David Farris - Lie Still: A Novel of Suspense

A N O V E L O F S U S P E N S E

For Kendra

MY ROCK, MY OXYGEN

Contents

All she said was, Doctor, hes turning blue. She spoke

That was almost seven years ago.

My having crawled into Glory, Arizona, where I met Henry

Here on the plains my work hours come to

me

Since Henry, since escaping Arizona with my hide and little

From here in Nebraska, way beyond being too late, its

Walter Bryants warning about his bleak future as a surgeon

There are rules, maxims, and Lessons for Life to be

On my first Friday night, years ago, in the Quiet

Hundreds of weekends ago Adrienne sent me to one of

Timingusually bad timingis, logically, the lifeblood of emergency

Henry Rojelio, my asthmatic unfortunate from Glory, on the morning

Here in Hooker, besides watching

thunderstorms while Im on call

Hoacham, Nebraska, Scenic Hub of

Agriculture for the Republican Valley,

Four weeks ago I did an odd thing: a nine

Three weeks ago in Othello I met Fred Sommers.

Fred

After a few years of ER work here on the

Dad had a spill a couple of weeks ago.

Since

Annie Parrott dubbed last Wednesday in the Othello Clinic Minor

From the time I could walk, I got to tag

Figuring Id try to clear my head with a workout

I did not go back to sleep in the lecture,

The only possible conclusion was easily reached, but, like a...

My descent to Phoenix was semiconscious; staring; blinking at the

Hooker, two censuses ago, was a town of 10,300

souls.

H E N RY RO J E L I O , DAY O N E

All she said was, Doctor, hes turning blue. She spoke the words softly, quickly into my ear. I turned to look, expecting a grin. All I got, though, was backside, hurrying away to the exam bay, like a game of tag.

Ive relived it a million times. It wasnt a game, it was a play. A stage whisper blurted by a vanishing actress. She knew her audience. She told me the patient was cyanotic

cyan-colored, like icebut the delivery had its own message: I may be new here, but Im not panicked. Ive done thisbefore; Ill do it again. On TV she would have stood up straight and tall in the center of the ER and ceremonially announced just short of a shout, Doctor! The patient is acro-cyanotic. Come stat! Writers love the word stat. Clinicians only use it when theyre pissed off. Stat is Latin for hurry the fuck up.

Anyway, thats how it started. Henry, Day One.

She got exactly the response she wanted. On cue, I thought, Bullshit. I probably snorted. Robin Benoit was a nurse. I knew well the common doctorly chauvinisms about nurses as diagnosticians.

In all the retelling, the reliving of the openingfor the 2

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other doctors, the family, my closest friends, my parents, the police, the lawyers, and over and over for myselfI have always admitted that I hesitated, though only for a few seconds.

Dont misunderstand me. I would never let a patient lie there starving for oxygen for even a millisecond, no matter whose ego is on the line. But I did not believe thirteen-year-old Henry Rojelio really could have been blue. Not ten minutes earlier he and I had been talking about baseball and his crooked penis. He was not that physically sick.

Nor did my hesitation make one whit of difference. The record will support that. Five seconds was not long enough to have mattered. But the issue has never laid down and died.

Professional machismo looks lousy in the hindsight of self-recrimination.

I was on the phone. I ended the call, abruptly, then sat there with a vacuum-tube stare long enough to show that I wasnt impressed and certainly wasnt panicked either. This from the rules Id learned early on: Never run. For punctua-tion I took a last gulp from my can of Squirt and made a point of finding my stethoscope. Wheres my fucking stethoscope? I remember saying out loud. I was annoyed.

Whether the patients cyanosis is real or imaginary, its a pain in the ass for all concerned. I patted all my pockets, then found it looped over my shoulders. All this may have added five seconds to the downtime. That could not have been critical. I sauntered after Robin. I didntI wouldnt

believe her. Five seconds.

Though new to me, Henry had been a regular in the Glory ER. His chartwhich I had dutifully read overwas into its fourth volume. At his worst he was only a moderately bad asthmatic. When I listened to his chest on admission he was not all that tight, and he was getting overaggressive treatment as it was. True blue was not possible.

I pushed open the door, smiling, stupidly optimistic that a doctorly presence would right the misdiagnosis and end the scurrilous rumors. It had worked before.

He was, however, lying oddly flat and straight, uncon-LIE STILL

scious and limp, and by-God blue all right. And starting to turn a mottled gray, which is worse than blue, because its what comes next.

I thought to turn around, not to run away, but to find the Resident-Who-Knew-What-to-Do. For almost all of my time tending patients, there had been somebody at least one year further along in training standing behind me, sheltering both the patient and me. Certainly Id signed on in little Glory to be The Doctor, but I had hoped to avoid conflagra-tion at least until the locals had come to trust me. I knew I was a good doctor despite anything they might have heard.

Theyd told me it was a quiet little ER in a quiet little town, and no one would bother me. Turns out, though, sickness is pervasive.

I was, I confess, paralyzed. Though not as long as they tried to imply. A second can seem so long. Panic, however ephemeral, looks bad. All my brain parts were going off at once, chattering and bickering. Hurry, think, hurry, think, hurry, think. Robin, bless her heart, spoke, coaching me. Is he breathing?

I put the back of my hand an inch under the boys nose, hoping for a tiny current or hint of warmth. Nothing was moving. Of course he wasnt breathing; thats why he was so goddamn blue. He was, though, a known malingerer. It said so in his chart. Maybe he was holding his breath. Id heard mothers swear their children would hold their breath long enough to turn blue, but Id never seen it. I didnt really believe it possible, but at that moment I was willing to believe in the Tooth Fairy if she could help. I dug a knuckle into his sternum, hard, and twisted it. Its one of the accepted bits of medical sadism we use to weed out fakers and wake up drunks. Henry, however, lay still.

He was dying or maybe already dead. He needed me to breathe for him. I looked for the bag. Every ER room in the world is supposed to have a breathing bag and mask in plain sight, ready to go, no glass to break in case of emergency.

Its usually hanging on the wall by the oxygen outlet. In Henrys room there was only a stripe of yellowed adhesive 4

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tape, loose at one end, no bag. The breathing bag had not been replaced from the last disaster, which, in this backwater, may have been years earlier.

I imagine there are times in every profession when you feel as though you are the last fledgling hawk or hawklet high up the rock wall in a canyon and its time to see if your upper extremities are functional or merely decorative. You sit on your ledge and look down and all around for as long as you can. Then you jump.

Just as Id done on vinyl dummies, only faintly fearful Id ever have to do it on flesh and mucus, I tilted his head back, pinched his nostrils, sealed my mouth over his, and blew in.