Cassie Alexander - Nightshifted

She rose and frowned. “Will it make you a better nurse?”

I sure as hell hoped so. “Yes.”

“Well, then. Good.” She opened the drawers containing Mr. November’s personal items. “It’s a hospital, new—” I inhaled to complain, just as her eyes found my badge. “Edie. Sometimes accidents happen. He was agitated and undersedated.” She pulled out a huge black overcoat. “If Dr. Turnas believed us every time we told him patients were crawling out of bed, or if God forbid he was here himself to see it—”

I blinked. “You mean this happens a lot?”

“About once a year.” She shrugged. “No one believes night shift.”

I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to make me feel better, but this conversation would be shorter if I pretended it did. “Great, I guess.” It was only then that I remembered my hand. It ached where Mr. November had bitten me. I snuck a look while Gina went through his coat pockets. I couldn’t even see where he’d broken the skin, if he had. But a flat purple bruise was growing, tracking the passage where his teeth had been.

“Well, this is interesting,” Gina said.

I looked up, quickly hiding my left hand behind my back. Gina held two small bottles with crude red nail polish crosses on their sides.

“Holy water?”

Gina spritzed the air and sniffed. “Unknown vintage, and who can say what it was cut with?” She handed them to me and I took them with my good hand. “Put them in the incinerator box.”

The glass bottles clinked in my palm. They were repurposed cologne bottles—my mom used to sell Avon, I recognized the styles. “Why would a vampire have holy water?” I asked.

“Maybe he was unpopular?” She shrugged.

I could sympathize. I peeked at my hand and thought I saw the bruise on my bad hand beginning to spread. It might just be in my head, but— “Um, Gina?” I said, interrupting her search of his pants.

“Yeah?”

I held out my injured hand. “He bit me.”

Gina squinted. She ran her gloved thumb over my naked skin, feeling for the telltale rough edge of torn skin. “That was dumb.”

“I know.” I watched her inspect my injury and wished she’d say something comforting.

“Looks like a bruise for now. Keep an eye on it.” She released my hand. “You didn’t get any of his blood on you, right? So you’re probably not exposed.”

Probably fine? Was that good enough? Not when matters of my potentially becoming a vampire were at stake. But I bit my tongue and nodded like that was good news as she left the room, leaving me alone with a corpse.

I finished the rest of my charting and waited for the coroner to arrive. When he got there, he was a dour-looking man in a dark suit. The only color on him was a tie tack, a bright green Christmas wreath over an American flag. Maybe he had one for every season—perhaps I’d missed the flag-waving Thanksgiving turkey by mere days. He wore a canister vacuum under one arm, and in one hand he carried a package of vacuum bags.

I followed him into the room wearing just a mask and gloves and collected Mr. November’s belongings to follow his vacuum bags into the afterlife. Shoes, shirt, the pants that Gina dropped—and in the pocket of these, a lump. I reached in and found a silver pocket watch. On the back of it, in a florid script, was a golden letter A .

Nurses are natural kleptos. You don’t want to be in a room without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you’re not careful. Some days it’s hard to remember that the gum at the end of the grocery checkout aisle isn’t there just for you.

From beside me, the coroner began. The vacuum cleaner’s sound made me jump, and I had only a moment to decide what to do with the watch. I could announce that I had it, and then what—trust the coroner to turn it in? He’d probably trade it in for another tie tack. Mr. November’s death was my mistake, and the burden of figuring out who to give the watch to belonged to me. Staring at Mr. November’s pile of diminishing ashes, I put the watch in my scrubs pocket, next to the bottles of cologne.

I waited until the coroner finished, as Mr. November was swept away. He’d probably lived for hundreds of years, until he caught pneumonia and met me. It would be nice to pretend that the pneumonia was where things had gone wrong, but I knew the truth. I finished my charting with a sinking stomach, then put all the paperwork on the nurse station ledge.

I didn’t have to stick around to give the report to day shift. There’s no report to give when your patient’s become dead.

I never turn my cell phone off. Not even when I’m asleep, after working the night before. I tell myself it’s because I want to be available if the County calls to offer extra shifts, but the real reason is that I’m afraid they’ll call after I’ve gone home, to ask me some important question, to remind me of something I should have done that I forgot to do or chart. And/or fire me. On the phone. I know I can sound a little paranoid, but it felt plausible today.

My voice mail message says I work nights and sleep days. Everyone who knows me, knows this. And still, people who aren’t employed at the Nursing Office feel compelled to call me before three P.M. Certain people feel compelled to call me repeatedly, until I pick up—namely, dicks.

I sent three calls to voice mail and then gave up and answered on the fourth.

“Hello?” I croaked.

“Edie—Edie, I need money.”

And I already knew who it was. “No, Jake.”

“Aw, come on, Edie…”

“I have these things called student loans.” I blinked beneath my blindfold and rubbed it up onto my forehead. “Not to mention taxes. Lots of taxes.”

My brother made an exasperated sound. He doesn’t know what I’ve done for him. At least it wasn’t the floor calling me, to tell me to not come in ever again—

The events of last night came rushing back. Jake was asking me something but I didn’t hear him—all my concentration was on my left hand and the bruise upon it. I’d killed a patient. My patient. A daytimer—but still my patient. Any chance of sleep evaporated like cool alcohol off warm skin.

“Edie? Are you listening?”

I yanked off my blindfold. Had the bruise changed shape? I couldn’t remember. I leaned over my bed and rummaged through last night’s scrubs to find a Sharpie. Mr. November’s watch fell out, along with alcohol swabs and an empty bottle of heparin.

“Come on, Edie—” my brother continued, just as whiny as every other patient I’ve ever had who knows that they are “allergic” to anything less than oxycodone.

“I said no, Jake. No means no.” I braced the phone against my shoulder and traced the margins of my bruise in Sharpie so I could see if it expanded later.

“Some help you are,” he said with exasperation.

“I wish you knew,” I muttered, as he hung up on me. Finished with my personal arts and crafts project, I dropped the phone and picked up the watch.

It looked old. The inlaid golden A remained clear, but any finer details on its silver case had been rubbed smooth by time. I found the latch with my thumbnail and swung it open.

A photo was inside the lid, old if it was legit. A family portrait in sepia: two men, a woman, and two children, a boy and a girl. I guessed one of the men could have been Mr. November, give or take a hundred years. The men had strangely shaped hats, and the women wore kerchiefs on their heads.

Which one was Anna? The woman or the child? I stroked my discolored thumb over their miniature faces.