by Holly Rayner
I sniffed, trying to ignore how good such a gentle touch on my shoulder felt. “Karla used to say that too.” And it was true, and I knew it. I just didn’t know where to set the balance between the basics that I needed to keep going, and the endless, desperate, life-or-death need waiting for me at work, both here and at home.
“Karla was right.”
I looked up at him, the tenderness in his stare putting me even further off-balance as my heart started beating in my ears. His kindness, his hand on my shoulder, that look he was giving me…dangerous. Dangerous. A lady might fall for that, mystery man or not.
“She was,” he insisted. “If you truly wanted to serve where you are needed, there is no better mission of mercy than one like this.”
Before I could answer him, though, the aged, crackling intercom we used rasped to life, startling me both with its noise and the fact that it still worked on this floor.
“All medical personnel, we have hospital overflow incoming. Be advised that these are government soldiers from the front, meaning bullet and shrapnel wounds. Again, all medical personnel are needed on the floor now.”
Regret flickered in his eyes and he dropped his hand. “I should get down there,” he sighed. “We both should, really—they’ll need every hand available. Are you going to be all right?”
“I…yes.” I set the broken keepsake aside and rose, brushing myself off. “I’ll be all right. Thank you…for your help.”
“Think nothing of it.” He considered me. “Are you going back to work?”
“Looks like I can’t get a nap in until I dig this place out or they reassign me,” I replied, and he chuckled. “So yes, I am. Anyway, personal grief isn’t enough excuse to keep me from my duties. It think it’s best if we both go back down.”
“I think it would be best if you came back down, then scrubbed up and came to assist me with those wounded soldiers,” he prodded gently, smiling when he saw my look of surprise.
“I…” I can do that now, I thought. But there were some issues. “I signed on as an administrator. I think it’s against protocol for me to just switch.”
“Then break protocol,” he replied mildly. “From what I’ve seen so far, you’re the finest nurse in all of Al-Rasmah, and I want you working under me. Those soldiers need you to do so. Some may die without it. The paperwork for the transfer, we can worry about later.”
I hesitated. What if I freeze up again? But he was right; those bleeding soldiers wouldn’t wait for me to work up the nerve. They needed help now, and my fears couldn’t take priority over their lives.
I smiled and nodded, then followed him as he turned to walk out.
Chapter 8
Vincenzo
They were already bringing in some of the wounded soldiers by the time we finished scrubbing up. I watched Rose for any signs of hesitation or nervousness, but she had steeled herself admirably, and her hands were steady as she pulled on a pair of gloves.
“Let’s see what triage has sent us first,” I told her as groans and curses in multiple languages started mixing with the other noises in the ward.
“Sounds like Saturday night in Miami out there,” Rose said, with the manner of someone who had patched bullet wounds so often she could do it blindfolded.
Exactly why I had urged her to scrub up and join me. Not only was she a talented nurse, but she had worked in a place that saw a lot of gunshot injuries. “Did you usually get a rush of gunshot wounds in Miami?”
“Yeah, drunk people with guns, vengeful people with guns, territorial gangbangers with guns. Plus a lot of hold-my-beer injuries.” She sounded a little distracted. Perhaps she was reminiscing. “Is that why you’re asking for my help?”
“Perhaps in part.” I wasn’t sure what to expect aside from what our dispatcher had informed us over the intercom: bullets and shrapnel wounds. But then I remembered that misplaced rocket and started to suspect where it had come from.
When we walked out to the makeshift triage area, my suspicions were confirmed: at least three of the men presented with burns, crush injuries, and shrapnel wounds, consistent with being too close to a rocket impact.
Those three were the worst off. I found the one who looked like he was at the most risk of dying, a young man who looked barely out of his teens. His uniform was shredded, bits of shrapnel sticking out of him all down one arm and leg; his side was torn up from much larger slivers of metal. He kept grunting softly through his teeth.
“This is our man,” I said to Rose. “Help me get him into one of the surgery bays.”
She nodded and brought out one of our makeshift stretchers: really just a length of heavy-duty canvas stretched between two poles. She was, like most nurses, stronger than she looked, and only grunted with effort as we loaded and lifted the man, then carried him back out into the first empty cubicle. She didn’t complain, or waver, or need to set her end down, but carried it in one go, until we had him laid out in our makeshift surgery.
The young man looked at Rose curiously; with no time for her to grab a set of scrubs, she was still in her office clothes, aside from a surgical cap she had slipped on.
“Hi,” she told the man in her only slightly clumsy Arabic. “Dr. Marino and I are going to get all of this out of you, but we need you to cooperate with us, all right?”
He nodded, unable to speak, sweat rolling down his face. I felt terrible for him; I knew shrapnel injuries hurt like the devil. But he nodded and lay back on the table, giving me a chance to push aside his shredded clothes and get a good look at his various wounds.
Rose got him one of our precious, carefully rationed painkiller injections, and shot him up with a steady hand. He sighed, lying against the wall the cot was set against as I cut open the side of his shirt.
Rose sucked air beside me as the cut cloth revealed not only shrapnel wounds but a good look at two of the patient’s ribs. Fortunately, they had not been penetrated; the bone on one was visibly cracked but still intact. The young soldier had been lucky.
Our patient quickly passed out from the combination of painkillers and exhaustion, and I set to work getting the shrapnel out, checking for any bits remaining in the wounds, and disinfecting and stitching up each wound in turn.
“Poor guy’s a mess,” Rose muttered.
“We’re going to save him,” I promised her quietly. “Please get an IV set up while I work on this.”
She nodded and went to do so as I busily piled up scrap after sliver of stone, glass, and steel into my little tray. There was so much of it that I quickly lost count: large, small, and almost invisible to the naked eye, but tangible when I touched the skin.
It was like trying to get all of the quills off of a porcupine with a pair of tweezers. Many of the holes that the extractions left weren’t very big or traumatic at all: just a small cut, a bit of tattered skin, not even worthy of stitches. I disinfected them carefully instead, and checked the areas for missed slivers. And always seemed to find them.
Fortunately, I was a fast worker. When Rose returned, I was already working on the big bits of shrapnel stuck in his side, notching his ribs and leaving whole stretches of skin torn and bleeding. Rose set up the bag of Ringer’s and went back to aiding me in cleaning the wounds and handing me tools and supplies.
For a while, neither one of us spoke. It was too important to focus on fighting for the man in front of us, who kept drifting in and out of consciousness. I stitched up the last of the large wounds, hands steady until the end.
“That’s it,” I said finally. “As long as we stave off infection, he should be fine in a couple of weeks.”
Scarred, but fine. He would have an excuse to lift up his shirt around women, and brag with his friends about the day he had survived being hit by a rocket. I checked his pulse a last time, then moved away for a moment to get a breather.
Once we were away from him, Rose spoke up.
“You were so confident that you could save him, from the beginning,” she murmured as she saw him sta
bilize and slowly regain some color in his cheeks. She smiled just a touch wryly. “More people should have your self-confidence.”
I didn’t answer at first, instead feeling a catch in my throat as I thought of all the people—my entire family, all their operants and allies—who had stood in the way of my becoming a doctor.
“You can’t work among the common people,” they would tell me. “You can’t possibly serve them. They are made to serve you, not the other way around.” That had been my father, in one of his typical rants.
My father had always considered the idea of working for others to be absolutely absurd. Peasants worked. We did not. Our family had enough money to support us in indolent excess for the next hundred years. Why work or suffer in any way when someone else could?
My father is an evil man, I thought, and winced as I imagined my mother’s years with him. Marrying into the Marino family had been an invitation to suffering for anyone with a good heart…and my mother had possessed a very good one. Good enough to break and die early, after seeing too much of what my father had thought was appropriate.
Lavish parties, suspicious deaths of spies and turncoat functionaries. Intrigue. Cruelty. One would think we were still back in the Renaissance.
My father was the one behind the family’s constant attempts to retrieve me. His pride meant he would not let me continue as I was. He had to bring me to heel, even though my activities would have improved our family’s reputation more than hurt it. He had to stop me from doing good. Not because I was doing good, but because the good I did involved working with my hands, wearing myself out, spending long hours at an actual job. He just couldn’t have that.
I found myself wanting to tell Rose everything; about my family’s cruelty, about their insane rationales, about their attempts to stop me—prevent me from attending school, prevent me from residency, prevent me from coming here or to the dozen places I had gone before coming here.
The Congo. The Philippines. Haiti. Belize. Places full of desperate people in need, whether war, poverty, disease, or pollution was the cause. How many times did they track me before I got better at covering my tracks? How many times was I nearly caught by them or someone who wanted their money? Three? Yes, it’s three now, after Belize.
I wanted to unburden myself with Rose. I knew in my heart, after seeing her in action, that this highly opinionated, strong, idealistic young lady would never break a confidence. Even when it came to secrets as big as mine. But that could have been bias talking. I was already very aware that I was attracted to her.
“It came at a cost,” I said finally, feeling suddenly very tired as I thought about all those arguments, all that struggle, the slow, painful realization that I would have to not only abandon but also hide from my family if I was to pursue my dream. And doing so had taken more work, initiative, and cleverness than I had previously thought I was capable of. “I have had some trials and battles of my own, and some losses.”
She looked at me curiously, but I simply smiled, and we set back to work on the young soldier.
He was never actually in mortal danger except from blood loss or shock; now that he was cleaned up, stitched up and hydrated, his main risk was from infection. The shrapnel might have been hot enough to cauterize the wound going in, but the pieces had also pushed scraps of his clothing into the wounds with them.
“I need you to run antibiotics into his IV line. He’s going to be burning up with fever soon if we don’t start them now.”
Rose nodded and set to work taking care of it; meanwhile, I did another inspection of the boy’s body, making sure I had picked every last bit of shrapnel out of his skin. There was so much on the tray that it threatened to spill over; so many skin breaches that I didn’t want to think about his chances of infection without the IV drip.
I needed to pull some strings to get more supplies here. I could have just dug a little deeper into my accounts and ordered it all myself. But if I did that, I ran the risk of being noticed again.
My freedom to continues saving lives against the supplies and equipment needed to do so. It was a difficult choice to make. But every single time that I saw a need, I had to answer.
Perhaps this was my rebellion against my father and family: doing the exact opposite of what they thought was proper. In this case, that meant doing what was good and right. Ever since my youth, I had prided myself in having more ethics than my father and his family.
As we worked, I heard the rest of the medical staff bustling as they handled the other patients. I had deliberately taken the worst-off man, and now that he was almost done, I could feel the exhaustion weighing down my limbs.
“Almost done here,” I told Rose as I bandaged the last of the man’s wounds and laid a blanket over him. “Thank you for your assistance. I knew you would be a great deal of help, and I’m pleased that I was correct.”
She blushed, lowering her eyes, and I felt that same stirring of warmth toward her that I had before. It made me smile…and start to make plans. I knew that regardless of the unusual circumstances, there was only one proper response when unattached and feeling this kind of chemistry. Pursue it.
I simply wasn’t quite sure how to do so right now. Perhaps when I knew her a little better.
“It was nice to finally feel like we’re on the same side,” she admitted, surprising me.
“We were never at war,” I reassured her, but she just smiled and shook her head.
“Not at war, no, but there was some tension there for a while. I understand you better now, I think.” She licked her lips, gazing up at me winsomely without realizing it, and I fought down another smile.
“No, definitely not. I can’t actually see myself disagreeing with you that severely on much of anything.”
She swallowed. “So…call it a misunderstanding?”
I nodded. “Exactly that.” And something to put behind us.
As we gazed at each other, I had to stifle the urge to reach out and remove her hair cover so I could see her lovely—if mussed and dusty—locks again. But now was not the time or the place.
Still, something in my eyes must have betrayed my temptation because she blushed again.
“I should get back upstairs,” she started. “It’s going to take a good long while before I can, um, actually sleep on my mattress again.”
As she turned to go, I caught her arm. She stopped and looked back at me, startled, and I simply said, “Wait just a moment.”
“Hm?” She peered at me curiously as I put on the most charming manner I could under the circumstances.
“Perhaps before you go, you’d like to have supper with me?”
She looked so shocked that, for a moment, I thought I had misread the situation and overstepped. But then she smiled at me wryly and asked, “Is this a date, Dr. Marino?”
I couldn’t keep the wry little twist off my own smile. “Well. I can’t manage candlelight and violins, but I’ll see what I can do with my rations of lentils, rice, and some spices down in my trailer.”
She gave me a confused look. “I thought you were staying upstairs with the rest of us.”
“I thought about it, but I have some logistics needs that being up on the top floor couldn’t accommodate.” Namely, maintaining my privacy and reducing the likelihood of my true identity being revealed.
I gave her the most relaxed, inviting smile I could under the circumstances. “So, what do you say?”
And then, not even meaning to, I found myself holding my breath. As if I was bracing myself for a refusal that would somehow hurt more than my pride. I couldn’t remember the last time I had hung on a woman’s decision like this, but here I was.
Rose considered for what seemed like an agonizingly long while, before her smile finally broadened and her eyes twinkled. “Well, Dr. Marino, as scandalous as it may be to some of the other staff, I think I’ll take you up on that offer.”
That trickle of warmth came back, redoubled in strength. “It’s Vincenzo,” I said softly
.
Her smile softened too. “Vincenzo,” she repeated, as if savoring the name. “I like the sound of that. Let’s go.”
Chapter 9
Rose
Vincenzo’s trailer confirmed my suspicions that I was dealing with a very wealthy man who simply didn’t want to draw attention to it. It wasn’t as if the walls were hung with Degas or Renoirs or anything like that, but they did feature a variety of keepsakes and art from all over the world. Maori wood carvings sat next to Chinese jades. African statuettes stood on their own little wall shelves beside circles of elaborately worked stained glass. Everywhere I looked another culture was represented, leaving me wondering just how long my mysterious doctor had been traveling.
I also wondered why he had chosen the trailer over the comparative safety of the stone and brick building looming over us. Though…perhaps “comparative safety” was a laughable prospect when a rocket had left my room in rubble.
“Come in, come in, I’ll find you a chair.”
The place was neat, but the table was piled with well-used hardback books; he scooped them off the table and disappeared behind the bedroom curtain for a moment, giving me a glimpse of what lay beyond.
His bed wasn’t big, but it had to be at least three times wider than my little cot. And interestingly enough, whereas everything else in the room had a low-key air of wealth and opulence, one decoration did not. It was a plain, hand-knotted fisherman’s net, hung above Vincenzo’s bed from top to bottom like a canopy. Its hemp ropes were old-looking, stained by the sea, bleached by the sun. It wasn’t ornamental; it had seen a lot of use.
“That’s interesting,” I commented as he reappeared. I wondered whether any of the rocket attacks would end up knocking it down on him.
That could get awkward. He’d have to say, “Someone come down to my trailer, I’m tangled in a net. Don’t ask.” I fought down a smile.