THE SENSATION HAD been one of traveling: out the trailer window, past Moyers Corners—Euclid’s farthest signpost, past Bumble Bee Groceries, Three Rivers Inn—and the Clay County line, beyond the antique buildings of Syracuse, then above Route 81 where it gashed the mountain valleys, past teardrop ponds, men in waders among boulder-broken rivers and pines carpeting the earth.
Then Dolores opened her eyes to see a girl with the bearing of an angel, neck flowing into the fine cast of the head, eyes concentrating, the mouth making her think of the story princess whose mouth spilled rubies.
The girl looked up and said, “I am Nurse Melvina Ramoud, head nurse. Now that you’ve come out of it I’ll inform your doctor, but before I do, it’s incumbent upon me to make clear how near death you were and what an incredibly stupid stunt that was—”
“You’ve been talking to my ma, haven’t you,” Dolores said.
Melvina clicked her pen against the clipboard she held. “This is your life we’re talking about, young lady,” she said. “Every last synapse and enzyme of it, and I’ll thank you not to forget it.”
Dolores lifted her head an inch or so from the pillow and peered at Melvie. “Hey, I know you! Didn’t you ride the bus with my Wally? You did!”
Melvie’s eyes flicked to the name on the chart: Jane Doe #1675. She’d been admitted through emergency after the paramedics had been summoned on an anonymous call—a child’s. There was a note from one of the drivers that a group of children had run into the woods when they saw the ambulance. Melvie imagined them fleetingly, dirty children scattering like doves. “That’s unlikely—I’m twenty-two, you must be around thirty-six.”
“Twenty-nine. I had little Wally when I was twelve, hey, it wasn’t my idea—what do you think! You would’ve been in sixth when Wally was in first. Little Wally got held back in school, like forever, until they got sick of him and booted him out completely. So he rode the bus with a whole lot of different people. Sad to say, that kid is half-moron and half-psycho. He’s my oldest.”
“That would have been my assumption.”
When Dolores lifted her head off the pillow a roaring started in her ears like she had seashells clapped over them. She liked the sensation, but when she tried to do it again, Melvina reached over with a hand cool as steel and pinned her flat by the forehead.
“Hold still, you’re overexerting,” Melvie said. She scrutinized her patient, reading the lines that touched her skin and the yellow of her eyes. “Perhaps you enjoy suffering,” she said.
“Honey,” Dolores said, suddenly tired with this woman’s hand on her head, her eyes inside Dolores, taking her over, making her let go. “Maybe I just plain don’t know the difference between that and anything else.” She closed her eyes. “Tell me one thing.”
“If possible.”
“Am I still preg?”
“No.” Melvina turned and walked out. There was no point in telling her that she hadn’t been to begin with.