His Other Wife (11 page)

Seconds passed as he tried to make sense of what had happened. The sound of something sliding below him along the face of
the cliff. Stones scattering along the rock face like pearls escaping from a string. Somewhere in the bottomless distance
Emily started to scream.

H
ilary hadn’t wanted a shift at the hospital during the graduation festivities, but she’d agreed to take this one. It seemed
like every time she wanted off, they had unstable patients and nurses out sick. Guess it made sense, didn’t it? A hospital.
Always in some state of emergency.

In the wee hours of the morning, halfway through her nursing shift in the PCU, they’d paged her to help out in OB. Even if
OB/GYN hadn’t been short-staffed tonight, they would have been shorthanded. Three women had delivered babies in a forty-five-minute
span, and one had been a nineteen-year-old without any family support.

“They’d better start taking advance reservations on those birthing rooms,” Gina Minor said wryly as Hilary finished up her
paperwork at the PCU station. “I hear they’ve got two more couples practicing Lamaze in the lobby.”

“What was going on nine months ago today?” the charge nurse asked.

“Don’t want to know,” Hilary said, adjusting the stethoscope at her neck and waving them good-bye.

Every time a baby appeared at Englewood General, the intercom played a lullaby, and during the past hour it had sounded three
times. No matter where a person happened to be in the hospital, you could hear the birth song. Whenever the melody repeated
itself someone would laugh and say, “Boy, they’re really pushing them out now, aren’t they?” You could be stanching blood
or administering electric shock or setting a broken bone. You could be administering a catheter or holding clamps for a surgeon
or sitting with a family as someone died. The strains of Brahms’s Lullaby would play and you’d breathe a sigh of relief. You’d
think,
New life
. Whoever else might be dying; whatever else might be falling apart.
New life.

Hilary had already read the young woman’s Kardex. The girl had asked for help feeding her baby. Hilary knocked on the door
to announce her presence and the girl lifted her face. “Hi.”

“You ready to try?” Hilary asked after she’d introduced herself and admired the baby.

“I — I don’t know.” And as Hilary scanned the girl’s features, she recognized the same expression she always found on a new
mother’s face: astonished, a little starstruck.

“You’re going to do just fine. You’re going to love it.”

“Will it hurt?”

“A little,” Hilary said. “Not right at first, but later.” And Hilary thought how she might be talking about so much more than
the subject at hand. “You’ll be a little tender. But there are tricks to make it better. I promise you, once you get started,
it’s one of the easiest things you’ll ever do. And it will be so good for this little munchkin here.” She grinned at the newborn.

Ten minutes later the young woman sat against the pillows, beaming. The baby nursed with a tiny hand fisted in his mother’s
hair. Hilary’s pager sounded. She made sure the girl could reach her call button before she gave the A-OK sign with her fingers
and backed away.
You’re doing a good job
, she mouthed as she passed through the door.

After Laura had fallen, after Emily had screamed, Seth had scrambled down to see what he’d done. He hadn’t searched for footholds
or where to place his hands. He’d grabbed the next root and propelled himself down, daring gravity to make him fall, too.
When he’d reached the bottom, he’d pushed his way through the group, trying to get to Laura. Nobody stopped him, which surprised
him. No one grabbed his arm and shouted,
You did this! You stay away!

He shouldered his way through the kids who were closest to the center of the circle. There he saw Emily swaying beside Laura,
folded across the girl’s torso, protecting her friend. The eerie sound coming from Emily’s throat could have been the cry
of the wind, the keening of an Illinois snowstorm along the lakeshore.

Emily rocked back on her heels, holding Laura’s head in her lap. When Seth saw Laura, his stomach revolted. One leg folded
sideways at an impossible angle. Her head fell backward against Laura’s knee. Leaves, brush, and blood tangled her hair.

“Should you be touching her?” someone asked Emily.

“I don’t care,” Emily said.

Laura’s face had gone gray as the moon. Her breath came in horrible rasping gasps, one deep, then two, three that could scarcely
be heard.

After Seth saw Laura, he elbowed his way through the other kids and started to run. He thrashed through the black underbrush,
tripping over fallen logs and shoving branches out of his way. He ran and could hear nothing except the sound of his labored
breathing, the crack of the world breaking beneath his feet. He saw nothing but the net of tree limbs descending on him below
the pale arc of moon. He didn’t slow until he thought his heart would explode. He didn’t stop until his lungs caught fire.

Even then, even before he pulled up, Seth knew he had to go back. The police would be there and they would be searching for
him. But he waited with his chest heaving, letting the pain engulf him. He dragged his hand roughly across his chin, didn’t
know whether it was tears or blood, didn’t care.

Night sounds sprang to life around him, the owl’s hollow call, something with glowing eyes scurrying beneath a stone. The
specter wail of sirens coming closer.

“Hilary Myers?” Her small pager sprang to life. Hilary lifted the small electronic device where it clipped to her scrubs and
pressed the button. “What’s up?”

“Hilary?”

It was Gina. Hearing her voice again was a jolt. Instead, Hilary had been expecting the charge nurse asking her to return
to PCU. She didn’t know why, but Gina’s voice sounded knot tight. “Gina? Are you okay?”

“We’ve got something coming in.”

“They need me back up there? Are you going to ER? Do you need to gown up? I’m on my way.”

“We’ve got something coming in that you need to know about, Hilary.”

“Oh.” A beat. Then, “What have we got?”

“Couple of minutes out.”

“Injury?”

Until this moment, it hadn’t registered that anything might be personal. “A girl. Multiple crush injuries, open fractures,
puncture wound in torso.”

Hilary stood rooted to the spot. “A teenage girl?”

“It’s a fall injury.” Then, “Some accident that happened at some big outdoor party.”

“Some party?” Hilary repeated, trying to get her mind around it. But there could be hundreds of big outdoor parties in Cook
County tonight, couldn’t there?
Couldn’t
there
?

From somewhere in another world, a cart rattled past, its test tubes tinkling like chimes. An alarm sounded on a distant heart
monitor. A light blinked over a patient’s door. “It’s a girl?”
Thank you, God. It’s nothing to do with Seth. It’s not.

“They haven’t officially ID’d her yet.”

“But do you know who it is?”

“Julie got me on my cell. Chase called her before the EMTs had even gotten there. Dirk left right away to pick up some of
the other kids and drive them home.”

From the way Gina rushed past Hilary’s question, there was something she wasn’t telling; she was testing to see what Hilary
knew. “Gina? Is my son okay?”

Silence.

“Gina? What is it? What’s wrong? What does Seth have to do with any of this?”

At her friend’s hesitation, the sound started in Hilary’s head like a keening wind. All she could hear was the roar. She was
drowning; her head kept going under.

“Why don’t you come up to the ER before the ambulance gets here,” Gina said. “It’s best if you hear this from me.”