“Ahhh. A tough girl, eh?”
“Quite,” I said, and pointed down the hall.
He tilted his head like a curious dog. He’d been in power all night long, but me there on my own bed, naked in the lamplight—I was like a Greek goddess as an odalisque, while he scrambled to find his clothing on
His accent was still as lovely as he was. I did my best to keep my advantage, and gave him a languorous smile. “Perhaps.” He tucked his shirt in and smiled mischievously at me before heading off down my hall. I waited till I heard his car engine rev before heading there after him, to lock my door. Then I went back to my room, where everything still smelled like sex and there was a layer of condensation on the window.
I lay down in my bed and inspected my hand by the lamplight. I hadn’t banished everything for very long, but I fell asleep, fast and hard. Even nonorgasmic sex can be a pretty good exorcism too.
Chapter Eleven
In my dreams, I was on a boat. That was my first clue I was dreaming, since I had an epic fear of open water based on viewing both
It was a clear night and the stars shone overhead. Two people stood on the top deck’s edge, staring out at a black sea. They were facing backward, as if looking at their past.
As I concentrated, my perspective changed and they grew nearer. From here, wherever dream-here was, I realized they were just kids, dressed in that oddly formal way of children from long ago, like little adults. They stood near one another, bundled up against the cold, holding on to the railing—and the little girl I knew.
It was Anna, the vampire that’d bitten me. Blond wisps of hair peeked out from underneath her hat and I could almost imagine her mother’s last kiss upon her brow. She appeared healthy but looked unhappy, staring out like she distrusted the ocean as much as I did.
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you,” the boy said, in a language I did not understand but instinctively knew the meaning of. He set one of his hands atop hers, and they held on to the railing together.
When I woke I knew there’d been more, but all I could remember was looking out at the horrible sea.
I slept in till four P.M. or so, and didn’t have any more creepy dreams based on my dual fears of vampires and the ocean. I knew I had the next three days off, but I didn’t know my schedule beyond that. My dining room set wasn’t going to buy itself back. I was already pulled thin beforehand, and now courtesy of Jake and Jake’s monkey, I was stretched drum tight. I called in to see if anything was open that night.
“Sure, I’ll go to pediatric intensive care,” I heard myself tell the Nursing Office on the phone. I hung up before I could say no.
I tried to put things in perspective on my way there. After all, pulling a shift in pedi ICU was better than being in Med-Surg with all the whining postknee ops, strapped into their continuous passive-motion machines. And Y4 had given me pediatric training—some sanctioned donors were children, though I hadn’t met any of them yet—and so I was pediatric life-support certified. That didn’t mean that I was comfortable around kids—rather, I was the opposite—but I figured I could keep two of them alive for the night.
Most importantly, I’d really, really loved my dining room set. I hoped this shift was worth it.
The pediatric wing was attached to County like an extended middle finger. It was newer than the rest of the buildings, and nicer too, although compared to Y4, anything with a view of a parking lot would be an upgrade.
The lights were already dimmed when I arrived, which muted the bright colors on the walls. Smiling yellow suns appeared menacing and gray above little villages where bowed farmer-people tended fields. A human-sized teddy bear occupied the wall in front of the nurse’s station. I was sure in daylight he looked friendly, but right now he looked like he hoped the charge nurse was hiding a steak.
One of the things I was glad about on Y4 was that we dressed out from the locker room’s supply of green OR scrubs—that way I didn’t have to wear dumb ones with smiling cartoon cats. The Pedi ICU’s charge nurse’s scrubs had winking Betty Boops holding out oversized bandages and lollipops. They looked sarcastic. I almost approved.
“I’m your float from the Nursing Office,” I told her, and gave a short wave. She looked me up and down slowly, and her left eyebrow rose. I was wearing an old pair of OR scrubs brought from home, freshly washed, but not wrinkle-free, and my ponytail was of dubious quality. I could see her doing the math of letting me, a potential ingrate, nurse some of the children in her care. If you thought plain intensive care unit nurses were overprotective and judgmental—which I frequently did—you hadn’t met a pediatrics intensive care nurse yet.
I tried to give off my best “I won’t kill anyone tonight, honest” vibe, and waited for her to come to her assignment decision.
“You’re in sixty-two and sixty-three. Call if you need help.”
I walked away confident that I, as a float nurse, had been given the easiest assignment on the floor. I’d probably have two kids with broken legs, or a dehydrated baby. I found my set of rooms at the very end of the hall near the fire escape stairs.
The curtains were closed, and I could hear speaking in a foreign tongue. The charge nurse hadn’t mentioned relatives. Pediatric patient parents were the worst, either hovering or incompetently neglectful. “Is that German?” I asked aloud.
“Night shift?” came the response. “Come help.”
I sniffed the air. Closed curtains were rarely a good sign. It smelled sweet—
“Hello?” asked the outgoing nurse.
“Tying my shoe—sorry!” I lied, and ducked inside.
The patient was a boy who looked about twelve, with a ventilator connected to a tracheotomy tube in his neck. His whole body was flaccid, and his head was tilted to one side. The nurse had a plastic tub full of water balanced on the bed, bathing him. She handed me a dry washcloth. “Glove up.”
I sniffed the air again. “Strawberry?”
“Ensure. He gets 45 ccs an hour. But I didn’t connect his peg tube right, and I pulled the covers up and—” she said, and I saw the problem. For some reason this kid had a tube from his stomach to the outside world, and she’d set the feeding pump on when the tube was disconnected. Instead of going into him, the Ensure’d spilled all over him, as pink as the painted walls above his bed. But why didn’t the kid say anything?
“Shawn was in a motor vehicle accident four years ago. He’s a C3 quad now.”
“Ooooooh.” C3 meant a neck fracture, high. “And now?”
“Recovering from autonomic dysreflexia. He’s in the clear, we’re just watching him one more day is all.”
I nodded to head off any extra questions. She went through the rest of her report, while we finished the bath. All his monitors were on and all of the parameters were currently normal. I wrote things down at the appropriate times, and she seemed confident she was passing Shawn over to a competent nurse, one who hadn’t gotten a patient killed on the last active shift she’d had.
There were family provisions stocked up on the shelf near the windows, Doritos, Diet Cokes. The German continued from a small CD player set up with speakers by the table at the head of the bed. It made everything we were doing sound more dramatic than it was, like I was about to Nurse in Space, or in a fairy-infested cave.
“And over there?” I gestured to my second patient, in a crib on the other side of the room.
“Downs syndrome and RSV.”
“Ahhhhhh.” What the hell was RSV? Some pedidisease. In my mind, I scanned through lecture slides. Respiratory-something-virus, my brain pulled up, relieved. I walked over and peered into the crib. The baby was surrounded by teddy bears that actually seemed cheerful. She had a nasal canula taped to her cheeks and an extra tube, like a ventilation duct in miniature, pointed in front of her nose, with air hissing out, taped atop a teddy bear’s arm. “No lines?” I asked, after scanning nearby for IV poles.
“Nope. Just oxygen. You gotta watch her oxygen saturation—when she sleeps too deep, or rolls away from the blow-by,” the nurse said, waggling the duct-taped teddy bear pressed into service, “she drops.”
Desats, I knew about. “Okay. Got it.” I looked around the room. Not bad so far. I almost felt as confident as I
