Anything to do something. Just not to think.
I was chasing down the last of these when my phone rang. I picked it up, dust covering my face. “Hello?”
It was one of the places I’d sent a résumé to earlier. The person on the far end of the line had a slight accent, and wondered if they could ask me some preliminary questions.
“Sure.” I opened up my laptop and brought it back to life so that I could use it to cheat if need be. “Where are you guys located?” I asked, to buy myself some time.
She gave me an address, and I plunked it into my browser first off.
“Yes—two years of prior hospital experience. No, I don’t speak Spanish.” Some things weren’t worth lying about when they could be easily disproved. My browser hopped into map mode and pulled up the street view of the Divisadero clinic. I saw it had a huge Santa Muerte mural painted in front of three elaborate crosses on its wall and a dramatically shadowed numeral seventeen. The woman on the phone began making polite excuses to get off the line with me.
“No, wait, please. I’m very interested in working there. Public health has always been a passion of mine.” Completely not borne out by my résumé or working experience, but hey. I shrank the map program and saw just how much farther south Divisadero was, and made an assumption about how much of a pay cut it would be. There couldn’t be that many other qualified nurses applying. I zoomed back in quickly. The mural on its side was huge, and her outstretched skeleton hand seemed to be beckoning me. “I can even interview today.” I crossed fingers on both my hands. Please, this time, just let me get what I want.
She inhaled and exhaled loudly, and gave me a time two hours from now.
“Thank you—public transportation? I have a car—if you say so. Okay. See you then.”
I hung up the phone with her and paused to really think. Despite the fact that I’d slept normal hours last night, I wasn’t used to being up during the day. I was covered in dust and cat hair—and I’d just volunteered to be at an interview in two hours. But it was an idea. The mural seemed more stagnant than it had barely a minute ago; now that I wasn’t deluding myself, her outstretched hand was more pointing up the street than calling out to me. But still. Nothing said I actually had to take the job. I might as well see, right? And two hours was long enough for a shower and coffee.
* * *
After my shower I blow-dried my hair and got dressed in a just-past-the-knee skirt and a blousy summer-weather-appropriate top, hoping it would say interview but not mug me, and walked to the train station in the pre-noon sun. Today would be as hot and humid as every other day this summer had been, the sun breathing over Port Cavell’s shoulder like a stalker.
While I felt confident that no one actually wanted to steal a Chevy from last century, the Divisadero clinic was more than a little into what I’d been trained to think of as the bad side of town. No wonder she’d suggested I take public transportation.
* * *
The fourth leg of the train ride was the longest. As the train snaked aboveground to where the fifth and sixth stations were, the entire population of the train rotated through the car, everyone but me. When we reached the sixth station, I got out alone.
This was an open station, and just below it in the shelter the train platform provided was an open-air market of sorts. There were stands with fruit piled up, and ropes strung from side to side of the bottom of the pavilion, knotted off and lined with shirts. There was a cart with a grill and something good-smelling cooking on it. I took the next few steps down.
The platform above provided some shade, and maybe the trains created a passing breeze. There were women pulling small children behind them. Smoke from the grill caught a crosswind and made me cough nervously. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish.
People were looking at me, registering that I was there, that they didn’t know me, and then looking away. I didn’t feel I was in danger, but I did feel like an outsider. I got my bearings while trying not to turn my back completely on anyone. I’d been too paranoid for too long to let my guard down now. According to the map in my head, the clinic was two blocks up. I set off down the sidewalk while listening for footsteps behind me.
The road was lined by the walls of run-down businesses, a few painted fresh white over graffiti. Others were turquoise and pale pink. There were some cars parked outside, though none that would have shamed my Chevy. The road itself could only questionably be called such, full of potholes and patches of gravel. The sidewalk wasn’t much better.
I looked back where I’d come from. Who knew there was this whole other world that I’d never been to before, or even seen? I thought back to the train. Had I taken that line before? Yes. It’d been a while, but I had—I’d just never gotten off at this one stop. It was like Europe—you were sure it was there, but you mostly only saw it on TV.
Kind of like cancer too.
A car pulled up beside me, and the music playing inside it turned off. I elbowed my purse a little closer to my chest.
“Need a ride, lady?” asked the man inside the car. I thought about ignoring him. I didn’t want to be the type of person who thought poorly of anyone, but I also didn’t want to wind up a sad morality tale that women told to other women on dark nights. Still, it was one P.M., and there wasn’t anything in my purse worth stealing.
I leaned over. “I’m just walking to the clinic. It’s up that way, right?”
“Yeah. Just up the street. Tell Hector I say hi.” He nodded and turned his music back on, veering back into the center of the street and heading up to proposition another pedestrian.
Just a gypsy cab—a cabbie without a license. I relaxed a little but kept walking quickly. There were men standing on a corner, outside what looked like a liquor store, but that was farther down. I saw the clinic itself, its name at the top of one wall, the letters painted on where the original ones had fallen off. I realized I was facing the wall that had been on the street view—but that the mural was gone, replaced with off-white paint that hadn’t been weather-beaten by an entire summer’s sun. Santa Muerte was gone.
I wondered what that meant for me.
I stood for a moment, trying to compose myself. Just how much of a fool’s errand this would be. An early-teens kid standing outside the clinic door walked over to me. He looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, judging me, and then he clucked, shaking his head. “You’ve got susto bad, lady. You won’t find help for that in there. You need to come with me and see my grandfather.”
My left eyebrow rose involuntarily. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Are you sure? Only farsantes in there. My grandfather is a curandero—” He kept going, his patter confident. His pants were a little short, and the center of his shirt had the logo of a brand I didn’t recognize.
“I’m sure. Thanks, though. I appreciate your concern.” I squeezed around him and opened the door.
“Don’t put that in your mouth, mija!” a mother told a child inside. An elderly woman coughed in a corner, running rosary beads through the fingers of one hand. A pregnant woman sat with one hand on her full belly, the other pushing a stroller back and forth with a sleeping occupant inside. And two men were having a discussion—one of them didn’t have any teeth, and the other had a grotesquely swollen hand.
They may not have been my people, as I had come to understand it, when I was working with the vampires, daytimers, and sanctioned donors on Y4. But they were patients. And just like that, I knew where I was again. It was home.
Hard plastic chairs lined the waiting room walls; the bulk of the clinic itself was walled off by double-paned plastic. I presented myself at the nearest window, and a woman with short dark hair and copper skin told me to wait a minute for Dr. Tovar to see me.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Miss Spence?” My name rang out from the side door. I stood and smiled, and went over to the woman in pink scrubs holding it open. She looked me up and down and snorted dismissively, but she still opened the door. “Dr. Tovar
will see you now.”
I followed her down a corridor with instructional posters in English and Spanish. I could count the Spanish words I knew on both hands. I knew corazon meant “heart,” sangre meant “blood,” dolor meant “pain.” Other than that, I was pretty good at guessing, and quick to call the translation line at the hospital if need be. The woman I was following knocked on a closed door and, at an answer from the occupant, opened it for me.
Dr. Tovar held my résumé in his hands.
He was beautiful. Dark skin, black hair, a strong jaw, wide shoulders under a tweed coat—suddenly I wished I’d dressed up a little more for this, until I remembered he was a doctor.
Doctors were bad ideas, and off limits, for any nurse. You got into fights with doctors too often to think of them that way. At the hospital, it was like war. Nurses were on the front lines, and doctors were like distant generals who never believed you when you said you were running out of ammunition while they were yelling at you to march.
When he was done frowning at my résumé, he glanced up and looked surprised, for the briefest of moments, to see me. Regaining his composure, he gestured to the extra chair.
I sat down across from him. This room was a personal office with a simple desk and worn-down chairs, not a place for seeing patients. There were books in both Spanish and English behind him, thick medical dictionaries that looked out of date. If it were any smaller, my knees would have met his beneath the desk.
“And just why am I looking at your résumé?” He had a mild accent, the kind that said he’d grown up somewhere else but lived here a very long time.
“Lucky, I guess?” I tried halfheartedly to sound convincing.
He looked up at me with a grimace, and his eyes traveled up and down the length of me, much as the woman who’d walked me down the hall had. At a club or on a date, it might feel sexual, but here I felt like he was cataloging all my flaws. When he was done, he sighed. “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”
“I’m sorry, but no. I can play a mean game of charades, though.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “What do you know about serving diverse patient populations?”
I’d had to camouflage the second-to-last job on my résumé. No way to put works well with vampires down in the prior employment blank. “I worked at a county facility. We saw all kinds of patients there.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t like working night shift.”
“And yet your next job was at a sleep clinic? Your … current job?” he said, after inspecting the dates more closely.
“I’d rather work days. And with patients that are awake.”
He made a thoughtful noise. He wasn’t that much older than me, early thirties, but he seemed older, like he was required to exude the aura of middle-aged wisdom here. I guessed as the doctor of a community health clinic, it was expected of him.
“So, um—what happened to the mural outside?” I asked, trying to make small talk.
He gave me a dark look over my résumé. “We painted over it. I don’t want people praying to death on my watch.” I swallowed and nodded as he went on, setting my résumé down. “Nothing personal, Miss Spence, but you’re completely unqualified to work here. You don’t speak Spanish, you’ve never done real clinic work with people who were awake, and you’ve never been out of a hospital setting. I don’t think there’s anything you can offer us. At all.”
His tone wasn’t rude; he was just being forthright about the facts. My instinct was to fight him—but with what? My mom was right. Just because fighting was the only tool in my tool belt didn’t mean it was always the best one for the job. And why should I, now that the mural was gone? It’d been foolish to think I’d gotten some sort of a sign.
And being rejected here didn’t mean I was condemned to work at the sleep center. I’d sent my résumé out to a ton of other places. At least now I knew I needed to come up with a better why-I-left-my-last-job lie.
I stood and reached out to shake his hand. “Ah, well. Sorry for wasting your time.”
He took my hand and shook it. His hand was warm and strong, and he gave me a begrudging nod. “Not many people try to work down here.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.” A quick smile crossed his face, and then he gestured to the door.
* * *
I saw myself out the short hallway. Strike one. But I probably had twenty-four hours’ grace at the clinic—it’d take them that long to find my replacement, and I hadn’t seen my current job up on Craigslist this morning. No way for them to know I was fishing for a new one. I should call them tonight, in case none of this went well. I tried to muster up some enthusiasm for going back there, and found myself hollow.
I let myself into the waiting area just as the far door to the outside world opened. Two men came in, one holding the other as he stumbled and bled. The mother sitting in the waiting room screamed, while her daughter stared innocently.
“¡Médico!” the standing one shouted, pulling the bleeding man another step into the room. The elderly woman with the rosary beads began to pray aloud.
I stepped through and let the door close quickly behind me to protect the staff. I could see into the plastic-windowed wall to my right where the receptionists had scurried off like rabbits. Hopefully to tell someone in charge there was a bleeding man out here.
“They tried to kidnap me!” The standing man pointed what I belatedly realized was a gun at me. Instantly I held up my hands. “¿Quién eres?” he asked me.
I didn’t know what he was asking precisely, but the gun helped make it clear. “La enfermera,” I said, at least knowing the Spanish word for “nurse.” I opened up my purse slowly and pulled a pair of gloves out. “Let me see your friend.”
As an actual clinic employee had yet to be seen, the gunman grunted assent. I moved closer to the bleeding man. He was shot in his upper arm. Behind us, with the men distracted and the gun pointed at me, the other patients filtered out, stepping over the wounded man’s trail of blood.
“That’s gotta hurt. Let’s get you sitting down. How long ago was this? How much blood did he lose?” I kept asking questions, trying to distract them both from the mass exodus happening at the door. I inspected the rest of him visually and with both gloved hands—he’d slimed blood all over himself in getting dragged here. There could be a second, worse gunshot wound hidden somewhere else on him, easy. When I didn’t find anything else, I tested a finger near his wound, and he yelped.
“Pray for me, Grandmother,” he begged the elderly woman sitting behind us, the only waiting room occupant left inside.
The grandmother snorted, loudly. “I would sooner die than pray for you!”
I heard the back room door slam open behind me. “Goddammit, I told you all to call ahead. You all have our number.” Dr. Tovar was at my side. He looked at me. “You go home. Now.”
This wasn’t my fight, my place, or my people. But I was here, and my hands were covered in an injured man’s blood.
“I mean it! Go home!” Dr. Tovar yelled at me.
“I’m not some dog you can shoo away!” I yelled back. He closed his mouth and glared, but then he turned to our patient rather than continuing our fight.
The door to the outside world opened up again. I turned around to see. Two men stood in the doorway, sunlight pouring through from behind, casting them in deep shadow. They both held up guns. The man holding his friend dropped him to hold his gun up too.
“Not in here!” Dr. Tovar yelled. The standoff continued over our heads. I looked back at the floor, not wanting to gawk at the men holding guns. “We’re off limits!” Dr. Tovar yelled again.
None of the men moved.
I closed my eyes and winced, waiting to hear a round, not knowing who or what it’d strike. The grandmother prayed louder, “Santa Muerte, escucha la or ación de su hijo pobre.”
I opened my eyes in surprise and turned to look at her. The gunmen were cl
oser now. I could make out their faces and see the beginnings of strange tattoos high on their necks.
“I said my clinic is off limits!” Tovar yelled.
“Your clinic, and your people. For now,” the nearer of the gunmen said. “But Maldonado has unfinished business with him.” He twitched his gun at the man bleeding on the floor.
I instinctively leaned in over the bleeding man to protect him—and found Dr. Tovar was already there. Our shoulders touched. If they were going to shoot the man, they’d have to be content with a leg shot—or shooting through one of us. The tweed of his coat rasped against my upper arm where my sleeve ended.
“The seventeenth is coming, Doctor. Did you tithe yet?” the gunman asked of Dr. Tovar, jerking his chin up slightly.
“You can’t have him,” Dr. Tovar stated again.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Your answer is tell Maldonado to go fuck himself,” Dr. Tovar said, his voice frighteningly calm.
The first gunman started forward, and the second swatted out a hand to hold him back. Their faces were as cold-blooded as any vampire as they contemplated shooting Dr. Tovar and me.
The second one released the first. “Come on. He’ll come out eventually,” he said.
“We’ll shoot you in the street, like a dog,” the first threatened, staring at Dr. Tovar, lowering his gun.
And then they retreated, the door closing behind them, taking the sunlight and shadows with them.
The grandmother went on a tirade. “¡Rezo y rezo y sigue siendo lo mismo!” Then she stood up and left the waiting room, clearly disgusted with all of us equally.
I wanted to run after her and ask her who she was talking about, how she knew anything about Santa Muerte—I didn’t get to ask many questions back in December when I was being shunned out the door.
But I was helping Dr. Tovar. I looked over to him, and he nodded at me. “Let’s get him up and into the back room.”
We did so, with the help of the man he’d come in with. One of the receptionists held open the door.
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