“What difference does it make?”
“Forget it,” Ernesto said. “Go ’head.”
“Bottom of the eighth. We’re down by one. Sizemore hits a shot into the stands. And I didn’t manage to stop it.”
Ernesto stopped chewing and they stared at each other. Then he swallowed and said, “You mean it hit your kid?”
Sweeney continued to stare at him. “It was the first game I’d ever taken him to.”
He started to turn back to the inventory and Ernesto said, “Bullshit.”
It sounded more friendly than angry, and when Sweeney looked up, the pharmacist was grinning and had strands of tuna and mayonnaise on his chin.
“Excuse me?” Sweeney said.
“C’mon,” Ernesto said. “That’s bullshit, right?”
“Why would I lie about my son’s coma?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” Ernesto said. “But if that’s what happened, you’da sued the shit out of the franchise and you wouldn’t be living down in the basement.”
Sweeney pointed at the chin with his pencil. “You got some tuna there,” he said and Ernesto wiped it away with his hand.
“You’re not gonna tell me what happened, are you?” Ernesto said.
Sweeney smiled and said, “What else do you do all night besides eat tuna sandwiches and flirt with the nurses?”
Ernesto slid his ass off the counter and tossed his brown bag and empty Coke can into the trash.
“These nurses?” he said and threw up a hand in disgust. “Don’t even bother. None of them got a sense of humor. ’Cept the ones with that bitchy sense of humor. And you don’t need that. This place is gonna drive you crazy, you know.”
“Why’s that?”
“Lots of reasons. You were running a big store back home, right? Lots of customer service, dealing with the people. You don’t deal with no one here. Specially on third shift. I did eleven to seven my first six months, I almost went batshit. No kidding. You’re filling the same meds, night after night. You got the skeleton crew, right? You dying for the janitor to come down, tell his same stupid jokes. Really, I don’t mean to depress you or anything, but you made a bad move here.”
“Thanks for the concern, Ernesto.”
“Big turnover on the third shift. That’s another reason I’m getting out. I earned my way to second shift and they keep scheduling me back to third every time we’re short-staffed. Look at tonight. I’m supposed to be down La Concha — hey, you play dice?”
Sweeney shook his head and Ernesto went on.
“Here I am training you instead.”
The notion of Ernesto training him struck Sweeney somewhere between sad and annoying, but he said, “Speaking of training, maybe you could run down the routine for me.”
“Good idea. I told Nora I’d give you an hour and if you knew your shit I’d leave you alone.”
The room was more drug closet than pharmacy. A claustrophobic wouldn’t have lasted. There were no windows beyond a small pass-through rectangle cut into the wall where the nurses and the occasional doctor would pick up their orders.
“You won’t see much of the doctors,” Ernesto explained. “They keep one resident on at night. Right now it’s Tannenbaum. You meet Tannenbaum yet?”
Sweeney shook his head and Ernesto went on.
“Unless there’s a problem he just sleeps all night in the lounge. Anyway, you’ll find all your med orders there in your in-box when you get here. Mostly it’s the same old shit unless one of the patients develops an infection or something. Sometimes Dr. Peck, the lady, she’ll mix things up on you. But basically, you’ll just be filling your bags and syringes and putting them up on the tray. There are six night duty nurses, two to each floor.”
“For fifty patients?”
“It’s not exactly intensive care, you know? They do their rounds, check the monitors, hang their bags, maybe roll somebody or give a sponge bath or change a diaper. But mostly they’re drinking coffee with Romeo and reading their romance novels.”
“Back up a second,” Sweeney said. “The nurses don’t fill their own syringes?”
Ernesto shook his head.
“So there’s nobody double-checking the meds?”
“It’s all on you, bro,” Ernesto said. “So you got to pay attention.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Sweeney said.
Ernesto seemed amused. He checked his watch, clapped Sweeney on the back, and said, “I got to get running now. My boys are waiting for me. If you get hungry you can have the rest of my sandwich. It’s in the fridge.”
He moved to the door and said, “Anything I forget?”
“I don’t think so,” Sweeney said. “Thanks for staying late.”
“De nada,” Ernesto said, slipping out of his smock and hooking it over his shoulder. “You’ll get the hang of it real quick. And listen, if you start thinking you made a mistake, I can put a word in for you down at Wonder Drug.”
“I appreciate that,” Sweeney said.
And then Ernesto was gone and he was alone in the vault. He turned the radio on and fiddled with the tuner until he found a station playing Philly soul. That was one improvement over the chain stores. Most of them pumped in a loop of Muzak day and night. The same shit over and over.
He moved to the service window, stuck his head out, and looked down the corridor, then turned up the volume on the Stylistics doing “Stone in Love with You.” Kerry had loved this stuff, called it “blue lightbulb” music, and would never tell him what that meant.
He took a small stack of med orders from the in-box and thumbed through them. Lots of requests for bags of Jevity, various antibiotics, insulin, blood thinners and diuretics, Verapamil. Light work and nothing out of the ordinary. He could fill everything in less than an hour even if he dawdled. If nothing new came in he’d be sitting on his ass until dawn.
Which, he knew from experience, was unacceptable. It was never a good idea to leave his mind unoccupied for too long. To be idle was to be in danger. Because in unoccupied moments, he would remember. Images would come. Sequences from the old life. One man at that group meeting had used the phrase memory is the enemy and Sweeney had seized on it.
He worked as slowly as he could, rechecking each script he filled, hoping that one of the nurses would visit and he could introduce himself, try to pull someone into a conversation. But by 1:30 all his work was done and his in-box was empty. No one had come by to meet the new guy.
For the next half hour he went through the room methodically, played cop, opened every drawer and cabinet. Then he played efficiency expert and rearranged everything he found. And then he put it all back the way he’d found it.
By 2:30 he decided to find the floor nurses and introduce himself. He pulled the steel shutter down over the order window and secured it, moved into the corridor, and locked the door. It was silent in the hall. He walked past a row of closed doors, trying and failing to keep his steps from echoing.
He came to the nurses’ station and found it deserted. Ernesto had said there were two nurses assigned to each floor. It seemed unlikely that they’d all break for coffee at the same time. Then again, this wasn’t an ordinary hospital and he had no idea what Clinic protocol entailed.
The station consisted of a tall, grand semicircular desk made of glossy wood and set in the center, but toward the rear of the first floor’s enormous foyer. It was flanked by a chalkboard that had been mounted on the rear wall. The board had been gridded and patients’ names were written in boxes down the left margin. Next to the names were written various notes — vitals, meds, therapies, schedules, and, Sweeney assumed, attending nurse. It was an intricate system of notation, using shorthand and different colored chalk.
He found his son’s name, printed in yellow, and read across the grid. He could make out the meds, of course, and the latest BP, pulse, and temp, but there were several boxes that he couldn’t decipher. The final box in Danny’s row read “Rey.” He decided to look in on room 103.