24. Lockdown
Lockdown
NORA
September eighth came and went somewhere in that week. Knox said happy birthday when I woke up and asked if I wanted to do anything at all, and I said no. That night he ordered takeout and put a plate in front of me, and I ate some of it because he was watching.
I went back to work because the duplex without Ian was worse.
His room was at the end of the hall with the door closed.
His shoes sat by the front door because I'd tried putting them in the closet and couldn't leave them there.
Knox didn't move any of it. He let me decide when.
But every hour I spent in that house was another hour of the quiet where my brother was supposed to be, and eventually I couldn't take another one.
The ER had patients and a clock. It would give me something to do with my hands.
The morning I came back, Liz and Jen were waiting at my locker.
Liz was holding a Tupperware container with cupcakes inside, chocolate frosting, lopsided and homemade. Jen stood behind her with her arms at her sides.
"We made these for you," Liz said. "We're sorry about your brother, Nora."
I thanked them and took the container, expecting that to be all of it. But they didn't leave. Liz glanced at Jen, and Jen looked at the floor before she looked at me.
"We wanted to tell you something else," Jen said. "About what we told Dr. Sullivan."
I set the container on the bench.
"The things we said about you and Dr. Harlan." Liz's voice dropped. "We made it up. We told Sullivan you were involved with a married attending, and none of it was true. We knew it wasn't true when we said it."
I stood there looking at them. Two women who had spent months making my life on this floor harder than it needed to be. They had carried a lie about me to Knox's father, and that lie had shaped how Cliff Sullivan saw me from the moment I sat down at his dinner table.
And now they were telling me the truth.
Months ago, this would have sent me home shaking.
But Ian was dead, and his death had rearranged the scale of everything that came before it.
What Liz and Jen had done to me was real.
It had cost me something real. And it was so small beside what I'd lost that I couldn't find it in me to hold on to it anymore.
The apology might have been sincere. It might not have lasted past this conversation.
Either way, I was putting it down. Not for them.
For me. Because I had already lost the thing that mattered most, and I was not going to spend what I had left carrying the weight of two women who might never change.
"Thank you for telling me," I said. "I forgive you."
Liz blinked. She'd come prepared for something harder.
Jen's eyes filled. She pressed her lips together and nodded, and for a moment she looked like someone I hadn't seen before.
I picked up the container, set it on the shelf in my locker, and closed the door.
The floor was steady through the morning. Josie had the board, Sullivan and Harlan were splitting the bays. I worked my assignment like every shift before Ian died: one patient at a time, one chart at a time, one hour at a time. It was good to have something in my hands again.
The first gunshot wound came in after lunch.
Ambulance transport, a woman in her forties caught in crossfire outside a convenience store on Tropicana.
Bystander. Sullivan took the lead while I drew the blood, hung the line, charted the vitals.
Through-and-through. We stabilized her and moved her to a bay.
We were still cleaning up when tires screeched on the ramp outside.
A car pulled up to the bay doors and two men hauled a kid out of the backseat, dropped him on the concrete, and ran back to the car.
Before they could pull away, a second car came in behind them with another body.
The men from the first car started shouting at the men from the second. Security moved toward the doors.
Then a gunshot cracked across the parking lot.
One shot, then two more. The men on the ramp dropped flat and someone in the waiting room screamed.
The wounded were still on the concrete. Security and two techs rushed the bay doors, grabbed whoever they could reach, and hauled them inside.
The wounded, the drivers, all of them, pulled off the ramp and into the department before the doors sealed behind them.
Josie paged overhead. Her voice was steady and it carried through every room in the department.
"Attention all staff. We are initiating a facility lockdown effective immediately. All external access points are being secured. No entry, no exit. LVMPD has been contacted. Security to all entrances. This is not a drill."
The locks engaged, running down the corridor one door after another, sealing us in.
I grabbed gloves and went to work.