* * *
At 2:30, the curtain around bay two finally opened.
The paramedics were gone.Janet stood at the foot of the bed, entering something into the mobile charting station.The woman on the bed was now hooked to a heart monitor and an IV drip.Her eyes were open—barely.She stared at the ceiling with the rigid, watchful stillness of a person who had trained herself to disappear while lying in plain sight.
“I’ll take her vitals,” Maren said from the doorway.
Janet looked up.The reading glasses hung from the chain around her neck.She didn’t reach for them.“The patient’s care has been assigned to Peg for the remainder of the shift.”
“Peg is managing bays three through six.I have capacity.I’ve only got Mr.Egan and the cardiac monitor in bay three.”
“The assignment stands.”Janet’s voice was the same even register it always was—orders delivered inside the shape of suggestions.“If you need additional duties, there’s restocking to be done in the supply room.”
Restocking.She was being sent to count gauze pads while a woman lay in bay two under the same protocol that had erased a teenage girl from the system five days ago.
“Understood,” Maren said.
She walked to the supply room at the end of the hall.She opened the inventory clipboard and began counting boxes of four-by-four gauze pads.She counted slowly.She counted accurately.And while she counted, she kept the supply room door cracked two inches—enough to see the hallway, enough to see who came and went from bay two.
At 2:48, Peg walked into bay two carrying a medication tray.She was inside for four minutes.When she came out, her expression was blank, her steps slightly faster than normal.She went straight to the medication room and closed the door.
Maren waited thirty seconds, then followed.
Peg was standing at the dispensing cabinet with both hands on the counter, head down.She wasn’t pulling medications.She wasn’t charting.She was just standing.
“Peg.”
The older nurse straightened.Her hands moved automatically to the cabinet, pulling a vial with a label Maren couldn’t read from across the room.
“I’m fine.”The words came fast.
“I didn’t ask if you were fine.I asked nothing.You volunteered that, which tells me you’re not.”
Peg turned around.Under the fluorescent lights, the skin beneath her eyes looked thin, papery.Twenty-two years of night shifts and whatever she’d just seen in bay two were sitting on her face at the same time.
“She has marks on her ankles,” Peg said.Her voice was so low Maren had to step closer.“Old ones.Healed over.Like she’d been—” She stopped.“I’m not doing this.I can’t do this.”
“Peg, listen to me.”
“No, you listen.”Peg’s eyes were bright, and Maren couldn’t tell if it was anger or tears.“I have nineteen months until retirement.Nineteen months.I have a pension.I have a husband with a bad back who needs his insurance.I can’t?—”
Her voice broke.
Maren took a step closer.She kept her voice at the same volume, the same register.The voice she used when a patient was frightened and needed to believe that someone in the room was steady.
“You don’t have to do anything.You don’t have to say anything.But I need you to tell me one thing, and then we never have this conversation again.”
Peg stared at her.
“Is there anything on her—a bracelet, a necklace, anything personal—that wasn’t in the chart?”
Peg’s chin trembled once.She pressed her lips together until it stopped.
“Left pocket of the gown they brought her in.Whatever she was wearing before they changed her into hospital clothes.It’s in the clear bag under the bed.”She picked up the medication tray and moved toward the door.“We never had this conversation.”
“We didn’t.”
Peg walked out.The door hissed shut behind her.
