11. Fall Risk
Chapter eleven
Fall Risk
NELLIE
The sky over Willowbend turns green at four o'clock, and every nurse in Texas knows what green means.
Green means the ER fills up by seven. Green means chainsaw hands and ladder falls and one fool who tried to move his boat. Green means go home while you can.
The charge nurse cuts half of us loose at five. "Go home while the roads still know they're roads." I drive with the radio hollering about a gulf storm nobody's naming yet, wind shoving the car sideways at the four-way stop.
I'm wearing his flannel. Have been since he left it.
That's the other thing. Owen Peterson has been in this town barely two weeks and the last three days he keeps happening to me.
The morning after the corridor, he happens to be leaning on the ER desk when I come off a code, holding two coffees.
"How do you know how I take my coffee?"
He shrugs. That's it. That's the answer, all of it.
Then he walks off like he didn't hand me a live grenade in a paper cup.
The next day I swing by the station with two dozen kolaches I happened to buy. For no reason.
Half the town has money on us. That afternoon, June leans over the bakery counter with my change and doesn't let go of it.
"I've got Labor Day," she says. "Is that realistic?"
"I leave in eight weeks, June."
She pats my hand. "Sure you do, honey."
Debbie's worse. Yesterday I come up to the nurses' station and there's a drawing on the whiteboard. A little flame. A little heart. A plus sign between them.
Debbie's standing next to it drinking her coffee like it's the weather report.
"What is that."
"Art."
"Erase it."
"Can't." She taps the marker against the board. "It's load-bearing now."
I have a rule. Eight weeks left on the contract, and the rule is the rule.
The rule does not explain why I've stopped sleeping on the left side of the bed. Like I'm saving room.
By eight the power's out on Juniper Lane. By nine the rain's going sideways and something upstairs makes a sound like the house getting shot.
I take the stairs with a flashlight. The attic window is gone. Not cracked. Gone. A live oak limb came through it like a fist, and rain is pouring onto forty years of somebody else's Christmas boxes.
It's a rental. It's not my house, not my boxes, not my problem.
I trade his flannel for my rain shell at the back door. That shirt's not mine to ruin.
I'm up the ladder in six minutes.
Because here's the thing about a woman who never stays anywhere. She cannot stand watching something get ruined that she could've saved. Ask my therapist. If I had one. If I stayed anywhere long enough to get one.
The tarp fights me the whole way. Wind grabs it like a sail, rain runs cold down my sleeves, and I've got a staple gun in my waistband and a bad attitude, and I am winning. Mostly.
Headlights swing into the drive.
I know the truck before I see it. Of course I do.
"NELLIE." Owen's out and moving, still in his station tee, soaked in three steps. "Get down off that ladder!"
"I'm fine!"
"You're on an aluminum ladder in a lightning storm!"
"Then quit distracting me!"
He doesn't argue. That's the scary part.
He climbs up beside me, takes the tarp corner out of my hands like I wasn't fighting it perfectly well.
"I had it," I say.
"You had it, sugar? You were about to sail into the next county."
"And you'd have what, caught me?"
"Yep." He hammers a nail through the grommet. Doesn't even look up. "I'd catch you."
Water streams off his jaw. He looks at the tarp, at the limb, at me.
"You're doing it wrong," he says.
"I will staple you to this roof."
"Corner first. Windward side. Trade me."
We trade. And it works, is the infuriating part. Same as the wreck on Main, same as the ER at three a.m. He pulls, I staple, he calls the next corner before I ask. Four hands, one brain. The tarp goes down tight and beautiful and I'm grinning in the rain like an idiot.
"Not bad, Peterson."
"Not bad yourself, Greer." He's grinning too. Rain in his lashes. "Now get down before God notices us up here."
Thunder rolls somewhere over the county line, long and low, like the sky clearing its throat.
"Why are you even here?" I holler over it.
"Storm knocked the scanner out at the station. Figured I'd check the lane on my way home."
"You live the other direction."
He wipes rain off his face with the back of his wrist. Doesn't answer that. Doesn't have to. The betting pool would riot.
I swing onto the ladder first. He steadies it from the roof edge, waits till I'm three rungs down, then follows.
He's two rungs above me, boots still level with the gutter, when the gust comes out of nowhere.
The tarp corner rips loose with a crack like a gunshot, whips past my face, and I flinch, and the ladder feet skate on the wet gravel, and the whole world tilts.
Here's what I will remember for the rest of my life. He has half a second. Half a second, both of us falling, and I watch him choose.
He twists. Grabs my jacket with both fists and throws me. Not down. Up and sideways, onto the low slope of the porch roof, where I land on shingles and sliding and safe.
Owen takes the fall alone.
There's a sound. I hear it through the rain and I know it, because I've heard it in trauma bays, and it is never, ever good.
"Owen!"
He's on the flagstone path. On his back. Not moving the way people move when they're okay.
I don't remember getting off the roof.
Then I'm kneeling in the gravel and the nurse takes over, thank God, because Nellie is screaming somewhere in the back of my skull and the nurse is calm as church.
Airway clear. He's breathing. He's conscious. Pupils fine.
His right leg is wrong.
Lower leg, angulated, mid-shaft. And below the knee, through the soaked denim, white. Bone. Open fracture, tib-fib, the storm hitting it.
"Okay," the nurse says with my mouth. "Okay, sugar, don't move. Don't you move."
"Nellie." His voice is gray. His face is gray.
"Don't look at it. Look at me." I strip my jacket and pack it around the leg. My hands are shaking. My voice isn't. I don't know how the body does that. "Can you feel your toes?"
"Yeah."
"Wiggle them."
"They're wiggling."
"Good boy." I get my phone out. Water on the screen, three tries to dial. "This is Nellie Greer, I'm an NP at Willowbend General, I need a rig at 1287 Juniper Lane, adult male, open tib-fib fracture from a fall, alert and oriented, send them now."
I put the phone on speaker in the gravel and hold pressure and count his breaths and watch the rain wash pink off the stones and my heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
He's watching me. Fool man is smiling.
"Don't," I say.
"See?" It comes out thin. Broken through the pain. "Told you I'd catch you."
"Shut up. Shut up, Owen." My eyes are burning and it is not rain. "You didn't catch me, you idiot, you threw me at a roof."
"Same thing."
"It is not the same thing!"
"You're not hurt." He says it like a diagnosis. Like it settles everything. "So it worked."
The sirens come up Juniper Lane loud enough to feel. Lights turn the rain red, then blue, then red. Randy and Beto pile out with the gurney, and Randy sees who's on the ground and says a word his mama wouldn't like.
"Fall from about ten feet," I hear myself say. Steady. Flat. A stranger's voice using my mouth. "Open tib-fib, right leg. Distal pulses present. No loss of consciousness. He needs a splint, fluids, and fentanyl, and he needs County, not us. Move."
"Yes, ma'am," Beto says, and moves.
My hands are still shaking. My voice never heard about it.
They log-roll him to the board and he makes a sound through his teeth that I am going to hear at two in the morning for the rest of my life.
"Ma'am, we've got him," Randy says, gentle, the way you talk to family.
Family. I open my mouth to correct him.
Nothing comes out.
I climb in the rig. Nobody stops me. Nobody in this town would dare.
Beto's got the line in, Randy's calling County for ortho, and the doors are still open, rain blowing in, and Owen's hand comes off the board and finds my wrist.
Grips it. Hard. Fentanyl on board and his grip is still iron.
"Don't leave," he says.
He means the ambulance. He means ride along, stay in the rig.
That's what he means.
But his eyes are locked on mine and his thumb is pressed to my pulse like he's counting it, and the words go through me and hit something way, way down. Some floor I forgot my house had.
"I'm right here," I say.
The doors slam. The siren winds up. Beto calls a five-minute ETA and the rig rolls, and I sit there in soaked scrubs holding the hand of a man with his bone through his skin, a man who had half a second and spent it on me.
Eleven schools. A packed box in every closet I've ever had. Thirty years of leaving first because leaving first is tidier, and not one soul on this earth has ever put me down soft and taken the fall himself. e soul on this earth has ever, not once, put me down soft and taken the fall himself.
The monitor beeps. His grip doesn't ease.
And there in the screaming red dark of that ambulance, the truth lands on me heavier than any tree limb ever could.
He fell because of me.