Red Light

by J. D. Glass

  “Glad you like the brew,” I answered and reached for her hand. “I’m Tori.”

  She had a nice firm handshake and her skin was soft; her hand felt just the slightest bit cool in mine.

  “Nice to meet you, Tori.” She held the mug up in salute. “We’ll have to keep you around here if you’re going to keep making coffee like this.”

  I laughed and shrugged. “Actually, I’m supposed to be doing a rotation tonight, only no one seems to know what to do with me.”

  Trace leaned her hip back on the counter and frankly examined me. For one naked second, I could see the flash of appraisal, approval, and even attraction in her eyes, and I grinned to let her know that I’d seen it, and it was fine by me.

  The look she gave in return let me know that whatever came next from either one of us would be totally okay.

  “Well,” she drawled, “you let me know if no one can figure out what to do with you—page me in respiratory therapy.”

  “Will do,” I agreed. Nice. Very nice. An open door with a pretty woman. Every nerve in my body snapped to attention. The game was on.

  Trace took another sip of her coffee, then put the cup in the sink. “You really do make good coffee,” she said as she grabbed for the doorknob. “Oh, hey, when’s your shift over?”

  “I’m supposed to do eight hours, so I guess I’m here until three.”

  “Hmm, why don’t you page me when you’re done, and I’ll treat you for coffee while you tell me all about your first time,” she grinned, a sharp flash of teeth I instantly liked, “in the ER.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “I’ll do that.” Set.

  “Cool. See you later, then?”

  “Definitely.” Match.

  Well, that was cool, I mused as I sat there and played with my mug. It had been about four weeks since Kerry and I had—ah, enough of that, and enough sitting there. I checked my watch, the required one with the sweep hand, as I walked back to the nurses’ station. Huh. I’d already been on duty for half an hour. Surely I could do something besides make a better supply of caffeine.

  *

  “Hey, Debbie,” I said, reading the tag of the woman who’d sent me to the lounge, “give me something to do. I’m supposed to practice stuff.” I grinned. “And as much fun as the coffee room is, I’d really like to make myself useful.”

  Debbie finally peered up from her chart. “Great, then. Bed five, over there.” She pointed. “Get his vitals.”

  “Will do,” I said, and hustled over to bed five.

  Bob and the rest of the instructors had been prepping us for this. If we were on a rig, we’d take vital signs and get an idea of the paperwork everyone had to fill out, the PCRs—patient care reports. If we were in the emergency room, we’d also measure and monitor vital signs, wheel patients around to X-ray and such, and if it got really busy? Help the triage nurse.

  So with those duties in mind, I wasn’t prepared to meet Mr. Wheeler—his name was written on the bag on the hospital tray table in front of him, in big, black Magic Marker letters: Mr. Wheeler.

  “Hi, Mr. Wheeler,” I said as I walked in, “I’m Tori Scotts and I’m—” I stopped cold. This wasn’t Mr. Wheeler anymore. This man lay with his head back and eyes open, eyes that had the strangest cast. Before instinct prompted me to touch his hand, I knew. He was still warm, but Mr. Wheeler was dead, very dead, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Did Debbie really want me to take his vital signs? Did people do that in a hospital setting, just in case or something?

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wheeler, I’ve got to find a nurse,” I said to the dead man. He couldn’t have been dead long, and what if something was there, like a soul or something, and it could hear? “But I’ll be right back,” I told the corpse. I felt a little stupid, but what if, just in case… Besides, I believed that whether or not some ephemeral, ethereal something existed, it would be very sad if a person left the planet disregarded and disrespected.

  I walked back to the station, but Debbie was gone.

  “Um, what am I supposed to do with the dead guy?” I asked the first passing nurse.

  She stopped and stared at me a moment, then sighed, obviously exasperated. “This way,” she snapped out. “Judy!” she called as we hurried down the corridor between bits of mechanical parts and stretchers. “I need a morgue kit!”

  Like magic, one flew at her head, and she snatched it out of the air as she hurried over to bed five with me behind her. “We need to strip him and zip him,” she said as she pulled the curtain back around.

  “Huh?”

  She opened the kit. “Take off his shoes and socks, and after we undress him, we’re going to cross his hands and feet,” she explained as I carefully unlaced a well-worn black oxford, “and we’ll put him in this.” She held up a white plastic shroud with a zipper that ran along its length. I’d seen them in class because every rig carried at least one morgue kit.

  “Hey, Mr. Wheeler,” I said as I took his shoes off, “it’s Tori again. I’m taking your stuff off, and we’re going to put it in this bag for your family.”

  I made sure I had gloves on before I took off his socks—dead or no, socks can be gross. I glanced up to see the nurse give me the eye as I continued to talk to the corpse.

  I knew, because of all my classes, we weren’t supposed to believe in such things as God or spirit. Everything was accident and evolution and that was it, no God, no one pulling any strings, but what if there was more? I was rather embarrassed, because I couldn’t really let that spiritual sense go completely. I knew it was very unscientific, and one of my professors had said that to even think that there might be a God or some such thing was very ignorant, still, what if? And if there wasn’t, then no big deal; I was just talking to the inanimate like people talk to the television. And if there was, well…better to err on the side of compassion.

  “Well,” I asked her as she efficiently stripped off his shirt, “what if he’s, like, listening or something somewhere, you know?”

  I looked up to see her smile at me across Mr. Wheeler. “That’s not a bad idea, kid,” she said, “it’s not a bad idea at all.” She started to talk with him too.

  After I carefully crossed his hands and placed a bit of gauze around his wrists so the ties wouldn’t cut into them, things got crazy.

  Debbie tore the curtain back. “Scotty, we’ve got an MCI MVA coming in. Go out to the bay and help the crew.”

  “Right, okay,” I agreed, but glanced back at the nurse I’d been working with.

  “Got it from here, kid.” She smiled yet again, more warmly than she had when we started. “Go play with the wreck.”

  “Thanks.” I waved and ran off with Debbie to the ambulance bay. MCI was a multicasualty incident, MVA meant motor vehicle accident.

  This…was going to be interesting. I wondered if I’d remember how triage was supposed to work, if I’d remember the basic stuff I was supposed to know. I wondered if I’d get so grossed out I’d forget everything and throw up my coffee.

  As we waited for the doors to open, the first stretcher came in—and organized pandemonium began. It held a female in her fifties having a severe asthma attack brought on by the stress of the accident.

  Next was a male, approximately forty, fully immobilized and complaining of a headache.

  A sixteen-year-old male with an open tib-fib fracture of the right leg called loudly for drugs—and while in some respects I didn’t blame him, under her breath Debbie told him to shut the fuck up, because we had more, all immobilized and ready for their dates with the X-ray machine.

  Then the night really took off. Another male in his sixties with chest pain. A woman with nonspecific, wandering pain, but normal vital signs at least. A boy, aged two, whose sister had stuck a chicken leg up his nose and left the cartilage in his nasal passage as a souvenir. He didn’t cry at all until I had to help hold him during X-rays, and I was certain those films showed more of my hands than they did of his head, poor kid.

  Then the drun
k driver arrived: fifty-year-old male, immobilized, well-bandaged head trauma, chest trauma, and obviously agonal, meaning distressed and difficult, breathing. Bennie had ridden third man on this call, and her face was pale but composed as we helped transfer the patient from the stretcher to an available bed.

  The crash crew materialized like magic—I couldn’t even tell at what moment they had been paged, and while I helped pass things to people and clear beds and stretchers, I got to watch as Trace dropped a tube down the man’s throat and hooked him up for ventilation before he was wheeled into surgery.

  Trace hung back a moment. “You’re due for a break soon, you know.” She grinned at me as she stripped off her gloves.

  I glanced at my watch—one a.m. How had so much time gone by? “You sure?”

  Debbie walked by just as I asked. “Yeah, kid, you’re supposed to get a break—if you get a chance to take it,” she said, sounding tired. She glanced around the ER. Except for the steady noises from machinery and the background hum of people talking, things had finally calmed down.

  “Why don’t you go for about forty-five minutes?”

  I was about to agree when I saw Bennie stripping down the stretcher she’d helped wheel in, the two techs she’d come in with gone.

  “Check me in ten?” I asked Trace.

  Her eyes traveled from me to Bennie, then back again. “Sure,” she agreed. “I’ll come grab you in ten.”

  “Great,” I answered and smiled, relieved. I didn’t want to blow her off at all; I just wanted to talk to Bennie—she didn’t look right. I held up my wrist and tapped my watch face. “See you in ten.”

  “Cool.”

  I hurried over to my classmate. “You all right?” I asked as I helped set the stretcher up with a fresh sheet.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” Bennie said, looking everywhere but at me as we wheeled the stretcher back out through the bay doors to the rig.

  We opened the back of the parked ambulance and lifted it in, then slid it into position, locking it in place.

  I observed her closely under that big square dome of light. Funny. I’d always thought of Bennie as young, just, well, younger than anyone I was used to being friends with, anyway. But in that moment and in that light, when I could really see her eyes, I realized I’d never think of her that way again.

  Her eyes were a rich brown that made me imagine, well, I don’t know really, they were just full and vibrant, and her ponytail flowed like honey over her shoulder. I wondered if she always wore it up like that or only for class and rotations. I wondered how long it really was when it was down.

  I realized that after all these months of class together, I didn’t really know her, and I wanted to, because she was smart, she was competent in class, and…she looked like she needed to talk. Maybe I could listen.

  I spoke with that impulse. “Hey, Bennie, wanna grab a beer or something when you’re done?”

  She jumped slightly. “Oh. Where you thinking of going?” Her hair shifted as she finally turned those eyes on me.

  “Not far—a little dive off of Sand Lane.” I named the spot where the only gay bar on the Island was. I hadn’t been there in a while, but if I was going to hang out, I wanted to be comfortable. “It’s light, it’ll be quiet, and we can grab a beer.”

  Something about her face made me think I’d read her wrong, and maybe I’d been misunderstood. This wasn’t a come-on; it was just chat, that was all, chat and a beer.

  “No one’ll bother you,” I told her. “It’s midweek. It’ll probably be pretty dead.”

  She smiled at me, a real smile finally, and I was surprised at how different it made her seem.

  “Nah, I wasn’t, I mean, I know the place. I wasn’t worried about that,” she said. “I just, well…I’m a little light this week and I gotta grab the bus.”

  I understood, I truly did. But still, that late at night? It wasn’t really safe and I had a car—I’d drive her.

  “Whattaya say I stand you for the beer and you get it next time?” I offered super casually, “and I’ll give you a ride home?” I understood her pride. I had it too, and I didn’t want to offend her.

  I watched as Bennie considered.

  “Fine,” she nodded and agreed. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I asked with a teasing grin, trying to catch her eyes with mine.

  “Yeah. Okay.” She smiled again. “Meet you back here in two hours?”

  “Sure,” I said, “no problem.”

  I checked my watch. It had been about ten minutes. “I’ll see you later, then. I should get back inside.”

  “Later, Scotty.” Bennie waved, and I walked back into the emergency room.

  I met Trace by the nurses’ station and followed her to the main cafeteria, which was empty except for the clerk behind the counter who doubled as a register person.

  “It’s not cappuccino, but it’ll do for now,” Trace said as we walked to an empty table.

  “That’s fine.” I pulled out a chair and looked around me as I sat—Trace had picked a corner where the windows met, and here on the third floor, we had an excellent view of the ambulance entrance to the ER. The letters that spelled “emergency” glowed a dull red in the dark. I sipped at my coffee as I contemplated the sign, the shadows it cast, the word itself until it seemed to float apart into separate letters with no connection to each other.

  “So…how’s it going so far?” Trace’s voice, a smooth burr, broke the silence.

  I smiled in reflex when I saw her watching me with an expression I would come to know as a mix of humor and concern: it made the gray of her eyes darken.

  “Well…” I took another sip, then launched into a recap of the events so far—from the boy with the bit of chicken cartilage stuck in his nose to Mr. Wheeler’s last sock change.

  Trace’s nostrils flared slightly at that terminal tale. “She told you to do what?” And even though I’d just met her, it was obvious she was upset.

  “She told me to take his vitals. Should I have?” I asked, confused. Maybe that really was a protocol for the ER, make sure the obviously dead guy was really dead—but didn’t they have machines to do that?

  Trace shook her head. “That…was a bad call on someone’s part,” she said finally, her mouth a straight line. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to be eased into this scene, not dropped head first into the whole mess.”

  “Ah…don’t worry about it,” I said, and grinned at her, because I recognized the element of care for me in that statement, “it had to happen sometime.” We chatted a while longer and somehow, eventually, the conversation turned to what we both knew it would sooner or later: sex.

  “I’m just talking sex—healthy, consenting adult sex—no strings,” she said with a lifted brow and a very sensual twist to her lips.

  “We don’t know each other well enough for that,” I said with a smile. She hadn’t come on but had made a blatant declaration, and while I was definitely interested, I wasn’t sure how to handle her—most women were a bit more coy, and I enjoyed that, the flirting, the teasing, the verbal foreplay, the game.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t have sex with Trace; it wasn’t that at all. But I had just come out of living with someone, and while that wasn’t what Trace was asking, I wasn’t sure I wanted no-strings sex either. Then again, it was worth considering.

  “I’m sure we could learn each other well enough, don’t you think?” She let her gaze travel down my face to rest pointedly on my throat.

  I could feel the pulse jump in my neck—she really knew how to play this game.

  “But first,” I took a sip from my mug, “are the preliminaries, you know.” If we were playing, I wanted to up the ante, build the anticipation just that much more. I didn’t plan to bed this woman this night, but I wanted to make sure she remembered me, because I probably would the next time.

  Her hand lay on the table and I laid mine over it, running my thumb along its edge. “Victoria Scotts,” I said qu
ietly as I felt that smooth skin under mine, “and I’m very glad to meet you.”

  Trace exhaled softly as my hand touched hers and didn’t pull away as she observed them. “Named and claimed, is that the deal?” she asked as her cool dark gray eyes met mine.

  “Maybe.”

  I watched as she thought about my offer, then finally turned her hand under mine until she grasped it. “Trace…Tracy Elizabeth Cayden,” she said finally, “and I’m very glad to meet you as well.”

  As I shook her hand again, I glanced at my watch. My time was up and I had to get back to the emergency room.

  “Thanks for the coffee. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow—I’m doing ambulance rotations.”

  “You just might,” she responded. “Tomorrow’s an odd-numbered day and we’re designated trauma. I’m on the crash team.”

  “I remember.” I grinned. “But if it’s a quiet night…”

  “Page me in respiratory when you’re done if you’d like,” she finished for me.

  “Will do.” I stood to leave. She might not have known, but I planned on it.

  The last hour of my rotation went quietly, and I spent most of it taking vital signs and writing them down on the various patient charts. I checked my watch: three minutes to go, three minutes until my rotation was done, three minutes until I met Bennie for a beer so we could compare notes.

  “So…rough night?” I asked after we ordered our beers and found an even quieter spot in the nearly empty bar.

  Bennie took a long pull from the glass bottle in her hand before answering. “Yeah,” she said finally, then stared at the ground a moment, “yeah, it really was. You?”

  I sipped at my beer and thought about it. “Mostly I was scared that I’d fuck it up, you know? I was afraid I’d forget shit, or that my brain would freeze up or something like that, at a critical point, but I mostly took vital signs—well, except for Mr. Wheeler and that drunk driver—” I shut up right there.

  Even in the dim light, Bennie seemed green. I let the silence stretch, unwilling to push in any direction, just letting it flow however it wanted to or needed to.