Aunt Gigi likes to come check in on Taylor from time to time, even though she is doing just fine off orientation. Taylor can’t figure if her aunt is concerned about her nursing performance or simply fulfilling some sort of promise to Taylor’s dad.
Aunt Gigi could also be doing it because she simply likes Taylor’s company, but given how absent her aunt has been for most of Taylor’s twenty-five-year-old life, she doubts it.
“I always have somewhere to be. The ICU is nonstop,” Aunt Gigi says, with a sigh, before finally leaving.
Taylor’s shoulders relax, and she takes a deep, cleansing breath. She’s relieved she’s no longer being watched by her aunt, but it’s a complicated, guilty relief. Apart from her father, Aunt Gigi is Taylor’s only living relative.
Taylor grabs a 20-gauge, 18-gauge, and 16-gauge needle each from the medicine cart and lines them up in a row. A 16-gauge IV is always preferable—you want a bigger hole to flush in as many fluids as you may need—but you never know the shape the veins of the patient may be, and Taylor likes to be prepared. She doesn’t yet feel confident in her ER nurse position the way she did those three years while working as an orthopedic nurse back home in North Carolina. It’s hardly surprising; being in an orthopedic rehab center in a southern coastal town is vastly different from the ER at the place they call “MGH, or Man’s Greatest Hospital,” after all, but she won’t admit this to her aunt.
Nor to anyone. Taylor adds it to a growing list of things she is keeping to herself: How because Boston is so expensive, she’s sent her dad money only a couple of times, far less than she planned. How sometimes, when she’s had extra cash, she’s guiltily spent it instead on herself—in the secondhand stores, purchasing castoff designer items. How she misses the bad sex she used to have with her ex-boyfriend Grayson. How sometimes she wonders if she made the wrong decision, moving to Boston five months ago. She wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t miss home—there’s no way in hell she would missthat place, where the idea of fancy is donning sneakers instead of flip-flops—but she feels she has miscalculated what Boston would be like. It’s not shiny and exciting like she thought it would be—or at least, not for her.
Another thing she keeps to herself: How, at night when she finally allows herself, the memories of her dead mother cling to her like the pages of a book she can’t put down.
The gloss of the hair is the first thing Taylor notices as her patient is quickly rolled in on the gurney by two paramedics. It’s alustrous chestnut brown, softly coiled with an effortless ease. It reminds Taylor of the Pantene commercials where the women toss their hair over their shoulder like it’s no big deal.
Taylor has an urge to touch the hair. See if it’s as perfect as it appears. See if it’s real.
Then she thirstily drinks in the rest of the woman, which is also flawless—her skin like a smooth pearl, even under the harsh fluorescent overhead lights. No freckles like the ones that dot Taylor’s nose, no sunspots like those that muddy her dad’s face—and, to a lesser extent, Aunt Gigi’s. No, this woman is a beauty: wine-colored lips, feathery black lashes, angled cheekbones. Taylor would bet money that her teeth are perfectly even, no gap between her two front incisors like Taylor has.
The woman’s eyes briefly flutter open, and then they close again.
Something about her feels familiar.
She wears a silky cream-colored blouse, rolled up at the sleeves to expose an IV placed by the paramedics in the field that Taylor will need to swap out, per hospital policy, and a sumptuous brown leather tea-length skirt. Her pedicured feet stick out from beneath the half sheet that drapes over her. On top of the sheet, next to a classic black Chanel quilted bag, rests a pair of red-soled pumps: Louboutins with a jeweled edge.
This is no ordinary patient. This is a creature of wealth.
Taylor swallows, a flurry of excitement building in her chest. She’s been waiting for this for months: a patient of this ilk and stature to present herself. Before Taylor moved to Boston, she envisioned that the city would be teeming with these ladies, that she would encounter them at every turn. That she would get to move among their world, learn from them, drink in their fanciness like gulps of tap water, letting that old New England generational wealth rub off on her until she glimmered withsomething of its gold dust. She assumed that somehow even her fellow Mass General nurses would beabovethose she’d worked with back home, set so far apart from the tired North Carolina women with their bottle-blond hair bleached of life and color, the men with their surfer suntanned sameness.
It is Boston, after all: the city of cobblestones and beauty, of Harvard and MIT, of sophistication and history.
The city her own mother abandoned Taylor and her father for, all those years earlier, in search of a more desirable life.
But Taylor had been wrong. The nurses herearedifferent—as are acquaintances with whom she’s spent time—but not in the way she expected. Far from being upscale or posh, they’re commendably tough, no frills, somewhat guarded with outsiders, and mostly “wicked” smart.
As for high society? Well, the closest Taylor’s gotten has come through occasional glimpses into the stately brick townhomes whose windows are left draped open in the evenings to reveal dioramas of crystal chandeliers and tufted velvet fainting chairs. She’s also sniffed out society ladies in the museums she visits on her days off. The women who cluster around the exhibit du jour clad in Chanel tweed jackets and carrying Birkins, conversing with the curators, with whom they are on a first-name basis. Taylor’s careful to avoid the first Thursday of every month, when admittance is free and therefore flooded with ordinary people.
And then there are the thrift stores, her kryptonite. Like nosebleed seats in a stadium, the secondhand stores in Boston’s wealthiest neighborhoods allow Taylor to distantly experience the lifestyle she can’t have at full price. The rich discard their fancy clothes far too easily: a little stain on a blouse that just needs to be lifted with baking soda, a pull in a cashmere sweater that can simply be darned—or better yet, covered with a patch or a jewel.
So maybe that’s what feels familiar about this patient: She’s one of Them, the wealthy. The old-money, buttoned-up kind of wealth that seems to prevail in Boston yet remains as partially visible and entirely elusive to Taylor as stars in the city’s night sky.
“Vivian Lawrence, age forty-four, unwitnessed fall down a flight of stairs at a cocktail party,” the older of the two paramedics says, as they pull the gurney alongside the hospital bed.
Taylor snaps to, embarrassed that she noticed the patient’s clothes first, not the actual patient.
“Brief LOC. Glasgow coma score fourteen. Pupils equal, reactive. Equal hand grip. Positive ETOH,” the paramedic continues. “Complaining of head pain, three out of ten.”
In other words, the woman must have gotten drunk, fell down the stairs, briefly lost consciousness, but is now with it and doing okay.
“Hi, Vivian,” Taylor says, as she and the paramedics slide Vivian from the gurney into the bed. The movement releases a sudden powdery clean, floral scent into the air, like the puff of a perfume bottle, and Taylor deeply breathes it in. She knows it instantly: Chanel N°5. It’s what her mother wore. As a young girl, Taylor used to both love and detest the perfume; it was beautiful and elegant, like her mother, but its presence also meant her mother was on her way out the door.
It’s the most common scent amid the clothing stacks at Covet in Beacon Hill, the secondhand store with the best stash, thanks to its local residents.
“Hi, Vivian,” Taylor repeats, as the paramedics leave. “I’m Taylor, your nurse. How are you feeling?”
Vivian blinks open and glances around the room with an unfocused gaze. Then, seemingly satisfied with the scene she’s just taken in, or perhaps tired, she elegantly closes her eyes, like a butterfly coming to rest and tucking in its wings.
“Vivian,” Taylor prods. “I need you to open your eyes.”
