FOUR
SLOANE
Zeth: I’m going away for a few days. I won’t be long, though. Michael’s going to come stay at the house with you.
Zeth’s text is not the beginnings of a discussion. It’s a statement. He’s going away to finally deal with the Italians. He must be, or he would have been more specific about his destination. I close my eyes, trying not to freak the hell out. I wish he’d talked to me about this before just vanishing off this morning. I would have tried to talk some sense into him. We haven’t heard from the east coasters in over a month. I’ve been beginning to assume that torching the warehouse was their way of punishing Zeth, and that the loss of his property was enough for them. Zeth hasn’t said otherwise, but clearly he still considers them a threat. A very grave threat, if he’s willing to leave town right now.
I start typing out a response to him, my finger hovering over the touch screen as I type one thing and then think better of it, deleting the text and starting over. There’s no point in being angry or disappointed with him. He’s doing what he thinks is right for me and the baby. I’d rather the three of us went and lived in a beach shack in Mexico than have him put himself in danger again, but he is the kind of man to ever turn tail and—
“Dr. Romera? Dr. Romera! We have incoming!”
Head nurse of St. Peter’s of Mercy hospital, Grace Miller, barrels around the corner, dragging a paper apron from her body and slamming it into a HAZMAT bin as she charges toward the ER entrance. I can already hear distant sirens wailing—more than one ambulance, which means more than one patient.
Shit. I slide my phone into my pocket, and I take off after Grace, abandoning my coffee as well as Mikey the intern, who was waiting for me to delegate patients to him. I reach the drop off point out of the front of the building moments before the first emergency response vehicle arrives. An EMT opens the rear doors of the ambulance from the inside and jumps out, turning and sliding a gurney out behind her.
“Partially de-gloved right hand. Severed ring finger. Metacarpal fractures. Analgesia administered in the field. Crush syndrome presented on the scene. Fluids have been hung. Patient is a twenty-eight year old woman, trapped in an elevator. She was trying to climb out and got pinned by her hand overnight.” The EMT hands Grace a bag of saline to hold as she pushes the gurney toward the hospital entrance.
I catch sight of the woman’s hand at the same time as Grace, who pales significantly. “Jesus,” she hisses. “That’s…that’s got to hurt.” So much blood. So much bone. Shattered bone. Visibly crushed tendons.
“Poor woman,” Grace hisses. “There’s no way we’ll be able to regain full mobility.”
I look down at the hand, and I can’t help but agree. The damage is catastrophic. With the crush syndrome and the loss of the index finger, it’s a miracle the EMTs didn’t call ahead to ask permission for a field amputation. My stomach twists at the sight of the blood-soaked bandages that are wadded up at the end of the gurney. I begin a visual examination of the patient’s hand, trying to assess the true extent of the damage. “Give me a read out. What are her vitals looking like?”
“Sloane?”
My head snaps up.
“Sloane. Oh my god. Sloane…” The woman on the gurney cries out, her voice choked with pain and fear.
“Patien’s regaining consciousness!” Grace dumps the saline beside the woman on the gurney, leaning over her, checking her pupils. I follow suit, shock making my skin prickle, the hairs on my arms standing on end. She knows me. She said my name. And her voice…
The second I look up at the patient’s face, it’s as though time stands still. Holy shit. It’s…
Fuck…
It’s Pippa.
******
How long has it been since I’ve spoken to her? Weeks? God, no. It’s been months. At least two months. There was a time not too long ago when I wouldn’t go a day without speaking to her, even if it was just a text or an incredibly brief phone call. When I met Zeth, though, everything changed. It was shitty of me to cut her out of my life so thoroughly, but the way she reacted to my relationship with him was violent to say the least. She did what any good friend would have done. She worried on my behalf. She lost sleep, wondering if I was okay. I could understand all of that, even though it was frustrating, but when she called Lowell in…
I’ll admit, that has been a hard betrayal to forgive.
Now, she’s looking up at me with sheer terror strewn across her face, and I feel like my heart is being forcibly ripped from my chest cavity and stomped on over and over again. I go to take her hand, to tell her everything is okay, but I quickly realize that would be a bad idea.
I’ve given her more pain meds, and she doesn’t seem as on edge as she was when she first arrived. She’s very spaced out, though. It’s hard to get a straight story from her.
“So, you were working? What were you doing in that building so late at night on your own?”
Pippa blinks hazily at me, her pupils contracting and dilating like the shutter of a camera lens. She shakes her head, closing her eyes. “I had a meeting. I was on my up to see my client, and...” She frowns, deep lines of confusion marking her brown. She has tiny flecks of blood all over her face, like delicate freckles. “The lights went out,” she says. “The elevator just…stopped. I couldn’t…I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t breathe. It was stifling in there. Everything was pitch black.” She opens her eyes, suddenly alert. “Wait, where’s Teddy?”
“Teddy?”
“There…there was another man in the elevator with me. The janitor for the building. He only had one more floor to clean and...then he was going to go home to his wife and…his little baby boy.”
The EMTs are long gone, so I can’t ask them about a guy called Teddy. Another ambulance did pull up after Pippa’s EMTs went back out, but I wasn’t hanging around to ask them questions about their patient. I was too worried about Pippa to be paying attention to anything else. Now that I’ve cleaned and wrapped her hand, given her more fluids, raised her body temp and gotten her comfortable while we wait for ortho and plastics to come down and see her, I’m feeling a little less fried. My emotions are all over the place. Pregnancy has turned me into some sort of emotional train wreck.
Oh, shit. Pregnancy. The baby. I haven’t even told Pippa about the baby yet. I’ve been meaning to for weeks, but it’s always better to wait until you know the pregnancy is safe before you start shouting the news from the rooftops. Still… Pippa and I have been as close as sisters since before we attended medical school. She’s going to be incomprehensibly hurt if I don’t tell her before one of my colleagues mentions something in front of her.
Pippa sighs heavily, tears overflowing from her eyes, down the sides of her face to wet the pillow underneath her head. “I started learning piano,” she says. “Last month. I always wanted to play, but I never had the time. I put it off and I put it off… It’s typical, isn’t it? I finally get around to doing something for myself, and boom! I’m going to lose my hand.”
I brush a stray strand of hair back out of her face. “You’re not going to lose your hand, Pip.” I’m surprised how convincing I sound. I don’t even know if the guys upstairs are going to be able to save it yet, but I’m relieved by how calm I sound. The panic in Pippa’s eyes dissipates a little.
“De-gloved. It’s such a fucked up term. I never once thought about it happening to me when we studied it during residency. It fucking sucks, Sloane. I mean it. It really fucking sucks.”
Brushing her hair more to comfort her than anything else now, I shhhh her.
“I know, babe. I know. It’s all going to be okay, though. The guys who work here are some of the finest surgeons in the country. If anyone can fix this and make it right, it’s them.”
Pippa blinks; her eyes look a little vacant. The latest round of morphine seems to be doing the trick quite nicely. “But my handwriting’s probably never going to be legible again, is it?” she slurs.
I smile. “Your handwriting was never legible to begin with, so no great change there.”
She’s quiet for a little while. She watches me with this somber look on her face that has nothing to do with what’s happened to her, or the drugs that are shuttling around her body. “You look really happy,” she says at last.
“I am really happy.”
“I’m sorry, y’know. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you to know what was best for you. I should have…minded my own business.”
I shake my head. “We don’t need to talk about that now. Let’s just worry about getting you patched up and out of here.”
“No, really.” She swallows thickly. “I need to say it. I was a bitch. I didn’t mean to be. I was convinced I was just doing it to protect you, but I suppose… I suppose I was a little jealous, too.”
“Jealous? Of what?”
“Of Zeth, of course. He just showed up one day and swept you away in this tide of chaos and madness, and I could see it in your eyes. No matter what, you were going to stand by his side until the end of fucking time. It was…shit. I was jealous that he was getting all of your time and energy. I should have been thinking a little more rationally, but at the time it felt like he’d…stolen you away.”
I can see how much it costs her to say this to me. She’s a stoic, proud person who doesn’t share her emotions easily. It’s a rare day that she will even admit that she has emotions. So an apology of this depth and magnitude? It’s difficult for her, I know it is.
“I forgive you,” I whisper. “I promise, it’s all okay. I’ve missed the hell out of you, Pip. We’ll never spend so long without each other again, okay? Now rest. Dr. Gaffin and Dr. Friedman will both be down here soon to check you out. In the meantime, your body’s been through hell and back. You need to get some sleep, okay?”
She nods. She’s been fighting her exhaustion, but it’s catching up with her, clearly. “You’ll be here, won’t you? You’ll be here when they come?”
“Of course I will.” I get to my feet, then bend and kiss her on the top of the head. “I’ll come back, I promise.”
******
Zeth’s text message is still sitting on my phone’s screen, waiting for my response. Truthfully, I don’t know what to say to him. He hasn’t brought up the warehouse fire since it happened, but he’s not a man who forgets easily. I know this about him. It should come as no shock to me that he’d up and leave in the middle of the day, while I’m at work, to go and ‘take care’ of the matter, without breathing a word of his plans to me prior. He knows a lot about me, too. He knows I’d try and talk him out of something like that, so his actions have fallen into the old, “ask forgiveness, not permission,” grey area. Jerk. If I weren’t pregnant and suffering from extreme morning sickness, I’d get on a plane as soon as my shift ended and go find him, to be with him, because that’s how it’s meant to be. Me and him. Together. Bad things happen when we’re apart. Every single time. Admittedly, bad things happen when we’re together too, but at least we have each other to lean on during those situations.
Michael’s going to be sleeping at the house. I’ll be safe enough with him around, he’d die protecting me without a doubt, but it’s not the same. I need Zeth at home with me, to lay his hand on my belly while I’m sleeping. To stroke my hair and whisper softly to me as I wrestle with my dreams.
“Looking a little peaky there, Romera. Need a script?” Oliver Massey uses the clipboard in his hand to tap me on the shoulder. I haven’t even noticed him arrive. I quickly type three words into my phone and hit send.
Just be safe.
My phone makes a shooping noise as I slip into the pocket of my lab coat. “Not quite at the medication stage yet,” I say to Oliver.
He returns my tired smile with one of his own, sympathy written all over his face. He’s taking the fact that I’m pregnant very well. I was worried about telling him; he’s hardly Zeth’s number one fan. “You tried antihistamines?” he asks.
I groan, letting my head rock back. “They make me so tired. I can’t. I need a clear head while I’m here. They make everything so foggy.”
“You could always take early maternity leave.” I shoot daggers at him, and he laughs. “Don’t murder me for merely pointing out your options, Romera. You’re a tough chick. You can handle this. How many weeks are you now, anyway?”
“Nearly fourteen.”
“Great. If you’re lucky the puking part’s nearly over anyway. How did your first ultrasound go?”
I shrug. “I haven’t done it yet.”
Oliver’s eyes double in size, surprise transforming his features. “You’re kidding, right? You haven’t done it yet? Why not?”
“Because. We just haven’t. Things have been crazy here at the hospital, and…” And I pushed the ultrasound back. I’m just not ready to do it yet. Honestly, I’m afraid. I work in a place where pregnant woman get told their unborn children have heart defects, genetic disorders, tumors, and other malformations every single day of the week. This knowledge is bearable normally. If we catch things during the early stages of pregnancy, occasionally problems can be fixed. But sometimes that’s not the case. I’ve been panicking for weeks about the moment the technician lays the ultrasound wand against my belly and that small, barely-there frown potentially forms between her eyebrows. The one that signals there’s a problem. I’m not ready to face that yet.
“You’re crazy!” Oliver shakes his head, as if trying to clear it. He takes hold of me by the hand. “Come on. No more of that bullshit. Let’s go do it now. I’m patient-free for the next hour or so, and—” He’s already pulling me down the corridor toward the elevators.
“Oliver?”
“Sloane. You’re being fucking weird. I know you. I know what this is about, and I can promise you now—”
I jerk my hand free from his, anchoring on the brakes. “No. No, you can’t promise me now,” I say, my voice flat. “You can’t make promises. That’s not in our job description. And besides…” I sigh, looking the other way, back down the corridor, not wanting to look him in the eye. “Zeth’s going to be with me the first time we see the baby, Oliver. Imagine how you’d feel if your girlfriend went and had an ultrasound and saw your baby for the first time without you.”
Silence prevails for a second. Oliver’s sneakers squeak as he shifts his stance, then he clears his throat. “Well, damn. You’re right. I wasn’t even thinking. I’m sorry.”
It takes me a moment to face him again. I’m a coward. I hate conflict, and more than that, I hate hurting people. I can see by the look on his face that Oliver is hurt by what I’ve said, and it makes me feel sick in a whole new, even more uncomfortable way. “I’m not trying to be a jerk,” I whisper. “ It’s just…”
My friend closes his eyes, flaring his nostrils. “Sloane, I get it. Of course you’d want to share that with Zeth. I clearly just haven’t had enough coffee yet today. My synapses aren’t firing.” His lips pull into a tight white line. “Just don’t put it off forever, okay. Everything will be fine. You’re missing all the fun developmental stuff.”
“Thanks, Olly.”
He raps his knuckles against his clipboard, nodding. “All right. Well, I’ve just remembered I have some paperwork to catch up on. So…I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Sure.”
He walks away, head bowed, his shoulders tensed. He hurries off, and I get the feeling he’d actually break into a run if he thought I wouldn’t notice.