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“Damn it,” Bunny growled under her breath, smashing the code button on the wall as her frustration overshadowed any of the misgivings she felt over her glowing patient. “Forget Tolliver—we need Hammond. She’s gonna need an emergency C-section. I’ll do this. Go.” When her colleague merely stood next to the other side of the bed, Bunny’s head snapped up. “Allison—run!”
Another nurse from the floor came into the room, responding to the code alarm. Bunny’s knuckles were white as she gripped the resuscitation paddles, pressing one to the right side of the woman’s bare chest. She navigated the other around the woman’s swollen, pregnant belly, nestling it laterally against her left rib cage. The defibrillator gave a slow, escalating whine.
“Clear!”
The woman responded, back arching as the electricity surged through her body. Bunny’s eyes darted to the monitor as the woman’s form fell back onto the gurney. No response to the charge. Bunny upped the ante, recharging the paddles.
“Clear!”
* * *
Hours later,she had finished what was possibly the most grueling shift of her entire life. Not only had they been flooded with patients, but there had been a death, too. Bunny stood with all her weight on one foot, the opposite shoulder dropped into a markedly defeated posture. The glass viewing window stretched along the hallway she was in, empty in both directions, as the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
Lined up on the other side of the glass were row upon row of bassinets. She couldn’t hear the crying on her side of the window, and for that she was grateful. Bunny Major didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, and she wasn’t about to start developing one now. But she had wanted a look at her baby. Or rather, the baby she had helped deliver from its mother; a woman who’d stopped glowing strangely as her baby and her last breath both left her body in the same moment.
As luck would have it, the little one was in a bassinet in the middle of the front row. A tiny ball bundled up under a hospital baby blanket with an unimpressed little red face. A pair of skeptical blue eyes peered up at her, watching the gentle sway of her body as Bunny shifted her weight. Then a sense of wonder sparked within her as she took in the sight of the button nose, the delicate fingers. And then that spark was followed by a deep wave of sadness.
Before she realized what she was crying about, tears were coursing down her face. This baby’s mother would never get to meet her own daughter. She’d never get to see her off to school, or buy her a dress for prom, or make her a hummingbird cake. And this orphaned baby girl, who had lost both parents before she’d ever set those impossibly blue eyes on either of them, would never get to learn to ride a bike with her dad, or help her mom sew, or enjoy a normal family dinner with the two people in the world who were supposed to love her the most.
It was unfair. Wrong. This little girl had been robbed. So had her parents. And, Bunny realized, so had she. Her mom hadn’t been an elderly sick woman on death’s door. According to Prissy Bishop, the week before her suspected heart attack, Doctor Goode had given Connie Major a clean bill of health. So then why had she dropped dead in the kitchen of the family home, leaving her cake in the oven to burn?
Bunny wheeled to face the corridor, making her escape. She passed through two security doors before she heard the voices of the other shift nurses laughing and talking as they came out of the locker room straight ahead. She used her ID card to access the medication room to her left, convincing herself she wasn’t hiding. She needed some space. That was all.
The bright light buzzed on overhead automatically, doing nothing to soothe her frazzled nerves. She heard the nurses in the corridor pass by, envying their mundane conversation about where they were going for after-shift drinks. Their jobs were physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding, often squeezing the best out of them and leaving nothing left for family or a social life.
Bunny was fine with that. Having been a sickly kid with every bug that was going around had created something in her—a desire to heal herself through healing others. But as a triage nurse, one of the first hard lessons learned was that there wasn’t always the option to heal. Sometimes it was about letting fate take its course.
Her back found the smooth, linoleum-clad wall of the closet and she let herself stop for a moment. She tried to focus on her breathing, making it through three or four breathing cycles before she realized it wasn’t working. Bunny opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling for a moment, the fluorescents above seeming brighter for a second before her eyes adjusted. She let her head rest on the wall too; let the wall hold her up when she felt like crumbling instead of heading down the hall to get changed and go home to her goldfish, RuPaul, and episode after episode of some mindless sitcom.
And then her head lolled to the side, and she looked at the locked medication cupboard.
It was so close. She could just reach out and take it without signing it out. It would calm her down, help her sleep. Help her stop thinking about the strange man in the black coat, the glowing, the orphaned baby. The medication would help her cope.
Bunny reached for the keypad on the cupboard, her hand halfway to damnation, before she snatched it back.
What was she even thinking, stealing drugs from her workplace and taking them to blur the edges of her anxiety? She could hardly believe that thought had even entered her head.
Bitter disgust rose in her throat like bile, and she realized all the breathing exercises in the world weren’t going to be enough to calm her down.
She needed to get home.
