She looked to the hospital roof. No Mullich. He couldn’t risk that. To show any inkling of interest in her would be stupid. Still, she couldn’t accept that it was over this soon. She hadn’t even warmed up in her run. She was about to ask for at least that. Before they took her.
But something changed within the van. The overhead sound ladle redirected its aim. The driver relaxed his shoulders and turned swiftly toward the wheel. The van’s weight shifted again, and Mendenhall stumbled back as the van sped away, the driver still craning his neck toward the other side, over the shoulder, arms rolling the wheel.
She felt abandoned, took a breath, turned, and ran along the trail to begin her descent. To look back, to show any interest, would have been fatal to this diagnosis. But this was not coincidence.
Coincidence has no place in the ER. When her mentor had told her this they had been examining an X-ray, a .22-caliber bullet inside a lung tumor.
Maybe Mullich had provided distraction. Others were trying what she was trying, had been almost from the start. But that would be coincidence, someone breaking through just now. Mendenhall increased her pace, gauging the downward slope. The sting of sunlight on her nape pushed her into the canyon while tire scuffs and dull shouts slowed her, lured her, almost spun her, just to look and see.
49.
Near the base of the canyon the asphalt trail became dust.
Mendenhall picked up a follower, heard the pop of running shoes behind her shift from hard to soft. Maybe it was just another runner using her for pace, getting set for a kick. They were on a lower ridge overlooking a housing tract. She risked one over-the-shoulder glance, a racer’s peek. Her trailer was smooth, swift, elusive, tracking her blind spot, sliding behind as though part of her shadow.
They dropped into the alluvial fan marking the trailhead. The switchbacks allowed her more glimpses, but she gathered nothing further. She didn’t turn and stop because she wanted this run to last as long as it possibly could, again feeling caught, finished. Would they use a net?
She took no rest and loped across the cul-de-sac. The tract was old enough to have grown trees, but its roads were wide and bowed and smooth, the roofs all black, the corners crisp, sidewalks fitted and even. The follower vanished. Immersed in this neighborhood, Mendenhall ran alone. But felt no relief.
In the ER, though predawn always brought the worst cases, each time of day held its own particular dread. Midafternoon was the most tragic, young deaths and self-inflictions from after-school malaise, the sorrowful domestic wounds, when those who don’t live alone feel most alone.
She rarely saw this light, only ran it on the hospital trails. The quiet houses and empty streets seemed to move while she ran in place, all coming to her. God, she thought. How have I become so crazy?
The homes, they could be tombs. She imagined a counterpart for herself in Reykjavik running toward a midnight sun. But that didn’t work. She was still the last person on Earth.
50.
The bus proved a bad idea. Mendenhall realized this after the third stop. She could see downtown, the gray haze of the ocean beyond. The distant foothills opposite appeared to hover in the smog. Somewhere in that vague gray-and-white triangle the university nestled. After more than ten years, she knew the city only in relation to County and Mercy. The university sprawled behind County. The bus rumbled and stopped in increments, seemed to gain no distance, nothing more than walking speed. She had never ridden the bus. Her patients rode the bus.
Only five passengers rode with her. The driver’s elbows were locked, his head angled, jaw chewing nothing. Mendenhall figured his next dose of meth would have to be in less than one hour. She noted his sunglasses case clipped above the side window—his stash.
The passenger across from her was passed out, his head against the window, lips squished open and drooling. His ear was yellow, and a tremor quivered the lobe. He would be dead within the year. She might see him die.
The thickset woman with the housecleaner’s basket was pregnant, maybe knew this, probably didn’t. Mendenhall thought to go sit next to her and tell her, ask her how it felt. The woman’s black hair was luxurious, curling with life. Her set jaw and swallow reflex fought tears. Maybe she was sitting there realizing her condition for the first time.
Nearby, an ambulance siren blared and drew closer. The bus lurched to the right and halted. From someplace farther, another ambulance siren began. This one sounded from all directions. Its blue and red reflections caught against a high glass building. The first ambulance passed the bus. Its speed indicated urgency, not a drunk with the DTs, not an invalid with low BP, not anything precautionary. The engine had that high grind of overdrive, chassis in full tilt. She wanted to go with it, to quit what she was trying to do and relieve herself with work.
Another siren called, far ahead, along the bus route, maybe coming from County. One of the three reached its destination, the siren making that final whoop. She always heard it as a question.
Mendenhall hurried to the front of the bus.
“Not a stop,” said the driver. “Go back.” He started spinning the wheel, ready to swing the bus into traffic.
She nodded to his stash, eyed it, eyed him.
He cranked open the door. She exited with the sound of the brake release, the driver’s stare hard between her shoulders. She jogged to the center of the sidewalk, avoided looking back when she heard the driver yell, “Hey!”
Only seconds later did she think his call could be meant for someone else, someone dismounting after her, someone following her. She turned and scanned the sidewalk for anyone who could’ve been one of the other passengers, one in back she hadn’t seen or recorded. The people seemed oddly static, not pedestrians, a mix of loitering and exchange. It all felt pooled, as in a marketplace.
Swaths of the city proper were like this, she knew, where most of the population waited. For nothing possible, really, except death. Not for someone, not a lottery ticket, not opportunity, not life. Sunny parts shown in movies and TV, stuck in the minds of travelers and cynics, were insignificant slivers within the morass.
She got the morass. That was what came to her. That was what she found without trying, jumping on a bus with a certain number and location on it. She hated most movies, most TV, most books.
She hated what she’d become—a person who loved an awful job, a hideous job. A person who worked as a voyeur, who was paid to peer and invade, see the undignified ways people die. Mendenhall never cured them or even really treated them. The doctors—and nurses—beyond her did that, the noble stuff.
Even now, she thought, look what I’m doing.
The ambulances went silent. The mingling crowd along the sidewalks gave no sense of event, no direction toward any of the emergencies. Mendenhall felt aimless, useless; she longed for the ER. People sang so many bad songs about this city, so many misconceptions and preconceptions. But she knew one good song about it. One that measured the hardness of dreams, dead grass, and concrete spaces, cut the ideals, and then gave the refrain “Don’t you wish you could be here, too? Don’t you wish you could be here, too?”
She regained focus and decided to use Mullich’s money for cabs.
The boulevard was jammed. She grew heated just looking at the traffic, saw no cabs. Did this city even have cabs? No one around her had ever hailed a taxi. That she could see.