The Spare They Came Begging For novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Property Of

Clare keeps her job after her mother calls the hospital, gets teased by her bus driver, and comes home to find the locks changed and her life in garbage bags.

By Friday morning the clip had nine million views.

I went to work anyway.

The ICU doesn't care what the internet thinks of you.

The man in Bed 4 needed his sedation weaned and the woman in Bed 6 needed her lines changed, and that was the whole world for twelve hours.

At ten, the daughter of the man in Bed 4 followed me to the med room.

She was holding her phone.

"Aren't you the girl in the video?"

"I'm your father's nurse."

"You walked out on your sick sister." She looked me up and down. "I don't know if I want you touching him."

I kept my voice level.

"I'm the one who caught his pressure dropping at four this morning. You can ask for another nurse. I'll get the charge nurse for you right now."

She opened her mouth and closed it.

Then she went back to her father's bedside and didn't ask for anyone.

At noon Moira found me in the hall.

"The chief nursing officer wants you. Now. Your mother called her."

"Of course she did."

"Want me to come?"

"No. Watch my beds."

The chief nursing officer had an office with one window and a dying spider plant.

She was a tired woman in her fifties who had worked nights on my unit before I was hired.

She didn't ask me to sit.

"Your mother says you're unstable," she said. "She says you've had some kind of breakdown, and she's worried about our patients. She'd like you on leave."

"Did she mention she's on the board at Commonwealth?"

"She mentioned it twice."

I put the stack of copies on her desk.

The consent form with my forged signature. The intake photo of Verity in gray scrubs. Moira's chart note from Bed 9, two o'clock, Thursday the eighteenth.

She read every page.

It took four minutes.

When she was done she took off her glasses and pressed her fingers to her eyes.

"Jesus Christ, Clare."

"I'm not unstable. I'm angry. It's different."

"I know the difference. I've been married twenty-six years." She slid the papers back to me. "I'm going to call your mother back and tell her we're short-staffed and you're my best day nurse."

"Thank you."

"Keep it off the floor. If a family films you, walk away. Don't argue with anybody's phone."

"I won't."

"And Clare?" She put her glasses back on. "Get a lawyer. A real one."

I went back to Bed 4.

The daughter had brought me a coffee.

She set it on my cart without a word and went back to her chair.

At 4:40 I got on the bus.

The driver was a heavy man in his fifties with a gray mustache and a Red Sox lanyard.

He'd driven the 4:40 for as long as I'd ridden it, six years.

He'd started calling me Gray the first winter, because of the scrubs and the coat and the hat.

He didn't know my real name. I didn't know his.

He grinned at me in the mirror.

"Gray. You're famous."

I sat down in the front seat behind him, where I always sat.

"My niece sent me the video," he said. "I told her, that's my Gray. She doesn't walk out on anybody for no reason."

"How do you know?"

"Six years, you never once yelled at me for being late. Even in the snow." He pulled out from the curb. "Somebody did something to you."

I watched the South End go by.

"They tried to take a kidney out of me without asking."

He was quiet for a whole block.

Then he laughed, short and hard.

"Well, don't let them. I could tell you a thing or two about kidneys."

"What do you mean?"

He lifted his left arm off the wheel for a second.

Under the sleeve of his uniform shirt I saw the swollen ridge of a dialysis fistula.

I'd seen hundreds. I'd never seen his.

"Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday nights," he said. "Four hours in the chair at your place. Harbor. Two years now."

"I didn't know."

"Why would you? I drive the bus." He shrugged. "My sister tried. She's type A, I'm type O. Not a match. She cried for a week like it was her fault."

"It's not her fault."

"That's what I keep telling her."

The bus wheezed to my stop.

He opened the doors and gave me a little salute.

"Don't give anybody anything you don't want to, Gray."

My condo was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a brownstone in the South End.

My mother's foundation owned it.

She called it donor family housing.

I paid them nine hundred dollars a month and fixed my own sink.

I knew something was wrong before I reached the steps.

There were black garbage bags lined up by the railing.

Six of them.

One had split, and the sleeve of my good gray coat was hanging out of it onto the wet brick.

My key didn't fit the lock.

I tried it three times anyway.

On the door, under the brass number, someone had taped a cream envelope.

I knew the stationery before I opened it.

I knew the handwriting, every loop of it, from twenty-eight years of birthday cards signed with only her name.

There was one line.

"Property of the Albright Hope Foundation."

Under it, a postscript.

"You can come home when you're ready to be part of this family."

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