Emergency Room

by Caroline B. Cooney

  He leaped backward down the corridor, ripped open the door that said STAIRS and was gone. The police launched themselves after him, yelling into their walkie-talkies, bumping into each other and leaping over sprawled legs. As television went, it looked more like a football game than a cop show.

  The Waiting Room 8:13 p.m.

  THE BULLET HAD GONE into the wall.

  The boy whose leg was broken said, “Wooo-oooo! Ma, let’s dig it out! I want it for a souvenir.”

  “Boy, you crazy,” said his mother. She was fanning herself with exhaustion and relief that the gunman was out of the room. Her son hobbled over, disregarding his pain, and used his penknife to dig out the bullet.

  “Don’t do that,” said a grumpy patient. “The police will need that for the trial.”

  Street-smart people laughed. “Ain’t never gonna be no trial. That man, he got off before, he get off now.”

  The young mother scooped up her remaining baby, staring at her little son with wonder; as if they had never met; as if the baby were some strange and wondrous creature from Mars.

  The volunteer sat with her jaw hanging open, as if she had never seen anything like this in her life.

  Anna Maria grabbed the stroller and beat it.

  The Waiting Room 8:19 p.m.

  MY BABY GIRL, THOUGHT ROO.

  She could not move. She could not even go to hold Cal.

  I’m no good, she thought. A good mother would run after him, screaming and beating on him. A good mother would shoot him dead or break his kneecaps.

  She tried to figure out who in this Waiting Room was a good mother. That addict, coming down, her whole body and mind collapsing into one big, trembling, chaotic mess? But who knew enough to know her baby needed a doctor? Was she a good mother?

  No.

  Nobody that far gone could be a good mother.

  But she loves him, thought Roo. She loves him.

  Roo was swamped with needing love: needing to see it, needing to feel it. Needing to hold the two people on earth who loved her: Callum and Valerie.

  I forgot that part of it, thought Roo. They love me. No matter how much they drive me crazy, I don’t drive them crazy. They go right on loving me. There is plenty of love in my house.

  She found that she had peeled Cal out of the stroller, and draped him on her shoulder where he lay in that heavy clingy way that babies had, melding right onto Roo, his little hot cheeks one with her neck.

  She found that she was sobbing, but not talking.

  She found that the police were telling everybody to stay calm, especially her.

  She found that the black woman was pulling her down. “Here, honey, here’s what we’ll do,” said the woman. “You hold your little one, and I’ll hold you, and we’ll wait, and I just know the other baby will be fine.” Roo lay deep inside the blessed comfort of somebody else’s hug. Somebody else’s unjudging love. “Just fine,” said the woman. Singsongy, crooning a lullabye. To Roo. “Ju-uu-st fine,” she repeated, rocking and comforting.

  City Hospital: Subbasement 8:21 p.m.

  SETH TOOK THE STAIRS down from seven, for no reason except the pounding of his hard shoes on the hard stair treads seemed to empty some of his embarrassment. Instead of walking through the public areas of the hospital to get back to the ER, he would take the tunnels.

  Of course, now when he was angry and felt stupid, he ran into three men who remembered him — they were in patient transport — and said, “Hey, man. How ya doin’?” and he in return had to say, “Not bad, man. Gonna live.”

  They slapped palms and slouched on.

  Seth did not actually feel as if he were going to live. He felt supremely stupid, and it was a feeling Seth rarely had. What with Diana rubbing him as raw as the pavement had rubbed that kid on the bike, and his being a total uncoordinated jerk with that asthma mother —

  Seth wanted to go to the gym and hit a punching bag about seven hundred times.

  He hit the bottom of the stairs and turned into the yellow tunnel.

  He had done something wrong.

  The tile in this tunnel was pea green.

  Hmmm, thought Seth.

  He could have walked back up a flight, come out on the ground floor, and found his way back. But this was his chance to trace another underground route. He was delighted. He knew by now that the volunteer jacket was amazing protection. Not only would nobody forbid him to go places, but they would guide him, because even though volunteers were pesky, they were also absolutely necessary. No hospital could manage without the volunteers.

  Although, thought Seth, the asthma mom could probably have managed a lot better. Well, forget her, so she had sore ankles and sued the place. She didn’t know his name, did she?

  Seth followed the tunnel.

  He was thrilled to pass a door (no lights on within) that read PATHOLOGY LAB. He was even more thrilled to pass a door (you couldn’t see in this one) that said Morgue. Each of those doors was not simply locked, but also padlocked.

  At the next turn, he passed the underground security station, where narcotics prescription sheets were kept and an officer sat twenty-four hours a day keying people in and out. Inside were security cameras focused on every entrance to the hospital. Seth waved at the guard, who frowned at him but didn’t question him.

  Seth loved it.

  In another hundred paces, he came to a choice. The pea-green tunnel intersected with the yellow tunnel. Now. Should he follow the yellow, which would take him back to the ER, or explore the green, which would not?

  Seth deliberated.

  He wanted the new territory but, on the other hand, he was starving to death and Diana might have supper with him if he begged and pleaded and pointed out that he was now in a position to blackmail her about Bed 8. Or even interrogate Bed 8 for her.

  Which I might do anyway, he thought.

  There’s no law against it. I could just sashay up to Bed 8 and say, “Why, Mr. Searle, I know a girl who looks so much like you! Do you have a daughter Diana?”

  Then if the guy died of a heart attack, Seth would know that yes, the guy had a daughter Diana.

  Seth took the yellow tunnel and entertained himself by bouncing up and down, sticking his fingers up inside the morass of wires and ducts and pipes that comprised the open ceiling. If this were TV, he thought longingly, I’d find an opening in that air-conditioning duct and crawl along it till I found the opening over Bed 8, and I’d drop on top of him and crush the evidence out of him.

  With this happy thought, Seth bumped into a man carrying a baby and a gun.

  Emergency Room 8:27 p.m.

  THE COPS REDISTRIBUTED THE people in the Waiting Room, thrusting them here and there for their own safety or the cops’ freedom of movement.

  Diana was pushed behind Knika’s heavy glass enclosure, and from the safety of that bulletproof place she stared. It was a zoo, and she had a ticket for the show.

  The police threw the other dealer against the floor, knotting his wrists behind him so quickly that Diana realized the man on the floor had done this before and was cooperating. Didn’t want his elbows snapped. Knew perfectly well he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Wudn’t me, man,” the guy kept saying, his mouth plastered against the filthy linoleum of the Waiting Room. “Not my idea, I din’ take no kid.”

  “What’s his name, the guy who did? What do we call him?”

  “Dunk. His name Dunk.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Kevin Duncan,”

  Kevin Duncan. It sounded like somebody you would know from high school. Somebody who would sit across from you in biology or on the bench during basketball games. Maybe he had. Drug dealers were kids once.

  But not for long.

  How different the Waiting Room seemed now. She was suddenly incredibly afraid. The room seemed to be percolating with evil — people actually willing to kill people, turn them into addicts, kick them when they were down, bring them down if they weren’t there yet. Di
sease, too, percolating like coffee. Not interesting things; not things to be fascinated by and learned from; but things equally evil and prepared to kill: AIDS. Tuberculosis. Hepatitis.

  Knika’s intercom said loudly, “Volunteer to Treatment Desk.”

  Meggie. Meggie actually wanted a volunteer back there. Didn’t she understand that there was a hostage situation in the Waiting Room? Diana shook her head. Really, Meggie was such a fool.

  Knika said, “Well? They need you.”

  “But Knika —”

  “What’re you gonna get done here? Huh?”

  “Well — well — I’m —”

  “You’re going to watch the show. I don’t blame you. It’s one of the perks of working in the ER. Aisle seats.”

  Diana had known that she volunteered in order to have an aisle seat for the show, but somehow she had not realized that the regular staff did, too. She had thought they were just clerks, just typing up their little insurance garbage. She flushed. None of them were “just” clerks. They wouldn’t be here, putting up with all this, enduring all this, if they didn’t think it mattered, didn’t want to be part of it.

  After a while Knika said, “They probably do need you back there.”

  Diana took a long last look at the ER.

  Police blocked the stair exit.

  Police had moved the other dealer to the holding room.

  Police arrived, car after car, in the parking turnaround.

  The little mother, so pretty, so young, so stunned, lay like a sick child herself in that grown-up mother’s arms. They looked like three generations: grandma, mother, grandson.

  Television arrived: The amazingly bright lights and gaudy truck of Channel 8 drove right onto the sidewalk (where any unfortunate sick person would receive a ticket or even get towed), and the reporting staff and cameramen leaped out and ran to the ER entrance.

  Maddeningly, Meggie’s voice, dry and cynical came on the intercom again. “We featuring any volunteers tonight? They go for supper? They trying to be interviewed on TV?”

  Supper, thought Diana, abruptly pierced by fierce hunger. She had not had a single moment to think about supper.

  Well, she didn’t have time now. She kept having to prove to Meggie that just because she was a college freshman didn’t mean she was worthless. She touched Knika’s shoulder, for what reason she really didn’t know — some kind of communication she needed to make — and Knika patted her hand as if Knika, at least, knew.

  Diana went back to Meggie.

  “We got a patient up at Radiology they need to move back down,” said Meggie. “You know where Radiology is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Patient’s name is Searle. He goes back in Bed Eight.”

  The guy shot at him.

  Luckily Seth was standing so close and the man was so rattled that the gun shot way down the tunnel and the single bullet ricocheted a hundred feet away. “It’s only me!” said Seth quickly, trying to look harmless and dull. “No need to shoot! I’m a friend!” He was mostly relieved he hadn’t wet his pants. The volunteer jacket didn’t hang low enough to hide that.

  The man waved the gun.

  The baby screamed.

  “He needs his diaper changed,” said Seth, who would not have known a diaper if he sat in one. “Why don’t you let me do that?”

  “Which way out?” said the guy.

  “Turn right down that green tunnel,” said Seth, pointing. “Takes you right out.” And past the police bay, but no need for details.

  The man nodded, handing over the baby and racing for the green tunnel.

  Seth stared at him.

  The whole exchange had been so fast that Seth really had not got the faintest idea what had happened. He only knew that some really hopped-up druggie whose eyeballs were practically spurting out of his head had just handed him a little kid.

  It seemed like the kind of situation that Barbie would know how to handle, so Seth headed for the ER while the baby screamed on in his arms. The kid had lungs. Whatever other problems this baby had, it hadn’t come into the ER for asthma.

  Seth reached the bottom of the stairs only to have the heavy metal door thrown open by what looked like fifty cops, as hopped up as the druggie, but on adrenalin. Their guns were also pulled but they probably had more training and better aim than the druggie.

  Seth could think of no syllable, no movement, no nothing, that had prepared him for this.

  They stared at each other for a moment, the panting, insanely aroused officers and the terrified college kid.

  Seth pasted his handy all-purpose smile on his face. “Hi, I’m just a volunteer,” he said. “Guy handed me this kid and headed down the green tunnel.”

  All the police but one shoved on past and thundered toward the green tunnel.

  They were going to use their guns if it killed them, which it might. Seth and the remaining cop went into the stairwell, shut the door firmly against any kind of armed warfare, and Seth said, “So what’s going down?”

  The baby, whose lungs were getting a class-A workout, kept shrieking.

  Emergency Room 8:43 p.m.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, we can’t go in there?” Susan and Mai were absolutely outraged. Who were these people attempting to block their entrance to the Emergency Room?

  “We’ve got a little problem here tonight,” said the policeman, “and we’re not encouraging visitors.”

  “We don’t need encouragement,” said Susan. “We’re here, and it’s necessary, and you are not within your rights to prevent access.”

  “Am I within my rights to save your little life from a druggie gunman?” asked the cop.

  “It looks as if you are completely unable to keep that sort of thing under control,” snapped Susan. “My roommate was shot this evening. Where were you then?”

  The cop looked interested. “Your roommate was the one who walked into the drug deal and got herself pasted?”

  “Pasted?” whispered Mai. “Does that mean dead?”

  “I haven’t heard anything lately,” said the cop. “She was alive when they brought her in.”

  “Excuse us,” said Susan sharply, pushing her way forward. “We have to see her.”

  The cops looked at each other and then shrugged.

  Susan and Mai charged into the Waiting Room. They took one look at the collection of pathetic human beings lining the walls and headed for the nurse, who did not look terribly impressive either. Obese. Probably smoked. Definitely not a vegetarian.

  “How may I help you?” said the fat nurse, reaching for a patient form.

  “We need to see our roommate, Jersey MacAfee. She was shot. She’ll need us.”

  The nurse shook her head. “No visitors.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Susan. She hated dealing with stupid people. “We are her roommates and we have to be with her.”

  “No visitors,” said the nurse. “We’ve got extraordinary problems this evening.”

  Susan was furious. She explained that her father was a lawyer.

  The nurse replied that her father was also a lawyer and so what?

  The Waiting Room enjoyed this immensely. It was always nice to have a chance to put one of these college kids in her place. The nurse enjoyed it, too. It was one of the perks of the ER, along with aisle seats. When people were obnoxious and pushy, you got to be more obnoxious and pushy.

  Susan had met her match in an Emergency Room Admitting Nurse.

  Finally Knika took pity on Susan and Mai. “Your roommate isn’t even in the ER anymore,” she said. “She was admitted, and she’s in the Intensive Care Unit up on nine. They definitely have no visitors, but you can use this phone to call the charge nurse there and get some information.

  Emergency Room 8:45 p.m.

  ROO HAD NEVER CHANGED a diaper so willingly.

  Every inch of Valerie’s soaking little body looked incredibly beautiful to her mother. Val never enjoyed diaper changes and grabbed Roo’s hands as always, thrusting t
hem away and arching her back to prevent Roo from getting it done. Always, always, this infuriated Roo and made her want to smack Val.

  Now she thought — Val’s got personality. She isn’t some bland little passive nobody who just lies around. She’s mine. And she’s tough. And she fights back.

  And I love her.

  In a queer way, she knew she was obligated to the criminal who had shown her there were two good things in her life. Valerie and Callum. She finished changing the baby and kissed Val’s throat and face and hair the way the male nurse had kissed the AIDS baby.

  Val giggled and grabbed at her mother’s nose.

  Roo moved back just far enough to prevent it, and Val burst into a smile so joyful, so delighted, that Roo suddenly knew something. Val had no words yet, but she had thoughts, and the thought was — there’s Mommy! My Mommy! My wonderful Mommy!

  Roo carried Val back to the Waiting Room, where her new friend was rocking Cal. She put them both in the double stroller and called a taxi. “You gonna be okay for the night?” said the woman, frowning. “You got somebody to call? You don’t wanna stay alone tonight, you hear me?”

  Roo hugged her fiercely. “I have parents,” she said. “They want me to live with them. I wouldn’t because I’ve been so mad at them for being so mad at me.”

  “Boy, do I know how that feels,” said the son with the broken leg. He was admiring his bullet. He tried to stuff it in his pocket before the nearest cop saw him, but he was too late. “Please can I keep my bullet?” he begged.

  “Get a life,” said the cop, holding out his hand.

  Yasmin was with the social worker.

  Anna Maria recognized him. Very tall, very thin, very black, very serious.

  “Hi there,” said the social worker, smiling down at her. “I’m Thomas.”

  Anna Maria said, “No English.” She peeled Yasmin’s hand out of the social worker’s and said quickly in Spanish, “We’re going home, Yasmin. He’s trouble. Kick him if you have to.”