Passage

He thought, You turned your pager off so Mandrake couldn’t page you, and no wonder you haven’t heard from Dr. Jamison. He pulled the pager out of his lab coat pocket and switched it on. It immediately began to beep. He went over to the phone to call the switchboard.

“Dr. Wright!” a voice said from the door, and a young Hispanic woman in pink scrubs burst into the room. “Are you Dr. Wright?” she said, breathing hard and holding her side. There was blood on her scrubs.

“Yes,” he said, slamming down the phone and hurrying over to her. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “I ran — ” she said, panting. “I’m Nina. Nurse Howard — there’s an emergency. You’ve got to come down to the ER.”

Vielle’s been hurt, he thought. “Did Dr. Lander send you?”

She shook her head, still trying to catch her breath. “Dr. Lander, she — Nurse Howard sent me. You need to come right away!”

Maisie, he thought. She’s coded again. “Is this about Maisie Nellis?”

“No!” she said, frustrated. “It’s Dr. Lander! Nurse Howard said to tell you it’s an emergency.”

He gripped her shoulders. “What about Dr. Lander? Is she hurt?” Nina gave a kind of whimper. “You said the ER?” Richard said and was out the door and over to the elevator, punching and repunching the “down” button.

“This guy came into the ER,” Nina said, following him, “and he must have been on rogue because all of a sudden, he pulled a knife—”

Richard punched the elevator button again, again. He glanced up at the floor lights above the door. It was on first. He took off running for the stairs with Nina on his heels, clutching her side. ” — and I don’t know what happened then,” she said, “it was all so fast.”

“Is Dr. Lander badly hurt?” Richard demanded, plunging down the stairs.

“I don’t know. There was all this blood. The security guard shot the guy.”

Down the stairs, through the walkway, across Medicine.

“Nurse Howard said to page you, and I did, but you didn’t answer, so then she said go get you. I came as fast as I could, but I went to the wrong wing—”

A metal ladder straddled the hallway, yellow tape barring the way in front of it.

“We can’t go this way,” Nina said. Richard burst through the tape and ran under the ladder and down the hall, sidestepping paint buckets and trampling the plastic drops.

“You’re not supposed to walk under a ladder,” Nina yammered right behind him. “It’s bad luck.” Into the service stairs, down to first, along the hall. And what if they’d already taken Joanna upstairs to ICU?

He burst through the side door, into the ER. Police everywhere, and the sounds of sirens in the distance, coming closer. Two black officers by the door, another officer talking to a man in pink scrubs, two more kneeling on the floor over by the desk, next to a body.

Not Joanna’s, Richard prayed. Not Joanna’s. She’s in one of the trauma rooms, he thought, and started across the ER. A security guard raised his gun, and a police officer stepped in front of Richard. “No one’s allowed in here.”

“He’s Dr. Wright. Nurse Howard sent for him,” Nina said. The officer nodded and stepped back, and Nina led the way quickly across the floor and into a trauma room. She pushed open the door.

He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. Joanna, sitting on an examining table, having her arm stitched up, turning her head to smile sheepishly at him as he came in. Or noise, activity, nurses hanging bags of blood, inserting tubes, doctors barking orders. And Vielle, stepping away from the examining table to explain Joanna’s condition, saying, “She’s going to be fine.”

Not this. Not a dozen people in blood-spattered scrubs, blood-covered gloves, standing back from the table, stunned and silent, none of them saying anything, no sound at all except the flatline whine of the heart monitor.

Not the resident, handing the paddles back to a nurse and shaking his head, and Vielle, clinging to Joanna’s limp white hand, saying, her voice rising sobbingly, “No, she can’t be! Hit her again!” Calm, professional Vielle sobbing, “Do something! Do something!”

The resident pulled his mask down. “It’s no use. We couldn’t save her.”

Couldn’t save her, Richard thought, and finally, finally looked at Joanna. She lay with her hair fanned out around her head, like Amelia Tanaka’s, but her brown hair was matted with blood, and there was blood on her mouth, on her neck, on her chest, blood everywhere. It stood out black-red against her white skin.

An airway had been inserted in her mouth, and there was blood on that, too. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing.

“I brought Dr. Wright,” Nina said inanely into the silence, and the resident turned to look at him, his face solemn.

“I am so sorry, Dr. Wright,” he said. “I’m afraid she’s gone.”

“Gone,” Richard repeated stupidly. The resident was right. She was gone. The body lying there, with its white, white skin and its unseeing eyes, was empty, abandoned. Joanna had gone.