underlying hum of machinery somewhere deep in the building. Nurse Rachel Taylor leaned over Dougherty’s bed, adjusting the flow of an overhead IV. Tonight’s cardigan was bright red. Corso cleared his throat. The woman looked back over her shoulder, smiled, and held up a finger. A minute turned to two before the woman walked across the room to Corso’s side.
“Don’t you ever go home?” Corso asked.
“Not according to my daughter,” Rachel Taylor said, with a sigh. “To hear Melissa tell it, my insistence that we remain fed and clothed amounts to abandonment.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen.”
“Great age for girls,” Corso offered.
“Yeah…if you don’t mind their brains being controlled from outer space.”
Corso walked to the side of the bed and looked down. Dougherty lay on her back. Yesterday’s stained bandage had been replaced, but she was still little more than an inanimate maze of tubes and wires, stiff and unmoving beneath the crisp white covers.
“How’s she doing?” Corso whispered.
“Her vital signs are better, but the brain swelling is worse.”
“What now?”
She took Corso by the arm and moved him toward the door. “Come on,” she said. Corso followed her out into the hall. “I hate to talk about comatose patients as if they’re not there,” she explained. “I always have this feeling that on some deeper level they may be listening.” Corso nodded his understanding.
“What next?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “Next we iron out a couple of administrative matters.”
“Such as?”
“I had a very unhappy financial administrator down here this evening.”
“And?”
“And he wants to move Miss Dougherty up to Providence Hospital.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Because we’re chock-full of patients and Providence is only sixty percent full, and because neither Miss Dougherty nor the young man with whom she lives has any kind of health insurance.”
Corso trapped the words in his throat. What started as a profane protest came out as little more than a low growl. He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed the growl. He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see the endless halls of the veterans’ hospital where his father had coughed out his last breath. Where he and his mother and his brother and sister had traveled every Tuesday night for seven years to pay homage to a man they barely knew—a man who left whatever decency he might once have possessed lying in the bottom of a frozen Korean foxhole and came home with little more than an unquenchable thirst and an ungovernable temper. Corso’s nose stung with the smell of stale urine along the maze of scuffed hallways. He could see the ghosts sitting outside their rooms in the late evening, mouths agape, stubbled black-tooth chins resting on stained gowns. The burned and the legless, the lame and the disjointed, the shakers, the droolers, and the goners, all lined up along the halls like sentinels.
When he opened his eyes, the nurse held up a moderating hand. “It’s standard procedure,” she said. “Providence is a full-service—”
Corso cut her off. “Providence is a dump. I want her to stay here.”
“If she stays here, she’s going to have to move to a semiprivate room.”
“A ward.”
“There are no”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“ wards anymore. The most patients we have in a single room is four.”
“She wouldn’t like being in a room with other people.”
Rachel Taylor made a resigned face. “Sometimes, Mr. Corso—”
“I’ll take care of the bill,” Corso said suddenly.
The nurse took a step back, looking at Corso as if for the first time. “Do you have any idea how much money we’re talking about here?”
“No,” he said, “and I don’t care. Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”
“Her present bill alone…You’re
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