The Panther’s Edge (Bathhouse Beasts #16)

1

“You’re not a doctor.”

The old man in bed six glared up at me like I’d personally offended him by existing.

He was seventy-one years old, drunk as a skunk, and bleeding from a two-inch gash on his scalp where he’d met the corner of his kitchen counter on the way down from a step stool.

His wife sat in the corner chair, holding his glasses and mouthing sorry at me every time he opened his mouth.

“No sir, I’m a nurse,” I said, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves. “But I promise I’ve stapled more heads than most doctors in this building.”

“I want the doctor.”

“The doctor is the one who told me to staple your head. That’s how much he trusts me.”

He worked on that for a second, then let out a laugh that turned into a cough, and just like that the fight went out of him.

I cleaned the wound and put four staples in while his wife told me all about their granddaughter who moved up to Traverse City earlier that spring.

He held still the whole time, leaning into my palm like a big old dog.

People did that, once they decided you weren’t going to hurt them. They just accepted it.

I discharged him a little after one in the morning with a head full of staples and a printout about alcohol and fall risks that we both knew was going straight into the recycling. On the way out, his wife grabbed my forearm and squeezed.

“Thank you for being kind to him,” she said. “He’s scared of hospitals.”

“Everybody is,” I told her. “He did great.”

Then they were gone through the double doors, and I went back to the board.

Chest pain in four. Feverish kid in nine.

Psych hold in eleven still waiting on placement, fourteen hours and counting.

Ambulance three minutes out with a possible stroke.

The board never emptied. It just shifted names in and out, like one big never ending breath.

I grabbed a sip of cold coffee at the nurses’ station and kept moving.

“Wes,” one of the other nurses called from down the hall. “I need your help in here.”

Back to work. That’s how it always was.

I’d been an emergency department nurse for seventeen years, and I’d worked the night shift for the last eleven of them. If you want to know what that does to a man’s life, all you have to do is look at my kitchen.

There’s nothing in it. A coffee maker, a microwave, and a dish rack with exactly one plate, one bowl, one mug, and one fork.

Somewhere in my closet there’s a box of my mother’s recipe cards, including the good pierogi recipe with the grease stain on the corner, and I haven’t opened that box in the six years I’ve lived in the apartment.

I used to cook. I used to do a lot of things. I used to have a life.

That’s the thing about nights that nobody tells you when you sign up for the differential.

It’s not a schedule, it’s a different world.

Your friends live their whole lives while you’re asleep or at work.

They invite you to weddings and birthdays and barbecues, and you say no because you’re coming off a three-in-a-row.

And after enough years of that they stop asking.

Not because they’re bad friends or because they don’t like you.

Just because you’ve become a person who isn’t available, and eventually the world gets the hint.

Dating was even worse of course. I dated a respiratory therapist named Danny for a year and a half that I met on the job.

And for a while I thought I had it figured out.

Same schedule, same upside-down life. We slept through the same afternoons and ate breakfast together as the sun went down and complained about the same doctors.

Then he took a day job on the other side of town.

It had real hours, actual sunlight, and he even asked me to come with him.

I looked around my life for a reason to say no, and I couldn’t find one.

But then I said no anyway. I still don’t entirely understand why.

That was four years ago. Since then, it had been a couple of dating app hookups and one very stupid night with a travel nurse that made the break room awkward for three months.

So that was my life. I worked my three nights in a row, drove home at eight in the morning with the sun coming up like I always did.

I had blackout curtains, I slept until four, and I hit the gym when it was empty.

All my meals were eaten standing over the sink, with my one bowl in hand, as I watched the same ten minutes of a movie made twenty years ago.

Twelve hours a night with my hands on other people’s bodies.

Lifting them, turning them, holding pressure, holding their hands when the news was bad.

And then home to an apartment where the last person to touch me was a seventy-something wife squeezing my forearm on her way out the door.

I wasn’t unhappy. That’s the part that’s hard to explain. I liked my job, I was good at it, and the nights suited something in me. But there was a cost, and I’d been paying it so long I’d stopped noticing the withdrawals.

Until the night Mr. Okafor died.

Mr. Okafor was one of our regulars. Congestive heart failure, seventy-eight years old, and a kitsune.

He came in every few weeks when the fluid got ahead of his meds.

He was also the sweetest man in the entire city.

He’d been a mail carrier for forty years, same route the whole time, and if you gave him the smallest opening he’d tell you about delivering through the blizzards of the seventies that broke all the records, back when creatures like him had to wear human forms to get through the world.

I always gave him the opening. Listening to Mr. Okafor was better than anything else happening in that building.

His daughter worked days at the university, so he always came in at night, alone, by ambulance. Usually we’d have him diuresed and comfortable by the time she got there, and she’d find him sitting up in bed holding court with whoever would listen.

He came in at two in the morning on a Thursday, and he was wrong from the moment they rolled him through the doors.

I’d done this job long enough to know what’s going on before the monitor does.

I got the doctor. We did everything right, and everything went the way it was supposed to go, and at 4:51 in the morning he died anyway, before his daughter could get there.

I was the one who called her. I was the one standing in the family room when she came through the door with her coat thrown on over her pajamas, and I was the one who caught her when her legs gave out.

She cried into my scrubs for ten minutes, and I held her up and said the things you’re supposed to say.

And then the charge nurse took her back to sit with him, and I went back out to the floor.

Because the board was full. The board was always full.

I finished the shift. I gave report. I honestly don’t remember a word of it.

What I remember is the parking garage afterward.

Level two where I always parked, freezing cold concrete, and my keys in my hand.

I stood at the door of my truck and I could not think of a single reason to open it.

Not in a scary way. I wasn’t going to hurt myself.

It was simpler and sadder than that. I just couldn’t picture what was on the other side of the drive home.

The blackout curtains. The one plate and the one fork.

Half a movie. I stood there running the math on my own life, and the total kept coming up short.

Tears ran down my face and I didn’t understand why.

That was where Roz found me.

Roz had been a charge nurse since before I graduated high school.

She was fifty-eight years old, built like a fire hydrant, raised three boys, buried one husband, and ran our department the way a good captain runs a ship.

Nothing rattled her. Nothing got past her either, which was the part I always forgot.

She was leaning against the concrete pillar next to my truck with her bag over her shoulder, like she just happened to be there. Roz never just happened to be anywhere.

“Bad one?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Didn’t ask if you were fine.”

I looked away and blinked hard a couple of times, trying to stop the tears. It was almost six in the morning in a parking garage.

“I liked him,” I finally said. “The blizzard of ’78. He walked his whole route. Not one person got their mail late.”

“I know,” she said. “He told me. Twice.”

“He told everybody.”

“He sure did.”