“Will told me last night. I’m sorry. I know he did some bad things, but he was …”
Amanda didn’t make her finish the sentence. “Yes, he was.”
Faith opened the junk drawer. All the pens were gone. She kept them bundled together with a red rubber band, tucked in the bottom right-hand corner. They were always in this drawer. She rifled through the coupons, scissors, and unidentified spare keys. No pens. “Did you know that Zeke was stateside?”
“Your mother was trying to protect you.”
Faith opened the other junk drawer. “Apparently, she tried to protect me from a lot of things.” She reached into the back and found the pens. The rubber band was yellow. Had she changed it out? Faith had a vague recollection of the band breaking a while back, but she would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that she’d used the red rubber band from the broccoli she’d bought at the store that same day.
“Faith?” Amanda’s tone was terse. “What’s going on with you? Has something happened?”
“I’m fine. It’s just …” She tried to think of an excuse. She was really doing this—she was locked into not telling Amanda that the kidnappers had been in touch. That they had left something of Evelyn’s under Faith’s pillow. That they knew far too much about Jeremy. That they had messed with her silverware. “It’s early. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“You need to take care of yourself. Eat the right foods. Sleep as much as you can. Drink lots of water. I know it’s hard, but you have to keep up your strength right now.”
Faith felt her temper flare. She didn’t know if she was talking to her boss or to Aunt Mandy right now, but either one of them could kiss her ass. “I know how to take care of myself.”
“I’m very glad to hear you think that, but from where I’m standing, it’s not the case.”
“Did she do something, Mandy? Is Mom in trouble because—”
“Do you need me to come by the house?”
“Aren’t you in Valdosta?”
Amanda went silent. Faith had obviously crossed a line. Or maybe it was a simple case of her boss being smart enough to remember that their conversation was being recorded. Right now, Faith didn’t care. She stared at the yellow rubber band, wondering if she was losing her mind. Her blood sugar was probably low. Faith’s vision was slightly blurry. Her mouth was dry. She opened the fridge again and reached for the orange juice carton. Still empty.
Amanda said, “Think of your mother. She would want you to be strong.”
If she only knew that Faith was about to lose her shit over a yellow rubber band. She mumbled, “I’m fine.”
“We’ll get her back, and we’ll make sure that whoever did this pays for what they’ve put us through. You can take that to the bank.”
Faith opened her mouth to say she didn’t give a damn about retribution, but Amanda had already ended the call.
She tossed the orange juice carton into the trash. There was a bag of emergency candy in the cabinet. Faith pulled it out, and Jolly Ranchers scattered onto the floor. She looked at the bag. The bottom had been ripped open.
Ginger was back. He leaned down to help her pick up the candy. “Everything all right?”
“Yes.” Faith tossed a handful of candy onto the counter and left the kitchen. She hit the light switch in the living room but nothing happened. Faith flipped the toggle down, then up again. Still nothing. She checked the bulb in the lamp. One turn made the light come on. She did the same to the bulb in the other lamp. She felt the heat singe her fingers as the light came on.
Faith fell heavily into the chair. Her temper kept revving up and down like scales on a piano. She knew that she needed to eat something, to test her blood and make the proper adjustments. Her brain wouldn’t work properly until she was leveled out. But now that she was sitting down, she didn’t have the strength to move.
The couch was across from her. Zeke had folded his sheets into a perfect square and placed them on top of his pillow. She could see the red stain on the beige cushion where Jeremy had spilled Kool-Aid fifteen years ago. She knew that if she flipped the cushion over, she would find a blue stain from a Maui punch Popsicle he had dropped two years later. If she turned over the cushion she was sitting on, there would be a tear where his soccer cleat had cut the material. The rug on the floor was worn from both their tracks back and forth to the kitchen. The walls were an eggshell they had painted during Jeremy’s spring break last year.
Faith considered the very real possibility that she was losing her mind. Jeremy was too old for these kinds of games, and Zeke had never been one for psychological warfare. He would rather beat her to death than unscrew a couple of light bulbs. Regardless, neither one of them was in the mood for pranks. This couldn’t just be Faith’s blood sugar. The pens, the silverware, the lamps—it was little things that only Faith would notice. The sort of stuff that would make someone else think you were crazy if you told them about it.
She looked up at the ceiling, then let her eyes travel down to the shelves mounted on the wall behind the couch. Bill Mitchell had been a collector of kitsch. He had hula girl salt and pepper shakers from Hawaii. He had Mount Rushmore sunglasses, a foam Lady Liberty crown, and an enameled silver spoon set depicting some of the more notable scenery of the Grand Canyon. His most prized collection had been his snow globes. Every road trip, every flight, every time he left the house, Bill Mitchell looked for a snow globe to mark the occasion.
When her father died, there was no question in the family that these would go to Faith. As a child, she had loved shaking the globes and watching the snow fall. Order into chaos. It was something Faith had shared with her father. In a rare splurge, she’d had custom shelves built for the globes and made Jeremy so scared of breaking one that for an entire month he took the long way to the kitchen just so he didn’t accidentally brush against the shelves.
As she sat in the living room that morning, Faith looked up at the shelves to find that all of thirty-six globes had been turned around to face the wall.
CHAPTER NINE
SARA WONDERED IF IT WAS A SOUTHERN PECULIARITY FOR little children to get sick in the half hour between Sunday school and church services. Most of her early patients that morning had fallen into that golden time period. Tummy aches, earaches, general malaise—nothing that could be pinned down by a blood test or an X-ray, but was easily cured by a set of coloring books or a cartoon on the television.
Around ten o’clock, the problems had turned more serious. The cases came in rapid succession, and were the kind Sara hated because they were largely preventable. One child had eaten rat poison he’d found under the kitchen cabinet. Another had gotten third-degree burns from touching a pan on the stove. There was a teenager she’d had to forcibly commit to the lockdown ward because his first hit of marijuana had pushed him into a psychotic break. Then a seventeen-year-old girl had come in with her skull split open. Apparently, she was still drunk when she drove home this morning. The girl had ended up wrapping her car around a parked Greyhound bus. She was still in surgery, but Sara guessed that even if they managed to control the swelling in her brain, she would never be the same person again.
By eleven, Sara wanted to go back to bed and start the day over.
Working at a hospital was a constant negotiation. The job could suck away as much of your life as you permitted. Sara had agreed to work at Grady knowing this truth, embracing it, because she didn’t want a life after her husband had died. Over the last year, she’d been cutting back on her time in the ER. Keeping regular hours was a struggle, but Sara fought the uphill battle every day.
It was really a form of self-preservation. Every doctor carried around a cemetery inside them. The patients she could help—the little girl whose stomach she’d pumped, the burned toddler whose fingers she’d saved—were momentary blips. It was the lost ones that Sara remembered most. The kid who’d slowly, painfully succumbed to leukemia. The nine-year-old who’d taken sixteen hours to die from antifreeze poisoning. The elev
en-year-old who’d broken his neck diving headfirst into a shallow swimming pool. They were all inside of her, constant reminders that no matter how hard she worked, sometimes—oftentimes—it was never enough.
Sara sat down on the couch in the doctors’ lounge. She had charts to catch up on, but she needed a minute to herself. She’d gotten less than four hours of sleep last night. Will wasn’t the direct reason her brain would not turn off. She’d kept thinking about Evelyn Mitchell and her corrupt band of brothers. The question of the woman’s guilt weighed heavily on her mind. Will’s words kept coming back to Sara: either Evelyn Mitchell was a bad boss or a dirty cop. There was no in-between.
Which was probably why Sara hadn’t found the time this morning to call Faith Mitchell and check on her. Technically, Faith was Delia Wallace’s patient, but Sara felt an odd sort of responsibility for Will’s partner. It tugged at her the same way Will seemed to tug at her every waking thought these days.
All of the tedium. None of the pleasure.
Nan, one of the student nurses, plopped down on the couch beside Sara. She scrolled through her BlackBerry as she talked. “I want to hear all about your hot date.”
Sara forced a smile onto her face. That morning when she got to the hospital, there’d been a large bouquet of flowers waiting for her in the doctors’ lounge. It seemed Dale Dugan had bought out the entire city’s supply of baby’s breath and pink carnations. Everyone in the ER had made a comment to Sara before she’d even managed to change into her lab coat. They all seemed caught up in the romance of the widow being swept off her feet.
Sara told the girl, “He’s very nice.”
“He thinks you’re nice, too.” Nan gave a sly grin as she typed an email. “I ran into him at the lab. He’s super cool.”
Sara watched the girl’s thumbs move, feeling three hundred years old. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever been that young. Neither could she imagine Dale Dugan sitting down and having a nice gossip with this giddy young nurse.
Nan finally looked up from the device. “He said you’re fascinating, and that you had a great time, and that you shared a very nice kiss.”
“You’re emailing him?”
“No.” She rolled her eyes. “He said that in the lab.”
“Great,” Sara managed. She didn’t know how to deal with Dale, who was either deluded or a pathological liar. Eventually, she would have to talk with him. The flowers alone were a very bad sign. She would have to rip off the Band-Aid quickly. Still, she couldn’t help wondering why the man she wanted was unavailable and the available man was unwanted. Thus continued her quest to turn her life into a television soap opera.
Nan started typing again. “What do you want me to tell him that you said?”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“But you could.”
“Uh …” Sara stood up from the couch. This was much easier when you could just slip a note into somebody’s locker. “I should go get lunch while things are quiet.”
Instead of heading toward the cafeteria, Sara took a left toward the elevators. She almost got mowed down by a gurney flying down the corridor. Stab wound. The knife was still sticking out of the patient’s chest. EMTs screamed vitals. Doctors snapped orders. Sara pressed the elevator down button and waited for the doors to open.
The hospital had been founded in the 1890s, and was housed in four different locations before finding its final home on Jesse Hill Jr. Drive. Constant mismanagement, corruption, and plain incompetence meant that at any given time in its storied history, the hospital was about to go under. The U-shaped building had been added onto, remodeled, torn down, and renovated so many times that Sara was certain no one could keep count anymore. The land around the facility was sloped toward Georgia State University, which shared its parking decks with the hospital. The ambulance bays for the emergency department backed onto the interstate, at what was called the Grady Curve, and were a full story above the main front entrance on the street side. During Jim Crow, the hospital was called the Gradys, because the white wings were on one side, looking onto the city, and the African American wings were on the other, looking onto nothing.
Margaret Mitchell had been rushed here, and died five days later, after being hit by a drunk driver on Peachtree Street. Victims from the Centennial Olympic Park bombing had been treated here. Grady was still the only Level 1 trauma center in the area. Victims with the most serious, life-threatening injuries were all flown here for treatment, which meant the Fulton County medical examiner’s office had a satellite location to process intakes down in the morgue. At any given time, there were two or three bodies waiting for transport. When Sara had first taken the job as Grant County coroner, she had trained at the Pryor Street medical examiner’s office downtown. They were constantly shorthanded. She’d spent many a lunch hour making body runs to Grady.
The elevator doors opened. George, one of the security guards, got off. His girth filled the hall. He had been a football player until a dislocated ankle had convinced him to pursue an alternative career path.
“Dr. Linton.” He held the doors back for her.
“George.”
He winked at her and she smiled.
A young couple was already in the car. They huddled together as the elevator moved down one floor. That was the other thing about working at a hospital. Everywhere you turned, you ran into someone who was having one of the worst days of their life. Maybe this was the change Sara needed in her life—not to sell her apartment and move into a cozy bungalow, but to return to private practice, where the only emergency during the day was deciding which pharmaceutical rep was going to buy lunch.
The temperature was colder two stories down in the sub-basement. Sara pulled her lab coat closed as she walked past the records department. Unlike the old days when she’d interned at Grady, there was no need to stand in line for charts. Everything was automated, a patient’s information only as far away as the computerized tablets that worked on the hospital’s intranet. X-rays were on the larger computer monitors in the rooms, and all medications were coded to patient armbands. As the only publicly funded hospital left in Atlanta, Grady was constantly teetering on bankruptcy, but at least it was trying to go out in style.
Sara stopped in front of the thick double doors that separated the morgue from the rest of the hospital. She waved her badge in front of the reader. There was a sudden whoosh of changing air pressure as the insulated steel doors swung open.
The attendant seemed surprised to find Sara in his space. He was as close to goth as you could get while wearing blue hospital scrubs. Everything about him announced that he was too cool for his job. His dyed black hair was pulled into a ponytail. His glasses looked like they had belonged to John Lennon. His eyeliner was something out of a Cleopatra movie. To Sara, the paunch at his stomach and the Fu Manchu made him look more like Spike, Snoopy’s brother. “You lost?”
“Junior,” she read off his nametag. He was young, probably Nan’s age. “I was wondering if someone from the Fulton ME’s office was here.”
“Larry. He’s loading up in the back. Is there a problem?”
“No, I just want to pick his brain.”
“Good luck finding it.”
A skinny Hispanic man came out of the back room. His scrubs hung on him like a bathrobe. He was around Junior’s age, which was to say that he had probably been in diapers a few weeks ago. “Very funny, jefe.” He punched Junior in the arm. “Whatchu need, Doc?”
This wasn’t going as planned. “Nothing. Sorry to bother you guys.” She started to turn away, but Junior stopped her.
“You’re Dale’s new lady, right? He said you were a tall redhead.”
Sara bit her lip. What was Dale doing hanging around all these ten-year-olds?
Junior’s face broke out into a grin. “Dr. Linton, I presume.”
She would’ve lied but for her badge hanging off her jacket. And her name embroidered over the breast pocket. And the fact that she was the only d
octor with red hair working in the hospital.
Larry offered, “I’d be pleased to help Dale’s new squeeze.”
“Hells yeah,” Junior chimed in.
Sara plastered a smile onto her face. “How do you two know Dale?”
“B-ball, baby.” Larry feigned a hoop shot. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“No emergency—” she said, before realizing he was just being funny. “I had a question about the shooting yesterday.”
“Which one?”
This time he wasn’t joking. Asking about a shooting in Atlanta was like asking about the drunk at a football game. “Sherwood Forest. The officer-involved shooting.”
Larry nodded. “Damn, that was freaky. Guy had a belly full of H.”
“Heroin?” Sara asked.
“Packed into balloons. The gunshot split ’em open like …” He asked Junior, “Shit, man, what’re them things with sugar in ’em?”
“Dip Stick?”
“No.”
“Is it chocolate?”
“No, man, like in the paper straw.”
Sara suggested, “Pixie Stix?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Dude went out on an epic high.”
Sara waited through some fist bumping between the two. “This was the Asian man?”
“No, the Puerto Rican. Ricardo.” He put an exotic spin on the r’s.
“I thought he was Mexican.”
“Yo, ’cause we all look alike?”
Sara didn’t know how to answer him.
Larry laughed. “That’s cool. I’m just playin’ ya. Sure, he’s Puerto Rican, like my moms.”
“Did they get a last name on him?”
“No. But, he got the Neta tattooed on his hand.” He pointed to the webbing between his thumb and index finger. “It’s a heart with an N in the middle.”
“Neta?” Sara had never heard the name before.
“Puerto Rican gang. Crazy dudes want to break off from the U.S. My moms was all up in that shit when we left. All ‘we gotta get out from the rule of the colonial oppressors.’ Then she gets here and she’s all, ‘I gotta get me one’a them big-screen plasma TVs like your aunt Frieda.’ Word.” Another fist bump with Junior.
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