Under the Dome

“How long can you keep this up?” Twitch asked. All the banter had gone out of his voice. “I only ask because right now you’re what this town’s got.”

“As long as I have to. What worries me is getting so tired I screw something up. And of facing stuff that’s way beyond my skill set.” He thought of Rory Dinsmore… and Jimmy Sirois. Thinking of Jimmy was worse, because Rory was now beyond the possibility of medical mistakes. Jimmy, on the other hand…

Rusty saw himself back in the operating room, listening to the soft bleep of the equipment. Saw himself looking down at Jimmy’s pale bare leg, with a black line drawn on it where the cut would have to be made. Thought of Dougie Twitchell trying out his anesthesiologist skills. Felt Ginny Tomlinson slapping a scalpel into his gloved hand and then looking at him over the top of her mask with her cool blue eyes.

God spare me from that, he thought.

Twitch put a hand on Rusty’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said. “One day at a time.”

“Fuck that, one hour at a time,” Rusty said, and got up. “I have to go over to the Health Center, see what’s shaking there. Thank Christ this didn’t happen in the summer; we would’ve had three thousand tourists and seven hundred summer-camp kids on our hands.”

“Want me to come?”

Rusty shook his head. “Check on Ed Carty again, why don’t you? See if he’s still in the land of the living.”

Rusty took one more look at the supply shed, then plodded around the corner of the building and on a diagonal toward the Health Center on the far side of Catherine Russell Drive.

10

Ginny was at the hospital, of course; she would give Mrs. Coveland’s new bundle of joy a final weigh-in before sending them home. The receptionist on duty at the Health Center was seventeen-year-old Gina Buffalino, who had exactly six weeks’ worth of medical experience. As a candy striper. She gave Rusty a deer-in-the- headlights look when he came in that made his heart sink, but the waiting room was empty, and that was a good thing. A very good thing.

“Any call-ins?” Rusty asked.

“One. Mrs. Venziano, out on the Black Ridge Road. Her baby got his head caught between the bars of his playpen. She wanted an ambulance. I… I told her to grease the kid’s head up with olive oil and see if she could get him out that way. It worked.”

Rusty grinned. Maybe there was hope for this kid yet. Gina, looking divinely relieved, grinned back.

“Place is empty, at least,” Rusty said. “Which is great.”

“Not quite. Ms. Grinnell is here—Andrea? I put her in three.” Gina hesitated. “She seemed pretty upset.”

Rusty’s heart, which had begun to rise, sank back down again. Andrea Grinnell. And upset. Which meant she wanted a bump on her OxyContin prescription. Which he, in all good conscience, could not give, even supposing Andy Sanders had enough stock to fill it.

“Okay.” He started down the hall to exam room three, then stopped and looked back. “You didn’t page me.”

Gina flushed. “She asked me specifically not to.”

This puzzled Rusty, but only for a second. Andrea might have a pill problem, but she was no dummy. She’d known that if Rusty was over at the hospital, he was probably with Twitch. And Dougie Twitchell happened to be her baby brother, who even at the age of thirty-nine must be protected from the evil facts of life.

Rusty stood at the door with the black 3 decaled on it, trying to gather himself. This was going to be hard. Andrea wasn’t one of the defiant boozers he saw who claimed that alcohol formed absolutely no part of their problems; nor was she one of the meth-heads who had been showing up with increasing frequency over the last year or so. Andrea’s responsibility for her problem was more difficult to pinpoint, and that complicated the treatment. Certainly she’d been in agony after her fall. Oxy had been the best thing for her, allowing her to cope with the pain so she could sleep and begin therapy. It wasn’t her fault that the drug which allowed her to do those things was the one doctors sometimes called hillbilly heroin.

He opened the door and went in, rehearsing his refusal. Kind but firm, he told himself. Kind but firm.

She was sitting in the corner chair under the cholesterol poster, knees together, head bowed over the purse in her lap. She was a big woman who now looked small. Diminished, somehow. When she raised her head to look at him and he saw how haggard her face was—the lines bracketing her mouth deep, the skin under her eyes almost black—he changed his mind and decided to write the scrip on one of Dr. Haskell’s pink pads after all. Maybe after the Dome crisis was over, he’d try to get her into a detox program; threaten to tattle to her brother, if that was what it took. Now, however, he would give her what she needed. Because he had rarely seen need so stark.

“Eric… Rusty… I’m in trouble.”

“I know. I can see it. I’ll write you a—”

“No!” She was looking at him with something like horror. “Not even if I beg! I’m a drug addict and I have to get off! I’m just a darn old junkie!” Her face folded in on itself. She tried to will it straight again and couldn’t. She put her hands over it instead. Big wrenching sobs that were hard to listen to came through her fingers.

Rusty went to her, going down on one knee and putting an arm around her. “Andrea, it’s good that you want to stop—excellent—but this might not be the best time—”

She looked at him with streaming, reddened eyes. “You’re right about that, it’s the worst time, but it has to be now! And you mustn’t tell Dougie or Rose. Can you help me? Can it even be done? Because I haven’t been able to, not on my own. Those hateful pink pills! I put them in the medicine cabinet and say ‘No more today,’ and an hour later I’m taking them down again! I’ve never been in a mess like this, not in my whole life.”

She dropped her voice as if confiding a great secret. “I don’t think it’s my back anymore, I think it’s my brain telling my back to hurt so I can go on taking those damn pills.”

“Why now, Andrea?”

She only shook her head. “Can you help me or not?”

“Yes, but if you’re thinking about going cold turkey, don’t. For one thing, you’re apt to…” For a brief moment he saw Jannie, shaking in her bed, muttering about the Great Pumpkin. “You’re apt to have seizures.”

She either didn’t register that or set it aside. “How long?”

“To get past the physical part? Two weeks. Maybe three.” And that’s putting you on the fast track, he thought but didn’t say.

She gripped his arm. Her hand was very cold. “Too slow.”

An exceedingly unpleasant idea surfaced in Rusty’s mind. Probably just transient paranoia brought on by stress, but persuasive. “Andrea, is someone blackmailing you?”

“Are you kidding? Everyone knows I take those pills, it’s a small town.” Which did not, in Rusty’s opinion, actually answer the question. “What’s the absolute shortest it can take?”

“With B₁₂ shots—plus thiamine and vitamins—you might manage it in ten days. But you’d be miserable. You wouldn’t be able to sleep much, and you’ll have restless leg syndrome. Not mild, either, they don’t call it kicking the habit for nothing. And you’d have to have someone administer the step-down dosage—someone who can hold the pills and won’t give them to you when you ask. Because you will.”

“Ten days?” She looked hopeful. “And this might be over by then anyway, yes? This Dome thing?”

“Maybe this afternoon. That’s what we all hope.”

“Ten days,” she said. “Ten days.”

And, he thought, you’ll want those goddam things for the rest of your life. But this he didn’t say aloud either.