SHE couldn’t have pushed herself all the way to the hospital, and she didn’t want to involve Mitch or Sunny or Lanli in this, but Bonsi was on a break when she called, and he was more than happy to scoot down the street and grab her. She was glad it was Bonsi. He was safe. He didn’t pry, and if ever there was a time she didn’t want prying, this was it. So, thanks to Bonsi, thirty minutes after Kyle stormed out of the house, Anna was sitting with Margaret Chase at the triage desk in the ER, simply watching. Why did she want to be there? She didn’t know, except that, for her, there was balance in the emergency room—a perfect order even amid chaos. One she couldn’t find in her own life. Tonight, when everything else was crumbling, she needed to remember that order, she needed to see that balance again.
“Sorry I don’t have time to chat right now,” Eva Rainart said, rushing by carrying two units of blood ready to hang. “It just got crazy around here…” Eva’s words trailed away as she turned the corner and followed the trauma surgeon into a room where a severed arm was the priority. Farm accident, Anna overheard. Overturned tractor. Eva, now the temporary evening charge nurse, was a somber, no-nonsense type. She’d been Anna’s second in charge. Not Anna’s choice for the job because she lacked the personal touch Anna loved to give her patients, but they weren’t her patients anymore. They were Eva’s.
“You work here?” a tired old man asked. He was slumped in a waiting-room chair, drinking a Coke while Margaret was checking in an ATV accident—two victims, four broken legs. “’Cause I got this powerful burnin’ in my privates and I’ve been waitin’ here for hours. Think you could get someone to take a look at me pretty soon?”
“Burning, like when you urinate?” Anna asked automatically.
“No, ma’am. It’s not inside like that. It’s on the outside. A rash. Think I got into some poison ivy or something. Out fishing on the riverbank and, well, you know. When a man’s gotta go…Don’t guess I paid much attention to where I went and now it’s got me in a real mess.”
She could handle that, even in her chair. Take him back to a cubicle, take a look, call the doctor to prescribe ointment or prednisone. Simple thing, really. And she was so tempted. Not because she relished the treatment of skin rashes, because she didn’t. That duty normally went to students. But because she could do it, and he expected her to do it in spite of her wheelchair.
Yes, she was tempted, but not resigned. This wasn’t hers anymore. None of it. Like Kyle, what had once fit so perfectly in her life no longer did. She was merely the observer. Her heart clutched at the thought…at the loss.
“I’ll go see if I can find someone to have a look,” she said, struggling to force the words, words that didn’t want to come.
The corridor back to the central station was a flurry of people in and out. Nurses running with arms full of supplies, doctors shouting orders, patients moaning and crying, patients’ families and friends trying to waylay anyone in scrubs for an answer. So much commotion, and it seemed so long ago that she was in the middle of it.
She’d loved nights like this—lots of activity, the adrenaline rush that had always got her through. Non-stop hustle, then suddenly the onslaught was over and the only things remembered were the successes and failures, and the faces. Never the hours. She wondered, for a moment, how her trauma team remembered that night—as a success, or a failure? Perhaps they only remembered her face. Or maybe that had already faded from memory, as had most of the faces that had passed through her care over the years.
Tonight, the gentleman with poison ivy would have to wait even longer than he already had, and Anna was on her way back to the waiting room to suggest he go find an immediate care clinic when suddenly a woman burst through the doors carrying a limp, bloodied child in her arms. “Somebody help us,” she screamed. “Please, he’s dying.” Even without a good look Anna recognized a GSW—gunshot wound. To his head.
Immediately the nurse in her took over and she instructed the hysterical mother to lay her little boy on a gurney sitting across from the station. “Margaret, call CT and tell them we’ve got one coming right up, then call the blood bank,” she shouted at the triage nurse. “Order up ten units of O-neg until we can get him typed and crossed. And get Neuro down here, stat. Also tell the OR to stand by.” The boy’s life was oozing away with so much blood loss, and there was so much to do to save him. Her mind was clicking off the list… “Call the lab,” she yelled at Margaret, who was already on the phone. “Besides type and cross we need a blood gas and a CBC. And we need to get an IV in him…plasma.” Volume extenders, a make-do to keep his blood pressure up until the blood arrived. She wheeled herself to the supply cart and grabbed the IV set-up, as she’d done thousands of times before—tubing, IV catheter, a butterfly since his veins were so tiny, Betadine scrubs to sterilize the site. Then she grabbed sterile gauze to apply as a dressing to his head and moved to the side of the gurney.
“Get her the hell out of here,” a resident yelled, shoving Anna’s chair into the wall, knocking the supplies on her lap to the floor. He looked down at the IV set-up and kicked it away. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing, giving orders?”
“She’s the charge nurse,” Margaret said, stepping in to start the IV.
Grabbing a pair of gloves from the supply cart, the doctor took his first look at the little boy, running down the preliminary neurology checks—pupilary reaction, voluntary or involuntary movement. “Oxygen,” he yelled, “And get him on a monitor.” Then he spun back to Anna. “Look, I heard what happened to you and it’s a tough break, but you don’t belong here anymore. You’re in the way, and if you don’t move, I’m going to have to call Security and have them remove you.” He kicked Anna’s foot as he stepped around her. “So get out of my way,” he snarled.
Margaret glanced over at Anna and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry,” as she attached the tubing to the IV catheter.
“Urinary catheter,” the doctor barked at the medical students flanking him as he rushed the boy away. “Start an I and O.” Fluid intake and urinary output, meaning the boy would be getting some pretty hefty drugs that could compromise his renal function. If he survived surgery.
Anna waited until the frenzy was over before she headed to the door. The order and balance was still here, but it was no longer hers. Like everything else, it had crumbled away.
“Look, Anna,” Eva Rainart called before Anna could leave. “Come back some time when it’s not so busy. We’d love to have you visit.” Visit. She was being invited to visit her emergency room.
“Did you find someone to see me, ma’am?” the old gentleman with the rash asked her on her way out the door. “Remember? My rash.” He said the word so quietly she could barely hear him.
Anna glanced back at Margaret, who was taking report from two paramedics who’d brought in an anaphylactic reaction to shellfish. Swollen tongue, breathing difficulties…so the rash would wait even longer. “Sir,” Anna said to him in the same hushed tones he’d used, “if I were you, I’d go to an immediate care center. They’ll get to you a lot quicker.” In spite of it all, in spite of not belonging there anymore, she was still a nurse. That much hadn’t crumbled.
“Thank you, ma’am. I think I’ll do that. And I appreciate your kindness.”
Anna smiled the smile she always saved for her patients. The one that told them she genuinely cared. “You take care of yourself.”
“You, too, ma’am.” He left, and so did Anna. She left it all—everything that had happened, everything that hadn’t happened—and made her way outside to the parking lot. No destination in mind other than to go someplace else, she made it as far as the spot where she’d been parked that night in January, then stopped. “Why?” she whispered. “I never wanted much. Just to help. Just to be a good nurse. And I was. Damn it, I was a good nurse.” Shutting her eyes, she expected the panic to rise up and grab her, but it didn’t. And she expected her heart to ache, but it didn’t. It was more like a numb feeling coming over her. She wanted to feel…Dear God, how she wanted to feel, but she couldn’t. Maybe there was nothing left to feel. Or maybe she didn’t remember how.
Suddenly it was that night again and she was plodding through the snow. Tired from thirty-six hours straight. Her feet ached, her back felt like it was ready to snap in half. And she was fighting the wind and the snow. Trying to get home. Anna chuckled, remembering the couple who’d threatened to sue her. Most likely they’d gone home to their miserable lives and that night in the ER was now chat relegated to cocktail parties when the conversation turned to the complaints of life—a miserable scratch on the door of their new Mercedes, a miserable infestation of grubs in their lawn, a miserable nurse who’d refused to fall into obedient servitude.
Anna’s smile vanished when she recalled the poor man who’d caused the accident leading to so many injuries. Even, indirectly, leading to hers. Most likely he’d recovered from his heart attack, but the kind of misery that had come after it wasn’t like the misery of that demanding couple. His was deep and painful, and abiding. It would never leave him. Or maybe he would stay numb. As she’d felt a little while ago when the resident had shoved her to the wall like she was a piece of furniture in his way.
Suddenly a bright light hit Anna’s face, jolting her from the memories. “You just gonna sit there, lady, or can I use that parking spot?” someone yelled at her.
Anna’s eyes shot open and she spun to see a monster-sized pickup truck turned part way into the parking space, apparently waiting for her to get out of the way.
“Can’t you just haul it over onto the grass so I can pull in?” the man inside it continued. “Or maybe go sit in one of them handicapped parking places?”
His voice wasn’t particularly belligerent. But it didn’t have to be. He was telling her she didn’t belong there, didn’t belong where she wanted to be. “Go away,” she said quietly.
“Come on, let me have it. OK? Save me some walking.”
She looked up at him, couldn’t see his face in the brightness of his headlights—but she saw his face in her mind. It looked like that of the resident who’d shoved her aside, like Eva who would soon have her job, like that couple who’d threatened to sue her. Like Kyle. And she hated them all. Hated the man in the pickup, too, for being just like everybody else.
“You want this parking place, you’ve got to come take it from me,” she screamed. “You hear me? Come take it from me. I dare you.”
“Hey, lady. I just wanted—”
“You all want to take what’s mine. Every single one of you. You think that because I’m like this…” she slapped her legs “…that I shouldn’t have it. That I’m not entitled to it anymore. But you’re not getting it unless you get out of that truck, come down here and take it away from me.” The rage was boiling in her. Rage, frustration, anger. And she wished to heaven she’d go numb again. “What’s the matter? You afraid to shove the poor crippled lady out of the way to get what you want? Well, you can go to hell. Do you hear me? You can’t make me move and you can just go to hell.”
He put the truck in reverse and started to back away, but Anna rolled right at him, stopping just to the side of his bumper, causing him to jam on his brakes. “Everybody keeps telling me where I belong and don’t belong,” she cried, her anger dissipating now. “And I won’t let you do that to me, too.”
“Look,” he yelled, jumping out of his cab, “I’ll go get you some help. OK, lady? I’ll find someone to come take care of you, then I’ll be right back.”
He ran away and left her there alone, sitting in the truck’s headlamps, staring at nothing in particular and too numb to care where she was or what she was doing. She could feel the heat of the truck’s headlamps on her face. It had been so cold that night in January, she would have welcomed heat like that. So cold…she remembered that more than anything.
“Miss Wells?”
She felt herself being pulled back from the light.
“Are you OK, Miss Wells?”
She opened her eyes, looked at the crowd standing around her. Strangers most of them, and a couple of faces she recognized. “I’m fine,” she said to Pete, the security guard. The truck was still there, its engine now off. She didn’t know which of the men huddled there, watching her, owned it, and she didn’t care. It was over. Finally, it was over.
“Look, Pete, I just want to sit here for a while, if that’s OK.” She spun her chair until her back was to the onlookers. “That’s all I want to do. Just sit here for a while.”
Pete shooed the people away and directed the pickup truck to a parking spot in the next row over. Then he stood across the aisle from Anna and waited until Mitch arrived before he, too, disappeared.
“Anna,” Mitch said, stepping around to face Anna. “Your dad got a call from Bonsi, something about you being pretty upset, getting into a fight with a guy in a truck. He asked me to come since he’s still up in Martinsville.” He pulled Anna over to the curb at the front of the parking spot, then sat down on it, just below her eye level. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
It was a hot night now. Mosquitoes and moths were swarming the parking lot light overhead. Anna looked up to watch. “It’s hopeless, you know. They fly to the light, but eventually the light will kill them. It’s what they know. Maybe the only thing they know. But when they get too close, and they will…that’ll be the end.” She couldn’t cry now. There were a lot of emotions running through her, but none that would bring her close to tears. Maybe it was the numbness finally creeping back in.
“Is that what happened to you? Did you get too close?”
“Something like that.”
“Bonsi told me what happened.”
She finally looked at Mitch. “I shouldn’t have been there. And you’re right, I got way too close to the light.”
“So you came out here to the parking lot and beat up on some guy driving a four-by-four.” Mitch reached across and took her hand. “Bonsi said to tell you the surgery’s going well. That the little boy will probably make a full recovery.”
“But I won’t,” she said, matter-of-factly. “And that’s got nothing to do with the way I rehab. I’m not going back there no matter what happens. They’ve gone on without me, and I can’t catch up. And I hate them for doing that. And I hate myself for hating them, because it’s not their fault. Not anybody’s fault. Not even that jerk resident who wasn’t very kind about pointing out just how much I was in the way. But he was right. I was, and I suppose I had to see that for myself.” Closure. She hated the word. It was ugly, and she didn’t want it. But it wasn’t her choice. She’d had closure with Kyle, and this had been the inevitable next closure in line for her.
Anna pointed to the blacktop below her. “Did you know this is where it happened?”
“Where you were hit?”
Anna nodded. “And they didn’t even put up a memorial to me. Here lies the career of the best damn ER nurse this hospital will ever know.” She pulled her hand away from Mitch and spun her chair so she wasn’t facing the exact spot where she’d been struck. “It’s not easy, letting go.” She laughed. “Just ask the guy in the truck.”
“For what it’s worth, you won that round. You’re still here and he’s not.” Mitch chuckled. “So do you want to erect a memorial to yourself right here on this spot? One that will tell the world you’re not giving up your parking space for anybody?” He jumped up before she could answer. “Be right back.”
Anna spun around and watched him run to his truck. A minute later he returned with a can of spray paint, and Izzy. Apparently Mitch had been bailing her out of jail for leading a rally to protest the use of gas-powered boats on the reservoir. “This is so exciting,” Izzy said. “I always did love defacing public property for a good cause.”
“Defacing?” Anna asked.
“Just a little,” Mitch said, shaking the can. Popping the top, he handed it to her. “Your memorial, you get the honors.”
Anna thought for a minute, then turned her chair sideways, flipped back the armrest, leaned down and started to write. When she was finished, she backed away to look at her handiwork, and there, in the parking spot where she’d traded one fate for one yet to be determined, were the bright, neon-orange words, ANNA WELLS IS STILL HERE! Closure didn’t mean she’d succumbed to the light. It simply meant she’d moved on.
Moving on. With that finally came the tears.
Bending down, Mitch lifted her out of her chair and pulled her to his chest, where he held her tight as she cried. It was the first time she’d cried since the accident—the tears she needed, and deserved. And cry she did, harder than she’d ever cried in her life, until she was all cried out. Then she looked down at her handiwork and smiled. “I am still here,” she whispered, sniffling back the last trace of her tears. Maybe, for the first time, she truly believed it.
“Who’s that big hunk?” Izzy asked, eyeing Frank appreciatively as they pulled into the driveway. “And is he married?”
“That hunk’s my dad,” Anna answered, wondering if she should shout at him to run for his life. “And he’s a widower.”
The truck wasn’t even at a complete stop when Izzy bolted out the door, across the yard and almost into Frank’s arms. “Sorry about that,” Mitch muttered. “Her social skills are sometimes a little exuberant. I probably should have taken her home before I came to the hospital, but she insisted.”
Even from a distance, Anna saw the smile crossing her father’s face. Izzy wasn’t exactly the kind of person she expected her father to take up with, but his smile told Anna she might be wrong. “Interesting,” she commented.
“More like scary,” Mitch quipped, hopping out of the truck. “The Fish and Game Department isn’t going to press charges as she didn’t cause any damage at the reservoir. And the county home agreed not to press charges so long as she shows up there every morning to serve breakfast, which she actually sees as a step in the right direction. But I’m guessing within a week Ed Benedict will be hauling her back to jail for inciting a food fight or something.” He laughed. “Or chaining herself to an outboard motor.”
By the time Mitch and Anna were in the house, Izzy and Frank were clanking pots and pans around the kitchen. “She’s going to fix dinner for all of us,” Frank explained, his eyes twinkling. “Later, we’re going to go over her case.”
“Cases, Frankie,” she called from the kitchen. “I’ve also got this thing going on over at the landfill. Or I will tomorrow, after I get out of the county home.”
“She works fast,” Anna commented, laughing.
“She can’t cook,” Mitch returned. “Can’t boil water, and I’m not even sure she knows how to call out for a pizza.”
Dinner did turn out to be pizza, delivered by a young man who beamed with delight over the twenty-dollar tip Izzy gave him. “You’ve got to make your friends where you can,” she defended herself. “That boy may turn out to be a cop, and maybe he’ll remember that tip I gave him and be nice to me when he arrests me.”
Mitch looked mildly miffed, while Anna laughed politely. But Frank roared with laughter, and scooted in a little closer to Izzy.
After dinner, Izzy and Frank went to the front porch, Mitch and Anna to the weights. “Five minutes, tops,” Mitch promised, grinning. “Unless you want more.”
“More? I’m still sore from last time. Is that natural?” she asked.
“For a while it is. The best thing you can do to work it out is exercise.” He handed her the pound-and-a-halfers then grabbed his own set and sat on a bench opposite her. “I’d like you to do an hour a day. Break it into five or six sessions if you have to. We’ll increase your endurance gradually, and do the same with the amount of weight you can tolerate.”
“How long do you work out every day to stay in such good shape?”
“I try for two hours. One in the morning and one later, usually before bed.”
“And it’s all weights?”
Mitch shook his head. “I run two or three times a week, walk, swim. Variety…Keeps me from getting bored, and carving bowls all day can get really boring.” He paused, smiling. “Want to come to my place tomorrow? I’m going to do about an hour in the pool, and since Lanli’s already had you in the water once or twice I thought maybe you’d like to…”
She wanted to go, but not necessarily for the swim. Which scared her to death, because building anything other than a professional relationship with Mitch was just plain stupid. Sure, he came to her rescue, like tonight. Even ate burgers with her in public. But that was certainly nothing to build any hopes on because, as good a guy as he was, it was an obligation. She was an obligation. No kidding herself on that one. Even though he didn’t call himself a doctor anymore, that was exactly what he was. He was the doctor, she the patient. Simple as that.
“I’m not up to that level of exercise yet,” she said, “and I’m not up to any more weights tonight.” She let go of the ones in her hands, dropping them to the floor, then backed away. “Goodnight, Mitch, and thanks for everything.” The stress of the day had finally descended and all she wanted to do was crawl between the sheets and forget everything. Forget Kyle, forget what had happened at the hospital. Forget Mitch, too, since in the very near future he’d be another weight she’d have to let go. For his own good.
“You dumped him tonight, didn’t you?” he asked. “Or was it the other way around? Did he dump you?”
“Excuse me, but my relationship with Kyle isn’t any of your business,” she snapped, spinning away.
“So should I repeat, verbatim, your lecture to me this afternoon, or would you like a summary about how this is my business? How I have a stake in that business since I agreed to help you, and how I need to know if I can count on you working your butt off, because if you don’t you’re wasting my time? Oh, and in case you haven’t figured it out, how that fiancé of yours plays with your emotions which, in turn, affects the way you work which, in turn, affects my time with you which, in turn, affects the outcome of one day’s production of carved bowls. And even though my mother dismisses them, they do have a ready market, a waiting list, and I make a couple of hundred bucks apiece. Which makes the state of your engagement, or non-engagement, essential to me, as well as my bowls.”
“Non-engagement,” she said, crossing the threshold into her bedroom. Then she slammed the door.
“You were proud of her today, weren’t you?” Izzy asked, scooting into the truck next to her son.
“Just a lapse in sanity,” Mitch muttered. “Won’t happen again.” A big lapse he couldn’t let happen again. First mistake was going to the hospital. He should have refused when Frank called. But he didn’t because when he’d heard what had been happening all he’d been able to think about had been getting to Anna. She’d needed him…or maybe he’d wanted her to need him. Whatever the case, that seven-minute drive from the police station to the hospital had turned into the longest drive of his life.
Then when he’d first seen her sitting there in that parking space, so lost, it had damn near broken his heart. She’d finally faced it…faced it all. Alone. That dreaded moment when the loss had finally and totally sunk in was the reason he’d left rehab medicine. He hated it! Hated it for all his patients. Hated it especially for Anna. Second mistake—he hated himself for not being there for her at that moment, but he didn’t know if he could have faced it with her and given her what she’d needed. And, God help him, part of him was glad he hadn’t been there. Sure, that made him a coward. Made him a failure, too. But he was a coward and failure. The two went hand in hand—in his hands. Hands that couldn’t take her where she wanted to go, and it was tearing him up.
“You should have told her you were proud of her, honey.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Complicated how? Like you’re falling in love with her, that kind of complicated?”
He clenched the steering wheel and made a sharp turn onto Izzy’s street, making the tires squeal. “She’s a favor I owe someone. That’s it, so don’t read anything else into it, because there’s nothing there. OK?”
“Tell you what. You go home and convince yourself nothing else is going on, and when you can do it to the point you’re absolutely sure, let me know. Tell it to my face and let me look into your eyes, and then I’ll tell you if I believe you, because right now I sure don’t. Oh, and, Mitch, honey. She’s a great gal. It’s OK to be in love with her.”
He laughed bitterly. “You’re giving me permission?”
“Yep, since you’re not ready to do that yet. But when you do, it won’t be so complicated. I promise you. So next time you see her tell her you were proud of her this evening. Because you were, and anyone who knows you could tell it from the look in your eyes. That, and the fact you’re crazy about her.”
Crazy about her. Those words buzzed around him like an angry mosquito all the way home, then on into the middle of the night. Crazy about her was one thing. Scared was another. How could he spend a lifetime looking at the woman he loved as his patient? If he let himself love her, that was. Would he always see her as someone who had to be cured or fixed? As ugly as it felt to him, it did get back to her disability—a bottom line in everything he was feeling. It was a fact of life he couldn’t ignore, one he didn’t know if he could, or wanted to, deal with other than in the professional sense.
Well, he certainly hadn’t planned this. There were some feelings developing, though. His for Anna anyway—he wasn’t sure about hers for him. And Izzy’s permission to go for it didn’t make things any better.
His brain was telling him one thing, his heart another—and the desire of his heart was far scarier than his mom hooking up with Anna’s dad. And that was pretty damned scary!