The Next Person You Meet in Heaven(32)

“We ain’t done yet,” Eddie said.





Annie Makes a Mistake


She is twenty-eight. It’s been eight years since the baby’s death. Today is the anniversary. She switches to an afternoon shift at the hospital and, after the morning rush hour, drives to the cemetery.

It is misty and damp. As she walks to the grave, she hears the gravelly drag of her feet. When she reaches the marker, she steps on the grass, lightly, as if not to disturb things. She reads Laurence’s name and the etched dates that declare his brief time on earth:

FEBRUARY 4–FEBRUARY 7

The dash in between seems a truer measure.

“I wish I knew how to pray better,” she whispers. “I wish I knew what to ask for you.”

For the millionth time, she tells herself she wasn’t really a mother, she never changed a diaper, never held a bottle, never rocked her son to sleep. She feels almost foolish, locked out of the very identity she is grieving.

The traffic is heavy going back to the hospital. She is agitated from the visit, and reaches into her purse for an anti-anxiety pill. Normally she takes these at night, but she reminds herself she has a whole shift to go, and she’d like to get through it with minimal drama. Besides, if this day doesn’t call for some relief, what does?

“Guess what?” a fellow nurse says when she arrives. “Terry called in sick.”

“No one is covering?”

“Nope. It’s you and me.”

The next six hours are rushed, covering multiple rooms. Annie doesn’t sit once. The call lights keep flicking on, and the two nurses scramble to deal with them. Annie grabs plastic pouches of medications earmarked for each patient and fastidiously administers them, working her way down the hall.

When she reaches room 209K/L the patient on the right is sleeping, a thin, older man connected to a feeding tube. Annie finds the pill crusher and opens the medication pouch, preparing to administer it by syringe.

“Nurse, I need help here,” the man in the next bed yells. He is bald and heavyset, his belly lifting the sheet. “I can’t get comfortable on this pillow.”

“I’ll be right there,” Annie says.

“I can’t sleep with this pillow.”

“Just a second.”

“Can you get me another pillow?”

Annie keeps crushing the medicine. She gets the purified water to dissolve it.

“I need to sleep,” the man whines.

Annie exhales. She presses the call button, hoping the other nurse will come, but she knows the buttons have been lit all afternoon.

“Come on,” the large man says.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Damn it! That guy can wait! He’s out cold!”

Annie is half shaking from the man’s screaming and half dragging from the medication she took. She rubs her forehead and pulls her eyebrows together, as if squeezing out a headache, then swishes the crushed pill in the water and takes it up with the syringe.

“My neck is so stiff,” the man moans.

Annie places the syringe in the tube port. She fastens the tip tightly and fingers the clasp to allow the medicine to flow into the patient’s body.

“COME ON, NURSE!”

Of all the days, Annie thinks, avoiding the man by staring at the pouch’s medical label. She blinks. Something’s wrong. The date on the pouch. It’s not today. Of all the days. Today’s date she knows, February 7, the anniversary of the worst thing that ever happened to her. The date on the label is February 3. As she opens the clasp, her brain races through an equation. Four days. What could change in four days? She sees a notation on the label, ER, meaning “extended release”—a pill you would swallow, never crush. But this man can’t swallow anymore. Maybe he could when they wrote this up—

She jerks the syringe out of the port.

“Damn it, Nurse, this pillow is—”

“SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!”

Annie doesn’t hear the words she just screamed. Her mind is fixated on what she almost did: inject time-release pain narcotics into a feeding tube—which would have administered the entire drug at once, a drug meant to release over twelve hours. She could have seriously harmed the sleeping man. She might have killed him.

“You can’t tell a patient to shut up!” the fat man yells. “I’m going to report you. I’m going to make sure you—”

Annie can’t hear him. Her breath fills her ears. She can feel her heartbeat nearly burst through her ribs. She grabs the syringe and the used plastic pouch, and she runs down the hall and whips them into the bin, feeling like a criminal trying to hide the telltale weapon.

She takes a two-week leave of absence, even though the hospital doesn’t ask for it. When she returns, she vows a tighter focus than ever on her patients. No distractions. No personal issues. Do one thing right, Annie, she tells herself. One thing right.





The Fourth Lesson




The ground beneath Eddie and Annie turned muddy and wet. There were oil barrels up a hill and bamboo huts burning everywhere.

“What is this place?”

“War.”

“When? Where?”

Eddie sighed. “War is the same every when and where.”

He stepped forward, feet squishing. “This is the Philippines. World War II.”