Arms of Grace

by Eleanor Chance

  “I wasn’t sure what kind of pizza you like, so we got four flavors,” Alec said to break the silence.

  Four large pizzas sat on the counter. There was almost enough for each of us to have our own! “You know me. I love all Italian food. What have we got?” I followed Alec into the kitchen. The others relaxed and started talking again. I exhaled loudly, and Alec laughed.

  “You work with these people every day, Grace. They aren’t going to bite you,” she whispered.

  She handed me a plate and told me to get a soda. I obeyed and followed her back into the living room. Angela was sitting on the floor telling a story, mostly with her hands. She stopped for a second when I came in but went on after I sat next to Alec. Everyone laughed when she finished. I laughed too, even though I had no idea what she’d been talking about.

  I took the chance to look around. Alec and I had always met on neutral territory, so we’d never been to each other’s houses. Her apartment was contemporary and sophisticated but comfortable. It wasn’t my style, but I liked it. It told me a lot about Alec too. Even though she’d rejected her pretentious parents, she’d learned the good parts from them too. She noticed me admiring the room and winked.

  When I put my plate down, Caroline said, “How’s Johnny doing? I’ve wanted to visit him, but my boss works me so hard that I never have time.”

  Angela gasped, and Caroline’s face turned as red as the sauce on her pizza.

  “That must stink,” I said. “My boss is a sweetheart.”

  They all knew I was pretty much my own boss, so that got a laugh.

  “Good one,” Alec said and patted my back.

  “Let me get this out from the start. We’re not at work. I’m just Grace here. To answer your question, though, Caroline, Johnny’s the same. Dr. Carter’s baffled. It’s been three months, but he still has no idea why Johnny hasn’t come out of the coma.”

  We talked about Johnny for a few minutes before the conversation returned to normal small talk. Alec tried her best to include me in the conversation, but I wasn’t making it easy. I answered their questions in as few words as possible and turned the conversation away from myself. That accomplished, I melted back into the sofa and listened. In one attempt, I said something about Dr. Emerson, and that got the attention off me.

  Dr. Adam Emerson was an internal medicine resident in his early thirties, just a few years older than Alec. He looked like a model for an outdoor magazine. He was a common topic of conversation with the nurses, and they constantly competed for his attention. Alec had confided in me that she loved his sense of humor and relaxed easy manners, but she wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship. She agreed that he was attractive, but she only wanted his friendship. That was hard to believe when her face lit up every time he walked into a room. I knew that if I brought him up, it would take the heat off me.

  At the end of the night, Alec asked me to stay after the others had gone. She shut the door behind Caroline and turned to face me. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders.

  “Don’t play innocent. You know what I mean. I wanted this to be about you relaxing with everyone. You ended up making them more uncomfortable.”

  “Hey, I tried.”

  “Did you, Grace? Was that you trying?” She waved her arm toward the sofa for effect.

  She was right. I regretted spoiling her plans. She didn’t deserve it. “That wasn’t fair to you. I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean that, but I’m not like you. This is hard for me.”

  “Excuses,” she said. “At some point, this friendship has to go two ways. Right now, it feels pretty lopsided to me. Are you ever going to make an effort?”

  “When you know me better, you’ll understand,” I said.

  “You keep saying that, but how am I supposed to know you when you won’t let me in?”

  I looked at the floor, ashamed to meet her eyes. “Give me another chance. Now that the first time’s out of the way, it’ll be easier. Don’t give up on me.”

  “I’m not, but you’re making it tough.”

  I raised my eyes to hers. “I warned you.”

  “You weren’t kidding,” Alec said and smiled. “I know there’s another you buried in there. I’d like to get to know her. It’s time for you to get past whatever’s standing in your way.”

  “I will. I promise. Soon.”

  Alec led me to the door and hugged me again. “I’m holding you to that,” she said as I went out.

  Chapter Four

  Dr. Emerson was telling a story about his cousin’s ex-husband when I walked into the staff lounge a week later.

  “He’d been smacking my cousin around for years,” he said. “One day, she’d had enough. She packed up their kids without a word and moved in with her brother’s family. She called yesterday to tell me that her ex was arrested for slamming a crowbar over someone’s head at the local raceway. He’s nothing but filthy white trash.”

  “I think I dated that guy once,” Angela said, and everyone laughed, except me.

  “At least you were smart enough to get away,” Dr. Emerson said. “We all tried to stop my cousin from marrying him, but she was ‘so in love.’ Why do women always ignore the warning signs with losers like that?” He looked directly at me as he said it.

  My uncle had leveled those words at me twenty-five years earlier.

  I stepped back, trying to escape before anyone saw me. As I did, Caroline came up behind me. I bumped into her and sent her lunch tray crashing to the floor. The hit sent me off balance, and I fell, dropping my tray too. So much for getting away unnoticed.

  I apologized to Caroline and started cleaning up the mess. Alec jumped up to help and tried to catch my eye. I avoided her, not ready for her to see what was there. When we finished, she cleared a chair and guided me to it.

  “Are you all right, Ms. Ward? You look pale,” Dr. Emerson said.

  “I’m fine, and call me Grace.”

  “Grace, then. I’m Adam,” he said. “Seriously, I think you’re in shock.” He knelt next to me and grabbed my wrist to take my pulse.

  I pulled my arm away. “This is what I get for working with doctors. I’m fine. I just didn’t see Caroline, and my blood sugar is low. I need to eat.” Before he could say anything, I stuffed a bite of sandwich that I’d salvaged into my mouth.

  Alec’s eyes bored into me. She wasn’t buying my story. I wolfed down the rest of my lunch and left without my tray. I had to get out before the interrogation started. I made it as far as the nurses’ station when Alec grabbed my wrist and spun me around.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

  Even though she had eight inches on me, I wasn’t about to let her push me around. I made myself as intimidating as my five feet allowed and said, “You work for me, remember? You can’t talk to me like that. Let go of me.”

  I pulled my arm free and rubbed my wrist. We were in front of the nurses’ station, and every eye was on us: nurses, doctors, and patients. For someone trying to avoid attention, I was doing a terrible job. I motioned for Alec to follow me into an empty patient room.

  “I’m sorry, Grace. I forgot where we were. That was unprofessional.”

  I nodded and went on rubbing my wrist.

  “Did I hurt you?” she asked, taking my arm to examine it.

  “I’m fine. Forget it. I'm just a baby,” I said.

  She squinted at my arm. “I don’t see any redness or marks. I am sorry. I was just trying to catch you.”

  “I know. Like I said, forget it. Let’s get back to work.”

  I reached for the door, but she put out her hand to block me. “Not until we talk. What happened back there? You don’t have low blood sugar.”

  “What Adam said hit close to home, that’s all. He caught me off guard.”

  “Because of your ex-husband, you mean?” Alec asked and crossed her arms.

  I stared at her and wondered if everyone was reading my mind that day.
“How do you know about him?”

  “Just what I heard from old-timers who were here back in the day. Not much.”

  I leaned my head against the cool tile wall and closed my eyes.

  “What happened to you? Why won’t you tell me?”

  In answer, I pulled the hair back from my forehead. “See these scars?” I asked and pointed to the web of white lines at my hairline.

  Alec examined my face and nodded.

  “I have more. I keep them hidden, but the physical scars aren’t the worst ones. They’ve healed. The scars on the inside, the emotional ones, those are the hard ones to cover up. I can’t hide them very well sometimes.”

  I slid to the floor and sighed. I was tired of hiding, tired of lying, tired of pretending.

  Alec sat next to me and waited. When it got too quiet, she said, “Have you ever gotten help for it? You know, talked to anyone?”

  “You mean therapy? Oh, I’ve had therapy. Andrew insisted on it, for all the good it did. I said what they wanted to hear until they declared me healed. The problem was, I didn’t trust them, so I only told them half-truths. I couldn’t allow them to have that kind of power over me.”

  I hoped my answer would satisfy Alec, and she’d let it drop, but that wasn’t Alec’s way. I should have known better.

  “Then you did it wrong,” she said. “Or maybe you had the wrong therapist, or maybe you needed a friend instead.”

  “Alec, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way.”

  “Maybe, but either way, you’re different, and I’m here. You’re not leaving this room until you spill.”

  “It’s not the time. We do have to get back to work,” I said to deflect her.

  “We have ten minutes left in our break, and you’re the boss. You can tell everyone we were treating a patient. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  I smiled. Alec had an easy way of getting to me.

  “Fine. If it gets me free of your clutches, I’ll tell you,” I said with a lightheartedness I didn’t feel. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered, not from the cold, but from the ghosts that had haunted me for those endless years. I thought of Andrew’s letters again and decided it was time to banish the ghosts.

  “My ex-husband was abusive, but it didn’t start there. My father abused me too. The first time was when I was four. He stepped on one of my blocks and took it out on me. When I was seven, he nearly killed me.” I lifted my foot and said, “That’s where I got my limp. It took months for me to walk again. He went to prison for attempted murder.”

  “Good Lord, Grace. Didn’t anyone try to stop him?”

  “Mama tried, but she was small like me, and he was a giant. At least that’s how I saw him, like the evil giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. I have two older brothers. They tried to run interference too, but Pop swatted them away like gnats. I wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been stopped.”

  I held myself tighter as the darkness of that time enveloped me. Alec left the room without a word but came back seconds later with a warm blanket. She wrapped it around me and sat on the end of the bed.

  “Now someone’s going to have to change that bed,” I said.

  Alec rolled her eyes and said, “Can’t you stop being you for five minutes? I’ll do it. What happened when your father went to prison? Please tell me your life got better.”

  I closed my eyes, wishing I could tell Alec that my life had been all butterflies and rainbows after Pop went to prison, but I would have been lying.

  “For a while, until Mama died of cancer when I was ten. We lived with our grandparents after that, until they died within six months of each other when I was fifteen. My brothers had joined the army by then, so I had to go live with Mama’s brother and his family. I hardly knew them. I was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska. They lived in Des Moines. I was torn away from my last connection with Mama.”

  I stopped, reliving the profound abandonment I had felt at the time.

  Alec moved next to me on the floor and put her arm around my shoulder. “Didn’t they want you?”

  “Andrew and his wife tried to adopt me, but my uncle fought them. He thought I should be with blood relatives. I’ve fanaticized so many times about how my life would have turned out if I’d stayed with Andrew and Sarah.”

  “Don’t live in the past. It only makes it worse,” Alec said.

  Before I could respond, the door flew open and Angela stepped through. “Here you are. We’ve been looking all over for you. Dr. Crawford wants you fifteen minutes ago. We have a protocol breach. Kimberly’s been infected.”

  We followed Angela to Dr. Crawford’s office. He was the chief physician on the ID team. On the way, she explained that Kimberly had spiked a high fever and was coughing. She also had a rash on her torso.

  When we got to the office, Dr. Crawford was leaning against his desk with the rest of the staff crowded around him, all talking at once. He held up his hands and said, “Listen,” to quiet everyone. “I’m no happier about this than any of you, but there’s nothing we can do, so we need to settle in and get to work. Grace, it’s about time,” he said when he saw me standing in the back. “Stay behind so I can fill you in. The rest of you have your assignments. Get going.”

  Everyone filed out. Dr. Crawford motioned for me to take a chair next to his desk.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you for more than half an hour,” Dr. Crawford asked.

  “I was tending to a patient,” I said, being deliberately vague.

  He eyed me suspiciously but let it go and repeated what Angela had told us. It was the worst-case scenario we’d feared most on the ID team. Dr. Crawford leaned back and rubbed his temples. He was in his early fifties and the only member of the ID team who was older than I was. While he was a brilliant physician and skilled leader, he wasn’t known for his patience. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor either, kind of like the old me. In spite of that, he’d been the perfect choice to lead the project. Seeing him so concerned made my gut tighten.

  “Why are you so sure this isn’t common influenza or something similar? I saw Kimberly when she came on this morning. She seemed fine,” I said.

  “Here’s her chart,” he said and handed it to me across the desk.

  With one glance at the test results listed in the chart, I could see we were dealing with more than the flu. It was the exact situation we worked hard to prevent.

  “I’m convinced it’s viral, and it may be a flu strain,” Dr. Crawford said. “If it is, it’s a new one. I’ve never seen symptoms like these. I suspect it came from Mrs. Morrison in one twenty-one who was medevacked here from North Carolina three days ago. The pathologists haven’t even had enough time to determine what the infection is. We’re throwing everything we have at Kimberly and her, but they’re both still deteriorating.”

  I was shocked by the short incubation period and quick contamination speed. “How did this happen? Kimberly knows the protocols as well as anyone.”

  “That’s what I want you to find out, even though knowing won’t change the situation. We’re trying to ascertain how many were exposed to the zero patient before she came to us,” he said.

  “And how many Kimberly infected before she exhibited symptoms,” I added.

  “Exactly. There’s still a chance we can contain this, but we need to prepare for a full outbreak. I’ve alerted NIH and the CDC. They’re setting up a temporary center in Chapel Hill, and two other teams will be here tonight. For now, we’re all under quarantine until further notice.”

  Even though I’d expected that my heart sank. Patients and staff alike would be trapped at the hospital for who knew how long. Some of them had spouses or children waiting for them at home or expecting to be able to visit. For me, it meant I’d be barred from Johnny. He’d be alone. I’d promised to never leave him alone. I was frantic at the thought of getting sick, not for my own sake, but for his.

  I pushed my th
oughts aside and listened while Dr. Crawford reviewed the emergency protocols that we’d hoped never to implement. After that, I left his office and went in search of my nurses. We were already down by one. Nurses often become infected first since they spend the most time with the patients. If we lost any more, I didn’t know what we’d do until the CDC team arrived. I revised the shift schedule and reviewed the emergency protocols with the nurses.

  I asked Alec for an update on Kimberly. “Not good,” she said. “Whatever this thing is, it hits fast. We’re not sure if one twenty-one will make it. She’s gone downhill since this morning.”

  “Don’t call her that. She has a name,” I said, snapping at her.

  “Sorry. Margret Morrison might not make it,” Alec said and held up her hands in surrender. “We’re looking for similarities between the two patients.”

  All thoughts of my earlier conversation with Alec had vanished. I lifted my hands to rub my temples as Dr. Crawford had done, but stopped myself just in time. Face touching is the fastest way to spread disease. I dropped my hands, took a few slow breaths and said, “I’m sorry too, Alec. The pressure is getting to me already. I’m worried about Kimberly, and I can’t stop thinking about Johnny. How did this happen on my watch? I’ve pounded the protocols into all of you.”

  “This just happens sometimes, in spite of everything we do.”

  “I won’t accept that. We’re here to prevent infectious disease spread, not contribute to it. I’m going to dig until I’m satisfied with an answer. In the meantime, please help me administer the antibiotics and antivirals to everyone. Let’s pray this isn’t some new resistant superbug.”