10. Leave the Jacket
Chapter ten
Leave the Jacket
OWEN
Three vehicles. One pickup on its side in the ditch, one sedan accordioned into a fence post, one minivan sitting crooked in the middle of Juniper Lane with its airbags hanging out like spent parachutes.
And a little yellow cottage forty yards past all of it, porch light on, untouched.
I count the house numbers while I work. Can't help it. 1287. The wreck sits at 1263.
Forty yards. A man could throw a rock that far.
"Peterson." Tater's voice cuts through. "Passenger side. She's pinned at the ankle, not the leg. Talk to me."
I get my head where it belongs. The woman in the sedan is sixty-something, scared, breathing fine.
The dash has her foot, not her bones. We take the door with the spreaders and I keep her talking the whole time.
Grandkids in Waco. A cat named Biscuit. She tells me my eyes are kind and I don't correct her.
The minivan family walks away with seatbelt bruises. The kid in the pickup, the one who caused the whole mess texting, breaks his collarbone and his phone, and I've got no sympathy to spare for either.
Last patient loads at 11:40. Tater claps my shoulder.
"Good work. Go home."
"Yeah."
I don't go home.
***
The ER at midnight is a lit box in a dark town, and I walk into it like I've got a reason.
I do have a reason. She's standing at the board with a pen in her teeth, hair coming loose from whatever she did to it at seven o'clock, and every patient off that scene is on her list.
She sees me. Takes the pen out of her mouth.
"You're bleeding," she says.
"I'm not."
She points at my temple. I put my fingers up and they come back red. Huh. Somewhere between the spreaders and the glass, something got me and I never felt it.
"Sit," she says.
"It's a scratch."
"Sit down, Peterson, or I'll chart you as combative and get orderlies involved."
I sit.
She cleans it standing over me, close enough that I can smell antiseptic and underneath it something warmer. Her fingers are steady on my jaw, tilting my head to the light. Neither of us says a word about the wreck being on her street. Neither of us has to. She knows why I'm here. I know she knows.
"Butterfly closure," she says. "You'll live."
"Been told that before."
"Well." She presses the strip down with her thumb, soft. "Now it's official."
The doors bang open behind us. Two more coming in, delayed presentations from the scene, a chest pain and a dizzy spell, and the night quits pretending it's over.
"You should go," she says, already moving.
"You short-handed?"
She stops. Looks at me a beat longer than the question needs. "Deb's out. Flu's got half the floor."
"Then I'm not going anywhere."
***
Here's what nobody tells you about the middle of the night in a small hospital. It runs on maybe six people and a coffee pot older than the engine we're raising money for.
I can't do nurse work. But I can lift, and carry, and hold a confused old man's hand while she draws his blood, and run to the pharmacy window, and stand in a doorway looking large when a drunk gets loud about his wait time.
Turns out I'm real good at looking large.
And here's the other thing. We don't fight. Not once, all night.
There's no time for it, but that's not why.
It's the same thing that happened on Main Street with the little boy's arm, stretched out over six hours instead of six minutes.
She says "I need," and my hand's already there with it.
I move a gurney and she's turned sideways to let me through before I've said a word.
Half sentences. Quarter sentences. A look across a bed that's a whole paragraph.
At two in the morning, she catches me watching her calm down a scared teenager, and she doesn't stop what she's doing, but the corner of her mouth moves.
At two-thirty I catch her watching me carry a sleeping toddler to radiology so his mama can fill out forms, and she doesn't look away.
We are in so much trouble, both of us. I know it the way I know a floor's about to go. You feel it in your feet before you hear it.
***
Three a.m. The board finally clears.
The dizzy spell's admitted, the drunk's sleeping it off, the chest pain was heartburn and a bad marriage. The lights in the back hallway are half-down, and the whole building breathes out at once.
I find her in the supply corridor.
She's standing at the shelving with a clipboard she isn't reading, and when I come around the corner she doesn't startle. Like she heard my boots and knew them.
"Restocking," she says.
"Uh-huh."
"It's a critical part of the job."
"Clipboard's upside down."
She looks at it. It is not upside down. She turns and glares at me and I'm already too close, and I don't remember crossing the space, and I don't think she remembers reaching out either, but her hand's got my sleeve and my back hits the shelving or hers does, I honest to God could not tell you which.
We stop with nothing left to stop.
Her forehead against mine. My hand's found the hem of her scrub top and closed into a fist in it, knuckles against her hip. Her fingers slide under the edge of my shirt and land on bare skin at my side, cool and steady, nurse's hands, and my whole body forgets what year it is.
"This is a bad idea," she whispers.
"Terrible."
"You're leaving in the fall."
"You're leaving in nine weeks."
"Exactly." Her breath hits my mouth when she says it. She's not moving back. Her thumb draws one slow line along my ribs like she's counting them. "I leave, Owen. That's the whole rule. That's the only rule I've got."
Her mouth is one inch from mine. Less. I can feel the shape of every word she's saying.
"Then we've got nine weeks," I say.
Her breath catches. Her fist tightens in my shirt. She tips her chin up that last half inch—
"NELLIE?" Debbie Sue's voice comes down the corridor like a freight train. "Girl, where'd you put the—"
We come apart so fast the shelving rattles. A box of gloves hits the floor.
My hand goes flat against my sternum. The ring, under the shirt. Old reflex, two years deep, and I don't catch it happening till it's done.
Her eyes flick to my hand. She doesn't ask. I watch her not ask.
Nellie's got the clipboard up like a shield and I'm three feet away studying a wall of saline bags like I'm fixin' to buy some.
Debbie rounds the corner in street clothes, looking like death warmed over, and stops dead.
She looks at Nellie. She looks at me. She looks at the gloves on the floor.
"I came in to cover the morning gap," she says slowly. "But I can leave."
"Debbie."
"I can turn around and drive right back home."
"Debbie."
"Restocking," I say, and pick up the gloves.
Nobody in that hallway believes me, including the gloves.
Dawn's coming up gray when I finally head for the doors. Shift change is trickling in. Somewhere behind me Debbie is talking sixty miles an hour and Nellie is saying "nothing happened" in a voice that would not convince a jury of the deaf.
I stop at the supply corridor on my way out.
My flannel's been riding my shoulders since midnight, the same one we knotted into a sling for Billie's arm on Main Street, the one Nellie's hands were all over while we worked.
I take it off. I fold it once. I set it on the shelf next to the saline, deliberate as a man leaving his hat on a hook in a house he means to come back to.
Then I walk out into the parking lot like I didn't do a thing.
Ten steps. That's how far I make it before I turn around, because I'm thirty-four years old and I have the self-control of a teenager, apparently, and I look back through the glass doors.
She's standing in the corridor. She's found it already.
I watch her look up and down the hallway. I watch her check that Debbie's gone. I watch Nellie Greer, who has a rule, who leaves in nine weeks, who told me twice tonight this was a bad idea, pick up my flannel and put it on. Sleeves too long. She rolls them like she's done it before.
It's my shirt. Cut for my shoulders. On her it goes snug at the chest and the hips and hangs loose everywhere else, and the sight of it does something caveman-simple to me that I would deny under oath.
Then she does the thing that finishes me.
She pulls the collar up to her face. Closes her eyes. Breathes it in.
And opens her eyes straight into mine through the glass.
Neither of us moves. The sun's not up. The doors don't open. She doesn't take it off and I don't look away, and somewhere under my sternum, right where a ring on a chain has been sitting for two years, something goes loose that I thought was welded shut.
She raises one eyebrow. Well? it says. You saw. Now what?
I walk to my truck grinning like an idiot, first time in two years, and I've got one thought going around and around like tones dropping in an empty station:
I am in so much trouble.
And nine weeks is not going to be enough.