She set about making us both a coffee, and I took a huge mouthful of it when she passed it over to me. I only had a thirty-minute break, but I was determined to use as many of those as possible drinking caffeine.
There was a metal clang out in the hallway—the unmistakable sound of one of the stretchers falling over—and Jenna frowned at me before putting down her coffee and heading to the doorway. I looked longingly at my own before doing the same thing and following her to the door.
She pulled it open and we both stepped out into a warzone of shouting and scuffling.
“What on earth is going on here!” she yelled, her voice loud even above the din around us.
A hand immediately came up and wrapped around her throat, and her body was slammed back into the chest of a heavyset man who looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. She let out a yelp of surprise, but then to my and everyone else’s surprise, she reared back with her elbow and slammed it into the man’s ribs. He let her go with a grunt of pain. Jenna turned around, and as the man bent over to nurse his tender ribs, she reached back and hit him in the nose with a punch that almost took him off his feet.
I gasped in surprise. I had never seen Jenna like this before. Sure, I knew she was tough and didn’t take crap from anyone, but this was a whole new Jenna altogether. She gripped him by the arm and twisted it up behind his back.
“Okay, okay!” he cried out, suddenly not looking so scary after all.
“Now you listen here, Roy. You sit down, and you wait for security to get here before I break this arm of yours, okay?” she snapped fiercely.
He sat down on the floor, looking up at Jenna with his hands out placatingly, a small drip of blood coming from his now red and swollen nose.
I looked around the hallway, shock and awe all rolled up into one. Was I dreaming? Was this a hallucination because I was so tired? The sound of booted feet stomping toward us had me looking up, and I watched as three security guards helped get the man—Roy—up.
“You okay?” one of them asked Jenna as they led him away.
“Of course,” she laughed, like that experience hadn’t terrified her. “Belle, come and help me with this,” Jenna said as she made her way to the fallen stretcher.
“First of all, what was that!” I said, still in shock. I grabbed one side of the stretcher that had been tipped over and we pulled it upright altogether. “And secondly, who was that? And who are you, for that matter!”
Jenna shook her head. “That there was Roy Milligan. Hot-headed, red-blooded, trouble-causing, no good man. That’s who that was. Always ends in up in here when he’s had a little too much to drink and is worse for wear. Probably got into a bar fight before passing out and waking up here.”
“So he was just a drunk?” I said, dragging a hand down my tired face.
“Yes, just a drunk. A drunk that likes to take his problems out on other people when it suits him.”
I let her words sink in for a moment. “But you were…” I threw my hands up in exasperation. “Who are you?” I finally laughed.
“I’m still Jenna. But here I’mJenna who has to deal with distasteful individualssometimes.”
I was still staring at her, waiting for more of an explanation to the little She-Ra scene she’d just pulled on me. My godmother Jenna didn’t take crap from anyone, but she was also loving and kind, gentle and giving. I had never seen her hit someone—let alone a patient—in all my life. And since she’d brought me up from the age of three, that was a long time. Sixteen years, to be precise.
Jenna chuckled and patted my arm. “Belle, sometimes, people just need to be put in their place.”
“But you’re a nurse. You don’t go around punching your patients in the nose!” I snorted on a laugh. “He came here for help, not to get more injured.”
“People like him don’t get the nice treatment, Belle. They get the this-is-all-you’re-getting treatment, which consists of sticking a Band-Aid on whatever he’s done to himself while drunk or high and sending him on his way. Trust me, he doesn’t deserve your sympathy.”
“Maybe he just needs help,” I suggested, ignoring the scathing look she gave me. “Everyone needs help at times.”
“Not him. He’s not a nice man and does not deserve your pity.”
I frowned. I’d never known Jenna to be so cold about another person. I was discovering all kinds of new things today—like my godmother was a badass. A cruel badass, but a badass all the same.
“I’m just saying…” I continued.
Jenna turned to me with a scowl. “Not everyone is good, Belle, and you need to figure that out quickly. Some people are just bad through and through, right down to their bones. But we still do our job as well as we do with everyone else. We patch them up and send them on their way and we see them again the next time they hurt themselves. We just don’t have to wear a smile on our faces with the assholes. Look, what I’m saying is, we don’t have to like every patient—or every person, for that matter. We just have to make sure that we help make them better and send them back on their way.”
We headed back into the break room, but just as we reached the doorway, Jenna’s beeper went off. She checked it and sighed.
“I’m needed with a patient.” She paused, giving me a thoughtful look. “Come on, you can help out too. Let me show you how pointless your pity is on some people.”
A chill ran down my spine at her words, but I nodded okay. There wasn’t anything she could show me that would make me believe that someone didn’t deserve pity and understanding, or even respect. People could be shitty human beings—I knew that more than most—but everyone deserved a second chance, didn’t they?
