cleaning closet with a cart, pail and mop. He seemed startled at her approach, then took a wide stance, as if planting himself firmly. A young man with tousled blond hair, a too-thin body and a narrow chin, he watched her approach almost warily. He looked to be fresh out of high school, which would have put him well out of her milieu when growing up, and the kindest word anyone would apply to his appearance was “ordinary.” Poor guy probably had trouble getting dates.
“Hi,” she said as she approached. “I’m Kristin Tate, the new night nurse.” Something about him looked familiar, but then darn near everyone in the county looked familiar, even after all her time away.
“I recognize you,” he said. Then, as if making a decision he added, “Charlie Waters. You probably don’t remember me. We only talked a couple of times.”
She smiled. “Sorry, I’m still getting to know everyone again. Nice to meet you. I was just wondering what I’m going to do all night. Any suggestions?”
A shy smile lit his face. “I play cards.”
“Now that’s an idea. Maybe the four of us can play.”
“After I finish,” he agreed.
“Do you have a deck of cards?”
He looked down at his scrubs as if to say, “Where would I be hiding them?”
“Good point,” she said in response to his gesture. “I’ll look through the drawers at the nurses’ station. We can’t be the only folks who have wondered how to get through a quiet night.”
“Probably not,” he agreed. “But I have a lot of work to do. Bathrooms and floors before the patients go to sleep. After that?”
“It’s a date.”
Julie and Nancy joined Krissie in her tallying of the supply closets, then returned to the nurses’ station with her. No call lights, no monitor warnings. All the patients were happily watching TV or sleeping and, for the moment at least, experiencing no problems.
“It’s awfully quiet tonight,” Julie remarked.
Krissie perked at that. “You mean it’s not usually like this?”
“Absolutely not,” Nancy said. “We usually have a few more patients than this. More injuries, for one thing. And in August it’s strange to have only one dehydration case.”
“I’m not complaining,” Julie remarked. “When the ward is full, we hardly get a breather.”
“True that,” Nancy agreed in the slang of the young.
Julie hesitated, then said, “I heard Dr. Marcus riding you. Not what he said but…just so you know, he can be hard to get along with sometimes.”
Krissie wasn’t quite sure how to respond. There were certain rules of professional etiquette, and while she’d seen them broken countless times when some doctor or nurse was a pain the rear, she didn’t think she should encourage it her first night on the job.
But she didn’t have to say a thing. Nancy chimed in. “I try to stay out of his way, because you never know when some little thing will annoy him. But mostly he’s okay. I don’t think he means to be edgy.”
“I don’t think so, either,” Julie agreed. “Because he can be really nice sometimes. But other times, there’s this look on his face, and you know he’s uptight about something. So I just duck.” She gave a little laugh. “If he’s mad about something I did, he has to find me.”
Krissie couldn’t contain her smile. “Sometimes that works.”
“Yeah, you can’t really hide, being the charge nurse. Anyway, you’ll find he’s here a lot. The other docs all have families, so Dr. Marcus is on call most of the time.” Julie scrunched her face a little. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t sleep.”
Or maybe, Krissie thought, he has trouble sleeping. She certainly did, even after all this time. Nightmares seemed ready to pounce, and were one of the reasons she preferred the night shift. When she had a nightmare while sleeping during the day, she only had to open her eyes to see sunlight, and she had learned it dispelled those images quickly. At least most of the time.
“Anyway,” Nancy said, “it’s probably the war.”
Her comment was laden with the knowledgeable tone of someone who thought they knew. Krissie didn’t think Nancy could imagine the half of it.
They did find a deck of cards, however, and after ten, when the patients had all been checked on, medicated and settled, Charlie joined them. He remained shy, but Julie seemed to have taken a shine to him, making him blush with alarming regularity.
Charlie left at midnight, his shift over, and Krissie sent Julie and Nancy to take a break. They announced they were going to the cafeteria to meet up with some friends from other wings and would be back in half an hour.
Krissie was amazed to discover how relieved she was to be left alone for a little while. The ward was quiet, the call board remained silent, Hester Alexander’s heart monitor continued its steady rhythms.
One by one, she checked on her patients, moving soundlessly as she opened doors and looked in. Mr. Hedley was going to need a new IV bag of antibiotics in about an hour. Other than that, everyone seemed to be resting comfortably and sleeping deeply. Mrs. Alexander opened her watery blue eyes just briefly, then returned to sleep. Krissie silenced the monitor in her room. It was enough that she could keep an eye on it from the nurses’ station; no need to disturb Mrs. Alexander’s sleep.
The next couple of hours passed smoothly enough, and finally Krissie decided to take her own break, a half hour in the break room with her bagged lunch and another cup of coffee from the coffeemaker on the counter.
She had eaten only half of her turkey sandwich when her pager sounded. Julie. Dropping her sandwich on the waxed paper, she took off for the ward at a fast walk, just as the PA system announced a code and a room number.
She arrived a few seconds later on the ward to see Nancy waving at her from the door to Mrs. Alexander’s room. From the nurses’ station she heard the unmistakable warning from the cardiac monitor. Ignoring it, she began to jog down the hall, even though you were never supposed to run in a hospital.
“Cardiac arrest,” Nancy said quietly. Inside the room, Julie was hovering over the patient looking helpless. Damn it, an LPN should know better.
“CPR, Julie. Did you call the doctor?”
Nancy nodded. “Yes. He answered the page.”
“Julie, I’ll take over. Where’s the crash cart?”
“Getting it.” Nancy fled.
Flatline. It was a sight a nurse saw too often, but never wanted to see. She joined Julie at the bed and motioned to her to take the breathing bag, while she herself climbed on the bed, straddled the patient and took over the chest compressions. Each compression registered on the monitor, but nothing else.
Dr. Marcus and the crash cart arrived together, along with a crash team assembled from all over the hospital. The high whine of the charging defibrillator filled the room along with business-like chatter
