Lightning Read Free Page B

scent mingled with the acrid smell of Pine-sol, so cloying that Carver wondered if the air itself could heal minor illnesses, hung in a coolness that chilled like icy water after the warmth of outside. Green-gowned doctors and white-uniformed nurses were roaming the wide corridors, but there was no sign of Beth. Carver’s heart plunged to depths out of proportion to the simple fact of losing sight of her.
    She isn’t dead, he reassured himself; she’s only in one of the diagnosis and treatment rooms. But I don’t know that for sure.
    A heavyset nurse with pale lips and wild red hair sat behind a long counter with a gray computer on it. When Carver approached her, she looked up from writing on a yellow form and smiled. For some reason the perfunctory smile angered him. He wasn’t here to make small talk or return a toaster; someone he loved might be dying, and this woman was smiling!
    She seemed to read and understand his anger, and the smile faded. “Yes, sir?” she said. She had round, flesh-padded cheeks that made her eyes seem small, but there was a pleasant quality to her features that would exaggerate expressions of cheer. He realized that she hadn’t really given him the kind of smile he’d assumed.
    “Beth Jackson,” Carver said. “She was just brought in here from the explosion on de Leon.”
    “Explosion?”
    “Where is she? Can I see her?”
    “You a relative?” the nurse asked.
    “Closer than that.”
    “You’re assuming responsibility for payment?”
    “Of course!”
    She turned away from him and picked up a phone with a curved shoulder rest on its receiver, then talked for a minute in tones too low for him to overhear.
    The wide doors to outside hissed open and a blond woman on a gurney was wheeled in by two somber attendants. Beyond them Carver could see the back end of the ambulance with its doors open. The woman was covered to her chin with a white sheet and had an oxygen mask over her face. Her entire body seemed to be trembling beneath the sheet. As the gurney was wheeled past, Carver saw that most of the hair on the left side of her head was singed black. He remembered the young blond woman who had walked into the clinic ahead of Beth.
    Standing and watching the attendants wheel the woman down the hall and into one of the curtained cubicles, he hadn’t heard the nurse behind the counter.
    “. . . will come out and talk to you in a little while.” He turned. “What?”
    She was sitting on a stool and working at the computer now. “Beth Jackson’s being examined in room seven. A doctor will come out and tell you her status as soon as possible.”
    “Where’s room seven?”
    “It’s not a regular hospital room.” She motioned toward the wide hall. “One of those curtained diagnostic rooms.” She played the keyboard, smiled, and said, “Ah, there we go. I have a few forms for you to fill out, Mr. . . .?”
    “Carver. Fred Carver.”
    She stretched far to the side and lifted some pink and yellow forms from a nearby metal tray, then set them on the counter. “It will probably be a little while before the doctor talks to you. Do you want to take care of these now?”
    Carver stared at the forms. In the midst of life, in the midst of death, there are forms. “Sure,” he said. Maybe it would occupy his mind, hold at bay the dread that would double him over if he gave it a chance.
    “I need you to answer a few questions first,” the nurse said. “Is Ms. Jackson covered by insurance?”
    He patiently fielded her questions while she fed his answers into the computer.
    Ten minutes later, when he was finished with the questions and the forms, the nurse directed him to the emergency waiting room.
    It was a square room divided from the corridor by a low bank of potted ferns. The walls were green, like the rest of the walls in emergency, and the carpet was dark brown. An even darker brown vinyl sofa sat with its back to the ferns, and along two of the walls were alternatingly red and