Chapter 2 Taylor
Taylor
Taylor’s morning walk to work is typical Boston-dreary and gray: steel skies the color of metal office buildings, late February wind gusts that howl through her thin nursing scrubs, dirt-tinged heaps of snow piled on uneven brick sidewalks. Gray, gray, gray.
She lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Boston’s South End neighborhood, so at the beginning of each twelve-hour shift—which is an ungodly, unmentionable hour—she traverses through a city still shrugging off the dark.
If she were to draw a line on a map from her apartment to Mass General Hospital, it is a diagonal, like an arrow piercing the city’s heart, but given the old, winding streets, the actual walking route resembles more of a zigzag.
The jagged, switchback-ridden path has stones laid as if to trip one up and crooked brick walls that tilt and loom, as if struggling to carry the history they hold.
There’s an uneventful feel to this particular day, like time is cycling in a tiresome loop.
The ER hums and beeps like a machine that is both well-oiled and in need of constant repair: too many patients and not enough beds or nurses or doctors.
They are particularly short-staffed, as flu season is currently reigning like a smug queen, and Taylor doesn’t get a chance to sit down—let alone use the bathroom—until late afternoon.
But this is nothing new; she’s used to shoving aside her own needs while working as a nurse.
Part of her relishes the way the minutes disappear in the ER—it doesn’t allow her to indulge in a pity party of her current situation—but she also loathes it; resentful of how she gets pulled in too many directions like a piece of saltwater taffy, fielding endless questions, chasing down doctors and missing medications, dodging the continual barrage of patients’ frustrations unfairly hurled at her.
At the end of each shift, she’s usually worn thin, the taffy about to break.
Taylor squeezes in her sad excuse of a lunch break around three o’clock and makes it only halfway through a homemade turkey sandwich before being informed she’s getting the next patient.
She rewraps the remnants and puts them back in the communal fridge, where they’ll be neglected until dinnertime, or later, then goes to set up the patient’s room.
“February in Boston almost makes me want to move back down south,” her Aunt Gigi remarks, looking out the small window of the empty patient room Taylor is readying.
“It’s colder today than a witch’s teat in a brass bra.
” Aunt Gigi is the head nurse of the surgical ICU upstairs, and the one who got Taylor a job here in the ER—something that she often reminds Taylor.
Taylor pauses priming the IV bag to glance out the window herself.
Like all the windows on this side of the ER, it depressingly faces a brick wall of an adjacent hospital building and makes Taylor feel suffocated in a way she knows she can’t dwell on.
Not here, not now. At some point, she’ll need to address it; the claustrophobia has been lurking lately, like an old acquaintance waiting to be acknowledged.
“Acquaintance” isn’t right, though, is it?
It’s more like a foe, the way it slides its hands around her neck, grasping much too tightly.
She quickly jerks away from the window and focuses on capping the end of the IV.
“This weather must make you miss home, T.J.,” Aunt Gigi continues. “It must be, what, in the high fifties there today? Only a measly thirty-degree difference.”
“No, I don’t miss home at all,” Taylor is too quick to answer.
“Tell me how you really feel.”
“Well, you left North Carolina when you were my age. And you never really came back,” Taylor points out.
“True, true. But I was following my husband to his medical residency.”
“Well. I followed my job.”
“The job I got you.”
There it is.
“Yes, Aunt Gigi, I’m very grateful.” Taylor resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Aunt Gigi likes to come check in on Taylor from time to time, even though she is doing just fine off orientation. Taylor can’t figure if her aunt is concerned about her nursing performance or simply fulfilling some sort of promise to Taylor’s dad.
Aunt Gigi could also be doing it because she simply likes Taylor’s company, but given how absent her aunt has been for most of Taylor’s twenty-five-year-old life, she doubts it.
“I always have somewhere to be. The ICU is nonstop,” Aunt Gigi says, with a sigh, before finally leaving.
Taylor’s shoulders relax, and she takes a deep, cleansing breath. She’s relieved she’s no longer being watched by her aunt, but it’s a complicated, guilty relief. Apart from her father, Aunt Gigi is Taylor’s only living relative.
Taylor grabs a 20-gauge, 18-gauge, and 16-gauge needle each from the medicine cart and lines them up in a row.
A 16-gauge IV is always preferable—you want a bigger hole to flush in as many fluids as you may need—but you never know the shape the veins of the patient may be, and Taylor likes to be prepared.
She doesn’t yet feel confident in her ER nurse position the way she did those three years while working as an orthopedic nurse back home in North Carolina.
It’s hardly surprising; being in an orthopedic rehab center in a southern coastal town is vastly different from the ER at the place they call “MGH, or Man’s Greatest Hospital,” after all, but she won’t admit this to her aunt.
Nor to anyone. Taylor adds it to a growing list of things she is keeping to herself: How because Boston is so expensive, she’s sent her dad money only a couple of times, far less than she planned.
How sometimes, when she’s had extra cash, she’s guiltily spent it instead on herself—in the secondhand stores, purchasing castoff designer items. How she misses the bad sex she used to have with her ex-boyfriend Grayson.
How sometimes she wonders if she made the wrong decision, moving to Boston five months ago.
She wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t miss home—there’s no way in hell she would miss that place, where the idea of fancy is donning sneakers instead of flip-flops—but she feels she has miscalculated what Boston would be like.
It’s not shiny and exciting like she thought it would be—or at least, not for her.
Another thing she keeps to herself: How, at night when she finally allows herself, the memories of her dead mother cling to her like the pages of a book she can’t put down.
The gloss of the hair is the first thing Taylor notices as her patient is quickly rolled in on the gurney by two paramedics.
It’s a lustrous chestnut brown, softly coiled with an effortless ease.
It reminds Taylor of the Pantene commercials where the women toss their hair over their shoulder like it’s no big deal.
Taylor has an urge to touch the hair. See if it’s as perfect as it appears. See if it’s real.
Then she thirstily drinks in the rest of the woman, which is also flawless—her skin like a smooth pearl, even under the harsh fluorescent overhead lights.
No freckles like the ones that dot Taylor’s nose, no sunspots like those that muddy her dad’s face—and, to a lesser extent, Aunt Gigi’s.
No, this woman is a beauty: wine-colored lips, feathery black lashes, angled cheekbones.
Taylor would bet money that her teeth are perfectly even, no gap between her two front incisors like Taylor has.
The woman’s eyes briefly flutter open, and then they close again.
Something about her feels familiar.
She wears a silky cream-colored blouse, rolled up at the sleeves to expose an IV placed by the paramedics in the field that Taylor will need to swap out, per hospital policy, and a sumptuous brown leather tea-length skirt.
Her pedicured feet stick out from beneath the half sheet that drapes over her.
On top of the sheet, next to a classic black Chanel quilted bag, rests a pair of red-soled pumps: Louboutins with a jeweled edge.
This is no ordinary patient. This is a creature of wealth.
Taylor swallows, a flurry of excitement building in her chest. She’s been waiting for this for months: a patient of this ilk and stature to present herself.
Before Taylor moved to Boston, she envisioned that the city would be teeming with these ladies, that she would encounter them at every turn.
That she would get to move among their world, learn from them, drink in their fanciness like gulps of tap water, letting that old New England generational wealth rub off on her until she glimmered with something of its gold dust. She assumed that somehow even her fellow Mass General nurses would be above those she’d worked with back home, set so far apart from the tired North Carolina women with their bottle-blond hair bleached of life and color, the men with their surfer suntanned sameness.
It is Boston, after all: the city of cobblestones and beauty, of Harvard and MIT, of sophistication and history.
The city her own mother abandoned Taylor and her father for, all those years earlier, in search of a more desirable life.
But Taylor had been wrong. The nurses here are different—as are acquaintances with whom she’s spent time—but not in the way she expected. Far from being upscale or posh, they’re commendably tough, no frills, somewhat guarded with outsiders, and mostly “wicked” smart.