The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley Read online

  Being burned scares me. There was a guy named Smitty who worked at Station 9, where I volunteered as a junior firefighter. One of the coolest guys I’ve ever met. He spent his off hours riding motorcycles and jumping out of airplanes and climbing mountains without a safety harness. Smitty wasn’t afraid of anything. Nothing.

  Except being burned. As a rookie he got caught under a fallen beam in a burning house. It took three guys to pull him out, but the fire had already charred his back. Smitty showed me pictures of his burns and described in relentless detail the endless debriding and skin grafts. He told me that there were days when he never stopped screaming. Days when he would have welcomed death.

  And I can’t help wondering if that burned boy is welcoming death now—even as Arnold snaps at me to refill the bacon.

  But I know he isn’t, and can’t be. Because Death is in the corner, eating a fruit cup.

  It’s risky standing here staring at her. Death’s got my name on her list, and though I’m in disguise, it’s only a matter of time before she sees through my mask and discovers not a young man who serves slimy hash but a young man she was meant to collect.

  “Boy, if you don’t stop staring past me, I’m going to reach across that glass shield and grab a handful of your hide.”

  “Hey, Jo.”

  Jo is one of the ER nurses who sometimes lets me watch the good cases. She’s built for sumo wrestling, with grabby brown eyes and a smile full of braces. I learned the first time I met her that she is not the kind of woman you trifle with. She never quits, won’t take no for an answer, and would knife you for a Butterfinger.

  “Are you planning on feeding me anytime soon, or am I going to have to speak to your manager?” Jo frowns with her whole face.

  I toss the spoon into the eggs and cross my arms over my chest. “I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” I say. “And that includes uppity nurses.”

  Jo and I stare at each other across the sneeze guard, neither blinking, neither bending. It’s the Berlin Wall of sneeze guards. I study every line on her face. I would bet an entire day’s pay that each one corresponds to some patient she lost. Someone she went home and shed tears over while burying her sorrow in a pint of Phish Food and a couple of hours of bad reality TV.

  Each one of those lines has a name. One of them might be the name of my burned boy.

  “I’m too hungry to play your games today, Drew.” Jo rolls her big brown eyes and nudges her tray with her hip. “Load me up. And don’t be stingy with the bacon.”

  Steven slides into place beside Jo and grabs a bagel with a pair of plastic tongs. He’s different from how he was last night, springier in a way that makes me think he could have been a ballet dancer instead of a nurse.

  “Don’t listen to mean old Jo,” Steven says. “She’s just cranky because she got stuck cleaning up explosive diarrhea instead of watching the fireworks.”

  Jo slaps Steven’s arm as I pile food on both of their trays. Jo and Steven eat equal amounts, but somehow every ounce sticks to Jo’s ass like a blood-hungry tick, whereas Steven seems incapable of gaining weight—a fact that he likes to exploit, especially around Jo, and especially when there’s cake.

  The two of them bicker while I serve. I’m about to ask what they know about the boy from last night when Emma squeals “Drew!” and runs up to the counter. I think she’d hug me through the glass if she could.

  “Heya, Emma,” I say, and wink at her. Emma’s a sweet girl raised on sitcoms and infomercials. She’s the opposite of Jo, who wears her worries on her skin. Emma hides behind a wide smile and gracious eyes the color of a blue-raspberry slushy.

  I come out from behind the counter to give Emma a hug. Beneath the sharp scents of antiseptic and latex, Emma always smells like sugar cookies.

  “No hug for me?” Jo asks.

  “The boy’s afraid of getting lost in your mountainous bosom.” Steven ducks out of the way of Jo’s backhanded slap.

  Before releasing me, Emma crushes the wind from my lungs. I catch Arnold glancing down his nose at me from behind the line, so I run back to my station.

  “How are you today, baby?” Emma asks.

  I shrug. “You still not eating carbs?” Emma shakes her head, so I dump a double helping of eggs onto her plate.

  Jo tries to sneak a piece of bacon off of Emma’s tray, but she’s not nearly as stealthy as she believes herself to be. “Jo, get your thieving fingers off my bacon before I break them.”

  “So,” I say before Jo can start a fight with Emma, who despite her size is a fierce combatant. “Anything good come in last night?”

  The three nurses look at each other before sliding their trays toward the cash register. Jo takes a fruit cup from the cold case like it can balance out the seven hundred grease-laden calories she’s about to inhale. Steven tears off half the top of his bagel and stuffs it in his mouth. Emma’s eyes brand them both traitors until her pink face lights up.

  “There was the one guy. The guy with the cut on his arm.” She blinks rapidly in Steven and Jo’s direction. It takes them a second to catch on to her ham-fisted subject detour.

  Steven snaps his fingers, nearly tipping over his orange tray. His grace, it seems, has deserted him. He swallows that doughy bite of bagel and says, “Right, the Mexican guy. With the arm lac.”

  Jo laughs like she has a mouthful of bees. “I think you about scared him back across the border when you showed him the catheter.” She hands Aimee her credit card and says, “See you tomorrow morning, Drew?”

  “Maybe.” I rarely commit to anything these days.

  Steven waits for Aimee to ring him up before handing her some bills that he pulls out of the waistband of his scrubs. The ER’s standard-issue scrubs are a violent shade of fuchsia that the nurses universally despise.

  When Steven steps out of the way to allow Emma to pay, she sighs. “You want to know about the boy from last night, don’t you.”

  “Emma . . . ,” Steven says.

  Don’t talk about patients: That’s one of the first things they told us when I was a junior firefighter. They drilled it into our heads. Whether you’re a doctor or a nurse or a paramedic, you’re not supposed to discuss patients with anyone uninvolved in their care. Privacy laws and some such.

  But I doubt that’s why they’re hesitant to talk about the burned boy.

  “He’ll hear the details eventually.” Emma sighs again. “Some kids from his school lit him on fire.” She dumps it right out there, no sugar coating, which is odd since she loves sugar so much. “They doused that boy with alcohol and lit a match.”

  Steven is eyeing me warily the same way my mom did the first time I watched a horror movie. I begged her for weeks to let me watch Dream Terror IX. When she finally relented, she sat beside me with one half-covered eye on the movie and the remaining uncovered eye on me, waiting for me to tell her that the movie was too scary. I never flinched, but I had nightmares for a month.

  If Steven’s afraid I’m going to have nightmares about the burned boy, it’s already too late. Anyway, I’ve seen the effect; I may as well learn the cause.

  “Why did they burn him?” I ask.

  Steven gives in. “The police are saying it could be a hate crime.”

  “Aren’t all crimes hate crimes?”

  “Because he’s gay,” Steven says.

  “Oh.”

  Now I understand why Steven and the others wanted to keep this from me. They didn’t want me to make it personal.

  But knowing now that someone did that to him—it makes my memories of last night even more tragic. It’s as if the new knowledge travels back in time to rewrite the gravity of his situation.

  “Did you know him?” Emma asks, and I wonder why. Maybe I’ve let too much emotion onto my face.

  “We don’t all know each other,” I snap.

  Steven tries to lighten the mood with a chuckle that comes out an octave higher than his normal laugh. We all know it’s forced, but we play along—Emma beca
use she doesn’t know any better, and me because, now that I have the information, I’m not sure what to do with it.

  The burned boy isn’t just another hospital tragedy, a Fourth of July accident. He’s a victim.

  I point at Jo, who’s glaring at us with naked ire. “You should eat before your food gets cold.”

  Emma picks up her tray like it’s all no big deal. It’s nothing. The burned boy is nothing. I wish I knew her secret. “Bye, cutie. See you later.”

  “You betcha,” I say, trying to mimic her detachment.

  Steven hangs back. When Emma’s out of earshot, he says, “I didn’t want you to find out like that.”

  “It’s not like I know the kid.” Which is true—I don’t know him—but that doesn’t make his pain any less real.

  “I should go,” he says. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I slap on a smile and wave Steven away. “I’m good.”

  Steven nods and turns to join Emma and Jo. When he’s taken about two steps, I blurt out, “What’s his name?”

  “Drew . . .”

  “I’ll find out anyway.”

  Steven hangs his head, staring into his runny yellow eggs. “Rusty,” he says. “Rusty McHale.” He shuffles to his seat, but I notice that he no longer appears interested in eating.

  A couple of doctors enter the line, chatting about a particularly interesting liposuction. I tune out.

  The burned boy has a name now. I start to wonder how he’s doing, and I notice Death getting up from her table in the corner. She’s got long, dark legs and a floral-print scarf tied around her neck. She gathers her neat trash and deposits it in the wastebasket before striding away. I hope that she’s not going to visit the burned boy.

  Rusty.

  “Do you know her?” Aimee asks. That’s the most words I’ve ever heard her string together at once. She lives in Monosyllabia, in a house of yeses and nos.

  I glance at Death’s now-empty table. “No,” I say. “And I’m doing my best to keep it that way.”

  People are fed, and my job is done.

  Arnold pays me before I leave. “Explain to me again why I’m risking my livelihood by paying you under the table?” He hands me the envelope, and I don’t bother counting the money inside before I stuff it into my back pocket. It’s always all there, and the cash, while nice, isn’t important.

  “My parents won’t let me have a job,” I say. “But I need the money for college.” All I had to do at the interview was mention college, and he practically fell over himself to give me the job.

  “Where do your parents think you are when you’re here?”

  I tuck my sketchpad under my arm. It’s bursting with Patient F drawings and notes. Not that I need the notes. “Visiting Grandma.”

  “Ah,” Arnold says. “You really have a grandma here?”

  “Duh,” I say, with a smirk. “Room 1184. Eleanor Brawley.”

  “I might check.”

  “Be my guest,” I say. “Your sauce is boiling.” I point at the biggest pot of marinara sauce I’ve ever seen, happily bubbling away on the stove, spitting flecks of orange and red oil at the wall. Arnold mutters something under his breath that might be a swear but probably isn’t. I’m fairly certain that I’ve never heard Arnold swear. Not even the day I dropped an entire tray of macaroni and cheese on the floor. I swore. Arnold made a lame joke.

  While Arnold tends to his sauce, I sneak out. The hospital smell clobbers me as I pass from the cafeteria into the clean white hallways.

  I wander, not entirely sure where I’m going. I’m a sailing ship letting the winds take me where they will. And in those winds, I hear the whisper of Rusty’s name, which is how I end up standing outside the ICU, peeking through the gap between the double doors.

  The ICU is where they deposit the desperately ill, the patients whose grasp on life is tenuous and liable to slip. The ones who are most likely to receive a final visit from long-legged Death herself. That’s why I don’t spend much time in this section of the hospital.

  I turn to leave. Rusty is just a poor burned-up boy who probably won’t survive the day. I’ve got no reason to stay.

  Except I don’t move.

  The hallway in front of the ICU is the Doldrums, and I am adrift.

  The double doors open inward. I slide against the wall to avoid being seen. A nurse in sky-blue scrubs wheels an elderly woman wearing an oxygen mask down the hall without so much as a glance for me. As the automatic doors begin to close, I slip through them and into the first empty room. The ICU is arranged similarly to the ER, an oval room situated around a desk area like an egg-shaped wheel. But the ICU is nicer, newer. There are monitors everywhere, beeping and chirping to remind the nurses that their patients are still alive.

  Two nurses staff the monitors with an economy of movement that I find both admirable and terrifying. They’re more robot than person. They don’t chatter or joke like my nurses in the ER do. The ICU nurses barely speak, and when they do, it’s always in serious tones.

  If one of those nurses finds me here, I’ll likely wish Death had found me instead.

  I peek through the beige curtains to see if I can figure out where they’re keeping Rusty. There’s an enormous monitor hanging on the wall bearing a list of names and vital stats. I look for McHale and find him. He’s just a series of numbers. 97. 100/65. 97.7. 225. Heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and maybe his room number. I’m not sure if those numbers are good for the burned boy, but I know they mean he’s still alive.

  The nurse who left with the elderly woman returns with a Styrofoam cup breathing steam. Probably coffee. None of these nurses look familiar, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never seen them. I usually pay as little attention to them as they do to me.

  The nurse says something to the others that I can’t hear, but they respond with terse nods.

  Coffee Nurse goes into a room while the others wait outside. She returns, ushering along two people, a man and a woman, both frayed. They barely exist, clinging to the here and now by their brittle fingernails. I look at the number on the wall: 225. Those must be Rusty’s parents. They’re old, but not as old as they appear to be: sixty-five at forty.

  The other nurses slip quietly into Rusty’s room while Coffee Nurse speaks to the McHales. Rusty’s parents cling to her words as if they’re the only port in a storm. I imagine her saying, “Your son is in good hands. You’re tired. Go to the cafeteria and get some coffee. Maybe something to eat.” I should warn them to avoid the spaghetti.

  As Coffee Nurse leads the McHales away, the other nurses wheel Rusty out. I barely glimpse him, but I hear him moaning. The McHales hesitate and turn back toward their son. Coffee Nurse firmly guides them out the door, allowing them no opportunity to falter. Whatever is about to happen, she wants them elsewhere. Possibly for Rusty’s sake, likely for their own. It’s killing the McHales to leave, but they do. Maybe they go to the cafeteria. Maybe they flee the hospital, never to return. I couldn’t blame them for it.

  Coffee Nurse speaks to the others before they wheel Rusty away. When they’ve gone, she hangs her head. The things I imagine she told herself on her coffee break—that the boy is her job and not a child—aren’t the armor she needs them to be. In her position, it’s a weakness to care so blatantly.

  The screams begin a moment later. Inhuman, monstrous howls. Surely it’s an animal those nurses are torturing and not my burned boy.

  But of course it is him, and there’s no way to lie to myself about that.

  As Rusty’s shrieks devolve into frantic cries, calling out for the cruel parents who abandoned him, Coffee Nurse brushes the imaginary wrinkles from her scrubs and trudges toward the wicked place to which her cohorts have taken Rusty.

  Only a minute more, and I can’t take it. My fists are clenched, my knuckles white. My fingernails dig into the fleshy parts of my palms, leaving little half-moon indentations that will fade away painlessly. Unlike Rusty’s screams, which follow me even as I run out of the
ICU and far down the hall.

  There’s only one place I want to go. I lean against the wall for a moment and catch my breath, trying to unspool the line tightening around my lungs. Putting Rusty out of my mind isn’t easy, or even possible. I try to imagine that he’s Patient F fighting against his bonds as the doctors in red lab coats experiment on his broken body, but imagining Rusty as a superhero doesn’t make his pain any less real.

  My feet take me to Pediatrics. Everything here is brighter, livelier. The rest of the hospital is painted to remind people that they’re in a Serious Place where Serious Things happen and Serious People work, but Peds is an entertaining jumble of primary colors and clowns and flowers and toys. It would be the coolest place in the hospital if it weren’t for the sick kids.

  Nurse Merchant sits at a small, unobtrusive workstation, filling out charts. Down here, they do their best to avoid reminding patients that they’re in a hospital, but it’s a badly staged illusion that people can’t help seeing through.

  “Hey, Nurse Merchant,” I say. I try for a smile, but my lips barely twitch.

  “Drew.” Nurse Merchant has got enough smile for both of us. She moves with a mom’s sincerity, though I’m not sure she’s old enough to be anyone’s mom. “How are you, sweetie?”

  I tuck my hands into my pockets and shrug a little. “Good, I guess.”

  Nurse Merchant sets aside her pen and offers me her full attention. She’s pretty and reminds me of Marilyn Monroe, except that Nurse Merchant has brown hair that she wears pulled back. Sometimes I try to imagine her outside the hospital, but I can’t do it. Like me, she lives here.

  “That’s good,” Nurse Merchant says. “How’s your grandma?”

  “Still in a coma.” The joke falls flat, so I quickly change the subject. “How are Trevor and Lexi?”

  “Trevor had a rough night, but Lexi was up with the sun.”

  “As usual,” I say about Lexi, though lately it applies to Trevor, too. “Can I see them?”

  Nurse Merchant looks toward Trevor’s room. “Better give Trevor more time to sleep. But Lexi could use the break. She’s studying. Again.” Nurse Merchant emphasizes “again,” and I don’t have to ask what she means.