“See. Pretty cool, right?”
The little girl nods. “So cool.”
I tend to her and move onto the next. A pre-teen boy with a broken leg and a busted mouth.
“Is it broken?” he asks.
“It is. Don’t worry. Six weeks in a cast and you’ll be right as rain. I’m going to apply pressure for a split on three, okay? 1-2-3.”
I finish with him and am looking over the next patient when it hits me that all I’ve seen are children so far. I pause and lookaround the room. There’s kids in every bed. A few of them have two or three of them sandwiched together. The only ones that don’t are the three I’m seeing now who are by far the worst of the bunch.
Donna powerwalks past with a tray of gauze. I’m not the only one working, the nurses are tending to a few of the kids on the other side of the room. I glance over that way and see that it looks mostly like bumps and bruises. There’s kids in the five beds down that way, two to a bed, except for one bed. There’s one bed that has the privacy curtains completely drawn. It’s the last bed.
One of these is not like the other.
If every bed is full then why is that one cordoned off the way it is? We would only do that for a patient that needs to be separated, sometimes they’re more severe than the rest and sometimes they need rest.
My mind flashes to the chart Donna didn’t give to me.
MM.
The second I’m done putting the splint on and making sure the boy is fine, I’m off and moving towards the bed. I take a deep breath when I’m halfway there and I see red. Anger blinds me because right there beneath the overpowering stench of fear and pain is the scent of roses, sandalwood, with a hint of lemon.
I know exactly who is in that bed and whose chart Donna had in her fucking bony claws.
“Maris,” I say. It’s my wife that’s in that bed.
Thirty-Eight
MARIS
It’s when I’m home and putting away the groceries that I picked up on the way home that I remember that I have to clean up granny’s room.
“Just get it over with,” I tell myself. It’s not going to be pretty. I don’t exactly remember the state of it but I know it was messy. I trudge up the stairs and mentally prepare myself to do a load of laundry to get the bedding clean. I’m halfway up the stairs and envisioning the amount of baking soda I’m going to have to use when I hear a door slam. I freeze and look up the stairs to the second floor. I’m not one hundred percent sure that it was from the second floor but I think it was from the sound of it. I stand still and quiet, listening to see if I can hear anything else but there’s nothing.
“It was just the wind,” I lie to myself. I might have overlooked the sounds of the house but a door slamming is…well, it’s something. “One crisis at a time.”
Right now I can take care of cleaning the bedroom and doing laundry. I can worry about slamming doors and the fact that fucking Brian was seen wandering around town. I step onto the second floor landing and look up and down the hallway. Everything looks normal. All the doors are shut and quiet.
I swallow hard and take a tentative step and then another towards granny’s room. I’m alone up here. I have to be. I force myself not to hesitate before I open granny’s room. I let out the breath I was holding in a relieved sigh when I see the room is empty.
Brian is not here.
He’s not.
“What about him? He out causing trouble again?”
“He is. Found him wandering Hwy 80. It’s…well, you know the road.”
He’s not here. I don’t care if he’s a fucking zombie, there’s no way he came here without me noticing. I take in a shaky breath and let it out as I look around the room to assess the damage, except that there’s no damage.
“He cleaned it,” I laugh.
Everything in the room is back where it should be. The bed has been stripped and the clean linens and blankets are folded and sitting on top of it. I walk towards the bed and put a hand down on the sheet. I lift them up to inspect them. They’re completely clean, not even a ghost of a memory of a blood stain remains on the sheets.
I shake my head in disbelief and drop them back onto the bed. When did he even have time to do this? He must have started working on it the second I was asleep before he made me breakfast.
“He’s too perfect.”
