Page 32 of Ravaged Wolf
So, I can walk to the infirmary. Am I brave now? Am I fixed?
Suddenly, the doors fly open and slam the siding, and I nearly jump out of my skin.
Abertha struts out like a diva through a stage curtain. She’s wearing a white doctor’s coat over her customary flowy skirt. The fake gold coins sewn into the flounces tinkle as she moves. “Oh. Izzy. Good. You’re here.” She peers up and down the empty street. “Are you the only one?”
“Only one?” I croak. The scene suddenly becomes surreal. There is no one else in sight, and no noise, either, no cars or birds. The whole block feels like a ghost town.
She glances around and sniffs. “Well, time is money. Come on in. Let’s get started.”
“Started with what?”
“Orientation,” she says like I’m being dense.
“Orientation?”
She thumps the glass covering the bulletin board, pointing to a neon green flyer that I hadn’t noticed.
NURSING AIDE ORIENTATION. TUESDAY. 2 PM.
“Oh. I’m not here for that.”
“Are you sick?” she asks, not like the infinitely patient Abertha from when I was hurt, but like the scary, crotchety witch I always thought she was when I was a kid, before I knew her.
“I’m fine. I was just—” Just what? Going for a walk? For the first time in five years? My cheeks heat. I have no idea what I’m doing.
“Well, you’re here, and it’s Tuesday at 2 p.m. It’s nursing aide orientation time. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.” She turns, her skirts twirling, and disappears into the building.
Despite her age, she walks with a dancer’s grace. Shedoesn’t move like a grandma, maybe because she doesn’t have children.
“Come on, Izzy. Time waits for no woman,” she shouts out the door.
I could go home. I could tell her that I’m sorry, but I’m tired, and it wouldn’t even be a lie. I’m bone weary from a leisurely twenty-minute stroll. Today doesn’t have to be the day.
But it could be.
“Procrastination is the thief of—” Abertha stops mid-holler as I step into the infirmary.
The painfully familiar smell hits me first—antiseptic, latex, and that gross pink hand soap they use—and triggers my memories hard. The cold seeping into my forearm from the IV. Holding my pee because it burned, and I didn’t want to ask for help getting to the bathroom. The nurse spraying my hair with a squirt bottle, slowly working dried clumps of blood out of the strands.
My gaze sweeps the space. Nothing’s changed. There’s a registration desk to my right and a waiting area to my left. Patient bays line the walls and computer and supply stations are clustered down the middle of the room. All but one of the curtains are open, so there is only one patient.
Except for a nurse stocking a cabinet, no one is around. Boisterous, joking voices filter from the break room in the rear. That sound is etched into my memory, too. My room was close to that door.
Abertha nods at the nurse and strides with purpose to the only bay with the closed curtain. Thankfully, it’s nowhere near the one I was stuck in for nearly two weeks.
As she nears the bay, she whistles like a human calling a dog, waits a few seconds, and throws the curtain open.
A sleepy-eyed pup, a male no older than five or six,struggles to sit up in bed. “’Bertha,” he says, scrubbing his eyes.
He’s missing a front tooth, his arm is in a sling, and ash blond curls stick out from the white bandage wrapped around his head like a sweatband. He looks so small in the big cot. The scent of his misery hurts my stomach. I glance around for his mother, but he’s alone.
“Did you bring me something?” he asks Abertha plaintively, swiping at his nose.
“No, ‘nice to see you?’ No ‘how was your day?’ Straight to ‘what did you bring me,’ eh?” she grumbles gently as she digs in a well-concealed skirt pocket and plucks out a small, brown ceramic buffalo.
The male’s sad, tired eyes widen.
“Guess where I got this?” Abertha asks.
