Karin Slaughter - Fallen

“Aren’t you in Valdosta?”

Amanda went silent. Faith had obviously crossed a line. Or maybe it was a simple case of her boss being smart enough to remember that their conversation was being recorded. Right now, Faith didn’t care. She stared at the yellow rubber band, wondering if she was losing her mind. Her blood sugar was probably low. Faith’s vision was slightly blurry. Her mouth was dry. She opened the fridge again and reached for the orange juice carton. Still empty.

Amanda said, “Think of your mother. She would want you to be strong.”

If she only knew that Faith was about to lose her shit over a yellow rubber band. She mumbled, “I’m fine.”

“We’ll get her back, and we’ll make sure that whoever did this pays for what they’ve put us through. You can take that to the bank.”

Faith opened her mouth to say she didn’t give a damn about retribution, but Amanda had already ended the call.

She tossed the orange juice carton into the trash. There was a bag of emergency candy in the cabinet. Faith pulled it out, and Jolly Ranchers scattered onto the floor. She looked at the bag. The bottom had been ripped open.

Ginger was back. He leaned down to help her pick up the candy. “Everything all right?”

“Yes.” Faith tossed a handful of candy onto the counter and left the kitchen. She hit the light switch in the living room but nothing happened. Faith flipped the toggle down, then up again. Still nothing. She checked the bulb in the lamp. One turn made the light come on. She did the same to the bulb in the other lamp. She felt the heat singe her fingers as the light came on.

Faith fell heavily into the chair. Her temper kept revving up and down like scales on a piano. She knew that she needed to eat something, to test her blood and make the proper adjustments. Her brain wouldn’t work properly until she was leveled out. But now that she was sitting down, she didn’t have the strength to move.

The couch was across from her. Zeke had folded his sheets into a perfect square and placed them on top of his pillow. She could see the red stain on the beige cushion where Jeremy had spilled Kool-Aid fifteen years ago. She knew that if she flipped the cushion over, she would find a blue stain from a Maui punch Popsicle he had dropped two years later. If she turned over the cushion she was sitting on, there would be a tear where his soccer cleat had cut the material. The rug on the floor was worn from both their tracks back and forth to the kitchen. The walls were an eggshell they had painted during Jeremy’s spring break last year.

Faith considered the very real possibility that she was losing her mind. Jeremy was too old for these kinds of games, and Zeke had never been one for psychological warfare. He would rather beat her to death than unscrew a couple of light bulbs. Regardless, neither one of them was in the mood for pranks. This couldn’t just be Faith’s blood sugar. The pens, the silverware, the lamps—it was little things that only Faith would notice. The sort of stuff that would make someone else think you were crazy if you told them about it.

She looked up at the ceiling, then let her eyes travel down to the shelves mounted on the wall behind the couch. Bill Mitchell had been a collector of kitsch. He had hula girl salt and pepper shakers from Hawaii. He had Mount Rushmore sunglasses, a foam Lady Liberty crown, and an enameled silver spoon set depicting some of the more notable scenery of the Grand Canyon. His most prized collection had been his snow globes. Every road trip, every flight, every time he left the house, Bill Mitchell looked for a snow globe to mark the occasion.

When her father died, there was no question in the family that these would go to Faith. As a child, she had loved shaking the globes and watching the snow fall. Order into chaos. It was something Faith had shared with her father. In a rare splurge, she’d had custom shelves built for the globes and made Jeremy so scared of breaking one that for an entire month he took the long way to the kitchen just so he didn’t accidentally brush against the shelves.

As she sat in the living room that morning, Faith looked up at the shelves to find that all of thirty-six globes had been turned around to face the wall.

CHAPTER NINE

SARA WONDERED IF IT WAS A SOUTHERN PECULIARITY FOR little children to get sick in the half hour between Sunday school and church services. Most of her early patients that morning had fallen into that golden time period. Tummy aches, earaches, general malaise—nothing that could be pinned down by a blood test or an X-ray, but was easily cured by a set of coloring books or a cartoon on the television.

Around ten o’clock, the problems had turned more serious. The cases came in rapid succession, and were the kind Sara hated because they were largely preventable. One child had eaten rat poison he’d found under the kitchen cabinet. Another had gotten third-degree burns from touching a pan on the stove. There was a teenager she’d had to forcibly commit to the lockdown ward because his first hit of marijuana had pushed him into a psychotic break. Then a seventeen-year-old girl had come in with her skull split open. Apparently, she was still drunk when she drove home this morning. The girl had ended up wrapping her car around a parked Greyhound bus. She was still in surgery, but Sara guessed that even if they managed to control the swelling in her brain, she would never be the same person again.

By eleven, Sara wanted to go back to bed and start the day over.

Working at a hospital was a constant negotiation. The job could suck away as much of your life as you permitted. Sara had agreed to work at Grady knowing this truth, embracing it, because she didn’t want a life after her husband had died. Over the last year, she’d been cutting back on her time in the ER. Keeping regular hours was a struggle, but Sara fought the uphill battle every day.

It was really a form of self-preservation. Every doctor carried around a cemetery inside them. The patients she could help—the little girl whose stomach she’d pumped, the burned toddler whose fingers she’d saved—were momentary blips. It was the lost ones that Sara remembered most. The kid who’d slowly, painfully succumbed to leukemia. The nine-year-old who’d taken sixteen hours to die from antifreeze poisoning. The eleven-year-old who’d broken his neck diving headfirst into a shallow swimming pool. They were all inside of her, constant reminders that no matter how hard she worked, sometimes—oftentimes—it was never enough.

Sara sat down on the couch in the doctors’ lounge. She had charts to catch up on, but she needed a minute to herself. She’d gotten less than four hours of sleep last night. Will wasn’t the direct reason her brain would not turn off. She’d kept thinking about Evelyn Mitchell and her corrupt band of brothers. The question of the woman’s guilt weighed heavily on her mind. Will’s words kept coming back to Sara: either Evelyn Mitchell was a bad boss or a dirty cop. There was no in-between.

Which was probably why Sara hadn’t found the time this morning to call Faith Mitchell and check on her. Technically, Faith was Delia Wallace’s patient, but Sara felt an odd sort of responsibility for Will’s partner. It tugged at her the same way Will seemed to tug at her every waking thought these days.

All of the tedium. None of the pleasure.

Nan, one of the student nurses, plopped down on the couch beside Sara. She scrolled through her BlackBerry as she talked. “I want to hear all about your hot date.”

Sara forced a smile onto her face. That morning when she got to the hospital, there’d been a large bouquet of flowers waiting for her in the doctors’ lounge. It seemed Dale Dugan had bought out the entire city’s supply of baby’s breath and pink carnations. Everyone in the ER had made a comment to Sara before she’d even managed to change into her lab coat. They all seemed caught up in the romance of the widow being swept off her feet.