Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [13]
“I’m at Tacoma General until midnight. On the third floor.”
As I was on my way out the door, Allyson said, “Is she foxy, Dad?”
“This is business.”
“Oh, yeah? So her house is on fire?”
“Okay, she’s foxy.”
“That’s what I thought.” The girls exchanged looks while the baby-sitter put on a mood like a coat. My girls had solved the conundrum I couldn’t solve: why I was wasting my time.
All day I’d fumed over Stephanie’s verbal assault. It didn’t help that Click and Clack had gotten wind of it—Ian Hjorth and Ben Arden reporting to work that afternoon to take up the slack after Stan Beebe went home sick, sick of heart over our friend Joel. Click and Clack commentated on my love life with remarks that alternated between the lewd and the hilariously lewd.
Normally they were a positive addition to the atmosphere, poking fun at everything, including themselves. But their favorite target was my love life. To hear them rehash it, my tongue-lashing at the hands of Holly’s sister was the funniest thing ever. At one point, Ben got a sympathetic look on his face, turned to me, and sang to a melody of his own invention, “Somebody got a spanking.” Ian laughed so hard, his knees buckled. I suppose after what we’d learned about Joel McCain, our department needed a diversion.
Downtown Tacoma sat on a hill overlooking Commencement Bay. On top of the hill, a block or so from Wright Park and fronting Martin Luther King Junior Way, stood Tacoma General Hospital.
It was almost eight o’clock and still light out when I approached the nurses’ station on three. A barrel-chested woman with eyebrows plucked too thin gave me a questioning look from behind the counter, then reached over to thumb the intercom. She drew her hand back, glanced past my shoulder, and said, “There she is.”
She wore clogs and hospital scrubs with a stethoscope draped around her neck, her hair shoulder-length and loose. She wasn’t wearing a name tag, and it was a split second before I remembered how proud Holly had been of her older sister.
“You’re a doctor,” I said.
“Don’t act so stunned.” Any hint of flirtation in her demeanor had vanished.
“Holly said you worked back east somewhere.”
“Ohio. I’ve been volunteering here for a few weeks.”
“Terrific. Most people on vacation would never think of volunteering.”
“No, I suppose they wouldn’t.”
Holly had been proud of her older sister, said she was smart as a whip, had graduated from high school a year early and did the same in college, even though she had to work the whole time because their parents were dead. Their mother died of cancer. Six weeks later Holly came home from middle school and found their father hanging by his neck in the garage. Stephanie had been in her last year of high school.
Turning away from me, she said, “I have a patient to check on. Come along?”
“You sure it’s okay?” She walked away without replying.
When I caught her, she said, “Funny how all hospitals are pretty much alike. Don’t you think? You get inside and you could be in New York or Toronto or Timbuktu.”
The breeze from our pace brought tears to her eyes. She stopped at a patient’s room, glanced at the chart on the wall, pushed the door open with her fingertips, and went in. After a moment alone in the hallway, I followed.
It was a small room with one bed, the foot toward the door, a dark television high on a bracket on the wall. The only light was provided by the evening twilight whispering in through the blinds. The patient was silent and motionless. From where I stood, I could see only a swatch of lusterless hair on the pillow.
“I’d better leave,” I whispered.
“No. Stay.”
“You sure I’m not . . . ?”
“Take a look. You don’t recognize her?”
“I don’t know anybody in Tacoma.”
“Oh, I think you do.” It was at this point I realized all the sweet talk on the phone had been part of a ruse. I was always slow on the uptake, which explained why I was attracted to dim females, females who couldn’t fool me, but I’d never been this slow. On the drive down, I’d alternated between euphoria and apprehension, seesawing