Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

“What’s happening?” Liz repeated. She looked from Asher to me. I kept hold of Thomas’s side so he wouldn’t flop around like a dying fish.

“He’s just having a seizure is all,” I said, trying to sound calm.

“What a shame,” Nathaniel said, his voice actually calm, no pretending. He squatted beside us, taking in the situation clinically. Asher gave me a worried look.

Liz’s mouth dropped in horror. She looked from Thomas to Nathaniel and then back again, and then reached over and shoved Nathaniel, hard. He fell back off his heels, onto his ass.

“You!” she exclaimed, stood abruptly—and then ran off.

I looked over to Asher for explanation, but he looked as bewildered as I was. He didn’t need me here—he was, after all, a doctor. I stood and chased after her.

“Liz? Liz!” Luckily, I’d worn flats. I dodged around the same people she had, the crowd that seemed to spring fully formed around any medical emergency. She drew up short outside an opening elevator door and rushed inside. I waved my hand to hold it just in time and followed her in.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, panting. We weren’t the only ones inside the elevator, just the only ones out of breath.

“I’ve got to get his pills,” she said, but her face was completely panicked. She looked flushed, beyond what the run should have done; sweat was showing through her dress’s armpits as she repeatedly hit the button for her floor.

“Pills for what?” You didn’t give seizing people pills.

She opened her mouth to tell me, then closed it resolutely again.

“I’m a nurse, remember?”

“You don’t understand.” She hit her floor button a few more times, like it would speed the elevator up.

I decided to try a calming tack. “Look, seizures happen all the time. Kids just get them. Sometimes no one even knows what causes them—and they go away on their own.”

Her head began shaking halfway through my explanation, as she held down the button for her floor. “It’s not that. You don’t understand!” she said, in a pleading voice.

“Then tell me—what’s going on?” I got the feeling it was something bigger than just Thomas’s illness, but whatever it was, it was no excuse for this. “Your son is back there. You need to go be with him. He needs you.”

The elevator rose, stopping on floor after floor, people shoving inside with us, our loud conversation and her radiating crazy making them regret their choice. “This isn’t right, Liz—” I put a hand out to stop her from holding the button down. “If you’re scared, don’t be—”

The elevator settled onto her floor and I tried to block the door bodily. “Let me go! You can’t help us!” she protested.

“I can if you’ll tell me!” I wanted to spill it all then—what I knew about Nathaniel’s past from Asher—but I didn’t dare. “Liz—”

She gave me another torn look, but she didn’t respond—and there was nothing else I could do without restraining her physically. I moved out of her way before she could elbow me aside, and she began running down the hall.

“You’ll regret this!” I shouted after her. Because how could she not? What mother in her right mind would leave her sick child behind? I shook my head in disbelief and dismay. “What the—” I began, ready to curse. Then I saw another woman looking traumatized at the back of the elevator, with her child smashed protectively in the corner behind her. That was more like it. And then I realized between the two of us, Liz and I must have been a frightening scene.

“Sorry about all that,” I apologized, and hit the button for my own floor.

There was no point in going back to the restaurant, so I walked down the hall to our room. Just what the hell had happened back there? With Liz, with Nathaniel, and most especially with Thomas? Was he okay? I assumed by now he was in the medical center, getting treatment. I thought about things that would cause a sudden seizure in a child—most of them were not good, and some of them were contagious. Meningitis was the worst, and fever and seizure were its typical presentation in children.

I walked by another housekeeper on doorknob-wiping duty. When I reached the far end of the cart, I grabbed one of the extra spray bottles of cleaner dangling by its handle and held it up to my chest to hide it as I walked quickly past.

When I got up to our room, I washed my hands so long I could have sung “Happy Birthday” three times. And then I carefully got out of my dress and hopped into the shower to wash off the rest of me.

Asher opened up the door an hour later, with a bottle of cleaner also in his hands. I pointed to mine on the table. “Great minds think alike. How’s Thomas?”

“Rough. What happened with Liz?”

“I have no fucking idea.” I’d been trying to work it out in the shower as I washed all of my makeup primer and hair spray down the drain, hopefully along with whatever germs I’d been exposed to. “It was like she was scared, but I’m not sure what of. She said something about getting him pills. What happened once I left?”

“The doctor came. This time I got to see him in action. He has no bedside manner, but he seems competent.” Asher was holding his hands out in front of himself as if he were scrubbed in for surgery. “Mind getting the door for me?” he asked, nodding toward the bathroom.

I opened it up, and it swung shut behind him. I cleaned off the handle he’d used to enter the room with one of the bottles of cleaner. He spent as long in the shower as I had, and when he emerged he was wrapped in a fresh towel, holding his clothing with a washcloth to keep it from touching his newly washed skin. “Let’s set it all out to be cleaned.”

“Sounds good to me.” I held the laundry bag up, and he deposited my dress carefully inside as well. “What happened with Nathaniel?”

“Nothing. He was concerned, but only in a clinical way. He didn’t try to comfort Thomas, or soothe him, he didn’t even follow the stretcher all that closely.”

I frowned at the thought of a little boy all alone on a gurney. I’d been right to try to get Liz to go back downstairs.

“It was like he didn’t even know him. Cold.”

“Was he like that all the time?” I asked, well aware that Asher had a copy of Nathaniel’s older-self somewhere inside him.

“No. That’s the strange thing. He loved his daughter, back in the day. Her and money were the only two things he loved.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, which housekeeping had kindly made up during the brief time we were out. “What were the pills for?”

“She wouldn’t say. But not for seizures—if he had a seizure history she’d know better than to give him pills.” Sticking your fingers in the mouth of someone who was seizing was a good way to get bitten. I sat on the bed beside him. “Fevers, seizures—what’s a little meningitis between friends?”

“That is the obvious choice, isn’t it? Or something else. Worse.”

I made a face. “What’re you saying?”

“I don’t know yet. Only that I know what he’s capable of.” He turned toward me suddenly. “Edie, we wouldn’t have been there—you wouldn’t have been sitting across from him—if it weren’t for me.”

“I work at a freaking public health clinic with you. And you know I’ve seen worse—been bled on by worse—before.”

His hands kneaded the edge of the mattress. “It’s just that if anything happened to you because of me, I’d never forgive myself.”

“Which I’ll admit is sweet, albeit in a twisted way,” I said, reaching out to put my hand on top of his nearest one to stop its wringing motion. “But I’m safe, so everything’s fine.”