Chapter 5: Night Shift

On the fifth night Clayton ate an egg from a roadside stand and by midnight he was in my clinic.

Wanjiru woke me at one.

"Your husband," she said, and handed me a stethoscope.

"He's not on my rota."

"He is on the floor of my waiting room," Wanjiru said. "That is on everyone's rota."

He was lying on the bench with his knees up and his face the color of the wall.

Marissa knelt beside him, holding a basin.

"He didn't want to wake you," she said.

"He's been throwing up since ten," I said, looking at the basin.

"Eleven," Marissa corrected.

I knelt and took Clayton's wrist.

"Romy," he said weakly. "I'm dying."

"You're dehydrated."

"I feel like I'm dying."

"That's the dehydration."

I put in the IV on the first try.

He watched the needle go in and made a high, strange noise.

"You do this all day?" he asked.

"Forty times a day."

"On people who are sick?"

"On people who are a lot sicker than you."

He lay quiet while the saline ran.

Marissa smoothed his hair off his forehead, which she did without thinking, in a way that was easy and old.

"He gets sick when he's upset," she said to me. "He did it at his own wedding."

"I remember," I said.

"He threw up in the sacristy."

"I was there. I held the bucket."

For a second neither of us said anything.

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