The Queen of Hearts(64)
Neither Emma nor James was currently working; Emma had just finished the first night shift, and James was off today. So whatever was going down was not Zadie-specific, then.
“Ah, Mrs. Lukeson,” said Dr. Elsdon. “Excellent. I will turn our third years over to you for the time being. Kids, I’ll see you in a few. Hang tight and try not to worry.” With that admonishment, which was of course the most worrying thing yet, he spun around and strode back toward the emergency department.
“What the heck’s going on?” I whispered to Emma and James as they timidly trailed Mrs. Lukeson. Unlike her boss, she was not endowed with hypersonic energy; her pace was glacial. She glanced backward and gave us a poker-faced appraisal before she said, “Dr. Elsdon said you can wait in the conference room. He wants you to go through some of those old papers in there.”
We waited until she deposited us, along with the threatened stack of journals and xeroxed papers, in a rectangular carpeted room containing a medium-sized table before we began conferring again in heated whispers.
“What exactly are we supposed to do with these?” Emma muttered, flicking aside something entitled A Decision Rule for the Use of the D-dimer Assay in Suspected Pulmonary Thromboembolism.
“Right,” I said. “We can’t read all these. And how did you guys wind up in here? Did anybody say what was wrong?”
“No. We finished the lecture with you, and then we went back into the ED because I had to finish some charting,” Emma contributed. “James went with me because he wanted to observe before his shift tonight. So we were sitting at the doctors’ area behind the main ED desk, and she”—she motioned toward the open conference room door, through which Mrs. Lukeson could be seen at her desk presiding over the entrance to the department’s offices—“came up to us and said we had to follow her. No explanation at all.”
James looked pensive. “There was a lot of commotion over by the trauma room. Even for the ER, I mean.”
“Oh yeah,” I remembered. Micah had been standing there, looking up—guiltily?—when I beckoned to him, a faint impression, which I’d attributed to him being so hard to find. But why was he lurking outside a trauma room?
“Well, why in the world would they want to hide a trauma from us?” wondered Emma. “Zadie and I were on the trauma service a couple months ago. We were in and out of those rooms constantly.”
An answer to that question—an unpleasant answer—was pushing itself into the margins of my consciousness, but I shoved the thought away, reluctant to give voice to it. Emma must have been thinking along the same lines, though, because she said, “Unless it was someone we know.”
“Well, how would they even know who we know?” I asked, realizing a split second too late the answer was obvious. One thing bound the three of us together; since this was our first day on the rotation, Dr. Elsdon and the rest of the ED staff had very little knowledge of us personally.
But of course he knew we were all third-year medical students.
We thought about this silently for a moment, and then James said, in an inappropriately positive tone, “It might be somebody on the faculty. Or somebody famous, even.”
Of course it was possible some celebrity had been cruising around Louisville unheralded and managed to get bashed up in some fashion. But why would such an event require the hasty removal of only the third-year students, leaving everyone else to gawk away? This seemed unlikely.
We amused ourselves for the next hour as best we could, largely ignoring the option of reading the elderly emergency medicine journals, although we did thumb through some of them to look for gruesome photos. At last we heard the phone ring in the outer chamber of the ED offices, and unlike with previous phone calls, Mrs. Lukeson gave this one away by flicking a quick glance in our direction as she lowered her voice to answer. We could not discern much.
“. . . yes, yes, fine, still sitting . . . How did . . . ? Oh no. Oh, poor . . . Yes, I’ll . . . Oh dear. Okay. Yes. Yes, of course.”
She hung up the receiver and stood, smoothing her purple skirt, and then ambled in her poky fashion down the hall toward us. For once, she did not look fussy. She looked . . . sad.
“Dr. Elsdon is on his way to get you,” she said, not meeting our eyes. “He’ll be here in five minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-six
NO EASY WAY TO SAY THIS
Autumn, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky
There were two ways to reach the academic offices of the Department of Emergency Medicine. Most people—employees, civilians, visitors, mailmen—used the front entrance, a set of glass doors facing a large foyer with elevators and fake ficuses and directories to all the various other medical departments in this building. Mrs. Lukeson reigned at her desk in an open space with several carpeted hallways branching off behind her, one of them leading to the conference room in which the three of us waited. The less conventional means of approach to the department involved the subterranean tunnel coming from the main building of the hospital. It was ancient, with a concrete floor and tenuous fluorescent lighting, and seemed to narrow imperceptibly as you traveled it, so by the time you neared the end, you were somewhat panicked even if you’d not previously considered yourself claustrophobic. In the million years or so in which it had been in existence, no one had ever thought to attack it with a duster, so the ceilings were festooned with creepy swaths of cobwebs. It was one of a series of tunnels referred to as the “Catacombs.”