Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(29)

Between crises, I tried to call my parents. The cellular lines were jammed. No one was getting through. There was talk of other cities. Other planes. The entire system was shut down. Nothing flying. Nothing landing.

The world was chaos, but inside myself, I did what I had to. I cut. I sewed. I made decisions. For twenty-four insane hours, I was order inside madness.

A nurse named Lola dumped a bag of ice into the metal sink and turned on the water.

“Thank you,” I said, but she was already gone.

The parade of casualties had slowed, but no one had time for niceties when the world was falling apart. My eyes were burning. My knees were painfully swollen. When the sink was full, I stuck my head in it. The cold shocked my mind clear.

When I pulled my head out of the ice water, someone put a towel in my hands. I assumed it was Lola, but then he spoke with his deep Mexican accent.

“Stay still.”

Fingers on the inside of my wrist.

“I’m fine, Roberto.”

He didn’t answer while he counted. The bright fluorescents had a density all their own, and the sage green of the tile walls was loud against the soft blues of the linoleum floor. Outside the scrub room, staff ran past the windows. I needed to help them.

“You’re tachy,” he said, letting go of my wrist. “But better than I expected.”

I ran the towel through my hair. Dr. García was five foot five with a head of thick black hair. He had the wide cheeks and full lips of his Mixtec ancestors.

“I’m fine. How many are in triage?”

“You need to rest.”

“I told you I was fine.”

“No one bathes in ice water when they’re fine.” I was about to argue, but he cut me off. “Go take a nap before I write you up. And then we’re going to talk about your future.”

He had the power to fail me out. He wouldn’t, but I was tired and my face must have registered shock or disappointment, because he responded.

“You’re too good at this, St. John. Cardiac surgery is a waste of your talent.”

“What? Wait.”

My beeper went off, startling me. I tilted it to see the grey-and-black screen. It was my parents’ house, but not the code they used for emergencies.

“My mother.”

“We can talk next week.” García said, snapping the towel out of my hands. He tossed the towel into the hamper on his way out.

I flipped open my phone and called her. For the first time in dozens of tries, it connected.

“Caden.”

It wasn’t my mother.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Kent. I’m your father’s financial advisor twenty years now.”

I scanned my memory. I’d met him. Business dinners at the house. Holiday cocktails. He’d tried to get me to buy term life insurance. “Why are you in my parents’ house?”

“I have all the keys…”

“Where’s my mother?” I recognized the hum of the refrigerator in the background, but only when it clicked off.

“I called from my number, but you weren’t picking up.” Kent Whoever had a desperate edge to his voice.

“I asked you a question. Where’s my mother?”

Someone else murmured in my kitchen.

“We don’t know,” Kent said. “We were wondering if you’d seen them.”

“We?” I didn’t know why I latched onto the pronoun. Nothing could have been less important, but that was the most comprehensible straw to grasp, because as far as I was concerned, my father was somewhere in the city, sewing people back together, and my mother was home, on 87th Street, far away from the fallen towers.

More murmurs from my kitchen. Their kitchen. The kitchen I thought of when I thought of home. I was ten steps behind, still wrestling with taking a nap or demanding Garcia tell me what the fuck he meant about my future.

“My… we…” Kent shook the shit out of his head. “It doesn’t matter. I have… I had an office in the North Tower.”

I don’t care why is he telling me this why isn’t he dead but he’s in the house…

“And I was late,” Kent continued. “But your parents were on time.”

“Of course they were on fucking time.” I snapped up this lonely coherent straw, but that was the last one I’d get. “And you were late, so you’re in their house calling me to tell me what?”

“Have you heard from them since the attack?”

“No. The lines are jammed.”

“There’s no need to panic.”

“I’m not panicked, Kent.”

“There are posters all over the city.”

I hadn’t been outside the hospital in thirty hours. Something was happening. Something inky black, dropping into my clear mind, was curling into the calm waters, wider and wider. Soon, there would be no discrete color in the solution. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Can you check admitting lists?”

“For—”

—who?

The reality of the world clicked with the state of my little life. My parents. Kent’s office. The call from their house. I knew who I was checking the other hospitals’ lists for, and I knew why.