken tenders. They're in the fridge. You can have them for lunch tomorrow."
"Nice!" He was already halfway down the hall. "Is it anything like the tenders from Chunky's?"
"Nah. Sadly. But they're good. Just not as good."
He opened the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. "Ah well. I don't think anything's ever gonna come close." He cracked the cap and took a long drink.
"Shame."
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "How was work?"
"Hellish as always." I tucked my feet under the blanket. "I spent most of the afternoon with my fingers in somebody's neck wound. And then a kid got dumped on our ramp with a stab wound in his leg."
"Cool!"
"No. Not cool, Ian. He was about your age. Most likely got stabbed over something gang-related."
Ian stopped with the water bottle halfway to his mouth.
"How do you know that?"
"We get a lot of dump and run cases. Someone gets hurt, their friends drive them to the ER and take off before anyone can ask questions. Metro sends a detective every time."
"That's wild." He took another drink. "Did he make it?"
"He went up to surgery. Should be fine." I looked at him. "Just promise me you'll be careful out there."
"I'm always careful." He screwed the cap back on. "I'll just go shower."
"I'm heading to bed in a bit."
"Goodnight!"
His door closed. The shower started a minute later.
I sat back down and pulled the blanket over my legs. The cartoon was still on.
In a lot of ways, I was lucky. If working in the ER had taught me anything about teenagers, it was that not every kid Ian's age was as easy as my brother.
And Ian had more reason than most not to be.
Our father died when he was nine. Our mother handled the grief with alcohol, then pills, and overdosed two years later when Ian was eleven.
I was twenty when I became his legal guardian and I was rarely home, trying to juggle school and work to keep us above water.
I could only give Ian my early mornings before he left for school, a few hours at night before he went to bed, and not much in between.
It wasn't ideal, but it was what we needed to survive.
Ian had every reason to make this hard for me. He never did.
The cartoon finished. I folded the blanket, turned the TV off, and closed up for the night.
Sometimes when the shift ran too long or the weight of things got too heavy, I came up to the roof, sat with my back against the warm stucco, and just looked up at the night sky.
You couldn't see much. Vegas took most of the stars.
The Strip put its light into the western sky and washed out everything above it, so what was left was a handful of bright ones and the rest just darkness.
On a clear night I could find maybe ten if I really looked.
It was silly. I knew it was silly. But I liked to pretend that everything was already written up there, and if I stared long enough, it would start to make sense.
That everything we'd been through and everything that was coming had a shape to it like a pattern that someone decided before I was born, and I wasn't just stumbling through it alone.
It had been a long day. So I went to my room, climbed through the window, and sat on the roof.
Something streaked across the sky. For half a second I thought it was a shooting star. Then the blinking lights caught up with it and it was just a plane heading into Harry Reid.
I couldn't stop thinking about the man with the open neck wound, asking me if he was going to die.
I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them.
Two years ago, I wasn't even out of nursing school.
I held another man together in a parking lot while we waited for a helicopter.
His neck was open from his ear to his collarbone and I kept my hands on it until they took him from me.
I wasn't able to find him again, and a part of me had been wondering ever since whether the first man I ever held together made it through the night.
I didn't remember his name. But I still remembered his face, and how he couldn't answer me when I asked him to tell me about himself.
Somewhere out there, under the same washed-out stars, there was a man with a scar from his ear to his collarbone. Or there wasn't.
I sat with that for a while. Then I went inside.