Rushing to St. Jude

The wiper blades on Rosa’s civic slapped against the glass with a wet, rhythmic shudder. Water sheeted across Route 4 in gray ribbons, pooling in the ruts left by tractor-trailers and spitting against the rusted wheel wells.

Maya sat with her knees pressed into the glove compartment. Her right thumb dug hard into the soft meat of her left palm, the crescent bite of her nail anchoring her against the lurch of the transmission. She had not taken off her blue graduation sash. The satin was rumpled, pinned against her collarbone by the stiff nylon of the seatbelt.

“Breathe, May,” Rosa said. She did not take her eyes off the yellow median line. “Three miles.”

“The nurse had a clipboard,” Maya whispered. Her voice was flat, dried down to chalk. “I heard paper turning. They don’t turn pages if it’s over.”

“She said critical. That means working.”

Rosa swung the wheel sharp into the lower ambulance entrance of St. Jude Memorial. The headlights cut through the cloudburst, catching the slick brick arches and the green illuminated bay doors. A pair of exhaust vents on the roof churned steam into the cold rain. Rosa killed the engine beside a yellow curb marked for hospital staff only. Neither of them spoke about the ticket that would follow.

The automatic double doors parted with a pneumatic hiss, admitting them into a wall of heated air that smelled of floor bleach, damp wool, and iodine.

A woman sat four rows deep in the waiting room under three buzzing fluorescent tubes. She wore a faded red floral apron over a cardigan, gray cotton dusted with dry baking flour down the stomach. Her head hung low between her rounded shoulders, her wedding band clicking softly against a paper cup of cold water.

“Karen,” Maya said.

The stepmother jerked upright. Her eyes were rimmed in red, her lower lids puffy and swollen purple. When she saw Maya, her hands began to scrub against the denim of her knees, back and forth in rapid, useless arcs.

“You came,” Karen breathed. “Maya, you came.”

“Where is he?”

“The lab. They took him through the back doors with the red line.” Karen reached out a hand, hesitated an inch from Maya’s sleeve, and let it fall limp into her lap. “He was on the linoleum. We hadn’t even cleared the counter from the morning. He just—he dropped like an axe fell on him.”

A few yards away, tucked into the shadow between two soda machines, a tall boy sat flat on the linoleum with his long legs pulled tight to his chest. Tyler wore his navy warmup pants and a gray t-shirt turned inside out. His duffel bag lay spilled beside him, three basketball practice cones rolling loose on the tiles. His fingers were locked around his left wrist, spinning a black silicone band over and over until the skin beneath turned pale.

He did not look up when the doors slid open again to let two paramedics wheel an empty gurney out into the storm.

“He went after you,” Karen whispered, her throat catching on a dry click. “You backed out of the gravel, and he took three steps into the yard. He tried to call your name, Maya. Then he went down on his knees.”

Maya stared down at the apron, at the white streak of King Arthur flour pressed into the woman’s hip. “He was fine an hour ago. He was laughing. He had his hands on Tyler.”

“He wasn’t fine,” Karen said. A small, ragged sob broke through her mouth, and she pressed both fists into her cheeks to stop it. “He hasn’t been fine since March. His cardiologist took his keys six weeks ago, Maya. He wasn’t supposed to walk up the porch steps alone.”

A pair of metal doors swung open down the hall, and a physician in green scrubs stepped out into the corridor with a clipboard beneath his arm.