Page 53 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
“Come on,” the large man says.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Damn it! That guy can wait! He’s out cold!”
Annie is half shaking from the man’s screaming and half dragging from the medication she took. She rubs her forehead and pulls her eyebrows together, as if squeezing out a headache, then swishes the crushed pill in the water and takes it up with the syringe.
“My neck is so stiff,” the man moans.
Annie places the syringe in the tube port. She fastens the tip tightly and fingers the clasp to allow the medicine to flow into the patient’s body.
“COME ON, NURSE!”
Of all the days, Annie thinks, avoiding the man by staring at the pouch’s medical label. She blinks. Something’s wrong. The date on the pouch. It’s not today.Of all the days.Today’s date she knows, February 7, the anniversaryof the worst thing that ever happened to her. The date on the label is February 3. As she opens the clasp, her brain races through an equation. Four days. What could change in four days? She sees a notation on the label,ER, meaning “extended release”—a pill you would swallow, never crush. But this man can’t swallow anymore. Maybe he could when they wrote this up—
She jerks the syringe out of the port.
“Damn it, Nurse, this pillow is—”
“SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!”
Annie doesn’t hear the words she just screamed. Her mind is fixated on what she almost did: inject time-release pain narcotics into a feeding tube—which would have administered the entire drug at once, a drug meant to release over twelve hours. She could have seriously harmed the sleeping man. She might have killed him.
“You can’t tell a patient to shut up!” the fat man yells. “I’m going to report you. I’m going to make sure you—”
Annie can’t hear him. Her breath fills her ears. She can feel her heartbeat nearly burst through her ribs. She grabs the syringe and the used plastic pouch, and she runs down the hall and whips them into the bin, feeling like a criminal trying to hide the telltale weapon.
She takes a two-week leave of absence, even though the hospital doesn’t ask for it. When she returns, she vows a tighter focus than ever on her patients. No distractions. No personal issues. Do one thing right, Annie, she tells herself. One thing right.
The Fourth Lesson
The ground beneath Eddie and Annie turned muddy and wet. There were oil barrels up a hill and bamboo huts burning everywhere.
“What is this place?”
“War.”
“When? Where?”
Eddie sighed. “War is the same every when and where.”
He stepped forward, feet squishing. “This is the Philippines. World War II.”
“You were a prisoner.”
“Yeah.”
“You escaped.”
“Eventually.”
“I saw this when you held my hands. You burned these huts.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I did.”
He trudged through the muck and found the remains of a primitive flamethrower, a long hose attached to a gasoline-tank backpack.
“I was afraid when I was captured. Scared outta my mind. When I got free, I let it out. We all did. We attacked. We destroyed. We burned this place to the ground. I thought I was justified. Maybe even brave. But I was doing something awful, something I never knew.”
