Chapter 11: Night Shift

Conor drove us in the Volvo with Sir still in the back seat, because there wasn't time to take him upstairs.

He ran two red lights and apologized to each of them out loud.

"You're talking to traffic lights."

"I talk to everything when I'm scared. Kidneys. Dogs. The coffee machine."

"You're scared?"

"He's my patient." He gripped the wheel. "I promised him a kidney. I don't get to lose him before I've even found one."

We left Sir in the car with the window cracked and a blanket.

Moira met me at the ICU doors in her navy charge scrubs. She'd been working a double.

She looked at my jeans, then at Conor's flour sleeve.

She didn't say a word about either.

"Bed 3," she said. "I need a nurse. I've got two callouts and a GI bleed in 7."

"Give him to me."

"You're on days. You worked today."

"Moira. Give him to me."

She tossed me a pair of gray scrubs from the clean linen cart.

I changed quickly in the staff bathroom.

The driver was in Bed 3 with his eyes half closed and his skin hot and gray.

His left arm was swollen red from the wrist to the elbow, over the fistula.

His pressure was sixty-two over thirty.

"Gray," he whispered. "Why are you in my dream?"

"It's not a dream. I'm your nurse tonight."

"Lucky me."

We hung antibiotics. Then fluids. Then a drug to squeeze his blood vessels and push his pressure up.

Conor stood at the foot of the bed with the infectious disease fellow, arguing about cultures in a low voice.

At midnight, the pressure was seventy.

At one, sixty-eight.

I sat on the edge of my chair and watched the numbers.

His sister sat in the corner in her fleece with her hands pressed together between her knees.

She didn't cry this time.

She just watched him breathe.

At three in the morning I went to the vending machine in the hall for the first time in my career.

Conor was already there.

He was hitting the side of it with the flat of his hand.

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