Live to Tell (27 page)

“I
have
to work tonight. I can contain it. I can be professional. We both know I’m good at my job.”

“Danielle,” she said kindly, “you’re great at your job—when you’re a hundred percent. You aren’t a hundred percent right now, and these kids deserve nothing less.”

She was going to send me home. I couldn’t believe it. Karen was going to let the unit operate short-staffed rather than accept me.

“I want you to go downstairs,” she said now, voice brisk. “You need a medical evaluation, if not for your own sake, then for our insurance company. I’m giving you a five-day leave of absence. Rest. Talk to one of our counselors. Deal with yourself. Then you can return to dealing with these kids.”

I can’t go home, I can’t go home, I can’t go home
.

“I’ll go downstairs,” I heard myself say. “I’ll get a physical exam. Then can I come back? If the doctor says so …”

“Danielle …”

“I’ll help her.”

I looked up. Karen turned around. Greg was standing behind her. We hadn’t heard him enter, but it was obvious from his expression that he’d been listening for a bit.

He looked good. Dark hair still slightly damp from a recent shower. Broad shoulders filling the narrow space, a black gym bag slung over his shoulder.

“She can work with me,” he said, looking at Karen. “It’ll be the buddy system. That way, we’ll have someone on the floor to supervise meds, but you won’t have to worry about Danielle going solo.”

I felt pathetically grateful. How many times had I rejected this man? And he was still the best friend I had.

Karen looked like she wanted to protest, but at the last second, she hesitated. A soft heart beat beneath her stern exterior. God knows, once a year she cut me more slack than I deserved.

“Downstairs first,” Karen stated abruptly, staring at me. “If an intern will clear you physically, and Greg still feels like babysitting…”

I winced at the dig. She was testing me, seeing how in control of my emotions I was. “Exam first,” I agreed meekly. “Then I’d love to work with Greg. We’re a good team.”

I had shamelessly tossed him the bone. He smiled, briefly, but it didn’t reflect in his eyes. Maybe he knew me better than I thought.

The matter resolved, Karen squeezed past Greg back to the main office. It was nearly midnight, and she still had her own paperwork to close out before heading home; a head nurse didn’t get much sleep.

Alone with Greg, I felt awkward again. He opened a locker, stuffed in his bag. I stood there, watching him. He looked tired, I thought. A little worn around the edges. Or maybe that was me.

“Thank you,” I said at last.

He didn’t look at me. “Night’s young,” he said finally. “Don’t thank me yet.”

The police arrived at the PECB shortly after 1:30 a.m. They buzzed at the front doors—one, two, three times. They could see us. We could see them. And they got to wait.

The unit was in bedlam. Jorge, who normally shared a room with Benny, had woken up agitated shortly after twelve-thirty. Ed pulled Jorge aside to read a book. Jorge made it halfway through the story, then yanked the book out of Ed’s hand and hurtled it across the hall, where it hit Aimee in the head. She woke up screaming, and the rest of the kids were off and running from there.

Now Aimee was curled up under a table in the fetal position,
Jimmy and Benny were running laps around the chairs, and nine-year-old Sampson was standing in front of the closed kitchenette, yelling shrilly for a snack.

I’d been cleared by an intern just in time to chase five-year-old Becca down the hall. Somehow, she’d gotten her hands on a folded game board and she was beating it against any person unfortunate enough to cross her path. Greg was trying to untangle Jorge from Ed, while Cecille was working containment in front of Lucy’s room, because we absolutely, positively couldn’t have Lucy adding to the mix.

Third time by the receptionist’s desk, I managed to hit the buzzer for the cops. I got Candy Land away from Becca about the same time the police entered the unit. The curly blonde took the lead, three dark-suited officers fanning out behind her in the main hall.

“I have a warrant,” the lead detective started.

A book flew down the hall. To give the Boston police some credit, the detectives jumped pretty fast.

“What the hell …” the sergeant muttered, the scene finally registering.

“Whatever you want, it gets to wait,” I informed them crisply. “Keep your back to the wall. Don’t touch anything. Oh, and look out. I think Jorge just got away.”

Sure enough, the wiry six-year-old was bolting down the hall straight toward us, thin arms pumping, blue eyes bulging. He looked like he was racing away from every bad thing that had ever happened to him. I knew the feeling.

I got one arm around Jorge’s waist as he went flying by, and converted his momentum into a graceful little twirl I practiced at least once a week. “Hey, buddy, where’s the fire?” I asked, as if we did this kind of thing every night at one a.m.

“Bad man, bad man, bad man, bad man, bad man!” Jorge yelled.

“Did you have a nightmare,
chiquito?
Sounds like a doozy. Why don’t you come with me, and I’ll see what I can do to make all those bad men disappear.”

“¡Maldito, maldito, maldito!”
Jorge added, as I led him down the hall. Ed and Greg shot me grateful looks. Then they were in the common area, where Aimee needed rescuing, and Jimmy and Benny had
to be unwound like clocks, and then there was the care and feeding of Sampson….

In Jorge’s room, I turned on every light, then went through the motions of checking each nook and cranny. I even shook out his covers to prove no monsters were hiding in his bed. When he remained unconvinced, I went with plan B, moving a mat into the hall and preparing an emergency nest. We lay down, side by side, and I pointed at the silver half globes dotting the ceiling, explaining how their reflective surfaces would allow him to see any bad men coming. “They’re like a personal protection system,” I told him. “They’ll keep you safe.”

Jorge’s shoulders finally relaxed. He snuggled closer to me and I picked up a Dora book. By the halfway mark, his eyes were drooping. The hallway had quieted, the milieu restored.

Just the detectives remained, conspicuous in their dark suits. Greg paused in front of them. They were speaking too low for me to hear. Greg frowned, shook his head, then frowned again. Finally, he pointed toward me and the blonde turned expectantly.

In full view of her gaze, I finished the first book. Then I set it down, picked up a second, and opened the cover.

Whatever she had to say could wait, mostly because I didn’t want to hear it.

“Danny girl,”
my father sang inside my head.

I know, I know, I know
.

“We have a warrant for all records pertaining to Oswald James Harrington,” Sergeant D.D. Warren explained ten minutes later, stony-faced. “We also have a warrant for all information pertaining to Tika Rain Solis. Detective Phil LeBlanc will oversee the transfer of all information. The rest of us have questions for the staff.”

I stared at Sergeant Warren blankly. She was still holding out several official-looking documents. For lack of anything better to do, I took them from her. They definitely read like warrants.

“I’ll … I’ll have to call Karen Rober, the nurse manager,” I said at last.

“You do that.”

“Are you sure this isn’t something that can wait till morning? We run a lean crew at night, and can’t spare any staff.”

“I’m sure.” She didn’t blink and it occurred to me that the sergeant had planned this one-thirty ambush. Nine-to-five hours would’ve meant dealing with management, not to mention the hospital’s cadre of lawyers. Middle-of-the-night raids, on the other hand …

“You’re going to have to be patient,” I said, feeling frazzled. I’d never been served with a warrant before. How much did one give a detective? The warrant said everything, but what did that mean? The staff wasn’t equipped for this.
I
wasn’t equipped for this.

I needed to visit Lucy. She’d made it through Jorge’s meltdown. I wondered if that meant she was now curled up and sleeping in a moonbeam.

“We’ll move into the conference room,” Sergeant Warren declared briskly.

“Conference room?”

“You know, the room we used last time.”

“You mean the classroom?”

“Whatever. Don’t worry. We know our way there.” She started striding down the hall, two of the detectives peeling off to follow her. The fourth cop remained standing in front of me. Mid-forties, a little doughy around the middle, he wore a sheepish smile. Good cop, I decided. Anyone who worked with Sergeant Warren would have to be.

“Detective Phil LeBlanc,” he introduced himself. “If you show me where you keep your records, I can take it from there.”

Not that big a dope, I unlocked the door leading to the Admin area and dug through the filing cabinet for the two patients in question: Oswald James Harrington and Tika Rain Solis. I pulled the files, showed Detective LeBlanc the photocopier, then called Karen.

She was half-asleep, but woke up fast enough once she heard the news. “I’ll be right there,” she assured me, which, given where she lived, meant at least an hour.

“Do we need a lawyer? How does this work?”

“Don’t answer any questions you don’t want to answer, and
advise the rest of the staff to do the same. Showing up at one-thirty in the morning. Assholes.”

“I think Sergeant Warren considers that a compliment,” I said. As if summoning the Devil, Warren appeared at the end of the hall.

“We’d like to start with you,” she said: a command, not a request.

“No shit,” I muttered.

I hung up the phone. As the most senior person on the floor, I would have to shoulder this load and play nice with the detectives. Lucky me.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” Warren returned.

“Just gotta grab a glass of water.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Make yourself comfortable.”

I turned away from the detective and headed for the kitchenette. At the last minute, however, I continued down the hallway to Lucy’s room. I peered in, expecting to see Lucy sleeping in a corner.

Instead, she was dancing.

She moved around the room in graceful circles, swooshing from one moonbeam to the next. The oversized surgical scrub shirt ballooned around her as she twirled, leaping across her mattress, then pirouetting in front of the windows.

She was a cat again, moving in the languid style of a feline. Maybe she was trying to catch moonbeams in her paws. Maybe she simply liked the way it felt to sway to and fro. She hit the windows, placed her hands open-palmed against the glass. Then she stilled, and I knew she saw my reflection.

Was she angry after our last confrontation? Fearful, defiant?

Lucy turned away from the glass. Slowly, she meandered and twirled her way toward me. At the last minute, as I felt myself tense, she held out her hand, pale fingers extended. She dangled a tiny ball of string, something she’d fashioned from rolling together loose carpet fibers. A homemade cat toy.

I hesitated. She jiggled it again.

I accepted her gift, closing my fist around it as she swooped away, long pale limbs flashing silver in the moonbeams.

I tucked her peace offering into my pocket and returned to Sergeant Warren.