Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  Paige hurt? “God, I hope not!”

  “But if there are enough injuries to fill all these ambulances, wouldn’t they need her help?”

  He corraled his runaway heart. “As a doctor. You’re right. They would.”

  “Only she’s away this weekend. She went to her grandmother’s. I heard her telling the baby-sitter that, the night I had dinner at her house.”

  Noah was relieved that she was out of harm’s way. “Well, if they need her, I’m sure someone knows where to reach her.”

  “That must be awful.”

  “What?”

  “Being on call all the time. You can be having a nice dinner, even at a restaurant, and you get a call and have to stop eating and leave whoever you’re with and race to the hospital.”

  “That’s part of being a doctor.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad she’s not my mom,” Sara said so pointedly that Noah would have had to be totally ignorant of the workings of children’s minds not to get the message.

  Angie was feeling better about herself and her life than she had felt in weeks. She and Ben had taken Dougie to Montpelier, had spent several hours wandering through town before having an early dinner. Then they had returned to Tucker, rented two movies at Reels, and were now done with one and starting on the other.

  The best part was that she hadn’t arranged a thing. The day had been Ben’s doing from start to finish—except for the popcorn, which she had just air-popped and over which, as a splurge, she was in the process of dribbling melted butter.

  She didn’t splurge often. Dribblng melted butter on popcorn defeated the purpose of the air popping, but she wanted to do things differently. She was determined to pull herself out of the rut she had settled into in recent years, and if that meant dribbling melted butter on popcorn, or overlooking the fact that the late show had been Ben’s choice and was R-rated, or ignoring the sound of the sirens that had been wailing in the distance, on and off, for the last ten minutes, she would do it.

  “Wonder what’s going on,” Ben remarked when she returned to the den with the popcorn.

  “Beats me,” she said with determined nonchalance. “Peter’s on call tonight. He’ll handle whatever comes up.” She didn’t look at Ben to see whether he was pleased. He had to be. Her statement said that her family came first, which was at least part of what he wanted. “Sit here, Mom.” Dougie moved over to make a place for her between Ben and himself. “The movie’s starting. This is a good one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve seen it before.”

  Angie dared a glance at Ben. “When?”

  “At school. Some of the kids have rented it.”

  “But it’s R-rated.”

  “They’re old enough.”

  “Ahhhh,” she said.

  “There isn’t much difference if he sees it with them or with us,” Ben pointed out, though gently. He was trying. Angie could tell. That made it easier.

  “Better with us,” she said lightly. “That way we can answer any questions he might have. Or give a blow-by-blow commentary on what’s happening,” she teased, “or cover his eyes at the explicit spots.”

  “The R isn’t for sexually explicit,” Dougie informed her. “It’s for violent.”

  “Violent. Lovely.” Another siren wailed in the distance. “What with the sound effects out there, and the violence you say is in here, I may be the one who’ll have nightmares,” she quipped, but the truth was that she didn’t care. Sitting between her husband and her son, with a warm bowl of buttered popcorn floating back and forth along with an atmosphere of goodwill, she couldn’t have cared if she had nighmares for days. The moment was worth it.

  Ben reached back and hit the light switch, plunging them into a darkness broken only by the flicker of the television. Just as the opening credits of the movie filled the screen, the phone rang.

  Reflex brought Angie forward, but second thoughts had her elbowing Dougie. “It’s been for you most of the weekend. Go on. We’ll pause the movie.” She thought it was a brainstorm. After all, Ben said she smothered the boy. What better way to ease her grip than by letting him answer his own calls. It wasn’t asking much, just a short walk cross the room.

  From across the room a minute later, he called, “It’s for you, Mom.”

  “Oh.” She got up. “Sorry.” She took the receiver from him. “Yes?” She knew it would be business. No one would be calling for fun this late on a Saturday night.

  “Angie,” she heard Peter’s voice say, “we have a problem.”

  If he was saying that he was in bed with a woman and wanted her to cover for him, the answer was going to be no.

  “The movie house?” he went on. “The Henderson Wheel concert that’s been sold out for days? The one Jamie Cox was so damned proud to be packin’ ’em in for?”

  “Yes?” she asked with a sense of foreboding.

  “The friggin’ balcony collapsed. A hundred people on top of another hundred twelve feet below, with rotted wood and plaster and chairs between them.” He made a sound of disbelief. “No one knows how many people are hurt, or worse. They’re just pulling them out best’s they can. The ER at Tucker is a zoo. Ambulances are coming in every two minutes, making drops and going back for more. The criticals are being flown out, but we’ll have the rest. They need us, Angie. Do you know where Paige is?”

  Angie’s mind focused on the horror of it, so real, and in that far worse than anyR-rated movie. Hugging herself against a chill, she looked at Ben. He had risen from the sofa and was approaching.

  “Where’s Paige?” Peter repeated.

  “Uh, at her grandmother’s. I have the number. I’ll call.”

  “And get here as fast as you can. We’re talking wholesale carnage.” He hung up the phone.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “What happened?” Ben asked.

  “The balcony at the movie house collapsed in the middle of the Henderson Wheel concert. Hundreds of people have been hurt. They’re pouring into the ER.”

  “The concert?” Dougie echoed, his face pale. “Half the town was going.”

  Angie put a comforting hand on his shoulder while she looked at Ben beseechingly. “Mara saw it coming. She knew the place was unsafe.”

  “But she couldn’t have stopped this concert,” he said. “Cox has been planning it too long. He’d never have let her stand in his way.”

  “Do you think he had her killed?” Dougie asked.

  “No,” Angie and Ben said in unison.

  Angie softened her voice. “No. But people will be thinking a lot about her in the days to come.” She looked at Ben again, questioningly this time.

  Almost imperceptibly, he tossed his head toward the door. “Go,” he said. “They need you.”

  “I wanted to be here.”

  “I know, but this is an emergency. You’re not choosing them over us. They just need you more than we do right now.”

  Something stole around her heart, warming the fringes of the chill that had come with Peter’s words. She nodded, gave Dougie a hug, then, on impulse, gave one to Ben. Without looking up, she opened the desk drawer, flipped through her address book for Nonny’s number, and punched it out.

  Paige was asleep on the red shag carpet in front of the fire when the phone rang. The noise was so out of place that she jumped up, but Nonny, who had been reading on her white wicker chair, simply extended an arm and picked it up.

  “Hello?” she said with the same sweetness that was there night or day. She listened, looked at Paige, and said, “No, of course, you didn’t wake me, Angie. Paige, here, was sleeping, and my little pumpkin’s been sound asleep in her Portacrib for hours, but it’ll be another hour or two before I turn in. Is something wrong? You sound breathless.”

  Paige came to her knees, ready to take the phone.

  “Oh, dear,” Nonny said, then, “Uh-huh. Yes…. No, dear, it’s really no bother at all. She woke up when the phone rang. Here she is.”r />
  “Angie?” Paige asked, squinting at the clock.

  “Something awful’s happened, Paige. The balcony at the movie house collapsed during tonight’s Henderson Wheel concert.”

  “What?”

  “Scores of people have been hurt. Peter just called. I’m on my way to Tucker General now.

  They’ll need every able hand. It must be a mad-house there. I hate to ask you to drive back from Nonny’s, but there’s a good chance some of our kids were at that concert.”

  Paige pressed a hand to her chest. “More than a good chance. Jill was there with her friend. They’re ours. It collapsed?”

  “That’s what Peter said. Will you come?”

  “I’m on my way. Angie, are there any—” She broke off, but Angie understood.

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Paige hung up the phone and told Nonny what had happened. “Tucker isn’t prepared to handle anything like this.” Her thoughts swirled. “Mara always predicted a fire, so instead of burns we have crushed bodies. I have to go.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “But I can’t take Sami.” Especially not if Jill had been hurt.

  “She’ll stay here with me.”

  It seemed the simplest thing, since Sami was already there. “I hate to ask.”

  “You didn’t. I told you. She’ll stay with me.”

  “But I’ll be back first thing in the morning to pick her up.”

  “Not if you’ve worked all night and need sleep. She’s fine with me, Paige. Really. You brought a diaper bag filled with enough supplies to keep her a week.”

  “Just until tomorrow. Okay, maybe the afternoon, if I’m dead tired and stop home to sleep for an hour. Can I call you?”

  “Please do. But if I don’t answer, don’t be concerned. I may take her out. Just leave me that little stroller we used this afternoon. I liked that one. My friend Elisabeth took her grandchildren out walking in the fanciest something I’ve ever seen. She said it was state of the art, but I tell you there were so many layers of padding and shock absorbers and sunshades, and that was before she put in little blankets—well, you could barely see the child. So leave your little stroller. I want to see my Sami.”

  She isn’t your Sami, any more than she’s mine, Paige wanted to say, because it had been such fun taking Sami to visit Nonny that it could easily be habit forming. Regular reminders of the facts of life were in order.

  But the facts of life at the moment, given the tragedy in Tucker, were brutal enough without an addition. So Paige simply gave her a hug. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “That’s what keeps me going. Now drive carefully, do you hear?”

  Paige took the roundabout way into Tucker so that she wouldn’t have to pass the movie house. The street would be a logjam of ambulances and other emergency vehicles, and the helicopters—she saw two rise and head in separate directions—would cause delays of their own. The last thing she wanted was to be hung up in traffic.

  The access to Tucker General wasn’t much better, so she pulled into the parking lot of her own building next door, parked, and ran across the yard and several driveways to the emergency entrance of the hospital.

  Havoc reigned within. The sound hit Paige first, the discordancy of whimpering that cried of pain and fear, then the smell, antiseptic from preliminary treatment overshadowed by the mustiness that anyone who had ever been in the old movie house would know.

  The waiting room was packed with victims strewn in varying postures. Some were sitting, some were lying down, some were propped fragilely against pieces of furniture or the wall, cradling one body part or another. Clothes and skin alike were torn, bloodied, and filthy.

  Paige’s medical training had included discussion of the mass casualty incident, but she had never experienced it personally before, much less in a town she knew well. She would have suffered a rush of cold dread even if the crowd had been wholly adult, but too many of the faces she saw were those of adolescents. Too many were familiar, though she didn’t see Jill, or the friend she had been with, among them. Some of the injured were being comforted by parents and siblings who had rushed to the scene. Others clung to those who were similarly hurt.

  The triage nurse stood by the door, clutching an overflowing clipboard and looking bewildered.

  “Has everyone been tagged?” Paige asked. She could see a flash of green here and there.

  The nurse nodded. “I think. But there’s so many. The criticals were flown to the trauma center in Burlington. A couple of them were brought here until they were hemodynamically stable, but they’ve been taken out now. You missed the worst.”

  “Fatalities?” Paige whispered.

  “Three at the scene,” the nurse whispered back.

  Paige closed her eyes for a second, but that was all she allowed herself. Better than an hour had passed since the collapse. Those of the red priority one cases that hadn’t been airlifted would be upstairs in the operating room or beyond. The stable but serious yellow-tagged victims would be doubled up in ER bays. She was needed.

  She tried to make a beeline there, but there was no speeding through the maze of broken humanity. The injured ranged from their midteens through their thirties and were grouped with their friends. She saw patients and former patients and tried to touch or give each an encouraging word. When she missed one, she was called.

  “Dr. Pfeiffer! Here, over here!”

  She worked her way toward a sixteen-year-old girl whose family had her propped on a windowsill.

  “They say Leila only has a broken arm and has to wait,” Joseph complained, “but she’s hurting awful. Can’t someone look at her, at least?”

  Paige carefully lifted the packing that covered Leila’s arm and examined the spot where the bone had broken through the skin. Gently she said, “It’s a compound fracture. It’ll need to be set surgically, but if the OR is backed up, that might take a while. I just got here and have no idea what’s going on inside.” To Leila she whispered, “You’re going to be fine. Think you can hang in there just a little longer?”

  Leila nodded as another voice cried out, “Dr. Pfeiffer?” Paige looked around. “Butch is hurt bad, Dr. Pfeiffer.”

  Butch was slumped against a wall beside his sister Catherine. Former patients of Paige’s, Catherine was now twenty-one and Butch nineteen. He was trying to press a wad of gauze to his forehead and hold his ribs at the same time.

  Paige lifted the gauze and surveyed the gash. “A little stitching will take care of this,” she said, and lifted his arm enough to gently prod his middle, “and some wrapping here,” assuming the rib hadn’t punctured anything. “I know you’re uncomfortable”—she broadened her gaze to include Catherine—“but there’s nothing to be frightened of. Were you there, too, Catherine?”

  Catherine nodded. “I was up front. The music was so wild and loud and strong that when we heard this cracking we thought it was part of the show, y’know, a special effect or something. Then the cracking got louder and we heard screaming and looked around and right there in back of us the balcony just crumbled down on top of all the people underneath. Butch was in the balcony. The people underneath were, like, crushed.”

  “Did either of you see Jill Stickley?” Three fatalities. Three fatalities.

  “They were two rows down from me,” Butch said, which told Paige nothing. He added weakly, “This hurts real bad when I talk.”

  “Then be real quiet,” Paige coaxed softly, “and remember, the pain is only temporary. You’ve broken some ribs”—she hoped it was nothing more, though that wouldn’t be known for sure until he made it to an examining room—“but they’ll heal. Now, I’m going on in to help. The sooner we can move people out of those bays, the sooner we can get you in.”

  She worked her way through the crowd, thinking all the while about Jill being on the balcony rather than under it, which was small solace since she might have been down front with Catherine and not injured at all. If she was amon
g the least hurt of the green tags, the walking wounded, she might have been taken by bus to a more distant hospital, which was standard procedure during a mass casualty incident. In that case, news might be slow in coming.

  Paige prayed she was in that group.

  The hall off the waiting room was lined with loaded stretchers and wheelchairs. Relatives of their occupants huddled around each.

  “When will Trisha be taken, Dr. Pfeiffer?” asked one distraught mother.

  Paige bent down—“Hey, Trish”—and gave the mother a reassuring touch in passing. “As soon as we possibly, possibly can.”

  “Dr. Pfeiffer, Patrick can’t move,” cried another.

  The boy was on an immobilizer. Paige put a hand to his brow. “That’s deliberate. We don’t want him to move until we can determine the extent of his injury. The hard collar, the blocks by his ears, the straps holding him to the longboard—they’re there to make sure he stays as still as possible.”

  She gave them a bolstering smile and slipped into Room A, where the chief of the ER staff, Ron Mazzie, was bent over one of the two patients there. He was being assisted by a nurse and a technician. When he looked up, she asked, “Where do you want me?”

  “Room F. Maybe G. Whichever’s without. There are patients waiting in both. Thanks for coming, Paige. We need you.”

  “Glad to help. You haven’t treated Jill Stickley, have you?”

  “No. Maybe one of the others has.”

  Nodding, she let herself out. She would have stopped at each of the rooms to ask about Jill, if it hadn’t been for the patients waiting for her down the hall. She didn’t waste time looking for a lab coat, nor did she scrub up, other than to wash her hands in Room G, which was the one without the physician. A nurse was already there. Both patients were yellow-tagged. While she wiped her hands on a paper towel, the nurse showed her the vital statistics on the more serious of the two.

  His name was John Collie. He and his siblings had all been patients of Peter’s. John was now twenty-two and no longer coming to the office, but he recognized Paige. She talked softly, reassuringly, to him as she worked.