big bag of Fritos in her left hand. “Dinner!” she sang, and then she saw Jake sitting with me. “Oh.” She smiled. “I can wait out back.”
Jake stood and wiped his hands on his jeans. He put his arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Paige,” he said, “this is my wife, Ellen.”
Ellen’s dark eyes opened wider at the sound of my name. I waited a second, expecting a flare of jealousy to streak her smile. But she just took a step forward and held out her hand. “After all these years of hearing about you, it’s nice to finally meet you,” she said, and I could see it in her gaze-she was being honest. She slipped her arm around Jake’s waist and squeezed lightly, hooking her thumb into the belt loop of his jeans. “How about I leave the Fritos,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you at home.” And as easily as she’d interrupted, she disappeared.
When she left the small glass business office, taking with her the halo of energy that hovered around her, the air seemed to be sucked away as well. “Ellen and I have been married for five years,” Jake said, staring after her. “She knows about everything. We can’t-” His voice tripped, and then he started again. “We haven’t been able to have any kids yet.” I turned away; I did not trust myself to meet his eyes. “I love her,” he said softly, watching her drive onto Franklin.
“I know.”
Jake squatted down on the floor in front of me. He picked up my left hand and rubbed his thumb over my wedding band, leaving a stripe of grease that he did not try to eras
I tilted back my head and thought about the days when Jake would be getting ready for a date with another girl; all the nights I had eaten with his family and pretended that I really belonged and spun such complicated tales about my mother’s death that I sometimes wrote them down just to keep track. I remembered Terence Flanagan’s buckled grin as he pinched his wife’s backside while she served the potatoes. I remembered Jake coming to me after midnight, to dance in the moonlit kitchen. I thought of Jake’s arms around me as he carried me to my bedroom, still bleeding from the loss of a life. I thought of his face coming in and out of my pain; of the impossible ties he cut to say goodbye. “I’ve run away,” I whispered to Jake, “again.”
chapter 22
“This is the deal,” Nicholas said, juggling Max on his hip and the diaper bag on his shoulder. “I’ll pay you whatever you ask. I’ll do everything in my power to get you off the next two graveyard shifts. But you’ve got to watch my kid.”
LaMyrna Ratchet, the nurse on duty in orthopedics, twisted a strawberry-blond curl around her finger. “I don’t know, Dr. Prescott,” she said. “I could get in a shitload of trouble for this.”
Nicholas gave her his most winning smile. He was watching the heavy clock above her head, which said that even if he left right now he’d be fifteen minutes late to surgery. “I’m trusting you with my son, LaMyrna,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a patient waiting. I’ll bet you can figure something out.”
LaMyrna chewed on a fingernail and finally reached out for Max, who grabbed at her Coke-bottle glasses and her stringy hair. “He doesn’t cry, does he?” she called after Nicholas, who was running down the hall.
“Oh, no,” Nicholas yelled over his shoulder. “Not a bit.”
Nicholas had arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, a half hour earlier than usual. He’d actually had the pleasure of waking up his son, who had awakened him three times during the night to drink and to be changed. Max, still half asleep, had fussed the whole time Nicholas tried to jam him into a fuzzy yellow playsuit. “Yeah, well,” he’d said, “how do
Nicholas had expected to put Max in whatever sort of staff day care the hospital had, but there
“Dr. Prescott,” he heard, and he whipped around. He’d missed the door to the operating suite, that’s how exhausted he was. The nurse held the swinging door for him. He turned on the steaming water in the industrial sinks, scouring under his fingernails until the pads of his fingers were pink and raw. When he pushed his way backward into the operating suite, he saw that everyone else had been waiting.
Fogerty leaned closer to the unconscious patient. “Mr. Brennan,” he said, “it seems Dr. Prescott has decided to grace us with his presence after all.” He turned toward Nicholas and then toward the door. “What,” he said, “no stroller? No Porta-Crib?”
Nicholas pushed him out of the way. “Just when did you develop a sense of humor, Alistair?” he said. He turned to the head OR nurse. “Prep him.”
He was tired and sweating and badly needed a shower, but the only thing in his mind when he finished surgery was Max. He knew he needed to round his patients; he hadn’t a clue about his schedule for tomorrow. He rode up five flights in the cool green elevator. Maybe he’d go home today, and Paige would be there, and this would have been a lousy nightmare.
LaMyrna Ratchet was nowhere to be found. Nicholas stuck his head into the back room at the nurses’ station, but no one seemed to know whether she was still on duty. Nicholas began to peer into different patient rooms. He poked through a bouquet of balloons because he thought he saw a short white skirt, but LaMyrna was not in the room. The patient, a woman of about fifty, clung to Nicholas’s arm. “No more blood,” she cried. “Don’t let them take no more blood.”
LaMyrna was not in any of the patient rooms. Nicholas even checked the women’s staff bathroom, startling a couple of nurses and a female resident, but LaMyrna was not at the sink. He ducked down, peering at the shoes in the stalls. He called her name.
Finally, he went back to the nurses’ station in the center of the orthopedic floor. “Look,” he said, “this nurse has disappeared, and she’s taken my baby.”
An unfamiliar nurse handed him a pink telephone message note that had been folded like a Chinese football. “Why didn’t you say so?” the woman said.
Mike?
Nicholas couldn’t even remember where the volunteer lounge was. They had built it sometime during his residency; it was a general meeting area with lockers and a sign-in sheet for the candy stripers and older hospital volunteers. He asked for directions at the hospital’s front desk. “I can take you,” a girl said. “I’m on my way there.”
She was no older than sixteen and wore a jeans jacket with an airbrushed rendering of Nirvana on the back. She carried a He ?€†small Eddie Bauer refrigerated cold-pack, and her peppermint-stick uniform protruded from a plain white tote bag. She saw Nicholas staring at the bag. “I wouldn’t be caught dead leaving school in it,” she said, and she cracked a gum bubble, loud.
There was no one in the volunteer lounge. Nicholas ran his fingers over the page of signed-in volunteers, but found nothing to indicate that one of them was watching a baby. Then, propped in the corner, he saw his diaper bag.
Nicholas sagged against the wall, flooded with relief. “How do I find out what candy stripers are on what rotations?” The girl looked at him blankly. “Where do you all work?”
The girl shrugged. “Check the front of the book,” she said, flipping to the sign-in page. He saw a list of
