On Rotation(31)

I dragged my hands down my face. He’d said it himself: Not every guy who is nice to you is hitting on you.

“Yeah,” I said, hoisting my bag farther up on my shoulder.

We walked farther into the hospital, toward the bridge to the parking lot. Ricky was talking, relaying the events of the birthday boy’s party, but I found myself staring off into hallways as we passed. Maybe Shruti would run into us. Maybe one of the nurses, or worse, another sobbing person who looked eerily like the good side of the boy’s face.

The humid air hit us all at once. I realized Ricky had opened the door to the parking lot.

“You are so far away right now,” he said. He looked concerned. “You can tell me what’s up, you know.”

I sighed. There didn’t seem to be a point in hiding it anymore.

“I saw a kid who’d been shot in the head today.”

Ricky’s eyes widened.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “There’re no words, right?”

“None at all,” he agreed. He swore again. “Are you okay? You can’t be, right?”

I thought about it. Was I okay? In general, yes. Less okay than everyone else in the trauma bay, for whom a dead child was par for the course. But not devastated like I ought to be. I would sleep okay tonight. Two years ago, I’d felt the same way cutting into my cadaver for the first time. There had been a voice in the back of my head saying, You know this is messed up, but it was all too easy to turn the volume down.

“I guess,” I said. “It’s not really about me. I’m not the one who’s dying. Or who might lose a child.” I remembered the mother’s sobs, the officers barricading her with their bodies and trying to determine if his death was his own fault. “You know the worst part, though? His mom showed up. And the first thing the cops did was basically ask her if her kid was gangbanging.” I bit the inside of my cheek to keep my rage from boiling over. “I mean, Jesus Christ, she just found out that her son was shot. Can she get a minute to deal with that?”

Ricky shook his head. Despite having made a children’s hospital his home for almost a decade, he looked shaken by my description. This isn’t normal, I reminded myself. If someone had told me they’d seen what I’d seen a year ago, I would probably be a bit traumatized too.

“That is . . . ,” he said. He rubbed his temple. “Angie, I don’t know what to say.”

What was there to say? Only a miracle could save that boy now.

“I don’t expect you to,” I said. “It just . . . It made me think. I’ve been so lucky. No one in my family has any serious health issues, but that doesn’t mean anything. Like, them being alive and well isn’t a given. I could get a call tomorrow that, I don’t know, Tabs was in a car accident. Or my mom had a heart attack.” I wagged my head, shaking the images away, along with the accompanying guilt; I hadn’t called my parents in a while.

Ricky was quiet for a moment. Our footsteps echoed through the lot. He didn’t speak again until we stopped at a car, a white Honda Civic. The most practical of cars, I thought. The doors clicked open.

“I get that. My grandparents are elderly,” he said then. His eyes met mine over the top of the car. “I think about them dying all the time.”

Oh. I looked down at my hands.

“Of course. That makes sense.”

He shrugged, then opened his door.

“Does it? Oh, sorry for the mess. You can throw that in the back.”

I looked at the “mess” he was referring to—a duffel bag and a half-empty water bottle—and laughed. If this was a mess, he should see the inside of Nia’s car.

“This is nothing. Thanks for dropping me off.” I tossed his bag in the back and piled into his car. A pine tree air freshener hung from the rearview mirror, a new one, by the fresh, nostalgic scent that hit me the moment I shut the door. “How old are your grandparents? Are they pretty healthy?”

“My grandpa is in his early seventies. I have no idea about his health because he won’t go to the doctor,” he said, starting the engine. “He’s lived a ‘clean life,’ doesn’t smoke, barely drinks, and is still pretty spry, so he thinks he doesn’t need to. I mean, I think he just doesn’t like speaking English at his appointments and is too proud to ask for an interpreter.”

All those medical school lectures on health-care disparities, and it hadn’t occurred to me that someone I knew would be impacted by a language barrier.

“I didn’t know your grandparents didn’t speak English,” I said.

“They do. Enough,” Ricky said. “My grandpa doesn’t like to; he’ll do it for work but that’s pretty much it. Abuela’s mostly fluent, though. She learned before they came here. She used to teach classes at the church for kids who’d recently immigrated. So she goes to the doctor all the time. She’s been trying to get Abuelo to go forever, but he’s stubborn as a mule.”

Just like my dad, I thought. Despite his background in clinical pharmacy, my dad preferred to stick his head in the sand about his health. Every year, Momma had to drag him kicking and screaming to the clinic for his annual physical, and we were yet to convince him to get a screening colonoscopy.

“So, you’re bilingual?” I said.