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MY EYES OPENED. THE first thing I noticed, as I always did here, was the quiet.
I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to it. I lifted my head from the pillow and grinned at the absolute silence in the air around me.
When I moved to Maple Valley, I had expected it to be different from the city. Of course I had, I wasn’t stupid. I knew the town had a fraction of the population I was used to, but the reality of it was far more intense than I was prepared for.
The house I was staying in was large, and the quiet seemed to fill it on this particular Monday morning, flooding through me in a comforting peace that made me glad I’d come here. I moved out to this place to cover for the last doctor, who had just retired, and because I needed a change of pace. I hadn’t expected to go from a sprint to a dawdle, but it suited me better than I imagined it would.
I got up, got dressed, and poured myself some coffee before I left for the clinic, stifling a yawn as I did so. I’d been up late last night, helping Celeste get settled in, and I knew she would need more help this morning. After what she had been through, she was lucky to be up and lucid, but she didn’t need me to tell her that.
I sipped my coffee as I scrolled through my phone and looked at my appointments for the day; it was relatively quiet, but it usually started like that, before a half-dozen people with injuries or afflictions or complaints they needed looked at came to the clinic and asked for my help. The small office I worked out of doubled as a mini-hospital, with accidents and emergencies passing under my watch, too. There were even a handful of beds for patients who needed to stay overnight, like Celeste, which nearly doubled my workload. Which brought it up to about fifty percent of what I had been doing before.
Sometimes, it felt hectic, but then I compared it to working in the city and it seemed far more manageable. I was going to be fine here. It had already been a few months, and now I was settling in and starting to get to know the people I worked with, the patients around town, I was doing a lot better. There was something nice about being greeted at the grocery store by the woman behind the counter who knew me because I had prescribed her skin cream for her daughter’s rash the month before. I could get used to it.
I decided to walk the short distance to my office that morning. It was a clear, crisp day, the sun just starting to peep over the hills that surrounded the town, and the sunlight was beginning to warm the ground below me as though it had been made just for me to tread.
It didn’t take long to get to my office. It didn’t take long to get anywhere in Maple Valley—it was so small, you could pretty much walk from one end of it to another within an hour or two. Inside, Rita, the receptionist, greeted me with her usual cheerful wave.
“Good morning, Doctor Burgess!” she called to me, and I smiled and shook my head.
“You know you can just call me Nate,” I reminded her. I knew she was never going to do it; Rita had been working here for as long as the last doctor had been running the show, and she had clearly picked up on all her habits from him and the way he ran things. I didn’t mind. With her lacquered hair and bright smile, she made a good impression when you first came in the door, and that was all that mattered.
I made my way to the office, past all the posters telling kids to brush their teeth and letting patients know the early warning signs of diabetes, and took my seat. The office wasn’t much, just enough room to get a couple of patients in here before it got overstuffed, but it was plenty for me. The old doctor had left a stack of books about diagnostic criteria and other useful medical information on the bookshelf. I mostly got my knowledge from newer editions, but sometimes, it was fun or even useful to go through the old stuff and see what I might have missed.
I picked up one of the books on healing broken bones and planted it on the desk for me to have a look through later. There might be something there which could help me with Celeste.
I felt for her, I really did. She had come in a few days ago after she’d had a nasty falI. I didn’t even know how she’d managed to get herself in here, given the state she was in, but she had. I had told her at once she’d need to stay overnight, but she had brushed me off and told me she was fine, and headed back home. Of course, it hadn’t taken long until we had to send someone out there to get her, when she had called us back to admit she wasn't doing as well as she thought, and she needed our help. I’d asked for her permission to have a look around the house and see what kind of state it was in, and she was lucky not to have had a fall before this. I needed to talk to her about getting some safety railings put in, something to make sure she didn’t have another fall.
She shouldn’t have been living alone, let alone anywhere with two stories like her house had. It was too big for a woman like her, with no family to fill it out.
I’d heard a little about a daughter, but nobody in the town seemed to think much of her. What was her name? I’d heard someone gossiping about her when I had brought Celeste in the day before, but I didn’t know for sure. I had heard she’d left this place a long time ago, skipped town and headed out and started over somewhere new. I hadn’t seen her since I moved here, and I doubted she made much of an effort to come back too often, judging by the fact her mother’s house still looked as unhospitable as it did. Any child who’d seen that would have done all they could to make it right.
Had she heard about her mother’s fall, wherever she was? Celeste was clearly the kind of woman who thought she could deal with everything by herself, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear she was hiding it from her daughter. I didn’t know what to do with that. I could have called up her family, whatever I could find on her file, and told them they needed to get down here and do something to help her, but it wasn’t so easy. Families were complicated, there was so much going on there sometimes you didn’t know where to start. Most of them sure as hell didn’t appreciate someone like me sticking my nose in and making things worse.
Once I had checked over my plans for the da and ensured I had a half-hour to spare before it all started, I made my way to the private beds in the back of the clinic so I could talk to Celeste. I knew she wasn’t going to like what I had to say, but she needed to hear it.
She was already awake by the time I came in, a coffee in one hand. I didn’t even know how she’d gotten it, though I imagined Rita had snuck it in for her. The two of them seemed to know each other from way back, in the way women in towns like this did, and I was sure they’d shared a few coffees in their time.
“Good morning, Celeste,” I greeted her, and she smiled at me warmly, the corners of her eyes crinkling.
“Good morning, doc,” she replied. That’s what most of the patients here called me; at first, I thought it was because they couldn’t remember my name, but the more time that passed, the more I realized it was just their way of acknowledging my place in this town.
“How are you feeling today?” I asked her, and she shrugged.
“Not...great,” she replied. I knew it was a big admittance for someone like her. She didn’t like the idea of coming clean and telling me she might not be doing great, but that was what I was here for.
“I can imagine,” I told her as I sat on the seat beside her bed and reached for her chart. She had broken her leg, as well as seriously spraining her arm, and I would be amazed if she would be up and about again anytime soon. More to the point, I wasn’t sure I would be willing to let her out of my sight until I knew she was going to go home to someone who could take care of her.
“So, how long do you think it’s going to be before I can get back home?” she asked hopefully. I wished I could give her the kind of answer she would be happy with, but I knew she wasn’t going to like what I had to say.
“I think you’ll have to stay a bit longer,” I told her. “And I’m not comfortable letting you out until you can confirm you’ve got someone at home who’ll be able to keep an eye on you for a while you’re healing up. A friend, a family member...?”
I trailed off, and I could see the flash of discomfort on her face when I brought up the latter. Whatever it was, it seemed to hit a sore spot.
“Maybe,” she muttered, and I shook my head.
“It’s not a maybe,” I told her. “You need to have someone there to take care of you. You’ll do yourself even more of an injury, and the last thing you want is to end up back here with me.”
She smiled, as kindly as she could.
‘“I’ll be all right by myself,” she told me, and I sighed. It was going to be hard to get through to her. She was a stubborn woman, and she clearly thought she would be totally fine by herself, even though it was obvious to me—and probably everyone else, too—she wasn’t in the best state.
“And we’ll need to talk about putting in some rails and guides around the house to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” I explained. “That’s a big place for you to take care of by yourself.”
“I’ll be fine,” she replied. I wasn’t going to get through to her. I needed to go over her head for this, though I was sure she was going to be furious at me for it.
“I’ll be back in later today to talk about your pain meds,” I told her. “You’ll need at least something while you’re healing, okay?”
“I don’t feel too bad,” she replied, but I could see her wince as she went to place her bad hand in her lap. She was doing her best to sell me on the idea that she was fine, but I didn’t believe her. More than that—I had seen her X-rays. I knew she was going to need a while to get back on her feet, and the home she was living in now wasn’t exactly conducive to recovery.
I ducked into reception when I was done with her, and checked her file; there had to be something here, something to point me in the direction of someone who would be able to help her. I couldn’t let her out of here in good conscience without knowing someone was there to take care of her when I did, and I refused to allow her to talk her way into another fall, just because she believed she could take care of herself.
I skimmed my finger down the file until I landed on a number.
