After Hours (InterMix)(3)
Dennis and I had spoken a few times already. I’d gone through the interview process at an affiliated hospital back home, recruited via a job fair. Dennis had been present, if only as a kind voice coming through a conference line. He was a veteran nurse himself, turned shift manager and administrator, and he’d been working at Larkhaven for fifteen years, most of them on the locked ward, the unit reserved for the most dangerous patients. What shocking things had he seen in all that time? What shocks were in store for me? My invisible corset gave a mean squeeze.
“So we’re standing in the most important room in the building,” Dennis said, swiveling, gesturing with outstretched arms. “The coffee room. Some argue the smoking patio is more important, but to be fair, it’s not technically a room. Do you smoke?”
I shook my head.
“Give it a week,” he teased, but the joke was playful, not cynical. “Actually where we are now is called the sign-in room. Everyone comes in, writes their name in the appropriate slot so we know what their duty is for the day. You’ll be signing in as a general LPN, so easy-peasy, everyone will know to find you in the usual places throughout your shift. But our orderlies, for example, might sign in for general duties or be assigned for close obs on a difficult patient, so everyone will see they’re busy with a specific resident.”
He grabbed a dry-erase marker for me, and tapped the whiteboard. I printed my first name carefully in a free slot in the nurses’ section, and my in and out times, the same number for both columns—seven to seven. Dennis told me to write nurse shadow in the duties column, so I did, picturing myself as a mysterious Batman-like figure in a dark gray catsuit, black cape, stethoscope glinting in the moonlight. Nurse Shadow. A useful vision, lending me the illusion of unflagging competence until the day I’d feel it for real.
Dennis led me next to a storage room, eyeballed me and said, “Definitely a small.” He slid a bin from a shelf and handed me a set of butter yellow scrubs.
“The women’s lockers are through there,” he said, pointing to a door. “There’s a hamper for the dirties, and you can grab a fresh set from in here each morning. Yellow for the nurses and techs, green for the orderlies, blue for senior staff and managerial scum like me. Plus the classic white coats for the doctors and therapists. The residents in this ward wear gray. The residents in other programs are allowed to wear their own clothes, but at Starling we keep a dress code. Some say it’s depressing, makes it feel like a prison. But our patients do best when things are predictable—egalitarian, if you will—and we’ve found the uniforms help.”
“Right.”
“Bring your own lock if you’ve got valuables, but don’t worry if you don’t have one today. We’re all too tired to steal much of anything.”
I didn’t own anything of value. My cell phone was six years old, practically a brick, and I hadn’t worn any jewelry. If anyone swiped my car keys, they’d wind up driving off in a ’93 Ford Tempo, more orange than teal these days from the rust. The thing had been cranky since I’d inherited it from my uncle in my junior year of high school, and the only force holding it together now was a kind of willful, joyless, made-in-Michigan pride. The thief was welcome to it.
I changed quickly and met Dennis back in the hall.
“Every morning at ten to seven we have a hand-off meeting in the lounge,” Dennis said as he led me into a stairwell with another swipe of his keycard. We hiked up two flights, then banged a left down an echoing corridor. “The overnight staff catch the day crew up with anything that’s gone on. Ditto in the evenings. Bit old-school, but that’s kind of the Larkhaven way, you’ll find. Usually takes five minutes or less. Then at seven we start waking the residents.”
With a combination of a swipe and deft punching at a keypad, Dennis preceded me into a more welcoming hallway, lined on one side with tall windows, weak morning sun glinting off its clean linoleum floor. Another swipe and code and we were inside a nurses’ station, with a counter and a wired glass window for handing out meds, lots of shelves arranged tidily with boxes and equipment, a scrub sink, and a half-dozen filing cabinets.
The station looked onto a plain room with beige couches and chairs, two big windows; a high-ceilinged space lit equally with overhead bulbs and sunshine, as square and adequate and inoffensive as a Saltine.
There was a patient dressed in the requisite gray in the lounge, leaning a hip on the deep windowsill with his large arms crossed over his equally large chest. He stared over his shoulder into the yard beyond the glass, a placid expression suggesting he hadn’t noticed the cage of white bars marring his view. His head was shaved to brown stubble, and even from twenty feet away I could make out the scar running from beneath his ear down his neck. More an inmate than a patient, he seemed to me, fresh from a brawl in the exercise yard. I eyed the glass of the nurses’ station window, suddenly doubting its un-shatterability. Jesus, what on earth have I signed up for?