Chapter 9: Eli's Question

Eli's POV

I had gone to the hospital to drop off a hat.

It was a small knit one, soft wool, that my mother had made years ago for a baby that never came.

I told the charge nurse it was lost property. She took it without a word and set it on the shelf by June's incubator.

Then I sat in the NICU waiting room with a paper cup of bad coffee, and I did not go home.

I told myself it was because the snow had started again.

It was because every time I closed my eyes I saw a woman in a drift with her arms over her head, screaming at the sky.

I had been a medic for eleven years. I had pulled people from creeks and cars and a collapsed ice shelf.

None of them had looked at me the way she had when she said her husband locked her in.

She hadn't asked me to believe her. She had said it once and gone back to breathing.

I believed her at once.

That was the part that bothered me.

At two-ten the elevator opened.

Joyce Garver came out in her camel coat with a folder under her arm.

The heavy deputy from the cabin walked behind her, looking at his boots.

Joyce stopped when she saw me.

"Eli," she said. "What a surprise."

"Ma'am."

"You're still here? You've been so kind to my family."

"I'm waiting on a friend."

"How nice."

She walked past me to the NICU doors and pressed the buzzer.

I stood up.

A nurse's voice came on the speaker. "NICU."