1.
Sarah was humming to herself when she checked into the nurses’ station Monday morning. Most of the other women complained about the hours—it was a habit, a shtick, a way to pass the first dreary phase of the day, when eyes were still itchy with sleep and breath still sour with coffee—but Sarah liked the twelve-hour shifts, always had. She liked rising before the sun and driving to the hospital on silent, mostly empty roads. She liked the fact that the nurses’ station was a lively oasis among dimmed hallways, the hospital still mostly a kingdom run by women before the first doctors started trickling in at eight or nine to make their rounds. She liked the conversation at six A.M., the good-natured grunts and groans, the dry humor, the way she and her colleagues moved around one another in an unconscious but graceful dance, reaching for clipboards and phones and doughnuts, leaning to the side so that someone else could pull a file drawer and tuck away papers.
Sarah liked her colleagues, too, and after twenty-one years she even loved some of them like sisters and mothers. Betty Shaw, who had trained her, still worked two days a week, coming in long enough to help the young ones who kept missing veins and to sass difficult patients into compliance. Sarah realized that she was practically the age Betty had been when she first started at Roma Memorial, that the new girls saw her as she had once seen Betty: caught in that no-man’s-land between youth and old age. This wasn’t a happy thought, especially since Sarah had neither a husband nor children to show for her early middle age, those all-important markers of womanly success—but it was accompanied by a second, kinder understanding, one that made the extra weight and the lines on her face worth it: that she was easier in her body now than she had been at twenty-two, that she could speak with confidence and listen with interest and generosity, not always comparing herself to someone else. Would she like sometimes to be thinner, or to live in a more exciting town, or to have made her career at a hospital where she might have eventually ascended to some kind of administrative position? Sure. Did she ever think about how she’d probably missed her childbearing years and so, without ever getting to consciously make a decision on the matter, she’d ended up, officially, childless? Yes, that too. But she was happy in her work, and she loved the pretty little house she owned two blocks from the public library, where she went weekly for a new stack of mystery novels. She liked coming and going as she pleased, stepping out after her shift for beers with Jan and Shurice and even Betty on those rare days they could talk her into it. If Sarah had married Jason Holmes at twenty-three as she had planned, and if they had started having babies, she’d have teenagers in the house right now. Teenagers! She felt not so much longing at the thought as a sense of having narrowly escaped an unsavory fate.
“Morning, Tilly,” she said, checking the board. “I see you saved Mr. Anderson for me.”
“Morning, sweetie.” Tilly spun around in her chair and looked at the board, too, as if surprised by what she herself had written there. “So I did. Well, you know, it’s probably because you have such a way with him.”
“Way with him, my ass,” Sarah said, but even the thought of drawing blood from a cranky seventy-five-year-old couldn’t dampen her spirits this morning. “Coward.”
“That’s me,” Tilly said. She rose and stretched her arms above her head, sighing deeply. “Whew. Long old boring night. I tell you.”
“Wouldn’ve been so boring if you’d gone to Mr. Anderson’s room in the middle of the night to stick him.”
Tilly laughed. “That’s not my kind of excitement.” She stood and shouldered a leather handbag. “I’ll see you on Thursday, hon. You be good.”
“What fun is that?” Sarah asked, waving a little good-bye. She realized she was grinning to herself as she went to the supply closet to load her cart for morning rounds. The room smelled like rubber and the memory of alcohol. She sang under her breath as she gathered syringes, vials, probe covers for her new digital thermometer, making tick marks on an inventory sheet as she went. It was a Mariah Carey song that you couldn’t turn the radio on without hearing—not normally her speed, but she found herself repeating the chorus softly under her breath, smirking a little around the silly words about a dream lover and getting rescued. Jan, if she saw her like this, would say, “Girl, you’re gone.” Sarah reckoned she was. This thing with Wyatt had come as an utter surprise to her, especially after the way they’d left one another that night at Nancy’s, and she hadn’t felt this glad in a long while. Gladness, that’s what it was. Because she hadn’t been unhappy before, exactly, or even lonely; she had both her parents, still, and they were in good health; she had her brother, Daniel, his wife, and two sweet little nieces; she had several close friends. But romantic love was different, and she was remembering finally why it was different, why it was a thing worth craving. She thought about the warm pleasure of feeling Wyatt’s legs tangled up in hers, her ear pressed to his chest. She thought about his kindness and seriousness, about his strange core of sadness, and how her presence seemed to turn on a light in him. Sarah had devoted her life to making people well, and she thought that she often succeeded, that she caused much more good than harm. But this was more than that. This was love as medicine, and she didn’t think there was another person in the world that she could heal through loving. Not even her parents, whose devotion to one another had always, she suspected, transcended their devotion to her and Daniel.
“Sarah,” a voice called from outside the supply room. Jan. “Are you back there?”
“Yeah,” she called back.
“Get out here. You’ve got to see this.”
Sarah finished stocking her cart and wheeled it out to the nurses’ station, thinking, as she did every morning, that she really needed to get some WD-40 on that squeaky wheel. “Nice of you to show,” she said to Jan, pushing the cart out of the way into a relatively uncluttered corner, and Jan waved her over impatiently.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five minutes, sue me. Get your fanny over here.”
“Jeez, Jan, what is it?”
She had a copy of the local biweekly newspaper, The News Leader, folded so that only the top half was displayed. “Special Early Edition,” it read, followed by a headline in a large, blaring font: LOCAL WOMAN GOES MISSING, POLICE SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT. Beneath that, in italics and slightly smaller font: Community Meeting to Be Held Tonight at First Baptist.
Sarah scanned the first couple of paragraphs. “That’s terrible. I hadn’t heard.”
“Yeah, it’s terrible,” Jan said.
Sarah read a bit farther and then handed the paper back to Jan, trying for an appropriate level of somberness. “Well, thanks for filling me in. I’ve got to hustle, or Jill White’s IV is going to start beeping.”
Jan clutched her arm. “Wait.” She turned the paper over to the front page’s lower half. “Look at that. Look at that and tell me what you think.”
The bottom of the page was dominated by two images. The first was a photograph of a woman, the missing woman. Sarah didn’t recognize her, and the name, Veronica Eastman, didn’t ring any bells either. The second image was a drawing of a man’s face, and she lost her breath for a moment, pulled the paper closer, and quickly read the caption underneath: “Police sketch of man last seen with Veronica Eastman. Detective Tony Joyce called him a ‘person of interest’ and hopes that he will come to the station voluntarily for questioning.”
“You see it too, don’t you?”
Sarah cleared her throat and dropped the paper on the desk. “What do you mean?”
“It looks like that man who was in here last week, doesn’t it? The one who had the heart attack? Powell, right?” Jan pulled out a drawer and walked her fingers along the top of the hanging files; her right hand dipped down suddenly and emerged with a folder. “Yeah, Wyatt Powell. Dr. Patel performed an angioplasty on him last Wednesday.”
Sarah forced herself to consider the sketch again. “I guess there’s some similarities. It’s a pretty generic picture, though.”
Jan, paging quickly through the file, seemed almost giddy with excitement. “Generic! No way!” She waved her fingers around her face. “He had the eyes and the mouth and all that. You know what I mean. I think we should call the cops, maybe.”
“Now, that’s just silly,” Sarah said. She went to her cart and grabbed the handle roughly, bearing down on it with both hands so that she wouldn’t shake. “The man just had a heart attack. The last thing he needs is the cops beating down his door.”
Jan’s eyes bugged out. “He might be a murderer, Sarah. We might have had a murderer in this very hospital. We might have been treating him and making him better, for God’s sake.”
“Which is our job, as a matter of fact.” Sarah pushed the cart and lifted her eyebrows when Jan wouldn’t clear the path. “You mind? One of us is going to have to check on patients, Nancy Drew.”
“You really don’t think it could be him?”
“It could be him or a thousand other men. I don’t feel qualified to say.”
Jan slumped a little. “Huh. Maybe you’re right. You spent a lot more time with him than I did. I guess you’d know.”
Sarah made it to the hall, then stopped. She felt a sharp ache arcing from her throat down to her stomach, as if she’d swallowed an aspirin without water, and turned back toward the nurses’ station. “I don’t want to keep you from calling the police,” she said in as natural a tone as she could manage. “I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. So you should do whatever seems right to you.”
Jan looked from the image to the folder, then back again. “I guess I won’t. For now, anyway.”
“OK,” Sarah said. Her knees were so weak that she didn’t know if she could stand on them. She was thinking about something she had noticed after Wyatt was transferred from the emergency room to her wing, when she and Shurice were attaching electrodes and hooking Wyatt up to an IV: how he’d had scratches on his forearms and neck, one long enough and nasty enough that she’d applied some antibiotic cream to it. Cat get ahold of you? she’d asked him at some point in the week, and he’d gotten a funny expression on his face, like he was embarrassed, and said, I don’t know where those came from. I must have done it in my sleep. It must’ve been a bad dream.