Molly waved her off. “Right after I start breathing again.”
Sasha just watched her for a moment. “You're not going to save them all, ya know. You're probably not even going to save most of them. Which most of them might just thank you for.”
A sentiment Molly would do well to cross-stitch and hang over her locker. But not one she needed to hear right now, especially when she was trying so hard to keep herself together all by herself. To cram the old memories safely away where they belonged, but where they refused to stay during Christmastime.
“You really are much more fun to live with in October,” Sasha admitted, as if she could hear Molly's thoughts.
“I told you,” Molly admitted wearily. “My regression festivals are scheduled every Christmas and summer. I wet the bed and throw tantrums.” She sighed. “And I have a little more trouble dealing with kids.”
She had a little more trouble dealing with everything. She had ever since her halcyon days in Vietnam half a lifetime ago, but she'd been managing pretty well until the last eighteen months or so. In that time, she'd forfeited her savings and the job she'd held at one of the more posh St. Louis County hospitals to a malpractice suit, and she'd lost her psychiatrist to suicide. Now she had two jobs, no money, and a once-again precarious hold on her peace of mind.
But then, she also had the friends she'd found when she'd been relegated to the battered old halls of the Grace Hospital ED in downtown St. Louis, and a new sense of purpose in her second job as part-time death investigator for the city Medical Examiner. For the moment, though, stability was still something that she'd relegated to “mirage in the distance” status.
But heck, she'd survived before. She could do it again. She just didn't feel like doing it at Christmas.
Or summer.
Or around two-pound preemies.
“I think I should retire, Sash.”
Sasha even had an elegant snort. “And do what? Play death investigator full time? Even with all those buff young police to dally with, you'd be bored in a minute.”
“At least it would be easier,” she retorted.
As death investigator, her job was to filter the notifications of death throughout the city. Report the naturals and show up at the unnaturals to examine and take control of the body before seeing it safely back to the morgue, where the Medical Examiner would take over. Help organize the information if the case had to move toward trial.
Time consuming, yes. Detail-intensive, sometimes emotionally exhausting, since the death investigator usually notified families in the bad cases. But not dangerous. Not overwhelming. Not ever out of control, which trauma always was.
Molly sighed again, her attention on the Olsen Twins poster somebody had tacked to the ceiling and then redesigned with glued-on feathers, sequins, and G-strings.
“I'm tired,” she said. “I'm old. I'm too cranky to be empathetic anymore.”
Sasha lifted an eyebrow. “And the problem is?”
Molly had to grin.
“Please don't expect me to be your cheerleader,” Sasha all but begged. “You know I find it distasteful.”
“You're charge nurse. It's your job.”
“Balancing the staff like a circus juggler and not massacring the doctors is my job. Yours is to come to work so I have someone worth talking to.”
Molly didn't bother to look over, even for such a compliment. Sasha was fifteen years younger and a hundred years more world weary than Molly on her best days.
“Would you consider accepting a bribe?” Sasha asked.
“Is that part of your job, too?”
“Whatever it takes.”
Molly heard Sasha reach into her pocket. She heard the rustle of cellophane. She almost came straight off the couch.
“You're fighting dirty and you know it,” she accused, already salivating.
“It's a present from James,” Sasha said. “He heard of your act of heroism and tubed me something special for you.”
Molly's eyes closed in ecstasy. James was the evening pharmacy supervisor and supplier of the drug of choice for most of the nurses in the hospital. “Well, why didn't you tell me right away?” she demanded, her body reacting without her consent. “What is it?”
Sasha smiled like a pimp with a virgin in the closet. “What is it you want?” she asked.
Sighing, Molly briefly let her eyes go closed again as she battled a sharp flood of saliva. “Ding Dongs.”
Sasha swept her hand from behind her back with a flourish and dropped the cellophane-wrapped package on Molly's stomach. “Have we ever disappointed?”
Anyone who saw Molly rip through the cellophane would have thought she'd been starving on the desert. She took one bite of saturated fat, sugar, and preservatives and felt her life force returning.
“I might just make it,” she said with a profound sigh.
“Security, Emergency Department, stat! Security, Emergency Department, stat!”
“Oh, shit!” somebody yelled outside the lounge door. “She got away!”
Feet pounded down the hall. Molly sank back into the couch, her treat all but forgotten. She should have known.
“Uh ⦠Ms. Burke?” came a hesitant voice from the doorway. The voice of that security guard she'd warned not two hours earlier.
“You let the Water Mother get away,” Molly accused without opening her eyes. “Didn't you?”
“Well, ma'am, she seemed ⦠well, quite calm ⦠uh, after you left.”
“Tell me you at least took the knife away.”
“Uh ⦔
Molly took a few long moments to battle a sudden, flashing rage. She really was too old for this. And the rages never got easier, untidy bequests
she'd inherited from the post-traumatic stress disorder she'd brought home with her from Nam. She came within an inch of giving this guy a broken nose just because he was incompetent.
“Ms. Burke?” the security guard ventured.
“Give her a minute,” Sasha advised dryly. “At least until her eyes stop glowing.”
Molly wanted to laugh. She couldn't. Hell, she could barely breathe.
“Call the police. It won't take long before she accuses some other clown of stealing her sacrifice.”
The security guard got out of there so fast his big shoes flapped.
“See what I mean?” Molly asked a wryly amused Sasha, who still stood quietly by. “I used to be able to just laugh off stupid shit like that.”
Sasha motioned for Molly to finish her Ding Dong. “Babies always set you off.”
Molly did. “And, more and more, idiots,” she admitted around a mouthful of mood elevator. “And more and more idiots are working in hospitals.”
“Your security friend there's been with us all of three months,” Sasha admitted. “I hear he worked at a Safeway market before that.”
“Protecting frozen foods from potentially violent condiments, most likely.” Finally giving into the inevitable, Molly tossed the remaining cellophane in the trash and climbed to her feet to finish her shift. “And who the hell was that new tech I threw out of three?”
Sasha's laugh was as dry as insurance forms. “Another cross-trainee in the brave new world of Kmart management. He's one of those housekeeping guys who's also doing patient care now.”
Molly glared at her friend and charge nurse. “And you let them send him down here?”
Sasha shrugged. “He's mostly been emptying linen and cleaning crash carts. Don't worry. He'll be back up on the floor before you know it.”
“By which time I'll be retired, puttering in my garden, and thinking fondly of the good old days.”
Sasha didn't bother with empathy as she led Molly back up the work lane. “No you won't. You'll get in a good gunshot wound and be fine again. Just stay away from the kids.”
Just stay away from the kids. Yeah, Molly thought as she pulled up in front of her home three hours later. Sasha was right. It was the kids who mostly set her off. In the hot, humid summers they transported her back to the red mud of the Vietnamese highlands. In the winter, they made her dread Christmas, when happy families forced her to remember that she had none of her own. If she could stay away from the kids, she'd be all right. If she could stuff the memories back where they belonged.
Shutting off the engine in her faded red Celica, Molly gathered her purse and nursing bag and climbed out of the car. The air was soft and damp tonight, the temperature hovering in the fifties. Typical St. Louis December. Fifties one nanosecond, minus twenties the next. Like Sasha had said, it was a good thing the Water Baby had decided to make his appearance on a warm day. If the temperature had been down another twenty degrees, he never would have survived the ride in.
He was still surviving. Barely. Surrounded by enough high-tech equipment to launch a space shuttle, wrapped in cellophane and foil to preserve his body temperature, so that the NICU nurses would call him “Spuds,” isolated and alone and dependent on strangers to remember to stroke him so he could recognize himself as human. And all that so he could end up being discharged from the hospital just about the time his mother got custody back.
No wonder babies made her crazy.
Molly deliberately stopped a moment to consider her lawn. Even in the dead of winter, it pleased her. The flowers wouldn't be back for months, the trees were skeletal and scratchy in the wind, and the grass was brown and dormant. But there was order here. There was a predictability and pattern she could affect with her hands. There was beauty and structure and life. Considering what she usually had to deal with from either one of her jobs, not a bad thing to come home to.
It would have been nice if that feeling had only extended to her house. Sighing, Molly trudged on up the concrete steps to the small square front porch that fronted the Federalist house her grandparents had passed down. A classic, black-shuttered, red-brick box chockful of expensive artifacts her parents had collected and cherished, it reeked of security and elegance.
Most of her friends saw it as a privilege to live there. Maggie saw it as a prison, the place she finally came back to when she couldn't run anymore.
A trap of family pretension she'd never quite escaped and certainly didn't own.
Molly slid the key in the front door and wondered again what her life might have been like in a different house. A crowded, messy, noisy house. Instead, she'd grown up smothered in social snobbery. She'd had two parents who spent all their energy on achievement and their diplomacy on strangers. She had memories of housekeepers serving up Christmas and infrequent visits from a brother who devoted himself to carrying on the family tradition.
Molly never had. She'd fought every restraint and grown contempt like cancer. She'd become a nurse because they'd wanted her to become a diplomat, like a good Burke. She'd slogged through the mud of Vietnam instead of embassy hallways and come home disinherited.
It was her brother Martin who owned the house she lived in, his two sons the ones the valuables were held in trust for. Maggie, the failure, would be allowed to live there on sufferance as long as she kept the Burke Shrine intact. She could touch nothing, change nothing, expect nothing.
Molly had run to the ends of the earth to escape the trap they'd set for her. After two failed marriages and thirty years of flight, here she was.
She'd sure shown them.
Well, at least the house wasn't the ED. There were no babies here to panic her, no trauma to survive. Only silence, expensive trinkets she hated, and a shower of bills scattered across the glossy hardwood floor where they'd fallen from the mail slot. After the shift she'd had, she couldn't say she minded so much.
The minute she stepped onto that hardwood floor, a monster the size of a small truck let loose with a spate of barking that should have awakened the dead.
Molly smiled. Okay, expensive trinkets she hated and a big, sloppy dog she loved.
“Hey, Magnum, it's me!” she called, shutting the door behind her and setting the alarm.
Magnum didn't seem impressed. A massive red-and-brown head popped briefly out the kitchen door, slid back in to safety, and continued barking. Maggie bent to pick up her mail and chuckled.
“Knock it off,” she crooned, just as she did to the babies at work. “Burglars aren't impressed unless you actually come out of hiding to bark at them, honey.”
But she was grinning anyway. She'd wanted children. Somehow she'd ended up with a puppy the size of a Clydesdale. A puppy who was now whining as if she'd personally insulted him. Maggie was chuckling at his noise as she leafed through the most predictable of her bills.
She stopped, one envelope caught in her suddenly shaky hands.