The Lieutenant's Nurse

by Sara Ackerman

  “Promise me no sodium thiopental,” she said.

  Something like a smile crossed Dr. Newcastle’s face and he shook his head. “In all my years, I’ve never met a nurse like you.”

  “Please?” she said.

  He nodded and walked out.

  While Dr. Newcastle was cutting open Clark, Eva walked Brandy around the room to greet everyone and then headed down the hallway into the next room. It was certainly better than sitting around pulling out her hair, strand by strand. From the window, she had seen two of the other doctors outside smoking, so it was as good a time as any.

  Sasha was in there, still in her tennis dress, checking bandages. “Here’s something you don’t see every day,” she said.

  “Will you look who the nurse dragged in!” cried a young man with two broken arms.

  Brandy pranced across the floor with her head held high and made a beeline for him, standing at his bedside and wagging her tail.

  “I’ve been worried sick if she made it or not,” he said to Eva. “Come here, girl,” he called. “This dog used to swim with us every morning. At first she hated the water, but we got her in there and she would swim around us, herding in any stragglers. Best dog in the world.” Brandy swiped her tongue up his face. “Between Jack and me and a couple of others, we took care of her.”

  No sooner had he spoken the words than he broke down in tears. He leaned his face into Brandy’s fur while his back shook with sobs. Brandy gave Eva a look that said, I’ve got this covered, so Eva let them be.

  “Have they operated on Clark yet?” Sasha asked.

  “He’s in there now.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “There was no time,” Eva said.

  Sasha squeezed her hand. “He’ll come out soaring, just you watch. But don’t wait too long because you never know what’s around the corner.”

  Eva didn’t want to think about that. It was far easier to focus on the work at hand than what might happen in the next few hours or days. Sasha’s dress had gone from white to rust colored overnight. Her dirty hair was pulled into a tight bun, but she still looked radiant.

  “I’m glad you two are here. For my sake, at least. Though that sounds selfish, doesn’t it?” Eva said.

  “Funny how things work out, isn’t it? Bree and I were fixing to head off to war, and then war finds us here. And it’s not what I expected,” Sasha said quietly.

  “What did you expect?”

  “It just feels so—so mind-numbing. I keep having to remind myself that this is real and I’m in the middle of it and the whole world has changed overnight. I may look fine on the outside, but I think my ability to feel has up and left,” she said.

  Eva wrapped her arm around Sasha’s shoulders. “That’s what shock looks like.”

  “There’s no preparing for this kind of thing, is there?”

  “Nope, but for what it’s worth, we’re in this together,” Eva told her.

  The man with Brandy said, “Say, did Jack make it out alive?”

  One look at Eva’s face and he got his answer.

  “Damn, I loved that kid,” he said, blinking rapidly and leaning into Brandy with more force.

  If Eva had had a dime for every time she’d broken the news about one man or another in the past day, she’d have enough for another trip on the Lurline. It never got easier.

  * * *

  Back in recovery, two patients had been released to make room for recent post-ops, and each time someone came in the door, Eva jumped to the moon.

  This time, it was only Grace with a can of tuna for Brandy. “Quick, give her some of this.”

  Brandy gobbled it up in three seconds flat.

  “You realize you’re aiding and abetting,” Eva said.

  “Let them arrest me. See if I care.”

  “I owe you,” Eva said, looking at her watch.

  Grace sat on an empty bed. “If you look at that watch one more time, you’re liable to lose your arm.”

  Eva groaned. “Here I am supposed to be with Billy and all I can think about is Clark. I feel like a double-crossing scoundrel.”

  “Are you going to do something about it?”

  Eva glanced around the room. None of the men were paying them any mind. “Billy proposed to me.”

  Grace’s eyes grew wide. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do. After five days with Clark, I had fallen for him badly, which is obvious now, but I was so confused at the time. I had been pining away for Billy for so long, and I promised my father that I would marry him. This was all so unexpected. Clark, I mean.”

  “Did you say yes?”

  Eva shook her head. “I blamed it on the army and that we can’t marry. He caught me so off guard.”

  “Well, if nothing else, at least this war bought you some time. No one is going to be getting married anytime soon, I can promise you that,” Grace said.

  “I’m not marrying Billy. Ever.”

  “I guess that’s settled, then.”

  Clark had always been the one, from the moment he set foot on that ship. She saw that now. Letting him walk down the gangplank without her had been the most foolish decision of her life.

  From across the room, Samuel piped up. “I would marry either one of you right this minute if I wasn’t already spoken for. Could one of you Janes help me write her a letter?”

  Eva laughed. “What’s her name?”

  He got a funny look and scratched his head. “That’s the thing. I can’t remember,” he finally said.

  Good Lord, she hoped poor Sam was just shell-shocked and his memory would return in a couple of days. He had remembered his dog’s name, but she kept her mouth shut on that.

  “How about we write the letter and you can call her honey or sweetheart for now?” Grace suggested.

  A goofy smile spread across his face. “I knew I wanted to marry you for a reason. You’re not just pretty, you’re smart, too.”

  Grace’s cheeks reddened.

  Twenty seconds later, the door burst open and Bree and Dr. Newcastle wheeled Clark in. He was as limp as a dead body.

  “Tell me he’s alive,” she said.

  “We had to leave the shrapnel by his heart in place. It was lodged in the fifth rib and if I slipped while prying it loose, it would have killed him. We got the bullet out of his shoulder and the rest out, but he’ll be hurting when he wakes,” Newcastle said.

  Grace rushed for the door. “I’ll go get more morphine.”

  Eva was stuck on the words shrapnel by his heart. But he was alive.

  * * *

  Two cups of coffee and Eva still felt exhausted and drained and hollowed out like a reed. Now, instead of checking her watch every thirty seconds, she recited little prayers for everyone involved in this mess.

  Please keep that shrapnel from moving. Sweet God, keep us all free from suffering. No more attacks and no more killing. Fears heaped upon fears were taking their toll. A sudden urge of homesickness and missing Ruby rose up. If things had once seemed bad at home, now they seemed downright peachy. It was one thing to have your own life fall apart, another to see the whole world fall apart.

  With fewer new injuries coming in, the nurses busied themselves cleaning up the place in between surgeries and tending the wounded. You could hardly see the linoleum under mud, soot and blood. Beds and sheets were soiled, and so were the men. Now that they had time to undress them, the oddest things had turned up.

  Bree had found a pocket full of maraschino cherries on one sailor, and Grace a whole block of cheese in the pocket of another. On Clark, Eva discovered a smashed pickle was the cause of his vinegary smell. One grabbed what they could, she supposed.

  The day moved along in a horizontal blur. Surgeries, scraping muck off the floor, holding the hands of terrified men and he
aring how one had to leave his friend behind because he couldn’t fit out the hatch and another because there was no room left on the dingy. They gave sponge baths with water that might have been poisoned by Japanese spies. The women took turns catnapping when they could.

  On her way back from assisting Dr. Wallace with a surgery, Eva glanced out the window to catch the sun dropping into the ocean behind twisted battleships and smoking wreckage. This did not have to happen. The degree of her fury rattled her, and yet there was no other way to feel. All she wanted to do at that moment was collapse on the nearest mattress, but movement on the curb below caught her eye. Two men in suits hurried away from the hospital. One big as a moose. The other in a hat. They seemed out of place, but Eva didn’t give it another thought until she returned to the room.

  There was an empty bed where Clark had been.

  “Where is he?” Eva asked Grace, who was listening to a young man’s chest with a stethoscope.

  “Who?”

  “Clark!”

  Grace spun around. “Well, I’ll be damned. He was there a few minutes ago.”

  “Did anyone come into the room?” Eva asked.

  “I ran out for a bit to get more gauze and saline bags so I’m not sure, but Clark was here when I returned.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Grace wrinkled her forehead. “Well, I can’t swear on a stack of bibles. But I think he was. I was concentrating on not dropping my tray.”

  Eva looked around to see if anyone else was awake. Samuel was watching them with those sweet pale eyes.

  “Did you see where Clark went?” Eva asked.

  “Nope. I was busy writing my letter, but no one’s gonna be able to read it.” He looked to Grace. “Jane, can you help me rewrite it?”

  “My name is Grace,” she said, not adding for the tenth time as Eva would have been tempted to.

  Keeping a cool head under pressure was what her father always stressed. Some people have it, some don’t. Grace was in possession of an extra helping, and Eva was impressed by her once again.

  Eva bolted out the door and checked the bathroom and all the other rooms on the floor. Could they have taken him back to surgery? That would make no sense. Nevertheless, she peered into all the operating rooms. There was no sign of him. She should never have agreed to help Wallace, but she couldn’t just sit by Clark’s bedside all day.

  On her way downstairs, she ran into Bree. “Have you seen Clark?” she said, failing sorely at sounding calm.

  Bree gave her an odd look. “He’s sleeping upstairs, love.”

  “Not anymore he’s not.”

  “Well, he can’t have gone far,” Bree said.

  “Help me look, will you?”

  Bree grabbed her arm. “Eva, he’s probably just gone to the loo or something. Look at you, all forgetting to breathe. Let me hear you inhale.” Bree drew in a long breath. “And exhale—”

  Eva yanked her arm away and started off down the hallway. “He wasn’t in any loo or anywhere else upstairs, I checked.”

  Bree set down a box she was carrying. “Come on, you take the right side, I’ll take the left.”

  Eva opened every door, every broom closet, every cupboard without any sign of Clark. Bree turned up the same, and no one they asked claimed to have seen him.

  “How can he have up and vanished?” Eva said.

  “It does seem odd since he was stonkered last I saw,” Bree said.

  “Stonkered?”

  “Knocked out, sorry.”

  “There’s only one place in this hospital I haven’t checked,” Eva said.

  Bree knew exactly what she meant. “Nope, not possible.”

  “I want to believe that.” But there was no other explanation, was there? “Grace would have known if anything happened to him. But she did leave the room for a bit.”

  It made no sense.

  “Could he have been transferred?” Bree asked.

  “Where to? And why?”

  She flashed to the two men she’d seen on the sidewalk. Had they had a hand in this? Clark had mentioned something about acting as though she didn’t know him if questioned. When she thought about it, how well did she know him? Only a week ago, the name Clark Spencer meant nothing to her. The more she thought about it, the more she blamed the men. He was in some sort of trouble. It would have been easy to slip in and put something in his IV fluid and slip back out. And if anyone asked, they could have said they were just looking for someone.

  “I saw two suspicious men outside earlier, what if they took him, or worse?” Eva said, feeling weak behind the knees.

  “Oh, come on, love, now you’re being dramatic. Why would anyone take him?”

  Because he knows something, she wanted to say but held her tongue.

  Eva slumped to the floor. She couldn’t stop the fear from rippling through her body. “If he’s dead, I need to know. Come to the morgue with me?”

  “I will just to quiet you down.”

  Eva stood at the door to the morgue, unable to enter. She could not go in there. But if they had come for him, surely Grace or one of the other nurses would have known, wouldn’t they? Maybe she was torturing herself unnecessarily. But where else could he be? Only hours out of surgery, he shouldn’t have made it to the end of the block. Why was she suddenly so weak? She had survived losing both her parents, was handling the Ruby situation—if barely—but this...

  This was something different.

  “Will you look?” she asked Bree.

  The door swung open and a man stepped out, his hand over his mouth and looking as though he might lose his last meal, if indeed he’d had a last meal. Cold, hard air blasted them. Bree took a big breath and stepped through the door. A squeaky gurney rolled down the hallway and Eva stepped aside as a man pushed past her. The shape under the sheet was big. She fought back a sob.

  “Can I see his face?” Eva asked.

  He gave her a funny look. “Ma’am?”

  “One of our patients is missing, I need to be sure.”

  He pulled back the sheet to reveal the white face of an unknown man, mouth frozen open. Turning away, she said, “It’s not him. Bless his soul.”

  Why was it that one minute of waiting seemed longer than an hour of going about your business? Eva paced back and forth in front of the heavy doors, and the way she was gnawing on her fingernails, you would have thought someone had taken a sander to her hands. She watched a brown spotted lizard following a roach and listened for the sound of footsteps. She forced herself to breathe.

  At last, the door swung open again and Bree staggered out. “He’s not in there.”

  Eva moaned and hugged her. “Are you all right?”

  Bree shuddered. “I swear to you, that morgue right there is enough to turn anyone against a war. Even the most hardened general. You ask me, it ought to be required visiting for those folks.”

  Eva kept her arm around Bree as they walked back up toward the building. Army blankets had been hung in place again and were doing a good job of holding in the light. Only a few thin blue lines escaped.

  “Clark?” Eva called out into the night. “Are you out here, Clark?”

  Bree let her.

  Back in the room, there was a body in Clark’s bed and she rushed forward, but saw that it was only Judy, sound asleep and twitching.

  “Any luck?” Grace asked.

  Grace was sitting on the edge of Samuel’s bed looking awfully chummy.

  “I have a bad feeling,” Eva said.

  Brandy came over and sat at her feet, panting. “I bet you know where he went, don’t you, girl?”

  Brandy’s ears perked up.

  “If only you could talk.”

  The helplessness was crushing. Patients did not just up and vanish without someone knowing something. And if he had left on his own acc
ord, why hadn’t he said goodbye? Maybe he’d been transferred and did not even have the decency to leave a note or tell anyone. The bastard.

  He owes you nothing, Eva.

  WAR BLINDNESS

  Just before midnight, Willa instructed Eva to go home, get cleaned up, sleep a little and return at six o’clock sharp in the morning.

  “What about curfew?” Eva asked, imagining the hordes of trigger-happy soldiers in the area.

  “It’s only two blocks, and you’re in uniform. You’ll be fine.”

  Eva waffled about what to do with Brandy, but in the end, decided to bring her. Dr. Newcastle could not be trusted. Brandy had put up a good resistance to leaving her little spot under the bed, and Eva had to drag her out by the armpits.

  Sasha handed her a used towel. “Cover her in this and get some sleep.”

  “What about you guys?” Eva asked.

  “There’s an extra room out back that Dr. Newcastle said we could sleep in. Later, though.”

  Once Eva and Brandy were outside, Eva let Brandy down but kept her on a thin rope that she’d coiled up. Brandy went straight to a clump of bushes and squatted for a good thirty seconds. As soon as she was done, she stuck her nose in the bush next door and wagged her tail.

  Eva tugged. “Come on, little fella.”

  Oil must still have been burning on the water, because there were patches of glowing clouds here and there. The silence and darkness of the streets was unsettling. This gnawing feeling that at any moment another attack would happen, that this was it, the moment you wonder about all your life, death staring you in the face. And yet the disappearance of Clark seemed more important than the drone of Japanese Zeroes.

  Where were her priorities?

  Eva crept along, hugging a tall hedge, but fortunately the blackouts were doing their job and despite the fiery clouds, the streets were empty and dark. And warm. Back home she would have been in danger of freezing her nose off wandering around outside like this, while now she could have lain down in the grass and been perfectly fine without even a blanket. But there were far worse dangers here. She quickened her steps, but Brandy kept trying to pull her out into the street.