After Hours (InterMix)(2)
And I was little. An inch or two shorter than average, plus after a few years on what I called the Social Security Diet—a lot of beans and toast and soup to stretch the pathetic amount of money the government deemed adequate to keep me and my grandma warm and fed and clothed—I didn’t cut a very authoritative figure. I had a baby face and round blue eyes to match, too-soft light brown hair that defied all promises made by thickening shampoos. Once on the ward, the most intimidating thing about me would surely be the syringe in my hand.
All my worries gathered in a scrum and elbowed for attention. You’ll get stabbed with a plastic fork. You’ll f*ck up some poor man’s medication and give him a seizure. Your coworkers will treat the patients cruelly and you’ll be too chickenshit to report them. Amber’s stupid redneck boyfriend will pick today to show up and cause drama, and you won’t be there to rescue her.
Fucking Amber. My f*cking sister whom I f*cking loved.
I’d loved her from the moment I first held her as a baby, when I was five, but I wouldn’t be here—taking a job that frightened me in this nowhere corner of the state—if it weren’t for her. Her and my nephew Jack in that grubby little house on that grubby little block, thirty minutes’ drive from Larkhaven. If I wasn’t around to check in on them, nobody else would be doing the job. Nobody except Amber’s awful boyfriend or ex-boyfriend or ex-fiancé or whatever she was calling him this week. Jack’s father, she was seventy percent sure. When she was mad at him it dropped to ten percent, soared to ninety-nine whenever they reconciled. She’d turned into our mom. Same temper, same lousy taste in men; a too-young mother prone to impulsive, dramatic mistakes. Our mom had worked two jobs and treated dating like the night shift. Treated dating like playing the lottery, always imagining, This guy will be the one to lift me out of this shithole. She’d never been a lucky one, but you couldn’t fault her determination, putting in the hours at the singles’ bars, upping her odds.
I’d basically raised Amber from when I was ten or so, been the one who got her up for school, fed her, cracked the whip on homework. Not that I did such a great job, considering she’d dropped out at sixteen. I only prayed she wouldn’t take yet another leaf out of our mom’s book and ask me to raise her kid . . . Though mainly because I knew, given how much I adored Jack, there was no question I’d choose to turn my life inside out and accept.
After I shut off the engine, I held the steering wheel and counted my breaths, waiting for my heart to slow, for those corset laces to go slack. They never did. I pocketed my keys and stepped into the cool, damp morning air. There was birdsong all around and the grounds smelled of spring, like the final weeks of school before the freedom of summer. I sucked it in, knowing my first day would be busy, and that I might not get outside again until the end of my twelve-hour shift.
My flats crunched across the gravel lot, to the door labeled Staff Entrance. I pushed the zero key on a bank of buttons.
“Yes?”
“This is Erin Coffey, for Dennis Frank.”
“Hang on.”
I waited in silence for a full minute or more, then the metal door swung in, and a man was smiling at me.
“Come on in,” he said. “Welcome to Larkhaven.”
I stood aside in the little windowless foyer, and the man I assumed was Dennis let the heavy door hiss shut before swiping another open with a keycard. He led me down a short hall and into a cramped break room with a kitchenette, tidy but cast in a sickly glow by the fluorescent bulbs.
Dennis looked about fifty, with gold-rimmed glasses and a professorial goatee, and overgrown salt-and-pepper hair. He wore scrubs, pale blue, and boat shoes. He seemed at once kind and exhausted, defeated and determined, with one of those expressive, guileless faces that told you everything he was feeling.
“Coffey?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Erin Coffey.”
“Oh, sorry, I meant, would you like some coffee?” To demonstrate, he filled a paper cup from a carafe on the counter. When I waved it away he added a packet of sugar and took a sip. He smiled. “Six thirty in the morning on your first day and no caffeine? We’d been hoping to find somebody superhuman for the day shift.”
“I had a cup on the drive over.” Plus, being here had me so jittery, more coffee would surely plunge me headlong into my own psychotic break, landing me in Larkhaven as a patient.
“Well, Erin Coffey, I’m Dennis Frank.” We shook. He paused to check a roster of names listed on a large whiteboard beside the door. “I’ll be showing you the ropes this morning, before I hand you off to one of the senior nursing staff. The nurses run this ward. You’ll see doctors around, of course, for groups and one-on-ones. But their offices are all here on Starling One. S1. Up on the secure floors, S2 and 3, where you’ll spend most of your time, it’s the nurses’ show.” He said it with a little air of false haughtiness.