“Listen, George, my offer that I made yesterday still stands. You should go over to my apartment and lie down for a couple of hours. And have a proper shower and change your clothes. Frankly, if you did that you’d be doing us all a favor.”
George looked over at Paul, and he was smiling. George appreciated Paul’s attempt to defuse the tension with a bit of humor, and as soon as Paul mentioned lying down, George suddenly felt an overwhelming fatigue come over him.
“You know, Paul, I may just do that. I don’t think much is going to change here for the next few hours.”
“No. The plan is to reduce the drugs over the next day or so and bring her out of this sleep. Everything seems to be nice and stable. My sense is that she knows you’ve been here, George, I’m sure of it. But I imagine you want to be in good shape when she fully wakes up.”
“Yes, you’re right. Maybe I will take a couple of hours.”
“Good. I’ll get a cab for you. I wrote the address down, and here’s a key.”
Paul handed over what George needed.
“Paul, how are you feeling? I’m sorry I never asked.”
“Me, oh, I’m fine.”
In truth, Paul’s left hand was causing him a lot of discomfort, but he wasn’t going to complain, given how lucky he had been to walk away from the accident with nothing worse than a mild concussion from his head hitting the roof of the car — like Pia, he, too, had been knocked unconscious for a time — a couple of broken fingers, and bruising on his chest and thighs.
Paul had spent enough nights in the ER dealing with the aftermath of car crashes to know that there was often a strange randomness to the severity of injuries drivers and passengers suffered. He had seen pictures of crashes that left cars an unrecognizable tangle of mangled metal, which was how Pia’s VW looked, and killed three, yet a fourth person escaped with only a broken leg. In another instance, one he had thought about frequently since this accident with Pia, the driver had died while the man sitting next to him had been left without so much as a scratch. It was so random as to be astonishing. It also made him feel slightly guilty, considering how banged up Pia had been.
Paul remembered fastening his own seat belt, which certainly had been a good idea, and that Pia had not fastened hers. He even remembered trying to get her to do it, only to be rewarded with a dirty look. But he discovered later that Pia had been wearing her belt, and thank God, for without it, she would certainly have died. He couldn’t remember her actually fastening it, and wondered when she would have thought to do it, as fixated she was on catching the van from Nano carrying the injured cyclist back to the ER. He was very thankful that she’d paused long enough to take the precaution that saved her life. There were other things about the accident that Paul had trouble remembering, which made him recognize that he apparently had a certain amount of post-traumatic amnesia.
“All right!” George said finally. “I’m out of here for a few hours. You’ll check on her, won’t you?”
“Absolutely,” Paul said. He gave George a reassuring pat on the back. “Every time I have a free moment in the ER, I’ll pop up here and make sure all is in order. You have a nap. You deserve it.”
“Thanks,” George said. He smiled weakly, gave Pia’s leg a squeeze through the sheet, and left the room.
Paul watched George go, then, as he did every time he came into Pia’s room, looked around at the ostentatiously large displays of flowers that Zach Berman had been sending over from Nano on a daily basis. Paul had taken it upon himself earlier that day to throw out the first huge bouquet, which had seen better days. Berman himself had yet to put in an appearance, and neither had any other company official, although Pia’s new colleague tech, Jason Rodriguez, had been to see her. Paul noted that Pia’s direct boss, Mariel Spallek, hadn’t been in either, but he was not surprised, given what Pia had said about her.
What was really bothering Paul, however, was a feeling about Nano and the accident, made worse by the fact that no one from Nano’s administration had shown up. Try as he might, Paul could not remember much just before the accident nor immediately after, which was why he thought he’d suffered traumatic amnesia. All he remembered was waking up in the ambulance with the siren screaming, and this lack of memory left him with a vague feeling of foreboding that kept nagging at him, making him question if it truly had been an accident, and if it hadn’t, whether there was some complicity on the part of Nano.
This was Paul’s second day back at work, but with these thoughts, he was finding it hard to focus on the ER. On top of that, he was worried about Pia, despite what he had said to George. He hoped to God that she would be the same person when she woke up. But even that had a slight downside, having come to understand her mild paranoia, her tenacity of purpose, and how prone she was to conspiracy theory. What was worrying him was the fear that when she woke up, she would resume her search for answers to all the questions she had about Nano, only with even more vigor, especially if she shared Paul’s questions about what caused their car to go off the road.
Paul had initially told the police about his vague sense that the accident had not been an accident, meaning Pia’s vehicle might have been forced off the road. But he recognized that this idea was not given a lot of credence, and he could understand why. Then a day after the accident, two officers had quizzed Paul more closely, especially on the reasons why Pia was driving so fast since it had been ascertained she’d been traveling at approximately fifty-five mph in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. Paul had been honest and had explained that he and Pia were trying to intercept a van that had taken a patient before the individual could be loaded into an ambulance, a fact that the police had confirmed. Paul had also told them about the previous incident in the ER involving the Chinese runner and Mariel Spallek coming to collect him and sign him out against medical advice. Paul’s natural reticence and caution kept him from mentioning any of Pia’s suspicions about Nano, as he didn’t know how much credence to give them himself.
When the two officers returned to the ER the following day to ask further questions, Paul was glad he had been circumspect the day before. The officers asked him repeatedly about the supposedly planned intervention with the van carrying the cyclist — why did they deem it necessary to dangerously race around Boulder, chasing a man who had turned down the offer of help from an ambulance from the Boulder Memorial Hospital? Why were they so concerned about this one patient? The police seemed less interested in the possibility that the VW had been rear-ended on the road than the fact that Pia had been speeding, particularly because, according to them, the VW showed no evidence of having been hit by another vehicle, as banged up it was. Paul knew Pia would be far less sanguine about accepting the line of questioning than he was, but he was being honest. The fact remained that he truly couldn’t remember much at all about what had actually happened.