Lily
I wish Mom was alive. That’s the wish that keeps reoccurring in my mind as I return to work. I wish Mom was alive so I could tell her about the pregnancy. I go about my work like a robot, performing each task expertly even if there is a second track in my mind, running in a completely different direction. Mom . . . I always looked up to her, liked to linger before I left for the school bus to see her adjust her gun and her badge and her uniform: a princess of justice, dressed in blue. She looked like me, but taller, stronger, sterner. Dad died when I was very little, and so Mom was my only parent. A cop, a protector, a hero. I almost lost her once, before the cancer took her . . . One night, she was responding to a gang exchange, as she often did, but this time there were two bangers when she only thought there was one. She turned up and saw that one was wounded, and was making her way down the street to signal to her backup when another man came out of nowhere and shot at her, giving her a flesh wound. A nurse charged into the street—her heroism was reported in the papers—and tackled Mom to a barricade, where she started to patch her up. And then chaos struck, and the nurse was killed—but she saved Mom.
Mom . . .
I imagine telling her that I’m pregnant, imagine her placing her sturdy hands atop mine and offering me that expression that was halfway between a grimace and a smile, as though she was too accustomed to the evil of the world to be surprised by it anymore. I hear her saying: “It’ll be fine, girl. Chin up, grit those teeth, and get the job done.” That’s how I think of her, a hero in blue, not what she later became when the brain cancer began to eat her away. Walking down the hallway between patients, I shake my head, shaking away the memories.
I’ve just left the room of a kid who crashed his scooter into a hedgerow when the charge nurse advances on me. Sissy Sanders is the most inappropriately named woman I have ever met in my life. When I first heard Sissy Sanders, I pictured a petite, smiling, kind woman with a soft face. Instead, I was met with a six foot, wide-shouldered lady with a hard face and a no-nonsense attitude. “GSW coming in,” she barks. “Get room 202 prepped.”
I hesitate for only a moment, and then nod.
Spinning on my heels, I head for room 202. GSW: gunshot wound. I swallow as I walk. They call me the Sherlock of the nursing staff, but that’s because I’m good at talking with my patients and detecting lies—when somebody is trying to scam drugs, for example. It has nothing to do with the gruesome process of treating a GSW. When I get into the room, I begin to lay everything out which the doctor will need, doing it methodically, without having to think about my movements. Most of my mental energy is now directed at steeling myself for what I am about to see. I’ve done two GSWs before, and both were horrifying. One man had been shot in the face so that his eyeball burst like an overripe grape, and the other had the insides of his stomach spilling out.
When the second nurse comes into the room, I am relieved to see that it’s Carol. If I am Sherlock, Carol really is Watson: the medical woman, who rarely gets queasy in these situations. But all that said, I’m a professional, and by the time they wheel the man in I’m fully prepared for whatever I might see.
Or so I think.
At first, it takes me a few moments to recognize him. I am too focused on the wound, a nasty pattern of blood-red dampening his shirt and spreading out over his arm. And then I look from the wound to his face. I take a step back. My heart was the steady beat of a nurse before; now it is the frantic pounding of a lover, a mother. I find myself backed all the way to the window as they shift Roman to the hospital bed from the stretcher. Roman is writhing, moaning, his eyes closed. Blood has dripped down from his shoulder onto his yin-and-yang tattoo. He looks exactly the same as the night we met but for the wound: tall, muscled, somehow handsome even under the circumstances. Roman is shot, Roman is lying there bleeding. I find myself clawing at my throat; I can’t breathe. Roman, the father of my child—but I don’t know him, not really. I only met him once . . . but that once was oh-so-beautiful, and now I am carrying his child. If he dies, my child will be fatherless even before birth, my child will be robbed of even the chance of having a father.
I am taking shallow, quick breaths when Carol paces over to me. “What is it?” she snaps. Over her shoulder, I can see the doctor, ignoring me but his face knitted in annoyance. Sissy is already in the hallway, calling out for my replacement.
“It’s . . . him,” I manage to say. “It’s . . . Roman.”
“Oh.” Carol’s face immediately softens. “Shit.”
Carol calls across the room to Sissy. “This man is Lily’s cousin.”
Even hard-faced Sissy can’t argue with this. She nods. “Okay. Fields, you go to room 212. There’s a poison victim in there and they need your help. Can you handle that?”
I nod, grateful, and pace out of the room as quickly as I can. I can’t stay there, watching as the doctor picks and pokes at Roman, watch as the life leaves him. I don’t know him, I remind myself as I walk down the hallway between his room and the poison victim’s room. No, I don’t know him. But though that is true, I am carrying his life; his life is growing right now inside my belly. How can I one day raise a child after having seen his father die before my eyes? I get to the room, swallow, steel myself. Professional. Professional. Switching off my emotions, I enter the room.
The short, ginger-haired man on the bed is writhing in agony as the doctor probes him, checking his airways, trying to determine what kind of poison the man has ingested. The man’s mouth is covered in the remnants of froth and his hair is soaked through with sweat. As I enter the room, he begins to convulse. The doctor mutters, “Nurse,” and I quickly go to his side. Together, we restrain him, securing him to the bed, and then the doctor strokes his chin, looking down calmly at the convulsing man. I step back, awaiting instructions. It’s time like this I’m glad I’m not a doctor. Who knows what this man has taken? He isn’t talking. It’s all up to the doctor’s diagnosis now. I help them, sometimes, but this is way out of my league.
Finally, the doctor tells me what he needs. I get the supplies and return to him, and then insert the needle into his arm so that we can administer the antidote through an IV drip. Inserting a needle into the man’s arm is a weirdly calming procedure. I have done it thousands of times before. Finding the vein, making sure to insert it cleanly, and then ensuring that it doesn’t slip or cause any harm. About half an hour later, the ginger-haired man is asleep, lying on his back, breathing deeply. The doctor and I wash our hands with the alcoholic gel. When I ask the doctor if the man will live, he shrugs. I nod; doctors often give that stark response to nurses. They know that we know how brutal it can be.
By coincidence, we finish just when it’s time for my second break. I walk toward the breakroom, but then I take a turn, and another turn, and I’m walking back the way I came, toward Roman’s room. I have to see him, have to see him breathing—or not. I have to see what’s happened to him. I can’t go and eat microwave pasta as the father of my child bleeds out in the same building. I stop when I’m a few feet from the room and pretend to be reading a noticeboard. Two cops come out, shaking their heads. One is a woman, short, wide, with gorgeous red hair tied up and bound with a strip of leather. The other is a man, tall, young-looking, with a bowl of black hair.
The female officer mutters to the man: “What do you think?”
The man shrugs. “He’s bullshitting us. Of course he is. But the fuck we gonna do? No evidence.”
“Let’s see what forensics comes up with . . .”
“Yeah.” The man chuckles darkly. “Let’s see.”
They walk down the hallway. When they’re out of sight, I creep forward, listening for anybody else in the room. But I just hear the beep of the machines, and a quiet groaning. For a moment, I am transported back to over a month ago, to similar groaning, to when a musclebound stranger in the night leaned over me, groaning his warm breath onto my skin, thrusting: thrusting deep explosive pleasure inside of me. I open the door, wincing as it creaks on its hinges, and then walk into the room and close the door behind me.
Roman is propped up in bed, but his head is lolling, his eyes opening and closing. The police shouldn’t have questioned him in this condition, but that rarely stops the police. He groans, and then his head lolls toward me and he stops groaning. A sleepy smile lifts his lips. He looks exactly like the Roman I remember, but different, too. Physically, he is the same, but his tough energy has left him. He looks impossibly tired as he smiles at me. The first thing I do is go to the end of the bed and look at his clipboard. Roman Slade. At least I have his name, now.
“Hey bea’iful,” he murmurs, smiling that same tired smile at me. “What’s goin’ on?”
I’m pregnant with your child, that’s what’s going on. I’m pregnant with your child and I have nobody to help me. No parents, no family. Just my work. What am I going to do, Roman? How I am going to support this child and be there for her at the same time? Tell me that.
But he’s in no condition for this, so I just ask: “How are you feeling, Roman?”
Even now, as he lies there in a hospital gown, I can’t ignore how incredibly handsome he is. The fabric of the gown is thin and as it rests against his body, it perfectly outlines his muscles. I tell myself to stop thinking like this. It’s inappropriate in the extreme, but my body doesn’t care about whether or not it’s inappropriate. This is the first time in my life I have been horny, shocked, anxious, and scared at the same time, all of it mixing inside of me like a cruel brew.
“You’re angel,” Roman whispers, his eyelids falling closed. “Angel.”
“Get some sleep, baby,” I say, backing out of the room. “Just get some sleep.”
I return to the hallway, close the door behind me, and turn around only to walk directly into Carol.
“What are you doing?” I snap, feeling foolish at once. “Sorry,” I say, head bowed. “I didn’t mean to . . . It’s just . . .”
“I know,” Carol says understandingly. “So, is it really him?”
“Yes,” I say.
We walk toward the breakroom, talking quietly.
“What are you going to do?” she asks, as we sit at the corner table, the TV playing some soap opera .
I shrug. “I have no idea, Carol. This has been one hell of a day, one crazy hell of a day. First I find out I’m pregnant, and now . . . I mean, this is mad, right? This is absolutely mad.”
Carol grins, but it’s a shaky grin. “Mad,” she agrees.
“What is it?”
“It’s just—” She hesitates, and then pushes on: “I think that gunshot was self-inflicted. Nothing about it looks right. The angle, the burning around the skin. Which makes me wonder, why would a man shoot himself in the shoulder?”
“And your conclusion?” I ask.
Carol stares down at the table, unwilling to meet my gaze.
“Maybe Roman is a criminal, Lily.”
I want to argue with that, but I find that I can’t; I don’t know the man well enough, not even close.