Exasperated, I scramble to think of a way to keep him here. He hasn’t been unreasonable. He hasn’t said anything that isn’t true. The seizure Millie just had was bad, yes, but given the nature of her condition it really won’t be her worst. The worst is yet to come. LSG might not kill her, but in the same vein it could. Mason’s essentially saving for his sister’s funeral. I wonder if he realizes that. I squeeze the pen I’m clenching in my hand, digging my fingernail into the hard plastic. “Look. Just give me an hour, Mason. Give me one last chance to look her over. If she really is stable enough, I’ll let you take her.”
His eyes flash. “And if she’s not stable enough?”
“Then…then I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” It’s a pretty poor answer to his question, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment. I’m a doctor, though. A problem solver. Give me a pair of stockings and a rubber band and I’ll figure out how to stop someone bleeding out. Give me an hour and a cell phone, and I’ll figure out how to make sure Millie Reeves receives the care she needs and deserves. Mason doesn’t believe in me yet, but he will. He blinks, the muscles in his jaw working overtime.
“I’m—I’m supposed to be at work,” he says. “I don’t have an hour.”
“Then give me eight. Go to work. Come back later on this evening and I’ll have this figured out, I swear I will.”
Mason doesn’t say anything. He shifts from one foot to the other, his right shoulder lifting up and down as he looks from me to Gracie and back again. “She’ll look after her,” Gracie says softly. “She’s an excellent doctor. We’ll call the second anything changes with your sister, Mr. Reeves.” She already has her hand on his arm, ushering him out of the reception; she doesn’t give him the option of refusing the suggestion. The anger and the frustration that was spilling out of him a second ago seems to have fizzled out in the past few seconds. I’ve seen it happen many times before; the weight of responsibility is a heavy, heavy thing. Making difficult decisions on a daily basis is crippling. Carrying around the burden of someone else’s care every single hour of every single day is enough to bow someone’s back to the point of breaking. The second someone offers to relieve you of that burden, people are often too shocked to react.
I watch Gracie walk Mason out of the building, and I feel the weight of my assumed burden pressing in already. God knows how the poor guy has borne it for so long.
******
I find Oliver Massey furiously washing his hands in the residents’ lounge. He cuts me a sideways glance when he notices me slipping through the door. “Goddamn flu bug. There are barely any nurses in the ICU. How the hell are you supposed to operate an intensive care unit when there is no staff to intensively care for anyone? Jesus.” He takes a step back when water sloshes over the side of the deep stainless steel trough he’s bending over. His suit pants slowly turn from grey to black at the hem where the water has drenched them. “Great.” Oliver picks up a towel from the neat stack beside him and pats himself down, grumbling under his breath.
“You okay? Is Alex okay?” Oliver’s usually pretty upbeat, no matter how shitty his day has been. His current bad mood is likely related to his brother’s condition.
Oliver throws the towel into the laundry bin by the lockers and sighs heavily; his chin rests on his chest as he leans, resting his back against the row of steel locker doors. “Who the fuck knows,” he says quietly. “He should be on a recovery ward by now, Sloane. He should be back at fucking work or something, not still hooked up to life support.”
Anything I might say seems futile. Oliver knows the lines we feed to people when their loved ones are fighting for recovery, because he feeds them to people too: it’s a process. These things take time. The only thing we can do now is wait. We avoid giving false hope. We skirt around words like hope altogether, because it gives the impression that the situation is no longer within our control. Hope implies an unknowable force has taken the reins on their brother/mother/sister/daughter’s health, and we are nothing more than mere bystanders, peering through a window, lips bitten between our teeth and fingers crossed behind our backs.
Instead of trying to placate him, I ask him this instead: “What can I do?”
Oliver’s shoulders slump. He’s a picture of exhaustion. “I don’t know. Something? Nothing?” He spins around and props himself up against the locker beside me, and I suspect he’d crumple to the ground without the rigid metal’s support. “Anything?” he says, breathing out loud and slow. “We’re trained for this. We’re trained to detach ourselves, and I thought fuck yeah. I have this. I can do this. If anyone I love is ever rushed through those trauma doors, I’ll be able to switch it off. There won’t be time to have a meltdown. I know I’ll be able to do everything in my power to fix them, and my hands won’t be shaking as I do it. I’ll be determined. Focused. Because that’s what they drill into us, how they teach us to be.”