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I rolled my eyes. Insufferable YouTube Kids and their incessant unboxing videos that made my child want toys I couldn’t afford to buy her. “Okay,” I sighed.
“Yay,” she grinned into my shoulder.
I found the hospital easily enough, and there were plenty of parking spaces. The hospital was so small, it could probably fit inside the elementary school. The building had been made with faded, dark brick and the overhang to the ER looked just big enough for cars and ambulances. The early spring weather smarted through my thin jacket, and moisture hung in the air below the dark, burgeoning clouds overhead. It looked like it might snow. Again.
My headache started a steady drumbeat with my pulse, and my throat constricted every time I swallowed.Don’t you dare, I warned my body.Don’t you dare get a cold. We don’t have time for that.
I carted Calla inside, struggling to hold her, my backpack, and her towel to keep the blood from getting on their floors. I grabbed a couple of masks from the front table where they kept a supply of sanitizer and blue paper masks for the people like me who always forgot about them, and then weaved through the close-set furniture of the cramped waiting room.
At the window, I gave them our information and told them what had happened, and I was given a clipboard with information to fill out. Dread plunked into my stomach. This was going to be painful, financially. With a sigh, I started to fill out the application as self-pay.
As I finished up Calla’s medical history, one of the enormous doors opened with an automatic hum, and a nurse stepped out. She wore bubblegum pink scrubs, and her bright, red hair had been pulled back into a ponytail. From behind her mask, light blue eyes smiled at us. She looked like the Little Mermaid playing nurse. “Calla?”
She had asked out of courtesy, but we were the only ones in the waiting room. I stood up, pulling Calla up with me. Calla had my phone in her hands, and the grating voice of the children playing make-believe with their dolls drilled into my ears. It stabbed my headache like a butter knife through my eye socket. Was it warm in the hospital, or was I getting a fever?
I followed the nurse back and answered her questions, telling her the story the daycare had told me. She made sympathetic noises and said cute things to Calla, who generally ignored her.
We entered a typical ER room with a gigantic bed, lots of life-saving equipment we wouldn’t need, and a couple of hard, plastic chairs set against the wall. I deposited Calla on the white bed, and the nurse adjusted it so she could sit against the back comfortably.
The nurse’s black tennis shoes squeaked when she turned to take Calla’s vitals. “Does she have any allergies, Mom?”
“She got a rash from penicillin once,” I said. “But other than that, no.”
She nodded, typing a quick note into her computer, and then took Calla’s temperature by running the thermometer across her good temple. She took Calla’s blood pressure, chatting about the snow we were expecting.
I had no problem chatting. We were well into exchanging stories about what a pain it was to remove snow from our cars in the morning when she finished her preliminary vitals for Calla—who still ignored us in favor of a blind box reveal—and then took a look at Calla’s head.
She winced. “Well, that’s a good one.”
“Yeah, she hit it pretty hard,” I said. But my voice shook a little. I was used to Calla’s injuries, but that gash was something else. It would definitely leave a nasty scar.
Calla looked up from the phone. “Wesley said he could see my brains.”
“No one can see your brains,” I said dryly.
The nurse chortled and brought a thick paste over from a cup on the sink counter. “It’s not that bad, I promise. Dr. Cade will take good care of you. He’s absolutely the best.”
The sudden shift in her tone caught my attention. This was now the third time someone had taken on a dreamy quality to their voice when they mentioned Dr. Cade, and more importantly, her voice had a kind of confidence behind it that made me think they were besties… or they were banging. Looking at her curvy, tight figure, I was fairly certain which one it was.
“This is a little numbing gel that will make it feel much better, and then by the time Dr. Cade is ready to fix you up, it won’t hurt a bit.”
As if on cue, a knock sounded on the door, and the doctor breezed in, his eyes on a file in his hands. Like everyone post-pandemic, he wore a mask, and his eyes lifted as he closed the door behind him. “Calla?” he asked, looking toward my little girl, so tiny in the middle of the wide, white bed.
Calla went rigid. She knew the drill. And she knew there would be needles in her future.
“Hi, Calla,” Dr. Cade said. His voice rolled over me like a full yard of silk, deep in timbre and intoxicatingly soothing. That voice oozed care and competence, like he was born to help people.
Calla gave a limp wave. “Hi.”
“What’s going on today?” he asked, tucking the file under his arm and acting for all the world like he was there to hang out with her.
She visibly relaxed. “I smashed my damn brains in.”
I made a strangled sound before I could help it. “Calla.” Eyes crinkled with amusement, Dr. Cade turned to me.
I went into cardiac arrest.
Two
