She isn’t dead, he reassured himself; she’s only in one of the diagnosis and treatment rooms. But I don’t know that for sure.
A heavyset nurse with pale lips and wild red hair sat behind a long counter with a gray computer on it. When Carver approached her, she looked up from writing on a yellow form and smiled. For some reason the perfunctory smile angered him. He wasn’t here to make small talk or return a toaster; someone he loved might be dying, and this woman was smiling!
She seemed to read and understand his anger, and the smile faded. “Yes, sir?” she said. She had round, flesh-padded cheeks that made her eyes seem small, but there was a pleasant quality to her features that would exaggerate expressions of cheer. He realized that she hadn’t really given him the kind of smile he’d assumed.
“Beth Jackson,” Carver said. “She was just brought in here from the explosion on de Leon.”
“Explosion?”
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
“You a relative?” the nurse asked.
“Closer than that.”
“You’re assuming responsibility for payment?”
“Of course!”
She turned away from him and picked up a phone with a curved shoulder rest on its receiver, then talked for a minute in tones too low for him to overhear.
The wide doors to outside hissed open and a blond woman on a gurney was wheeled in by two somber attendants. Beyond them Carver could see the back end of the ambulance with its doors open. The woman was covered to her chin with a white sheet and had an oxygen mask over her face. Her entire body seemed to be trembling beneath the sheet. As the gurney was wheeled past, Carver saw that most of the hair on the left side of her head was singed black. He remembered the young blond woman who had walked into the clinic ahead of Beth.
Standing and watching the attendants wheel the woman down the hall and into one of the curtained cubicles, he hadn’t heard the nurse behind the counter.
“. . . will come out and talk to you in a little while.” He turned. “What?”
She was sitting on a stool and working at the computer now. “Beth Jackson’s being examined in room seven. A doctor will come out and tell you her status as soon as possible.”
“Where’s room seven?”
“It’s not a regular hospital room.” She motioned toward the wide hall. “One of those curtained diagnostic rooms.” She played the keyboard, smiled, and said, “Ah, there we go. I have a few forms for you to fill out, Mr. . . .?”
“Carver. Fred Carver.”
She stretched far to the side and lifted some pink and yellow forms from a nearby metal tray, then set them on the counter. “It will probably be a little while before the doctor talks to you. Do you want to take care of these now?”
Carver stared at the forms. In the midst of life, in the midst of death, there are forms. “Sure,” he said. Maybe it would occupy his mind, hold at bay the dread that would double him over if he gave it a chance.
“I need you to answer a few questions first,” the nurse said. “Is Ms. Jackson covered by insurance?”
He patiently fielded her questions while she fed his answers into the computer.
Ten minutes later, when he was finished with the questions and the forms, the nurse directed him to the emergency waiting room.
It was a square room divided from the corridor by a low bank of potted ferns. The walls were green, like the rest of the walls in emergency, and the carpet was dark brown. An even darker brown vinyl sofa sat with its back to the ferns, and along two of the walls were alternatingly red and gray molded plastic chairs, somehow fastened together so they stayed neatly aligned. In a corner sat a table holding a Mr. Coffee and stacks of foam cups. Some of the cups were sitting upright and held packets of sugar and artificial sweetener and powdered cream. There was also an opened box of tea bags, though Carver didn’t see any hot water. Directly above the coffee brewer was a TV mounted on a steel arm that elbowed out from the wall. The TV was tilted down slightly and aimed so that its screen was visible from most of the chairs in the room. A talk show was on without sound. A grim-looking woman wearing dark glasses and an obvious black wig was seated in a chair directly facing the camera. Beneath her a caption read “Slept with her mother’s boyfriend.” Carver poured coffee into one of the foam cups, then sat down in one of the plastic chairs facing the corridor. On the wall adjacent to the TV was a square clock that read 9:45. The coffee was bitter. He was alone in the room except for the woman who’d slept with her mother’s boyfriend.
At a few minutes before ten, a woman even more grim than the one on TV walked into the waiting room and slumped on the vinyl sofa. She didn’t look at the TV or at Carver. He thought she was about forty. She had dark hair that was mussed and hanging over one eye, and she would have been attractive if it weren’t for the fact that she’d obviously been crying and was under a strain that seemed to clutch at her face from the inside. She folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head, and stared at them, moving one finger then the other, as if testing to make sure they still worked. Her jaw was set. He could see the play of muscles in front of her ears as she rhythmically clenched and unclenched her teeth.
Ten minutes later a tall man in his early twenties, still with the gangly build of his teen years, shuffled into the waiting room. He was wearing Levi’s and a gray T-shirt and seemed upset. As he sat down in one of the plastic chairs, he glanced at the TV, then promptly stood up. He paced, sat down again in another chair. He bent forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor, digging the toes of his dirty white jogging shoes into the carpet and jiggling his legs. He acted as if he were the only one in the room. Carver realized that everyone was acting that way, himself included. Waiting room etiquette. This kind of trouble didn’t like company.
The wall clock acted as if time didn’t exist and it was pretending to be a painting. Carver tried not to look at it.
Only a few minutes had passed after the gangly man’s arrival when a doctor in a wrinkled and stained green gown appeared and rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Without a word, she stood up slowly and followed him into the corridor and out of sight, like a sleepwalker half awake with dread.
The young man in the chair stared briefly at Carver, then let out a long, loud breath and stood up. He turned up the volume on the TV and sat back down. “I don’t care about other people’s morality,” shouted a gray-haired man sitting next to the woman who’d slept with her mother’s boyfriend. He was wearing a suit and tie and had on dark glasses like the woman. He smiled as the audience applauded. A black woman in the audience stood up, leaned close to the microphone extended to her by the bald black man who apparently was the show’s host, and shook her finger at one of the guests on stage as she said, “You’re hurting other people besides your own self!” The gangly young guy got back up and turned the volume down too low to hear again. Carver was glad.
Another doctor in a green gown appeared, this one a slight young woman who appeared to be of Indian descent. Carver tensed his body and gripped the crook of his cane to stand up, but the woman crossed the room and said something to the gangly man. He looked stricken as he rose from his chair and followed her from the waiting room and down the corridor in the direction the woman and the other doctor had gone.