Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [11]
By the late afternoon, two new patients had come in, one of them from a car wreck out on the main highway, which made her think about Hut, and hope that he was okay. Surely, he’d page her or call, and, she had to remember, if something happened to him, she’d have been contacted.
The patient who arrived had been lucky—a broken leg, perhaps, and a dislocated shoulder. With her coworkers and the doc on his way, Julie got to work in triage.
Just before five, her shift supervisor called her over to an empty office, and said, “Julie. Something’s happened.”
The supervisor had that tone of voice that meant something horrible. Something tragic. She’d heard the tone when the news came about any major public tragedy—from the World Trade Center horror of a few years’ previous to the sudden death of one of the visiting physicians. Immediately, Julie thought of the children. Of Matt and his troubles. Of Matt and the time she’d seen him with a knife, and even though he hadn’t done anything to himself with it, she had known—he had communicated with his eyes—that he was thinking about his real mother, about where she was, the institution outside Philadelphia, about all the things that Matt had whirling in his mind at all times…
“Not Matty,” Julie said, tears already forming in her eyes. Images of Matt, memories of him, his violent outbursts, his tantrums, his moods.
“No,” her supervisor said, softly.
Chapter Four
1
The morgue wasn’t located in the hospital, but at the sheriff’s station one township over. It was an area of what New Jerseyans called the Lake District that was less wooded and natural than paved over and set up right off the major highway. The sheriff’s station looked like an industrial park, and the morgue was toward the back. Julie had insisted that she could drive, that it was a mistake, that none of this made sense, and she was fine, until she saw the staircase down to the morgue.
It looked like she had to walk down into limbo. It grew cold with each step, and she had to steady herself on the railing. She felt as if, at any moment, she might trip on the stairs.
A policewoman accompanied her, and Julie could tell that the woman watched her to make sure she wouldn’t collapse or stumble.
She sat down on the seventh step, and covered her face with her hands.
“We can sit here for as long as you want,” the cop said.
Julie wasn’t sure how much time had passed. “I’ve seen dead people before,” she said, steeling herself, wiping her eyes. “It’s all right. It is. I’m a nurse.” She wasn’t sure if she said any of this aloud or not, as she got up and went down to the chilly floor below, where the lights were a flickering blue and the smells were talcum, alcohol, and something that reminded her too much of the Emergency Room.
And then, the room itself: shiny and silver and garish in the overhead lighting, which was flat and made the coroner and the sheriff look as if they, too, were dead, as they stood there over the body. In the far corner of the room, three large blue plastic barrels that seemed out of place. It wasn’t as big a room as she had expected, and she felt crowded by the others there, and self-conscious because she was sure they were just watching her as if she might do something irrational.
She hadn’t looked at the face of the dead man until then.
2
“Mrs. Hutchinson?”
“It’s not him,” she said. “Thank God. Oh my God. It’s not him.”
The sheriff was a man named Cottrell, who she knew only from the time he’d brought Matt in when Matt had stolen a car at twelve, and the sheriff told her that the car was undamaged, the owners were willing to drop charges, and Matt had been bawling like a baby. Rellingford was that kind of town. Cottrell had told her, then, that he understood Matt’s situation from “Dr. Hutchinson,” and so he hoped it would just be