Fresh air hits my face as I push open the heavy emergency exit door that leads into the back alley behind the hospital. The narrow, paved dead-end street and the white building I just exited are shrouded in the dark-gray hues of late twilight. It’s June, and stepping outside no longer feels refreshing, even at this time of day, when the world starts to quiet down and the street lamps should flicker on at any minute. The heat radiating from the hospital laundry a short way down the lane doesn’t help.
I suppose there will be a blue moon tonight, since I’ve actually managed to get away and take a breather. Even though there’s a sign by the door that says there’s no smoking within twenty-five feet of the hospital, it’s well known that staff members step out here to light up, and no one stops them or snitches, because who the hell wants to deal with a bunch of coworkers who are suffering from nicotine withdrawal? Like this job isn’t stressful enough already.
No one else is out here right now, though, and I’m relishing having a moment to myself, away from the cacophony of moaning patients and bleeping machines, with a thick wall between me and the pungent scent-soup of bodily fluids and industrial disinfectants.
Leaning back against the sharp-ridged stucco wall, I slide down until I’m sitting on the concrete, draping my arms over my bent knees. With closed eyes, I draw in a deep breath and blow it slowly back out through my mouth, my cheeks puffed.
We just had a patient rushed in with a gunshot wound to the chest. Though I assessed and stabilized the guy, who’s now in the hands of the on-call trauma surgeon, I still feel unsettled and fidgety and ready to jump out of my skin.
I fucking hate gunshot wounds. It’s not a mystery why. Nothing sends my imagination into overdrive like patients with GSWs. One look at the blood and gaping entrance wound and crushed tissue, and I can see them. The family my dad destroyed—the husband and wife and their preteen daughter and her little brother—lying in pools of their own blood.
I can also hear the deafening cracks and booms as bullets fly from the car rolling past on that dark street, can see Sean jerking with the impact before collapsing to the ground, can see him lying there while blood seeps out onto the asphalt.
When a GSW rolls into the ER, all of that passes through my mind in a flash that lasts no longer than a couple of seconds. Then my instinct and training take over, and the grisly mental pictures get pushed to the back of my mind.
It’s the aftermath, as soon as I have a minute of downtime, that the images come creeping back and the idea of trying to beat them out with a hammer starts to seem tempting.
This time my thoughts begin to drift, though, just like they have been doing with maddening frequency for the past three weeks. Gory wounds are replaced by Mia’s facial expression in her car that night.
“Kicked puppy” would be an understated description of the way she looked at me. Seems more fitting to compare it to a puppy that had been tossed from a moving vehicle. In the middle of the desert, in scorching summer heat.
Shit.
No matter how much I try, I can’t stop the guilt and the longing and the almost constant sensation of being off-balance. I miss her so much it’s like a bone-deep agony that’s grinding and pounding and shredding me.
Extending my leg and twisting off the ground, I grab my phone from where it’s strapped to the waistband of my scrub bottoms. And like I’ve done so many times lately, I tap on her name in my messaging app.
The last text conversation I had with her pops up. It started with her sending me a selfie from a fitting room that day she went shopping with the other women in her family while I was helping with her dad’s backyard project. In the photo, she’s wearing a short, white, and pretty summer dress, and she’s posing with a hand on her outthrust hip, her knee bent.
What do you think? she wrote as a caption.
And I replied, I’d hit it.
To which she typed back: If only you were here right now. Followed by a winking emoji.
I tighten my grip on the phone, my insides clenching and twisting, squeezing the air from my lungs. My vision blurs, and I’m blinking frantically, trying to bring the picture back into focus. It’s beautiful and sexy Mia, smiling and happy Mia, playful and flirty Mia—and it fucking hurts to look at her, but I can’t not look at her.
And like I always do, I start scrolling up, reading older and older texts from her, conversations spanning back almost two years, back to when this phone was new. A lot of it is just mundane back-and-forths. The WTSs and griping about work draw smiles and a painful knot in my throat at the same time.
My favorites, though, are the exchanges that start with her texting me just two words: Good night. I always knew that message didn’t mean she was going to sleep. It meant it was late at night, and she wanted to talk. Because she had something on her mind or because she was feeling lonely…or because she just wanted to know I was there?
Breathing through my nose, my jaw clenched, I keep swiping my thumb down and down and down, scrolling through hundreds, thousands of messages.
This is all I have left of her.
Without thinking, I tap on the empty box where I can write a new message to her. I stare at the blinking cursor, my fingers twitching. I’ve been here before, almost daily. Is this the moment I finally cave and send her something? Do I even know what I would say? Three weeks, and I haven’t been able to think of anything. Not sure why today would be any different.
I jump, startling, as my phone suddenly vibrates and chimes. Disbelief seizes me as I see the name that appears on the screen.
What. The. Fuck.
Why is my mom calling me? Does she have some kind of sixth sense that sends her an alert when I’m at my lowest, just so she doesn’t miss the opportunity to kick me while I’m down?
The phone keeps ringing, a shrill and aggressive sound. I could decide not to answer it. That’s what I should do.
With a sigh, I tap the green receiver icon, put the phone up to my ear, and say, “Hey.”
“Hi, Jay,” comes the raspy voice of a woman on the other end, a woman who is definitely my mother, so there goes the hope that someone had stolen her phone or something.
“What’s up?” I say curtly, bracing myself for…I don’t know what, but odds are it’s going to piss me off.
“How are you?” She says this with all the sincerity of a retail cashier.
Pressing my lips together, I rest my head back against the wall and roll my eyes skyward. “Fine,” I reply, because I can fake politeness, too. “You?”
“Oh, you know…hanging in there.”
As she lets out a bitter laugh that dissolves into a burst of her wheezy smoker’s cough, a mental image of her pops up, and it’s so clear it makes my spine curl. She’s probably sitting at her chipped and stained kitchen table, a cigarette between her fingers with a thin stream of smoke drifting up from it, ashtray in front of her. She’s wearing a black tank top that she got for less than ten dollars at Walmart with washed-out jeans that fit like a second layer of skin, and her hair—dyed an unnatural shade of red—hugs her face in voluminous waves.
And that pretty oval face is covered in so much makeup that you can’t tell that underneath it her skin is loosening and wrinkling, betraying her middle age despite her desperate refusal to admit it to herself.
“Okay, good,” I say in response to her usual, Eeyore-like statement. “Wha—”
“The tendonitis in my shoulder has gotten worse, though,” she continues, interrupting my mission to get her to the point quickly. “I’d been working at ValuShop for about five months, but the pain was so bad I missed a lot of work, and the assholes fired me.”
“That’s too bad,” I reply impatiently, not bothering to try and sound like I give a crap. “So, why—”
“I’ve been seeing this chiropractor, and he told me to try acupuncture and homeopathic remedies, and I swear that’s the only reason I’m even able to pick up the phone to call you.”
Oh, for God’s sake. I press my thumb against the spot between my eyes where a throbbing headache just flared up out of nowhere. “Glad you found something that helps.”
At the other end, my mom releases a snort. “Yeah, I’m sure you have no faith in alternative methods of healing. You’re too brainwashed by that education of yours to see that all those toxic drugs and unnecessary testing and procedures are why we humans are sicker now than we ever have been.”
Grinding my teeth together, I resist the urge to just hang up on her, because to hell with this. Her “Western medicine is evil” kick was new the last time I talked to her—around Halloween last year maybe?—and it’s just the latest in a lifelong string of unhealthy obsessions that she gets caught up in because it distracts her from the empty and meaningless shit-fest that is her life.
This stuff actually bothers me, though, and the fact that she has the ability to affect my mood at all is beyond infuriating. It bothers me because she seems to be using it as an excuse to diminish my accomplishments, which any mother with a shred of maternal instincts would be proud of, goddamn it.
But no, not Sherry Miller. She knows how hard I’ve worked to get where I am, but all she has to say about it is to accuse me of being brainwashed.
I mean, Jesus fuck.
And because I’m a dumbass who can’t take the high road with this woman, I find myself saying, “Well, you know what they say about alternative medicine.”
She’s quiet for a second, and I can hear the quiet pop of her sucking on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out with a whoosh. “What’s that?”
“If it worked, they’d just call it medicine.”
Another short silence, and then she snaps, “You know what, Jay? I think I deserve for you to talk to me with a little more respect than that. Dr. Flores has changed my life—”
“Is there a reason you’re calling?” I ask without letting her finish, because enough already.
A moment’s hesitation, and then she clears her throat. “Have you talked to your dad at all?”
The muscles between my shoulder blades start twitching. “You know the answer to that.”
With a sigh, she says, “I was thinking we could drive down there together to see him and say good-bye.”
A scoff erupts from my throat. “Yeah. That’s happening.”
“He’s your dad, Jay.” For a split second, her voice softens and she sounds like she might actually be having emotions that don’t revolve around herself. “It’d make him so happy to see you.”
“I have zero interest in making him happy,” I growl into the phone.
“Your uncle’s going to see him,” she goes on, being unusually and irritatingly persistent today. “I talked to Warren just a few weeks ago. He’s in Africa right now, and he’s flying all the way across the world to say good-bye to your dad.”
Yeah, but that’s my uncle’s business. His relationship with his brother has nothing to do with me. Is she seriously trying to guilt trip me? She must have some sort of ulterior motive.
The exit door opens with a loud click, and an unfamiliar blond guy in light-blue scrubs steps through. Catching sight of me, he nods, and I return the gesture as he pulls a cigarette pack out of his pocket.
I clamber to my feet and take a few steps away, putting some distance between us, as much to avoid the secondhand smoke as for privacy.
“Can you just tell me what you want?” I say to my mom, tempering my voice.
“Well, since I haven’t been able to work, I’m too broke to buy plane tickets to go see him. He’s my husband, and they’re going to kill him.” Her tone goes up a pitch, growing all squeaky and broken. She lets out a sob, and I can’t tell if it’s fake or not. “They’re going to stick a huge needle in his arm and—”
“So you want money?” I’m not surprised. Honestly, cross my heart. With a sharp stab of pain, my headache grows worse, and I want to punch something.
She pauses. “I’ll pay you back, of course.”
Right. And the sun revolves around the Earth. And homeopathic remedies actually work.
“Don’t worry about it,” I’m snarling into the tiny microphone next to my mouth. “I’ll send you the money. I don’t even care if you blow it on a bar hop instead of plane tickets.”
From the other end comes an Oscar-worthy huff of wounded outrage. “I can’t believe you’d—”
“I only want you to do one thing for me,” I say, cutting her off once more.
“What?”
I draw in a deep breath and hold it until I can feel my lungs start to protest. Here goes. I’m going to do it. Going to say what I should’ve said years ago.
“Don’t call me again,” I tell her. “Don’t try to contact me in any way. Just pretend you don’t have a son. You’ve got a ton of experience with that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
No sound comes out of the phone speaker for several seconds. “Oh, really?” she grinds out, and I know very well the sound of her quiet fury. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t always been such a disrespectful, ungrateful little shit—”
“Hey!” I shout, not giving a crap if the smoke-break guy a few feet away can hear me. “I’ll send the money. Don’t ever call me again.”
Then I pull the phone away from my ear and hit the red button.
Fucking bitch. My hands are shaking, my breathing erratic.
I really need to go back inside, because my absence is pushing ten minutes by now. But I can’t. Not without getting this shit over with.
Pulling up the browser on my phone, I go to my bank’s website and log in. My mom’s info is still there in the Bill Pay section, since I’ve sent her money before, of course. Because I’m a moron.
My fingers are so unsteady it’s hard to type, but it doesn’t take that much effort. Five hundred dollars should get her to Houston and back. With two taps on the screen, the payment is scheduled. In a few days, she’ll get a check in the mail.
Sliding the phone into my pocket, I stride back to the emergency exit door. My fellow hospital staff member is puffing on his cigarette, his face pointedly turned away from me.
My movements jerky, I pull open the door and go inside. Back to work for another two hours at least. And tonight, I probably won’t mind staying late, because somehow I suspect my job is the only thing keeping me sane right now.