The Forgetting Place (20 page)

T
he second time I regained consciousness I resurfaced gradually to the sound of a soothing voice, a light touch of skin on my cheek. The room was darker than when I'd left it. An overhead surgical light that hung from the ceiling above had been switched on to its lowest intensity, but its beam was directed toward the far corner of the room, providing a soft, ghostly illumination to this otherwise unlit section of the ER. The curtain was closed, but I could see light coming from the hallway beyond. A nurse stood at my bedside, stroking the side of my face and repeating an unfamiliar name over and over. Something was tickling the inside of my nose, but when I tried to raise a hand to scratch at it my arm only went up a few inches and then stopped.

The nurse leaned over me a bit more, studying my eyes as they moved about the room. “It's okay, Candice,” she said. “You're just waking up, that's all.”

My thoughts were muddled. I was uncertain of where I was or how I'd gotten there. I'd been sitting outside talking with someone, I seemed to recall, although I couldn't remember who.
It had been getting dark—I remembered that much—the last of the day disappearing from the sky, the shadows spilling out across the grass.

“Time to wake up, Candice,” the nurse said again, adjusting the thin plastic loops of tubing running behind my ears and coming together to form two short prongs that rested in my nostrils.

I looked up at her, feeling more present in the room now. “Who's Candice?” I asked.

The nurse smiled. “Supposedly, you are. At least that's the name you gave the registration clerk.”

Of course,
I realized, more awake now.
I'm in the emergency room. Because—
I concentrated, reaching for it—
because I broke my arm
. Yes,
that's
what happened. But how had I broken it? I worked it over in my mind, willed it to come back to me. Snatches of conversation resurfaced.

You don't know
how
to help me. You can't even help yourself
.

Am I in danger?
I could hear myself asking.

You call one of the two numbers on that phone, and we'll come running
.

Will they come for us?

They always do
.

And then suddenly I remembered everything: Jason and Linder and Remy; Dr. Wagner and the men pursuing me through the administrative building; the fall I'd taken from the bathroom window, my right arm sustaining the brunt of the impact, the bones snapping like kindling.

“What time is it?” I asked.

The nurse glanced at the digital display on the wall behind me. “About eight o'clock.”

“
At night?
” I exclaimed, shocked it was so late. I tried to jerk
myself into a sitting position, but I was still woozy and my left wrist was anchored to the side of the stretcher.

“Hold on,” the nurse told me. “The restraint's just there for your safety until you're fully awake. We usually don't need to do that, but you got pretty wild there for a while and we had to give you extra medication. The doctor thought it would be best to let you sleep it off.”

She removed the restraint from around my left wrist. My right arm, I could see, was wrapped in a hard splint that ran along the underside from just below the elbow to the tips of my fingers and was held in place by an ACE wrap. The ache in my forearm was better now—not gone completely, but manageable. I'd done the right thing in coming here.

“There's someone who's been waiting to see you,” the nurse said, and that sent my pulse going, triggering the alarm on the monitor behind me.

“Whoa, take it easy. You don't have to see him if you don't want to.”

“Who is it?” I asked, wondering how in the hell they'd tracked me down so quickly. On one hand, I'd half expected it. But the reality of them showing up to claim me was—

“I think he said his name was Haden.”

I looked at her blankly. “I don't know any Haden.”

“Okay,” she said, sighing a bit. “I'll send him away.”

She'd turned and made it as far as the curtain before I called out to her.

“Wait. What does he look like?”

She turned back to me. “Tall. Dark hair. Blue eyes.” She paused, considering. “He could use a shave, I suppose, but if a
guy like that showed up in the ER to check on me, I sure as hell wouldn't send him away.”

I frowned. “John Deere baseball cap?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“No. He says he drove you here earlier and wanted to check on how you were doing. 'Course, if you don't know him . . .”

“No, no. I . . . I know who you mean now. I'll see him.”

“Okay,” she responded, an amused smile on her lips. “I'll go get him.”

She drew back the curtain and disappeared down the hall. A minute or two later she ushered the man in.

“This is Haden,” she said. “You know him?”

I nodded.

She stood there, looking back and forth between the two of us. “So we're okay here?”

“I think so,” he told her, a touch of southern drawl to his voice. “Thank you.”

She didn't reply, just stood there for a few seconds longer. “We'll get you going shortly,” she advised me, then left the two of us alone and walked off to attend to her other patients.

“I don't think she likes me,” I told him.

He smiled. “The waiting room looks like a third-world refugee camp. I can't imagine having to work in this type of environment every day.”

“I think she knows I've been lying to her ever since I showed up here.”

I expected him to frown, to ask me what I'd lied about and why, but he only nodded, taking it all in stride. “When she was younger, I used to tell my daughter that it's always best to tell the truth.”

“And now?”

“And now she's old enough to know better.” He stood there awkwardly for a moment before adding, “And so am I.”

I started to extend my right hand to him, then realized that shaking hands was a social ritual I wouldn't be able to partake in for a while. “I'm Lise.”

“Haden,” he replied. “It's nice to meet you, Lise.”

“Thanks for driving me here, and for checking up on me. It was really nice of you.”

He gave me another smile. He'd gone home and showered, changed clothes, and run a comb through his hair. The stubble was still there, but it suited him. The jeans he wore now were clean, his shirt a soft plaid button-down with an actual collar. His hair was dark and wavy, combed straight back from his forehead. I could see brown cowboy boots—of course—jutting out from beneath the cuff of his pants.

“You looked like you needed help,” he told me, “and probably a ride afterward.” He looked toward the corner of the room, then back at me on the stretcher. “I wasn't sure if coming back here was the right thing to do. But I got home and cleaned up after working in the yard, and I just kept thinking,
A person with no one to drive her to the hospital when she's hurt is a person who could probably use a little help afterward
. I hope that doesn't seem too . . .”

“Presumptuous?” I offered, and he nodded.

From where I lay on the gurney, I considered him carefully. The possibility occurred to me that he might not be as nice as he seemed. He could be a womanizer, a rapist, a psycho who would chop me up into little pieces and then bury my remains in the woods if I was foolish enough to get back into that giant truck of his. To be honest, it shamed me that I was thinking that way.
It really did. But it's important to remember where I worked, the kinds of things I'd seen in people's files during my years at Menaker.

Then again,
I thought,
he'd had an opportunity to do those things the first time I got into his truck, and instead he brought me to the ER like I asked
. And now, many hours later, he'd come back.

“It
was
presumptuous of you—coming back here like this,” I told him. “But it was also kind. Right now, I could use a little kindness.”

“Well,” he said, “how can I help?”

“I could use another ride. And, quite frankly, a place to stay tonight.”

“Okay,” he replied with no more than a second's hesitation. “You can stay with me.”

“Just like that?” I asked. “You don't want to hear my situation first?”

“If you want to tell me, I'm happy to listen. But, no,” he said, “it's not a requirement.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “I'm not sleeping with you. We should get that on the table right now.”

He laughed, blushed a bit. “What makes you think I'd wanna sleep with
you
?”

I should've bantered with him, used the opportunity to break the ice, but my mind was back on Jason. The thought of him locked away in a concrete room somewhere—or facing something far worse—made my stomach knot. He must've sensed this, Haden. His good-natured grin evaporated as he looked at me, his lips holding back the questions he'd promised not to ask.

“I'll bring the truck around, give you a chance to get dressed and to finish up in here.”

“Okay.”

“I'll be parked and waiting right outside.”

“Thanks,” I said, and watched him sweep past the curtain as he stepped into the hallway.

I looked around for the call button, but couldn't find it. Nor could I figure out how to lower the side rail. I removed the tubing from my nose, detached myself from the monitoring equipment, slid to the foot of the bed, and climbed off. The plastic bag with my clothes and other belongings was under the gurney. I removed the hospital gown and dressed. The splint, I found, was too bulky to fit through the sleeve of my shirt, but I'd worn a silk cami underneath, which gave me something besides my bra to wear on top.

Eager to get out of there, I stepped out of my room to look for my nurse, to ask her if there was anything else that needed to be done before I left. The ER remained a study in controlled chaos. The drunks lined up on gurneys in the hallway were still there, although a few of the faces—but not the smell—had changed. As I passed some of the rooms, I caught brief glimpses of activity in my peripheral vision. In a room to my left a child screamed bloody murder as several people held him down and the doctor bent over him, fishing for something with a long-nose pair of forceps. “This is why you don't stick toys in your ears,” his mother was saying, but I don't believe the child was listening. A different patient looked up from his iPhone. “Can I get some pain medication over here or do I have to get it myself?” he yelled to no one in particular, then scowled at me when I glanced his way.

The computer stations were in the middle of the ER, an island of doctors and nurses hunched over charts and keyboards. Dr.
Mathers was on the phone, standing with his back to me as I approached the station.

“Yes, we have her here,” he was saying. “Came in a few hours ago and should be waking up shortly.”

I stopped, listened.

“You'll need to send someone to come pick her up,” Mathers continued. “We can only keep her here for so long.”

Against the far wall to my right was a security guard, sitting in a chair with his body turned obliquely to where I stood. He was looking toward triage, not in my direction, but the triage doors were the way I'd come in and the only exit I'd seen so far. Taking that route out could mean trouble. But standing near the station and heading back to my room both seemed like bad ideas as well. I turned left, my back to the security guard, and walked past a curtain and into an adjacent treatment room.

It would have been nice if the room was empty, but instead there was an elderly woman lying almost flat on a gurney. A younger man—her son, I guessed—sat in a chair next to the bed. He looked up at me expectantly. I smiled, tried to think of what to say.

“I'm . . . Candice,” I told them, sticking with the alias I'd used thus far. “One of the hospital volunteers.”

“Oh,” the man said. “I'm Henry and this is my mother, Dorothy. Are you here to take her to X-ray?”

If I paused, it was only for a second.

“Yes,” I told him, warming up to my role. “They'd like me to bring Dorothy over to X-ray now.”

“Looks like you've had some X-rays yourself recently,” the man said, gesturing to the splint on my arm.

I looked down at it. “Slipped and fell a week ago right here at
the hospital,” I lied. “Broke my wrist. But at least I didn't have to go too far for treatment.”

He nodded, smiled sympathetically.

In the larger room just beyond the blue curtain, I could hear my nurse calling out to Dr. Mathers: “She's gone. Left the gown on the bed and took off.”

“We can't just let her leave like that,” Mathers advised her, his tone sharp and irritated. “I just told them we had her.”

“Well, we don't have her anymore.”

“—some time off,” Henry was saying, but I wasn't listening.

“Activate a Code Gray,” Mathers ordered. “Let's see if we can find her.”

“I'm sorry, what was that?” I asked, turning my attention back to the man.

“I said, ‘You should take some time off,'” he repeated.

“No,” I said, dismissing the suggestion. “I enjoy volunteering here.”

“CODE GRAY TO THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT. CODE GRAY TO THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT,” the overhead paging system blurted a few seconds later.

“Sorry about the commotion,” I told the patient and her son as I moved to an isolation cart and donned a cap, booties, and a blue plastic gown. I considered the gurney for a moment, imagined it would be difficult to maneuver. There was no wheelchair in the room, but I'd seen one parked against the wall near one of the bathrooms. “What are we X-raying today?” I asked.

“My shoulder,” the woman told me.