his family crying.’
‘I know you can.’
‘How badly are they hurt?’
‘I’m sorry, Adele. Again, I can’t give you that information, it’s to do with patient confidentiality.’
‘I know it is,’ Adele said. ‘I’m a nursing student. But I just need to know how he is, if he’s alive.’
‘It’s very hard for you.’ Janet gave her hand a little squeeze but gave her no information. ‘I wondered if you’d like me to take you in to see your mother before she goes up to Theatre.’
Adele tried to sit up.
‘Just lie there,’ Janet soothed. ‘We’ll wheel you over on the gurney. I can take that collar off you now, Phillip just checked your X-rays and says your neck is fine. It just had to be put on as a precaution.’
Gently she removed it.
‘How do you feel?’ Janet asked.
‘I’m fine,’ Adele said, though, in fact, she felt sick and had the most terrible headache, possibly from sitting in the car as the firefighters had used the Jaws of Life to peel back the roof. The noise had been deafening. The silence from her mother beside her had been far worse, though.
Janet could hear the sound of police radios outside the curtain and one of them asking if they could speak with Adele Jenson.
‘Just one moment,’ Janet said to Adele. She took the police to the far end of the corridor, well out of Adele’s earshot.
‘I’m just about to take her in to see her mother. Can this wait for a little while?’
‘Of course,’ the officer agreed. ‘But we really do need to speak with the other driver.’
‘Learner driver,’ Janet said, and with that one word she asked that they tread very carefully.
The officer nodded.
Janet left them then and wheeled Adele in to see her mother.
At the time Janet was quite sure Lorna wouldn’t make it through surgery.
But she did.
Now Lorna clung to life in a chronic vegetative state.
And her daughter, Janet rightly guessed, was still paying the price for that terrible day.
‘THAT WAS SOME storm last night,’ Janet said.
‘You’re telling me!’ Helene responded. ‘Hayden was driving and I had to get him to pull over.’
Adele was on another late shift and they were sitting at the nurses’ station. They had been discussing annual leave before the conversation had been sidetracked.
Adele really wasn’t in the mood to hear about Helene’s son’s driving lessons.
Again!
Helene had, a few months ago, come back to nursing after a long break away to raise her perfect family, and she spoke about them all the time.
‘Did you get home okay, Adele?’ Janet checked.
‘I did,’ Adele said, glancing over at Zahir, who had his back to her and was checking lab results on the computer. He was wearing navy scrubs and his long legs were stretched out. He was still taking up far too much space in her mind. ‘A lovely man stopped and gave me a lift.’
She watched as Zahir briefly stopped scrolling through results but then he resumed.
‘Who, Paul?’ Janet asked, because they all knew that Adele had a date with him tomorrow night.
‘No.’ Adele shook her head. ‘It was just some random man. As it turned out, he’d escaped from police guard in the psychiatric unit, but I didn’t feel threatened—he didn’t have his chainsaw with him.’
Janet laughed. She understood Adele’s slightly off-the-wall humour. ‘You got the bus, then.’
‘Yes, I got the bus.’
Chatter break over, they got back to business.
‘Adele, you really need to take some annual leave.’
Janet placed the annual leave roster in front of her and Adele frowned as Janet explained. ‘Admin don’t like us to hold too much over and further you haven’t taken any in the time you’ve been here.’
‘Nice problem to have!’ Helene said.
‘What about September?’ Adele suggested, because there were several slots there and Janet nodded and pencilled a fortnight in then. ‘You need to take two weeks before that, though.’
The trouble with that was it was now May. The upcoming summer months were all taken. In fact, a couple of months ago Adele had cancelled her leave when Helene had won a competition to take her perfect family on an overseas holiday.
‘How about the first two weeks of June?’ Janet suggested. ‘There’s a spot there.’
‘But that’s only three weeks away.’
‘That will give you time to book something last minute and cheap,’ Janet said. ‘I’ve been telling you to take some leave for ages, Adele.’
She had been.
‘What might you do?’ Helene asked once Janet had gone.
‘I have no idea,’ Adele admitted.
The truth was, even if she could afford to jet off to somewhere nice, she could not bear the thought of leaving behind her mum.
And a fortnight without the routine of work wasn’t something that Adele wanted either.
She didn’t like the flat where she lived, and, feeling guilty about acknowledging it to herself, neither did she want to spend even more time at the nursing home.
Perhaps she could do some agency work and try to get enough money together to start looking for her own place.
‘How is Mr Richards now, Adele?’ Zahir asked about the patient whose notes she had been catching up on when the subject of annual leave had arisen.
‘He’s comfortable.’
‘And how are his obs?’
‘Stable,’ Adele said.
Mr Richards was on half-hourly obs and they were due, oh, one and half minutes from now.
Basically, Zahir was prompting her to do them.
Well, she didn’t need him to remind her, as he so often did, but
