Exiles (35 page)

“I don’t like this place,” Alex said.

“We’ll blow on out tomorrow.”

“Maybe it’s time to go see her.”

“Up to you. Call her while I’m on shift tonight, if you want to.”

“Aren’t you going to want to sleep?”

“Checkout’s not till eleven. I’ll get my usual four hours.”

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The hospital was quiet. Peter was handed over to an RN named Jane, who was in her thirties and had wild, curly blond hair, wolvish blue eyes, and a runner’s build. She wasn’t particularly cheerful, but she showed him around and seemed to know what she was doing. The place had tiled floors in the ER but was otherwise carpeted in an industrial red-and-blue pattern that would have looked at home in any airport.

They took a break for coffee, and Peter noticed the list on the bulletin board in the break room. There was something similar at almost every hospital where he’d worked.

“These your personal bests?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Lowest sodium and still awake: 116,” he read. “Lowest potassium and still survived: 2.4. Highest serum calcium and still awake: 16.2. Highest blood alcohol and still conscious: 0.48.” He turned to her. “You had somebody with a four-eighty who was
conscious
?”

“Hardy stock around here,” she said. “The thing that kills me is these guys that come in after wrecking their cars, they’re so plowed you can’t tell where the alcohol leaves off and the concussion begins, and invariably they’ve only had two beers. It’s the industry standard. So you give them a Breathalyzer and they’re blowing 0.25, and the only thing you can figure is that they must have been the two hugest beers in the history of brewing.”

Peter smiled. He liked that she’d said “hugest.”

“What about your highest blood sugar in a diabetic patient?” he asked.

“Who survived? God, I don’t know, about nine-fifty, I think.”

“Twelve hundred here.”

“Get out.”

“As God is my witness.”

They got called back to the ER; an older man had come in complaining of back pain.

Jane rolled her eyes. “We get a lot of gomers up here too, just to warn you,” she said. Gomer, or “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” usually meant narcotic-seekers who’d invent injuries so they could get shot up with opioids. They had a tendency to yell until you delivered, and once they got their fix, they vanished. Peter had seen his share in Berkeley.

This guy was in his sixties and didn’t actually strike Peter as the type, though. He was reserved, a little cranky, and he claimed his only habit was a half-pack of cigarettes a day. Peter examined his back, but the pain didn’t seem to have a locus anywhere. The man groaned the whole time, and his pulse was 166, so he probably wasn’t faking the pain.

They checked his records, both at this hospital and throughout the state. He’d been in only once before, six years earlier, for a dislocated thumb. Peter had him roll over onto his back.

“Look at his legs; look at the veins,” Peter said. “Don’t they look a little blue?”

Jane examined them. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t think his circulation’s too good down here. Do you have a CT tech on call?”

“Sure, why?”

“Because I’m thinking aneurysm, as in aorta, as in leaking.”

Jane’s eyebrows went up. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m kidding,” he said. “Except I’m not.”

They called St. John’s in Eureka, but the vascular surgeon was on vacation and they hadn’t found a locum to cover for him. The next option was an airlift to Redding, but Jane said they wouldn’t be able to get a helicopter in because of the fog.

Twenty minutes later they had the CT. The bulb was down low, between the hepatic and mesenteric arteries. It was a good eight centimeters, and it was definitely coming apart.

“You have a surgical nurse here?” Peter asked.

“That would be me.”

“You any good?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. How about you?”

“I haven’t done this since I was a resident, and the few I did were higher up. I’m going to need you.”

“Fair enough. Thanks for scaring the shit out of me.”

“Put a team together, whoever you can. You have a kit?”

“Sure.”

They got the man prepped and moved to the OR. Jane turned out to be one of the best nurses Peter had ever worked with. He never had to ask for anything; it was in his hand as soon as he had the thought, and a few times
before
he had the thought, when he was still trying to figure out what to do next. The operation took hours, but the graft seemed to hold. The hospital had only two
ICU beds, so they moved the guy up to one of them, then Peter and Jane went outside to get some air. It was 4:00
A.M.
, and the town glowed like a spaceship, all streetlights and fog.

“Not a bad job for somebody who doesn’t actually know what the hell he’s doing,” she said.

“At least I never claimed to. You should see me do an eyelid, though.”

Their shift finished at 6:00, and she said there wasn’t a decent breakfast place in town but that she’d cook for him if he was hungry.

He looked at her, unsure quite how she intended this invitation. “Sure,” he said, though there was hesitation in his voice.

They stopped at the store and picked up eggs, milk, cinnamon rolls, frozen orange juice, fresh coffee, and a few other odds and ends. Just as they left the store, the sun came up. The light was diffused and distended by the fog, so it appeared as a great angry wound.

Jane lived in a little bungalow on the west side of town. Peter could just see the ocean in the distance, out her glass patio doors. She didn’t want any help in the kitchen, so he wandered around the house. He picked up a photo of a baby from her bookcase. “Who’s this?”

She looked up, then went back to breaking eggs. “That’s Joshua.”

“He’s a cutie. Where is he?”

She just kept stirring, apparently concentrating hard on the bowl. “Josh didn’t make it,” she said.

Peter looked at her, then back at the picture, and set it down. “I may never learn when to shut up.”

She brushed her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “It’s a natural question,” she said. “He was born with a coarc just under his aortic arch. The peds locum missed it.”

He appeared to be a healthy baby in the photo; his color was good, and he was smiling. “I might have missed it too,” Peter said.

“That’s the party line, but we both know better.”

“Who was the father?”

She laughed, just once, the kind of plosive sound you’d make if someone knocked the wind out of you. “This young Brazilian anesthesiologist who was out to see the world, or more accurately to fuck the world,” she said. “He was extremely charming, in a young-male-on-the-prowl kind of way. When I told him, he offered to stick around, but I said no.”

“Brave of you.”

“Sane of me. The brave part happens every morning when I wake up and think about my life and have to get out of bed anyway.” Their eyes met for a moment, then she opened the fridge and started rummaging. “I guess you can come mix up the orange juice if you want.”

There was a young-adult book on her shelf called
Nurse Jane Goes to Hawaii
. Peter picked it up and thumbed through it as he headed into the kitchen. She saw it and smiled—the first smile he’d seen from her that didn’t seem shaded with some kind of disappointment or bitterness.

He held up the book. “And did you?”

“I did, in fact,” she said. “That was a present. You can borrow it if you like; it’s compelling reading if you’re twelve.”

Peter mixed the juice while she took two plates out of the cupboard and started loading them with food. They had scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, rolls, juice, and coffee, and it was all very good, in extremis like that, after the long night.

She asked if he had any kids.

“A daughter,” he said. He explained the situation.

“Well, jeez, you should have brought her. There’s plenty of food.”

“I try to let her sleep these days. She’ll call me when she wakes up.”

“You want to take the extra?”

“That would be great.”

For ten or fifteen minutes, then, they picked at their food and talked about unrelated things, politics and weather and crazy patients
they’d had. She was easy to be around, and it was a relief not to have to discuss anything overwhelmingly urgent or important. Peter came to understand, without her having to say anything, that the invitation had just been about breakfast, nothing more. He was a little relieved. About a quarter to seven Alex called, sounding groggy, and he told her he’d be there in a few minutes.

He helped Jane do the dishes, then she took his face in her hands and kissed him, not all that passionately but
nicely
. He picked up Alex’s breakfast, then got his coat and his keys, and went out into the morning light, feeling blessed by this small kindness, and tender, and grateful for it.

Alex, at age five, sat cross-legged on the living room floor, having mastered the stereo remote so she could listen over and over to a Joni Mitchell song, “Cherokee Louise,” with which she’d become obsessed. The song contained such innocent themes as child molestation and a runaway girl in a subway tunnel. Alex didn’t notice these things because she didn’t understand them yet. What snagged her attention was this lyric:

Alex didn’t completely get what putting pennies on the rails meant, either, but she was captivated by the notion that doing so
could erase the heads and tails, and she wanted to know how. So Peter explained to her about the softness of copper, the weight of trains, et cetera, and her eyes grew wide.

Soon she tired of the song and stopped listening to it. But three months later, when Peter asked what she wanted for her birthday, she answered matter-of-factly, “A penny that’s been run over by a train.”

He said he hoped she was kidding.

“Amanda’s present cost thirty-five dollars,” she answered, referring to a friend of hers and content to let the economics speak for themselves.

The next day Peter waited by the siding. The freight had three big engines up front, and he felt its deep, trembling thunder just before the sun-bright light swung into view down the tracks. He’d already put the penny in place, and he was actually pretty excited about the whole thing.

The train passed, the dinging stopped, and the gate went up. An old green Chevy pickup joinked across from the other side and disappeared up the road. Then there was just Peter and the blackbirds but no penny. He wandered up and down the tracks, but he couldn’t find it. There wouldn’t be another train for at least an hour, and he had to pick Alex up at daycare before that.

Some Hispanic guys were breaking rocks at a construction site on the way home, so he stopped and, feeling like an idiot, asked to borrow a sledge. The kid handed it to him with a grin, glad to take a break. He sat down to watch as Peter took the next-shiniest penny from his pocket and laid it on a cinder block.

He put his legs into it and shattered the block on the first blow, but the penny emerged largely unscathed. An older fellow came over and suggested a piece of nearby granite, so the three of them strolled over to see if his luck would improve. It was like being at a county fair, trying to win your sweetheart a stuffed bear. The shock from the stone traveled right up the sledge’s shaft and into his hands, and although it hurt like hell, it had almost no effect on
the penny. Peter handed back the sledge regretfully and went to get his daughter.

After dinner, Cheryl distracted Alex while Peter discreetly pocketed more pennies, a flashlight, and a tube of Krazy Glue. A half hour later, shortly after sunset, he’d just finished gluing down the pennies when a cop pulled in behind his car and turned on his flashers. He got out and asked Peter the predictable questions.