Free The Narcissist's Daughter by Craig Holden Page A

second) was pulling OT. She didn’t like to work with Ray but needed the extra money for Christmas bills. She held down hematology and the blood bank and when it was slow dozed on the donor couch in the back, but it wasn’t slow that night, it was a wild ride: a girl awake and blinking at us with her scalp torn cleanly and completely off by a windshield, a sickler in crisis, two infarcts, an OD, and a rule-out Reyes. And that was all prelude to the flight that brought in a nighttime janitor who’d gotten caught by the sleeve in a shredder. Word was he’d managed to reach his knife and cut through whatever flesh was left of his upper arm, the bone being broken through already, and that if he hadn’t done that it would have taken him all the way in. It brought to mind Brigman’s story about Ted, and later that would gnaw at me but then it didn’t have time—I was tied up there for an hour while Kathy cranked out units of blood and Ray ran all the other tests, jogging back and forth between Chemistry and Hematology.
    After that it slowed and I dozed until a code came down around four from the ICU. It was the janitor. The senior resident running it spoke his orders in a low calm voice—in the ICU at night everyone stayed pretty cool. I stood hands in pockets away from the foot of the bed, watching them compress the man’s chest and pump the bag while someone squirted conductant on the paddles and rubbed them together. Even then I was conscious of that place around me, its order and cleanliness. When the resident placed the paddles on the man’s chest and popped him, everyone paused a moment to watch the new green blip on the monitor.
    “Hey, you.” Joyce stood beside me. “How’ve you been?” Her skin was so dark that the lab coat she wore over her scrubs seemed to glow against it. It made me feel sick how good she looked.
    “All right.”
    She looked up and put her hand on the back of my arm. “I was just worried. I wanted us to have a chance to talk…after. You know. But it’s been so busy.”
    “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m a big boy.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I noticed that.” She squeezed me.
    “Bloods,” someone said, and they broke into motion again and I came into the circle of light and felt for a radial pulse.
    “It’s awfully thready,” a nurse said. “Can you?”
    It was there, a distant flowing, more a vibration than a pumping, but as long as I felt it at all, I knew. “It’ll come,” I said. “Just slow.”
    “Get it,” said the resident.
    I uncapped the needle of a gas syringe and aimed it into a gauze and shot out the excess heparin, then felt again. I pushed the needle in and felt it cut through gristle and flesh, adjusting it as it traveled toward that distant flow, that tiny tide. The blood that came was dark, the color of ripe black cherries, and hardly strong enough to push the plunger back, but it came.
    “Damn,” someone said.
    I sheathed and unscrewed the needle and capped the syringe and pushed it down into the glass of ice someone handed me, and left. In the hallway Joyce leaned into the ice machine.
    She said, “How’s your morning look?”
    “Pretty open.”
    “Buy you a drink?”
    “Okay.”
    I watched her walk back toward the unit. She’d taken off the lab coat and I could see all the contours of her round and substantial ass moving beneath the thin cotton of the scrubs.

    I took a booth at Sobecki’s instead of my usual spot at the bar. I’d just lit a smoke when the door opened and the tocking of footsteps approached across the wooden floor. Joyce wore a white sweater, a denim skirt, navy stockings, and clogs with wooden soles. She slid in across from me and smiled and lit a cigarette.
    “Special occasion,” I said, and she smiled. She took the tin of Quaaludes out of her purse and swallowed one and offered them to me, but I shook my head. Later, after a couple of drinks, she said, “I don’t need to sit in a bar all morning. Can we go