Page 10 of The Girl from Widow Hills
CHAPTER 4
Friday, 8 a.m.
THERE WERE MANY BENEFITSto working in a hospital, in theory. Access to doctors and nurses, a behind-the-scenes look at how things worked, personal connections to book an appointment last-minute.
But what you gained in accessibility, you lost in privacy. Since I’d been with Central Valley Hospital, I visited doctors less, not more. The times I’d been sick, I’d stopped at the Minute Clinic instead. The doctors and nurses were people I saw every day. And I’d have to give a medical history, a personal history. I shuddered at the possibility of old details somehow making it into their system. Where they might notice that my arm had to be reconstructed and then fixed again as I grew, that there was a lack of full mobility due to the buildup of scar tissue around my shoulder. Where they might wonder why.
After the story ended, after the fade to black, these were the things that didn’t fit onto their carefully constructed page: the trauma of surgeries; the long process of recovery; the questions from the curious; the feeling of always, always being watched.
All I needed was a sleeping aid, possibly, to keep me in deep sleep. An easy remedy. Harmless.
The entrance to the hospital looked like a rich but rustic hotel, with log-cabin beams crisscrossing the walkway to the entrance. In the front, there was a greenway with a walking path and benches for employees and visitors to take lunch breaks.
I always parked in the back lot, partly to avoid the ER entrance and the corresponding waiting area. Bennett called me a germaphobe, but I had good cause: When I first started working here, I promptly got sick—a virulent virus I was sure would kill me. Or, at the very least, force me to never eat again.
Everyone said I’d build up immunity over time, but it hadn’t happened. That first winter, I’d come down with bronchitis, with a cough so vicious I’d bruised a rib. Since then: strep, something viral, a rash with no origin.
I still kept hand sanitizer in my bottom drawer. Stayed three feet away from visitors to avoid a handshake.
Bennett said I made people nervous, but I hadn’t gotten sick since.
That’s because you’ve built up immunity, he’d said. But I wasn’t willing to risk it.
Mostly, though, I came in through the back to be closer to the stairs and bypass the elevator, my least favorite technological advancement. Sliding doors, one way out, a steel box. I avoided the opportunity to take an elevator whenever possible, steering clear of small spaces for the obvious reasons.
From the back entrance, the only signs of life at this time of day were from the gift shop, a family of three clustered near the glass entrance, balloon in a child’s hand. I could smell breakfast coming from the cafeteria down the hall, but it was quiet before the breakfast rush.
When I unlocked the door from the third-floor stairwell, my hall appeared vacant. The wing was closed to patients, accessible only through a keypad beside a swinging set of doors at one end, or a key from the back stairs. This was less because of the offices and more because of the nurses’ lounge and medicine room.
It was early enough that most of the administration hadn’t yet checked in for the day, but still, it was hard to tell. People moved quietly. Everyone wore rubber-soled sneakers or clogs, and I’d adopted the same—because I was the only one you could hear coming, and I found my own presence unnerving.
My office was halfway down the hall, but turn the corner and you’d hit the nurses’ lounge and the central medicine room placed strategically across the way. I could see shadows passing quickly underneath the double doors at the other end of the hall, where the patients were.
I stopped just outside the lounge, peering through the small rectangular window, listening to the silence. A woman with curly auburn hair, her back to me, was reading something on her phone. The lounge was open to nurses in every department, but she was not someone I recognized; not someone who would know me.
Then I stepped backward across the hall to the medicine room. I held my breath as I eased my elbow down on the handle, feeling it give.
We didn’t have the tightest security, and I should know. I was on the original committee that helped determine need versus cost effectiveness, and we didn’t have a whole lot of cash coming in. A new security system was low on the list. We had guards in the ER and police on call. But we were a lot more lax upstairs, especially because of the keypads sealing off the restricted areas. People weren’t consistent about locking the outside door to the medicine room because the drawers themselves were locked and accessible only by code, and it was a pain to do both. Part of my role was uncovering and slashing areas of redundancy.
I kept the lights off now, checking out the boxes in the cabinets that lined the walls. While the pharmacy kept strict regulations on the inventory, I knew that the boxes of samples from pharma reps ended up scattered haphazardly in the cabinets above, alongside the non-drug-related equipment—tubes and gauze and needles.
Anyway, if the medicine wasn’t locked up, I assumed, it wasn’t a danger. There must be some sort of generic sleep aid in the mix. Something to knock me out and keep me that way. Reset my internal clock and my sense of stability.
The first cabinet seemed to contain mostly topical ointments and creams. I opened the second, moving boxes around, looking for something that sounded relevant. The labels I could discern highlighted acid reflux, generic painkillers, and allergy treatments. The words were hard to read in the dark, and I leaned closer to see the containers hidden at the back of the cabinet.
The door swung open behind me with no warning, and I pulled back so fast that I scraped the side of my hand against the wooden frame of the cabinet.
It was my reaction that gave me away. My heart racing, my feet frozen. Bennett stood in the doorway; he let the door swing shut, flipping the light. He blinked twice, and I looked down, trying to adjust to the sudden glare.
“What are you doing here, Liv?”
Bennett Shaw was my closest friend at the hospital. Though I didn’t have many long-term friendships throughout my past to compare it to, after more than two years of working on the same hall, of regular lunches and semi-regular dinners, I thought he probably considered me the same. He’d even invited me back to his childhood home in Charlotte for Thanksgiving last year, had said he had a big family, that they wouldn’t even notice the extra seat taken.
He was also a stickler for rules, a man bound by ethics. In medicine, you have to be. There are consequences for missing something, for forgetting, for being late. There are lives in the balance. Concerned more with the logistics of keeping the hospital staffed and the money flowing in the right direction, I had the luxury of removal. If I fell behind, I could catch up. If I sent the wrong information, I could apologize and resend. No mistake was permanent.
Usually, I loved how Bennett adhered to the rules. When you grow up with a lack of predictability, structure feels like a blessing. I knew what to expect of him and what he expected of me.
“Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like.” He took a step closer. I could tell by his voice—deeper, quieter—that he was upset, and I needed to head it off.
