As she ran up the stairs to the second floor—no time to wait for the elevator—she remembered the look of horror on Tina’s face when she realized that she had been the one to inject the lethal drug. It didn’t matter to her that a doctor had prescribed it, that no known drug allergies had been indicated on her patient’s chart—in her mind, she had still been the one responsible for his death. Olive knew she would have felt the same way.
The ICU was in total upheaval when she burst through the doors. No one was manning the nurses’ station, so Olive hurried past. The bulk of the chaos was concentrated in one fishbowl room. Alex, Tina, and Kevin were all crowded around the patient’s bed.
When Olive saw the young man, she thought she was too late. There was no way someone who looked so bad could still be alive. Both his left arm and leg were immobilized in braces; burgundy abrasions and lacerations mottled his skin. A bloody bandage covered the right side of his head. Tubes and wires coiled out of his body as though he were an insect held in place by a spider’s web. But his lips were not swollen nor his face severely flushed; he had not yet gone into anaphylactic shock. There was still time.
Kevin noticed her first. “What are you doing here? I thought you called in sick.” His tone was accusatory; it was clear he was the one filling in for her tonight.
Olive drew in a deep breath. Now that she was here, it was hard to keep from simply shouting at them about morphine. But she had to do this in the smartest, most efficient way. It took all her strength to keep her voice calm yet commanding. “Tina, can I please talk to you outside? It’s urgent.”
Tina’s eyes widened. She dropped the man’s chest tube, and it swung against the bed rail. “Are my kids okay?”
“Yes, they’re fine. It’s not about them. Can we please step outside? It will only take a minute.”
Olive guided Tina a few paces away from the fishbowl room. She didn’t want to be seen or overheard. There were painful crescent moons indented in her palms; she hadn’t realized she’d been squeezing her fists. Tina studied her warily. Despite Olive’s reassurance, she still didn’t seem convinced that her daughter and son were safe and healthy.
“This is about your patient,” Olive started.
Tina’s shoulders relaxed. She tilted her head toward the room. “Ryan Avery?”
“Ryan Avery.” Saying his name made the situation feel even more critical. “It’s not in his chart, but he’s allergic to morphine.”
Tina didn’t look as bowled over as Olive had expected her to look; instead she looked skeptical. “Do you know him?”
“It’s important that you record that in his chart. Give him anything else for the pain—fentanyl, Toradol—but not morphine.”
Tina pursed her lips, the look of an experienced nurse who was not about to be outsmarted. “A true morphine allergy is extremely rare. A lot of people think they’re allergic—they have a small reaction, some itchiness—but it’s a common side effect. Nothing a little Benadryl can’t fix.”
“I know it’s rare, but Ryan Avery has a true morphine allergy. If you give him morphine, he will go into anaphylactic shock and die.”
“How do you know that?” Tina’s skepticism had been replaced with stunned astonishment.
“There’s not enough time to explain. Please just trust me, Tina. His life depends on it.”
“But, what if—” Tina wasn’t a by-the-book nurse, but she was a good nurse, and Olive could see a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. Writing something unsubstantiated in a patient’s chart, administering a different drug than the one the doctor initially prescribed—this was serious stuff.
“Trust me. You won’t regret it.” She remembered how Tina had gone home early last year and then taken a week off. The young man’s death, accidentally on her hands, had really shaken her.
Tina studied her for a long moment and then threw up her hands. “Okay. I don’t know why I’m saying this, but okay. I’ll get Alex to prescribe something else.” She hurried back into the fishbowl room.
Olive crumpled onto a stool at the computer station. She doubled over, touched her forehead to her knees, and took several deep breaths. She had made it in time. She had prevented something terrible, and now Ryan Avery had a chance at recovering from his injuries. She thought of his parents, his siblings and friends, his girlfriend maybe, all the people to whom she had restored him. There would be no funeral, no grieving, no lawsuit against the hospital. Instead there would be long months of rehabilitation and then years returned that had been stolen away. Maybe there would be a wedding. Maybe there would be children who wouldn’t have existed if she hadn’t gotten here in time today. She saw a whole life spool out before her eyes for the young man she didn’t know.
Some time later, everyone but Tina left the room. Ryan’s parents had arrived. They were dressed elegantly, as if their plans for tonight had included an opera, not an emergency trip to the hospital. Seeing them dressed like that reminded Olive of the way Ryan’s mother had thrown herself weeping over his body, her black evening gown leaving sparkles all over his ruined skin. It was time for Olive to go. She had accomplished what she had come here to do, and she knew what came next would still be hard to witness. Even though he had survived this time, his parents would still be devastated by his condition. She wanted to leave, but something kept her transfixed in her seat. Perhaps she was waiting to see that moment of pure relief when his parents learned that he was still alive.
But it didn’t come. Alex led them into the room, and Ryan’s mother sobbed and held her son’s hand, while his father stared intently at Alex’s face, as though by the sheer power of listening he could overcome his son’s circumstances. Olive felt like a voyeur, and yet she couldn’t turn away. It was like looking through a window into last year. He’s alive, she wanted to call out to them. But of course, sorrow and pain were all relative, and thankfully, they did not realize how close to losing their son they had been.
She needed to leave now; viewing this was not helping her state of mind, and maybe Phil would still be at the condo if she hurried. But as she stood up from her perch, Alex walked out of the room and laid his hand on her shoulder. A shadow of stubble covered his face, and his white coat was rumpled.
“Can’t get enough, huh?”
Olive backed up a step. “Excuse me?”
“Tonight’s your night off, right? I’ve been on for almost twenty-four hours now, and of those twenty-four hours, I’ve gotten maybe an hour’s sleep. I’m so tired that I’m seeing floaters in my peripheral vision, and then all of a sudden, here you appear, like the angel of the ICU, watching over all of us shortsighted mortals. Sorry. It’s the sleep deprivation talking.”
She pretended not to have heard that last part. “What’s his prognosis?”
Alex rubbed his eyes furiously. “Fucked.”
Olive gasped. “He’s not going to make it?”
“No, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. He’ll live; his life will just never be the same. He suffered a transection of his spinal cord at T10 in the crash. He’ll never walk again, have sex again, have control of his bladder or bowels . . .”
She didn’t know what to say. Her earlier sense of triumph was eroding. “And you told his parents?”
He scratched at his chin stubble. “Yeah. One of my least favorite conversations. It’s right up there with telling someone they have cancer.” Despite his sarcastic tone, his eyes were tearing up. He rubbed at them again. “His dad seems to think it would’ve been better if he had died.”
“No, he doesn’t mean that,” she whispered, but she wasn’t entirely sure. “He’s just heartbroken for his son right now. All his hopes, his dreams for the future—that will all have to change now. But I know for a fact that losing him would not have been any easier for them. He’ll still be the same person inside, the same Ryan that they love. There will just need to be some accommodations. And maybe after
some rehabilitation, his prognosis will improve.” She squeezed Alex’s hand. Even to her own ears, the words sounded hollow.
How could she have been so naïve? She was furious with herself. Only moments earlier, she’d been patting herself on the back and imagining a fairy-tale ending for Ryan Avery. But no one just walked away from a rollover car crash. She’d stopped the morphine, but so what? It hadn’t been enough. In this year, nothing she did was ever enough. She would’ve needed to stop the car, and as Sherry had pointed out to her from the very beginning, they weren’t superheroes. When it came right down to it, they didn’t have the power to change much of anything. Instead of changing events for the better, Olive just kept fouling things up more and more. And it was one thing to mess up her own life, but to toy with someone else’s? Would Ryan Avery have wanted this for his life? She didn’t know the guy, and yet she had taken it upon herself to tamper with his fate.
Alex grabbed her hand and held on, stroking her palm with his thumb. “Thanks, Olive. I really needed to hear that right now. You’re amazing in that way.” He looked down at her through his eyelashes, straight and thick as the bristles of a broom. “Sometimes I feel like there’s this connection between us.”
She watched those eyelashes as they flicked up and down, and she wondered how he could not recognize the pile of bullshit she had just fed him. And if he did recognize it, why not call her out on it? Why ingratiate himself to her? Why the constant barrage of flattery, especially when her defenses were so weak? His eyelashes were the type that could flirt with you of their own accord, and she hated him for sleeping with her last year and for continuing to unknowingly be an obstacle between her and Phil and for being a symbol of everything that was wrong with her year, standing there telling her that Ryan Avery would be a paraplegic and trying to hold her hand at the same time. Beneath those gorgeous eyelashes, his irises were the same intense blue of Lake Mendota, and it was clear he wanted her, wanted her as if she were a cool drink on a hot day. He wanted her without asking for anything more than her body. No promises. No expectations. Only sweet, superficial intimacy.
She should have pulled her hand away, but it was such an innocent gesture. Consoling a coworker. Grieving for a patient’s prognosis. Never mind that the slow circles he was drawing on her palm reminded her of the slow circles he had drawn on other parts of her body once upon a time. Never mind that the Avery family was only a few feet away, weeping over their son’s broken body, or the fact that this was the kind of behavior that had gotten her into trouble in the first place. She was so sick of everything: trying, fighting, resisting. What did it ever amount to? It would be so much easier to give in. Her heart was heavy with everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours, and Alex was willing to help her forget that burden.
“Alex, I—” His fingertips were brushing back and forth across her own. She looked up at his face, which was kind and intelligent. But it wasn’t a face she loved. “Alex, I need to go now.”
Footsteps were approaching behind them. He released her hand, and she turned guiltily, expecting to see Dr. Su or one of the nurses.
But it was Phil. It took her eyes a few seconds to confirm that this was the real Phil, not some hallucination sprung from her desire to see him or her guilt over this exchange with Alex. Unfortunately, it was the real Phil, made of flesh that was quaking and blood that was boiling with anger. In a blur of action, he raised his fist as though he were going to punch Alex in the face, suddenly dropped both hands to his sides, and then turned and stalked away.
She ran after him. “Phil!” she cried. He was walking so fast that even though she was almost sprinting to keep up, she couldn’t catch him. She hardly noticed Kevin or Brenda, the night nurse manager, and their scandalized expressions as they watched them fly by the nurses’ station. Phil exited the ICU and rushed past the waiting room, where a handful of family members were watching what sounded like American Idol. Olive was at his heels. The elevator wasn’t there, so he jerked open the door to the stairwell and disappeared inside. She yanked the door back open. “Phil! It’s not what it looked like. Please stop. We were talking about a patient. He was in a car accident and now he’s paralyzed!”
Phil spared her a fleeting glance as he spiraled downward, but he didn’t stop. She barreled down the stairs, afraid of losing her footing in her hurry. She was breathing heavily, and her heart seemed to have given up on her. Its pumps were steady and indifferent, unaware of the trauma that had been inflicted.
They reached the ground-floor landing at the same time. Phil seemed to be slowing down. He pushed through the metal door and halfheartedly held it open for her. The lobby was almost empty. A tired-looking woman read a book at the front desk; she didn’t look up when they entered. The only sound was the peaceful patter of the water fountain. Olive passed it every day on her way to the ICU, but she had never truly taken the time to see it before. It had two tiers with what looked like a caduceus on top; both the stone of the smaller basins and the water in the pool had a greenish tinge. Spotlights under the water made the droplets spilling over the tiers shimmer. Phil paused in front of the fountain, too.
“Why did you come here?” she asked his back. “Were you ready to talk?” Were, not are, in case what he had just seen upstairs had changed his mind. Still she was hopeful.
“I went to the condo,” he started. “The lights and the TV were still on, there was food on the stove, but nobody was home. I was worried about you.” He sat down on the fountain’s edge.
She stood before him. “I was watching the news, and I saw this awful rollover accident happen on the Beltline. They said the victim had been brought here, and I thought—I thought I could somehow help. I had called in sick because—well, you know—and then I felt guilty for not being there when I saw that.”
Phil was watching her strangely. She wasn’t sure if he believed her. Did he think she had dropped everything and rushed to the hospital to be with Alex? The light from the fountain cast a hazy glow over his handsome features.
“Someone stopped by when I was there,” he said. “That friend of your mom’s. Sherry Witan.”
Olive froze. How had Sherry, in her weakened condition, made it to her condo? And what for? She seated herself a few feet away from Phil. Tiny drops of water pelted the side of her face.
“I told her you weren’t there,” Phil continued, “but she invited herself in anyway, and she looked so sick, I couldn’t turn her away. She told me everything about this year, Olive, everything you’ve been going through.”
Warmth bloomed in the pit of her stomach and spread to her extremities. It was nothing short of a miracle. Sherry—opinionated, jaded, self-absorbed, tough-as-nails Sherry Witan—had performed an act of love for her. An act to save Olive’s love. She had forced herself from her home to talk to someone she had never met before, to convince him of the truth in a way that no one else, not even Olive, could have done. Olive dipped her fingers in the fountain and touched the water to her forehead like a benediction. There was hope after all.
She was ready to launch herself at Phil and envelop him in a hug, but his face warned her away. All was not forgiven. There was still a very long conversation ahead of them.
He glowered at his hands in his lap. “I still can’t fully wrap my head around it, it’s so bizarre, and I felt like I’d wronged you in some way by not listening to you and letting you explain. I felt like I needed to give you that chance, so I came here, and what do I walk in on? You and that bastard holding hands, looking like the coziest couple in the world.”
“It wasn’t what it looked like. Alex was upset about his patient”—he winced when she said Alex’s name—“and I patted his hand. That was all there was to it. We were talking about how his patient’s life was going to change now, how his family was going to handle it.”
His eyes burned into hers. “Really? That was all there was to it? So you can honestly tell me that i
f I hadn’t walked in when I had, things wouldn’t have gone any further? History wouldn’t have repeated itself?”
Her cheeks grew warm. A rush of embarrassment tinged with anger coursed through her. She wanted to snap at him, Maybe if you stopped treating me like a yo-yo, bringing me in close only to fling me away again, I wouldn’t be so out-of-my-mind confused, but she held her tongue. “Of course not. I don’t want him. I want you. You’re the only man I want to be with. I’ve never felt otherwise—not even in my one lapse of judgment.”
He stood up and loomed over her. “How can I ever trust you again, Olive? Maybe you didn’t cheat on me this time, but how do I know you don’t want to? How can I know that you’re not going to run into his arms every time things get rough between us? Why is it that you never seek comfort from me? Why is it that everybody else—this prick, Kerrigan, even your mom’s book club friend—is your best buddy, while you keep me in the dark?”
Because she had wanted to protect him from the truth. Because she hadn’t thought he would believe her. Because she hadn’t wanted something like this to happen and ruin her beautiful second chance. “Because I didn’t want you to think less of me. And I really didn’t want to hurt you.”
The front desk lady had looked up from her book and was staring at them. Phil shook his head and walked to the automatic double doors; Olive followed. The fluorescent lights of the drop-off zone overhang buzzed and made everything look lurid and dingy. It was freezing outside. Had she driven here without a jacket? She hadn’t noticed the biting cold in her haste.
“Do you think we could go back to the condo and talk about this?” she asked, rubbing her goose bump–covered arms.
“I don’t think there’s much more to talk about.” Phil buried his hands in his jacket pockets. “This isn’t how I thought tonight would turn out,” he muttered.
“We can change it.”
“No, we can’t.” His tone was resolute. “I’m tired of being made a fool. It’s like—it’s like with my dad. How many chances can I give you to break my heart? There just comes a point when I need to say no. I love you, but no.”
The Repeat Year Page 28
