Emergency Room Read online

  It was air-conditioned.

  It had a working television on the wall.

  It was full of people and noise and things to watch.

  There was a water fountain to drink from. They gave you crayons and paper while you waited.

  Anna Maria paused briefly where the sidewalk curved beneath huge pillars. People were lined against the walls smoking cigarettes because you weren’t allowed to smoke inside a hospital. Two ears pulled up, and people got out and walked into the ER. Either they weren’t too sick to walk, or else they were visiting other people who were. Then the drivers drove on to the parking lot. A security guard came out, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun while his radio, on the other hip, shouted with static.

  Anna Maria took Yasmin’s hand and pushed the stroller forward. Big silent glass doors opened automatically when their combined weight triggered the controls.

  On the other side of the doors she quickly assessed the situation. The Admitting Nurse was taking somebody’s pulse. The desk secretary was answering phones. The inside security guard was yelling at a drunk.

  Anna Maria slid past a man in a wheelchair, two fat women reading old magazines, and a pregnant woman with tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Anna Maria sat down in one of the plastic seats and pulled the stroller in close. Yasmin hung onto the stroller handle and looked around. José sucked on his bottle.

  Oh, it was so nice in here! The air was cool and comfortable. The fat women looked friendly. Somebody had abandoned a bag of potato chips on the coloring table. Anna Maria would wait a little bit and if nobody came, she would share the chips with her brother and sister.

  The TV was showing the news.

  Anna Maria would not have chosen the news herself, but she loved being talked to, and the man on Channel 8 was talking in that warm, solid, comforting way.

  Nobody noticed the children.

  They were safe. They could stay hours, as long as José was good.

  José was two.

  Yasmin was four.

  Anna Maria was eight.

  The Waiting Room 6:17 p.m.

  DIANA PRAYED THERE WERE family members in the Waiting Room to give her the necessary statistics. She stood on the rim of the packed room, as nervous as a bungee jumper on the edge of his bridge. “Sczevyl?” she whispered. Funny-looking name. What if it was spelled wrong, or she was saying it wrong? It didn’t matter, nobody so much as glanced at her. Whispering in the Waiting Room was clearly ridiculous. She, who hated to raise her voice and be obvious, had to shout. “Sczevyl!” she yelled, pronouncing it “shovel.”

  If there were family members in the Waiting Room, they didn’t pronounce it shovel. Therefore, she had to find the patient.

  Diana went back to Mary, hoping for help on her second work sheet as well. “What exactly does this mean — urgent, female, psychotic, abusive, swearing?”

  Mary surveyed the sheet. “Offhand, using medical terminology, I’d say the woman’s nuts.”

  Diana tried to laugh.

  “It means she was fighting,” explained Mary. “Fighting probably means kicking, screaming, biting, hitting. That kind of stuff. See the check in this box? Police are involved.”

  “Neat.”

  Mary laughed. “She’ll be in CIU. Crisis Intervention Unit. That’s supposed to sound less threatening than calling it Psychiatric. The door’s that big thick slab of glass at the end of Hall Four. It’s locked. You have to knock. Guards let you in and let you out. Don’t be scared.”

  Don’t be scared.

  Right.

  Diana actually squared her shoulders to walk down the hall to CIU. Her hands were sweating and her knees hurt. She wanted to be a doctor, but she wanted her patients to be clean, neat people who talked normally.

  Crisis Intervention Unit? What kinds of crises were they intervening in? And did she, Diana, wish to intervene?

  What if she intervened when a fist or a foot was lashing out? Not to mention a gun or a knife?

  Seth fell into step with her. “So how’s Insurance?”

  Diana was sorry that Seth was so attractive. His looks kept provoking her interest. She wrenched her thoughts and eyes away from Seth’s buttons. “It’s pretty interesting. I haven’t actually done any insurance. What have you been doing?”

  “MVAs and GSWs,” said Seth casually. Motor vehicle accidents and gunshot wounds.

  Diana put him down instantly. She had time to stop herself but didn’t. “You mean they admitted an MVA and a GSW. I asked what you did.”

  Seth put on his usual big sprawling Texas-sized grin. “Nothing,” he admitted. “They kicked me out of Trauma. I hardly got to see a thing.”

  “Did you see the gunshot wound itself though?” whispered Diana. She didn’t want anybody to overhear; how perverted she would sound, hungering after the sight of a GSW. What did it really look like? A round hole? No chest where once a chest had been?

  “No, but if I do, I’ll give you details,” Seth promised.

  Diana was not grateful. She liked to be the one who knew everything first, not the one who found out secondhand. She struggled with jealousy. I’m investing too much emotion into a simple volunteer night at a hospital, she thought. The thing is, I want to be a doctor, and working in Insurance isn’t fair.

  “Want to go to Blood Lab with me?” said Seth. “We can stop at the vending machine room on the way and get a Coke.”

  Diana raised her eyebrows. “I’m in a hurry, Seth,” she said, to let him know he didn’t understand hurrying. Nothing he did mattered. “This is important.”

  “Oh,” said Seth, hanging onto his relentless grin. “Where are you headed?”

  “Psychotic admission.” Diana shrugged as if she’d done this plenty of times. What is it with me and cute guys? she thought. I go out of my way to make sure they know that just because they’re cute doesn’t mean they can get anything past me.

  But why would I want an adorable hunk like Seth to get past me?

  There was not, however, time for an in-depth analysis of her feelings toward men. She was already striding up to the locked bulletproof door of the Crisis Intervention Unit.

  Was Seth impressed by how calmly she knocked? She would never know. Once inside, she was too scared to look back.

  The attendants, clad in operating room outfits, like pea-green pajamas, were large enough to frighten football tackles. Who was scarier? The patients or the immense men in charge?

  An elderly, silent male patient in need of a shave sat on a disheveled stretcher. He was staring at nothing but talking to it anyway Desperate, filled-with-dread cries poured from his mouth. Somehow Diana knew it was not a foreign language. Just helpless, hopeless pleading. With nobody.

  A middle-aged woman had been sobbing for hours. Red-eyed, patchy-faced, and exhausted from tears, she glanced at Diana and turned away, bursting into tears yet again.

  A girl Diana’s own age was fastened down on her stretcher by the same thick leather anklets and bracelets that locked the drunks to theirs. A twisted sheet locked up and over her shoulders, flattening her out on the stretcher. Beneath the wrist locks were thick bandages, and another bandage covered her throat.

  Diana could not bear to think what this girl had done to herself.

  The largest attendant lounged around, while she surveyed his selection of patients. This was not a man with whom Diana would ever choose to argue. Maurice, said his name tag. It was the kind of name you got teased for, but she would bet her inheritance nobody ever teased this Maurice. “Who you want?” said Maurice, chewing gum between words.

  Diana did not want any of these patients.

  She certainly did not want to talk to any of them about their insurance status. How could the hospital make her bother people in such despair? Was she supposed to grab this sobbing woman or this manic man and demand their phone numbers?

  I hate this! she thought. “Sczevyl?” she said.

  Maurice pointed to the girl.

  This was th
e fighting, kicking, screaming, swearing psychotic? Diana gulped. “Miss Sczevyl? I need to ask a few questions.”

  The girl did not move. She did not change the focus of her eyes nor acknowledge that she had heard.

  “Would you tell me your next of kin, please?” said Diana.

  No response. It would have been less frightening if the girl had screamed and sworn. The deadlike person lying there was impossible to look at.

  “We’d like to know who she is, too,” Maurice said. “We want to let the kid’s family know what’s happening. So far she doesn’t want to tell us anything.”

  The silence broke. “I told you to leave me alone!” screamed the girl, her voice huge, like trumpets. She tried to free herself, hurling herself up and down even though it was impossible to lunge at all. She fought so hard, the mattress began to inch out from under her. Her skull thwacked violently against the now-exposed metal of the stretcher.

  Diana could readily believe this girl had enough strength to break leather bonds. She stepped back. I could be home listening to the radio, she thought.

  “Come on, honey, that’s not helping.” Maurice yanked the mattress back up under the girl.

  “I don’t want to help! Let me out of here! I hate you! I didn’t ask to come here! Let me go!”

  The volume of her screaming was unbelievable. Yet, the other patients never so much as looked her way. They were caught in their own broken hearts.

  “Ask away, honey,” said Maurice. This time “honey” meant Diana.

  On campus, it was not considered good form to call a woman honey or dear or sweetie. It was a putdown. In the ER, however, it was a quick way to show kindness and also, of course, to skip all that effort involved in reading name tags.

  Diana could not remember when she had felt so inappropriate but she asked, “Would you tell me your street address, please?”

  For the second time in ten minutes, somebody told Diana exactly, profanely, where to go. Miss Sczevyl meant it. She wanted Diana in hell. Perhaps that was where Miss Sczevyl was, and she needed company.

  Abruptly, the girl’s volume vanished. She stopped struggling and became motionless again. She was as silent and still as a corpse.

  But rigid, as if her muscles had turned to wire.

  “It’ll be all right,” comforted Diana. Why had she said that? What if Miss Sczevyl had the kind of life where it would not be all right?

  Tears slid down the patient’s cheeks to bury in her hair and dampen the sheets. The motionless face seemed not to be producing the tears, just lying beneath them.

  Diana could not bear it that the girl was so alone. The girl needed her mother or her sister or her best friend. “I could call home for you,” said Diana. “Or call somebody else. Who do you want me to call?”

  “I want you to go away. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. I don’t care what you do, and you don’t care what I do.”

  Gee, I have a flair for this, thought Diana. I can dedicate my life to helping depressed people.

  At least Diana was spared having to demand how the girl intended to pay for the privilege of being strapped to a stretcher. A person who wouldn’t give her parents’ names wasn’t going to turn over her insurance card, either. “How do you know her name is Sczevyl?” she asked Maurice, thinking that she could look in the girl’s purse for addresses.

  “We don’t. She was wearing a jacket with that name written inside on the collar tag.

  Jacket could be stolen or borrowed or bought used.”

  “Is your name Sczevyl?” Diana asked.

  The patient said nothing.

  There was nothing on her face.

  There was nothing in her eyes.

  She seemed to have stepped out of her body.

  Gone wherever she meant to go in spite of being strapped to the mattress.

  Diana shuddered convulsively.

  Maurice did not. That a patient’s personality could exit from the body without death was all in an evening’s work to him.

  Diana walked back to Mary. I learned one thing tonight, she thought. I’m not likely to become an Emergency Room psychiatrist.

  Mary entered the patient as Unknown.

  And she is, thought Diana. Nobody knows her name, her heart, or her despair, and that’s how she wants it.

  To be completely unknown. Surely the ultimate horror.

  It was a thought that required talk, and the only person Diana knew well enough for talk was Seth. She would forgive him for his past sins and his present arrogance and go for a Coke after all. They would discuss Unknowns. It was the sort of philosophic topic that college freshmen could kick around for days.

  She found Seth among the medical students who were giving reports. Seth had taken off his volunteer jacket and was standing in his white button-down collar shirt and dark tie, arms folded casually across his broad chest, back propped against the wall.

  He was pretending to be a medical student.

  Volunteers were known exclusively by their salmon-pink jackets. He didn’t have one. Nobody would recognize him as the college kid who volunteered Mondays.

  And the medical school was so big, the students probably didn’t know each other any more than Diana knew everybody on the undergraduate campus.

  If the Attending asked Seth a question, which Seth certainly could not answer, and he was caught, what would happen to him?

  But what if he weren’t caught? If Seth were assigned an actual task — like drawing blood — would he really dare try it?

  To Seth’s left was a tiny Chinese woman, who could not weigh a hundred pounds, and whose black hair was as thick and long as a draft horse’s tail. To his right was a weedy, stooped young man with lopsided glasses, a cartoon of the nerdy scientist. Behind the nerd stood a handsome wide-jawed blond man, central casting’s television doctor. Next to the blond was a young woman who was wonderfully pretty. Somebody you could be best friends with, somebody who laughed a lot.

  Somebody, thought Diana with a surprising twitch of jealousy, that Seth could have a crush on.

  The medical students shifted in order to study a document the Attending held. Sure enough, Seth moved next to the very pretty girl, and they smiled at each other.

  “Volunteer!” shouted Meggie, waving a pharmacy sheet.

  Seth didn’t move. Miss Pretty Medical Student was busy borrowing a pencil from Seth’s shirt pocket. She was having much more fun extricating the pencil than listening to the Attending. Seth likewise. Their eyes met and his black shock of hair moved a little closer to her long gleaming brown hair. Seth’s computerized smile began spreading.

  I hope you get caught, thought Diana, taking the drug order only because pharmacy runs were better than asking psychotic women for their phone numbers. I hope Miss Pretty Medical Student asks to see your ID. I hope the Attending asks you to draw blood and they arrest you for assault when you try it.

  Seth looked up and Diana curled her lip at him.

  He just grinned and mimed a passionate kiss. Diana remembered the real kiss the night of the difficult date, and thought — Why wasn’t I nice?

  Both Meggie and Miss Pretty Medical Student blew Seth a kiss back.

  Emergency Room 6:23 p.m.

  THEY WERE SEWING UP the hand of a boy who had ripped his palm open on the broken glass of a car window. He’d probably been trying to take the stereo out, but nobody commented on this. The students crowded eagerly around the bed on which the boy sat, feet dangling, pale and shivering with fear. Nobody likes the thought of needles stitching in and out of their very own personal flesh.

  The pretty brunette was regarding Seth with cheerful, but slightly speculative eyes. Either she wanted to flirt more intensively, or she wanted to check his photo ID.

  If they catch me, it’d go on my record, he thought. Nobody at this hospital would laugh. Responsible future doctors don’t masquerade. Pretending to be a medical student could stop me from being accepted at medical school.

  I’m not chicken, he tol
d himself quickly. I’m sensible.

  He wondered if girls — particularly girls named Diana — thought sensible was more interesting than daring. He managed to drift away as the real students trooped after the Attending. There was confusion in the eyes of the pretty doctor. She was wondering why Seth wasn’t standing next to her.

  I could have gotten away with it, he thought.

  But there was not enough room around the bed for Seth to join them. He leaned against the wall just beyond the curtain, alternately chewing himself out for not being an imposter and congratulating himself for having enough brains to back out now.

  He listened to a clear but shaky narration, the voice of a very nervous student addressing a patient for the first time. “Now, I’m going to — ummm — give you a shot first, to kill the pain, and I’m — um — going to do this — um — very slowly — and — um — you tell me — um — if it hurts.”

  A nurse near Seth was laughing. “The old, I’m-going-to-do-this-very-slowly trick.”

  “Trick?”

  “When you’ve never done something before in your life, you have to do it slowly,” said the nurse. “But now the patient thinks the wonderful doctor is doing it slowly because he’s kind and understanding.” Her face changed.

  “Hah. Show me the medical student who is kind and understanding. They’re all pushy and grasping.”

  It was what Diana had said. He didn’t want to be pushy and grasping, but he wanted to be a doctor, and sweet slow-moving types did not get into medical school. Reluctantly Seth took his volunteer jacket back from where he had tucked it, behind stacks of folded blankets.

  He considered the air kisses. Forget Meggie. But the pretty medical student — truly hot. Probably around twenty-three or four. Seth imagined dating a woman four or five years older, with four or five years more experience. Forget medical experience. Think sexual experience. This was so rewarding, he stayed with the vision.

  Diana’s kiss was the one he wanted and he did not want it in the air. Maybe the air kisses made her jealous. He decided to see if Diana had had a change of heart and headed for the Admitting Nurse’s desk. Insurance was back behind there and he could air kiss over the glass barriers and make Diana’s heart race.