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Since no one was around to stop me from leaving, I grabbed my jacket and went in search of the waiting room. A few other patients were lying on gurneys in the hall—a sure sign it had been a busy night in the emergency room—and I stopped to check them all, making sure there were no friends or acquaintances in the mix.
Nada.
I was all the way to the waiting room doors when a nurse caught sight of my stitched-up head, and said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m looking for my sister.”
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to return to your bed. You can’t go anywhere until a doctor has cleared you.”
“Then find me a doctor.” I ducked away from her grasp. “Because I’m not going back to that bed until I’ve seen my sister.” Sunny had seemed fine, but I had thought the same about myself up until I passed out.
I wouldn’t be able to rest easy until I saw her with my own eyes. I moved to bypass the nurse, and she sidestepped to block me.
“Ma’am,” she said impatiently. “You were involved in an explosion. Would you please have a seat?”
I didn’t want to be that asshole giving the nurse a hard time, I really didn’t. I knew how hard they worked. I knew how thankless the job was, how gross the tasks were, and how none of them got paid what they deserved. But I was going to punch this woman in the face if she didn’t let me see my sister.
Then, a man appeared from a nearby room, a knight in white lab coat, and moved between me and the beleaguered nurse. I wasn’t sure which one of us he meant to protect.
“She was at the Luxor.” This, apparently, was all the explanation he needed.
“I just want to see my sister. Please.”
He glanced at me. The doctor was a plain man, handsome in the way the best-looking middle-aged dad at a soccer game might be. He offered me a nice smile, and I relaxed at little.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Tallulah. Corentine.”
“All right, Tallulah, can you follow me for a second?” He took a step towards me, and I recoiled from him the way some people flinched away from touching Prescott.
“I want to see Sunny.” His unwillingness to take me to her was making me nervous.
“I completely understand, and I’ll make sure you do.” Again, the soft smile, a coaxing curl of his fingers trying to lure me forward. His name tag said Dr. Olson. “Just let me give you the once-over first to make sure you’re okay. Can I do that?”
I let him direct me to a bank of three plastic chairs and took a seat. The nurse, having handed me off to someone else, disappeared down a different hallway.
Dr. Olson stooped down in front of me with a little flashlight in his hand. He shone the light in my eyes, made me follow it, and checked each eye individually. He prodded gently at my stitches, took my pulse, and did a few other cursory health checks. When he appeared to run out of places to poke me and reasons to blind me, he jotted down a couple notes on a clipboard and patted me on the shoulder.
“My professional diagnosis?”
“Please.”
“You’ll live. I’d strongly urge you to have someone check on you periodically through the night. You don’t have any signs of a concussion, but it sounds like you went flying a good ways, and we always worry about brain injuries when someone is hit by debris. Can you hear everything okay? You were apparently pretty close to the blast when it went off.”
The blast. Explosion.
“There was a bit of ringing afterwards, but it all sounds okay now.”
“The ringing is a sign of tinnitus. It might mean there’s been some damage to the fine bones in your inner ear.” He tapped his own ear, just in case I wasn’t sure what they looked like. “Try to stick to low volume for awhile. No rock concerts. No monster trucks. Lots of Mozart and babbling brooks, that sort of thing.”
This doctor was weird.
“No rock concerts,” I assured him. “Now, with all due respect, can you please take me to my godsdamned sister?”
He nodded and got back up, giving me a hand out of the chair. He guided me to a small room where about ten people in dust-smeared clothes were sitting in plastic chairs, while a doctor in ER scrubs moved down the line, taking vitals.
“All right, Ms. Corentine. Make sure you come back immediately if you start to notice any nausea, signs of dizziness, or if that ringing comes back, okay?”
