Emergency Room (15 page)

“Get a life,” said the cop, holding out his hand.

Yasmin was with the social worker.

Anna Maria recognized him. Very tall, very thin, very black, very serious.

“Hi there,” said the social worker, smiling down at her. “I’m Thomas.”

Anna Maria said, “No English.” She peeled Yasmin’s hand out of the social worker’s and said quickly in Spanish, “We’re going home, Yasmin. He’s trouble. Kick him if you have to.”

The social worker said, also in Spanish, “No kicking. And you’re not going home until I find out who you’re with. You come here with your mother? Your grandmother? Your aunt? Who are you with? Who’s sick?”

Anna Maria regarded the floor for a while. No fair when other people spoke Spanish.

The social worker had a little room with half-glass walls and he tried to take them in there. Anna Maria didn’t move. Yasmin didn’t move. José sucked on his bottle.

“Thomas!” said a nurse, grabbing him. “It’s not enough we have a hostage situation going on here and television crews coming in. We’ve got a rape, you need to talk to her, and we’ve got a granny-dumping. Come on.”

Thomas stared down from his great height at Anna Maria. She tightened her grip on the stroller and moved toward the exit. They were too busy here to bother with minor things, and she was minor. Thomas the social worker knew a thousand families where the kids brought themselves up, fed themselves, dressed themselves, got themselves to school. What was he supposed to do, adopt them all?

She showed her control by taking her family toward the door, marching like a matriarch of fifty, not a small child of eight. He let her go.

D
IANA WALKED DOWN THE
rear of the H-shaped ER.

She went down the corridor with the brown floor tile and turned right into the corridor with the gray floor tile. She pushed the up button for the Main Building’s elevator. She waited. Eventually it came. She went to the third floor and turned right, and then right again. The hallways outside Radiology were always rather dim. She did not know if they were meant to be that way, to save the unfortunate waiting patients from having to squint upward at bright ceilings, or if they needed more bulbs.

There were three stretchers in the hall.

She went to the first one. It was a thin Asian woman.

She went to the second one. A grotesquely overweight human being whose gender was not immediately clear.

She went to the third one. A sleeping white man about fifty.

She stooped to read the wrist tag with his patient name and number. Robert Searle.

For a long time Diana Dervane stood at the head of that stretcher while the man slept on, not knowing that his daughter was there. As he had slept all these years, not knowing his daughter was anywhere.

I might have been Diana Searle, she thought. I might have sat in his lap and learned my multiplication tables. He might have taught me to play ball, or driven me to flute lessons, or applauded when I gave my first speech.

But I wasn’t Diana Searle.

I was Diana Dervane.

And no matter who this is, he wasn’t my father, was he? And never will be, will he?

She said to the sleeping stranger, “I’m going to roll your stretcher on back to the ER, sir. You don’t have to wake up.”

She thought about putting her ID in her pocket. No. She would not do that. If he woke, and read the tag, and if the name meant anything to him…or if he woke, and looked at her face, and saw something familiar…or if he did not wake, and so saw nothing, she would not get involved.

She would let happen whatever happened.

The man muttered a little when she accidentally bumped a corner, trying to shove the heavy stretcher toward the elevators. When the down elevator finally came, a resident standing inside it helped haul the stretcher into the elevator and helped shove it out again at the ground floor.

Diana normally flirted like mad with cute residents, or even plain residents. She didn’t glance at this one. Didn’t see that he had looked way past the repulsive pink jacket and appreciated the very pretty girl; that he would have liked to exchange names; meet her in the cafeteria.

She thanked him for holding the elevator door and pushed the stretcher on down to the empty space behind the beige curtain that hung around Space 8.

Why am I making this decision? Why am I letting go of it? And him?

Maybe, she thought, because he would ask what my life was like, and maybe it’s no longer his business. Maybe I don’t want to tell him how hard I worked and how much I cared about getting into this, college. Maybe I don’t want to talk about all the activities in which I excelled, the ones he never came to, never wondered about.

If it’s him.

You’d think that at least I’d want to know if it’s him.

But I don’t.

“I
JUST WANTED IT
to be more dramatic,” said Seth.

“It was very dramatic!” cried Diana. She was filled with awe. She herself had been so afraid when the puffy creep took the baby that she could not possibly have done anything heroic. She had hardly even been able to go on breathing. “You were breathtaking, Seth! Imagine being so cool! Just taking the baby, ignoring the bullets!”

What Diana found breathtaking was that she had been so ignorant. She thought she knew what was going on in that Waiting Room; thought that after two hours she had a sense of the place. But she knew nothing. These people inhabited a world so different from hers that every conclusion she came to and every deduction she reached was wrong.

Like the security guards. They didn’t sort of drift and wander because they were half asleep. It was because they were wide-awake, and very careful; not wanting to start anything that didn’t have to get started. She was the one who had not seen anything going on, who had barged into drug dealers, insulted them by not according them their due honor, and the guard had taken a major risk in crossing them also, to help her with the baby. She was the one to be rescued, not the rescuer. There was a certain amount of truth in the
you stupid college volunteer!
looks.

Okay, she thought. Next week I won’t be so stupid. I promise.

She found it breathtaking that every event in the ER seemed to wipe out the previous one. She had actually not thought about the baby and the drug dealer when Meggie had set her on the road to Bed 8. She had not thought about the college girl who’d been shot, or the badly damaged motorcyclist, in hours.

She knew herself a little better than she had earlier in the day. Imagine accusing Seth of being calculating! Just who was calculating here, anyway? She herself had turned out to be a person who could calculate her own father right out of her life!

What Seth found breathtaking was that Diana was not going to find out whether Bed 8 was her father. How could she stand it? How would she ever sleep again, never mind tonight?

Diana was sent to get an emesis basin for a mother who wanted her baby to throw up neatly, a choice with which the nurses certainly agreed.

Seth slipped back into the computer section of Insurance. “Hi, Mary,” he said. “Look up Searle for me, will you?”

Mary punched him in. Searle, Robert, had arrived at the ER at 1640 hours. 4:40
P.M.
“What do you need?” she said to Seth, punching in the patient numbers to call up the screen that would hold the admitting information on Searle, Robert.

“I’m not sure.” He knelt beside Mary and stared into the screen.

Robert Searle’s DOB appeared. His birthplace:
AMES, IOWA
. His place of employment:
EASTERN COMPUTERS
. His wife’s name:
BERNICE
. Was Bunny a logical nickname for Bernice?

Seth thanked Mary.

He stood at the edge of the Waiting Room, appearing trustworthy in his pink jacket. People felt comfortable with volunteers. Little did Bernice Searle know. He didn’t let himself think about what he was doing. If Knika and Meggie and everybody else thought he was arrogant and interfering an hour ago, best they should not see him at his arrogant and interfering maximum.

He said, “Family with Mr. Searle?”

A woman got up quickly. She was very ordinary looking. He said, “Mr. Searle is back from Radiology. They still aren’t letting visitors back, but I thought you’d like to know that progress is being made.”

“Thank you,” she said, trembling. “That’s so kind of you. How does he look?”

“Fine,” said Seth. “You look familiar. Is your name Bunny?”

The woman’s jaw dropped. “Why yes,” she said, smiling. The smile overtook her face and made her attractive, pleasant looking in a neighborly sort of way. “Where do we know each other from?”

He had forgotten to prepare an answer, but Knika saved him. “Volunteer! They need you in Trauma.”

“Gotta run,” said Seth.

“Of course,” she said, looking confused.

Seth ran.

T
HEY HAD BEEN THERE
three hours.

It felt like three hundred.

How did people work eight-hour shifts in this zoo?

Diana was more exhausted mentally and emotionally than she had ever been in her life.

How did medical students go through this — many more hours every day, every day in every week?

Did she want to be a doctor, and deal with so much pain?

Did she want to be a physician in an Emergency Room, where patients flew in and out, and you knew so little of who they were, and each remained a mystery, swiftly replaced by another?

She thought of the man with SOB, and how in a previous life that meant son of a bitch but in this life it meant shortness of breath, and in any case, both fit Rob Searle.

“Volunteer to CIU,” the loudspeaker paged. “Volunteer to Pedi. Volunteer to Admitting Nurse.”

Seth, in the voice of one paging Earth to Daydreamer, said to Diana, “Volunteer to Volunteer.”

She looked into his eyes. She had never bothered with that before. She had taken in the whole body, so to speak, and not tried for the windows to his thoughts. He looked softer, somehow. “Hey, Volunteer,” she said to him. She touched him lightly, and the touch, fingertips to jacket, sent a shiver through them both.

When they enrolled as volunteers, they had had to sign promises not to walk back to the campus after dark. Taking a taxi was required. Diana thought of how big Seth was, how masculine, how ready to fight…and how meaningless that would be against a bullet. She thought Seth was a little less buttoned up than usual right now, and she herself — she was Jell-O. A taxi home? She wouldn’t mind going on a stretcher, with a volunteer all her own to push her back to the dorm.

It dawned on her that if she really wanted one, she could definitely have a volunteer all her own.

Seth swallowed. Like the kid on the cycle, he went back for more. Who knew — maybe Diana wouldn’t toss him to the pavement this time. “Want to go to the cafeteria before we get a taxi? I never had time for supper, did you? They’re not serving hot meals anymore, but we could still get a sandwich.”

She smiled and he tried to decide what the smile was: friendly or getting ready for the punch, and then she shook her head. Seth’s heart sank. “I’m too tired to eat,” Diana told him. That was the lamest excuse he’d ever heard. Fine, okay, she was too tired to — “Let’s save dinner for a real date, Seth.”

A real date? He didn’t quite dare react to this.

“Volunteer to CIU,” repeated the page. “Volunteer to Pedi.”

Down the far hall came a new set of pink jackets; the late-shift pink jackets. Seth and Diana were done. They were off.

“Anything but a Monday, Seth, would be good,” said Diana. “If every Monday is going to be like this, I never want to miss one.”

Seth had lost interest in Mondays, his thoughts taking a familiar downward spiral. She was so beautiful. “Saturday?” he suggested, holding himself in till he saw whether she was serious. “A movie, too?”

“Saturday,” said Diana. “Dinner and a movie.” She linked her pink-clad arm through his and looked back up at him and laughed. And this time, it was no air kiss.

In spite of the fact that in the last three hours Seth had worked on naked torn bodies and soppy babies and avulsed eyeballs and druggies coming off highs, he was embarrassed to be doing something as intimate as kissing in the hospital halls.

But he pulled it off.

Seth thought:
finally.
I’m eighteen, I’m at college, I can vote, I’m a grown-up…and I have a girlfriend.

Yes!

Seth and Diana left the Emergency Room. Hanging their pink jackets in the Volunteer closet, they signed out on their time sheets. When they left through the main entrance, a waiting taxi slid right up, whisking them back to the world of college dorms.

The world of a hurting city went on without them.

Agony and chaos, sorrow and fear. One person’s story was replaced by another’s in minutes.

Whatever day of the week a volunteer came to help, there would always be need.

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life. 

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.