My Mother Sold Me to Pay Her Dealer, and the Man Who Took Me From Him Has a Use for Me novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: Night Shift
I took the bus.
It was the number six, and nothing about it had changed.
The driver did not know where I had been.
When I got on in my socks and a man's coat he looked at me, looked away, and did not ask for my fare.
I rode up Genesee Street with my forehead against the cold window.
A girl in a pink hat sat across from me eating fries out of a paper bag.
It was only a bus on a Wednesday.
I got off at the hospital stop and stood on the curb with my arms around myself.
A woman in blue scrubs came out of the staff door, saw me, and stopped.
"Bronwen?" she said.
She was the charge nurse, fifty-five and tired, with reading glasses pushed into her gray hair.
"Bronwen Treadwell. Where in God's name have you been?"
I could not answer.
She came down the steps and stood in front of me, and then she did something I had not expected.
She took off her cardigan and put it around my shoulders, over the man's coat, and held it closed at the front.
"Never mind," she said. "It doesn't matter. You're here."
I started to shake.
She did not ask me anything.
She walked me through the staff door and down the hall to the break room, put a cup of tea in my hands, and sat with me until I could breathe.
The hospice ward was on the second floor of the old building, in the wing the nuns had once used.
It had low ceilings and wide doors for beds, and a window at the end of the hall that looked over the roofs.
I had walked that hall at three in the morning two hundred times with a basin and a cool cloth.
I wanted, very badly, to work.
"I can take tonight," I said.
"You're not fit," the charge nurse said.
"I'm not fit for anything else."
She looked at me for a long while.
"There's a woman in four," she said at last. "She's not going to see morning, and her people can't get here till tomorrow. Nobody should be alone for it."
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