“Maisie,” he muttered, and Patrick thought, Close enough.
The Eisenhower Medical Center lay ahead in Rancho Mirage. Patrick had been there exactly once, when a persistent flu masqueraded as pneumonia. You couldn’t miss the names associated with the hospital. Bob and Dolores Hope. Frank and Barbara Sinatra. George Burns. Lucille Ball. On buildings. On signs. In hospital literature. While all these people were like a thousand years old, Patrick reasoned they wouldn’t have donated to a hospital that didn’t have a pediatric wing. And there was another name on his mind: Greg. The main campus was not far from his brother’s rehab facility, should they need to enlist him for Grant’s treatment.
Patrick was relieved to see lights as they pulled into the hospital drive. Whether they had power or were relying on generators he wasn’t sure and didn’t care. He pulled the Tesla into a parking spot near the emergency entrance just as the first hint of pink appeared in the eastern sky; it was the first time in years he’d been awake to see the sunrise. This morning, it was a welcome sight. “We’re here.”
Inside the emergency room, orderlies produced a gurney for Grant and wheeled him into an examining bay. Patrick stumbled relaying their situation to the admitting nurse: Sara was gone, Greg was unavailable. The nurse tried to steer him toward the relevant facts as he mumbled and overexplained.
“Yes, I know the facility,” the nurse said when Patrick finally got through to her about Greg. She looked tired, her mousy-brown hair stuck to one side of her forehead as if plastered there by a hand propping her awake. An earthquake, he gathered, was more than one bargained for on the tail end of an already brutal shift. “We can call over there and speak to the father.”
Patrick looked at his phone to see if there was any word from Greg. There wasn’t. But he knew his brother, if Greg felt the quake (he wasn’t on pills—even sleeping ones, he presumed—so how could he not have), he was scaling the walls in an effort to escape. “The thing is, if you do that . . .” He glanced down at Maisie, who was snuggled up next to his side. “Maisie, would you mind getting us a seat over there?” He pointed to the waiting area. When she walked over, settled in a chair, and started staring blankly at a TV, Patrick turned back to the nurse and spoke in a hushed tone. “If you call there and tell him his son’s been injured, he will bust out of rehab. I’m serious. He will break down the front door if he has to. Like in the cartoons. There would be a hole through the wall in the shape of my brother. And I would prefer he not do that. Not leave his treatment, unless that was absolutely, one hundred percent necessary.”
The nurse looked up at him with a weary expression. Was he really putting her through this? She checked the watch on her wrist.
“I have his insurance card. I have a letter from him that he gave me. A power of . . . something or other. And I can pay any deductible, or sponsor a new wing, or whatever it takes.” Patrick fished his wallet out of his pocket, as if that made any difference. He was still wearing gym shorts but had managed to throw on a tee. He looked a half step above homelessness at best, which was not helping his cause.
The nurse unwrapped a peppermint from the dish on the counter. “Are you on TV?” she asked skeptically as she popped the candy in her mouth.
“I was. I was on TV, yes.” He smiled weakly. “If that helps.”
“They play your show here every night.” She pointed at the televisions in the waiting room. “The reruns.”
“That’s right. I think, what, they air back-to-back episodes between ten and eleven?”
“Eleven and twelve. That’s when I know to take my break.”
Patrick offered a weak smile.
“You got old.”
Ouch. He ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to make himself more presentable; he’d have to find a bathroom to wash the serums off his face. “Can we just wait and see what the doctor says? I’m sure the boy’s going to be fine. I’m sure I’m here only in an abundance of caution. I’m new at this.” Patrick pleaded with his eyes. “I’m thinking of two people’s health here. Please.”
The nurse studied his face as if deciding if he were famous enough to break protocol. “Take a seat, Rerun,” she finally said with a sigh.
Patrick pressed his hands together like he was praying and mouthed, Thank you. He collapsed in the seat next to a sullen Maisie. He glanced in her direction, but she didn’t say a word. “You okay?”
Maisie looked at her feet; she was wearing two different shoes. “I don’t like hospitals.”
“Your mom?”
Maisie nodded.
“They’re not all bad, you know. Hospitals.” Patrick sighed, scrambling for an example. His head hurt; there was a tiny person inside his brain kicking the back of his eyeball. If he were going to have an aneurysm, this was probably the worst time but best place. “You were born in one. That’s . . . good. Right? It’s where we met.”
“You met me at the hospital?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t going to. Fly all the way across the country. Babies don’t really do anything, you know. I didn’t see the rush. But your mom insisted and the show was on winter hiatus. She said I was Dad’s brother. Her brother now, too. I was family. And that’s what family does.”
Maisie scrunched her features together in the center of her face. “What’s ‘hiatus’?”
“It’s a break. Like, a vacation from regular life until things start up again.” Patrick saw a connection. “You’re kind of on a hiatus right now.”
“And you met me and you were happy you did?”
“Oh, god no. It was a lot of pressure on me. A lot of people watching me, which—don’t get me wrong. I normally like. But everyone was
