Page 76 of Steadfast
“A smart person would understand that. But apparently these aren’t smart people. So you need to be a little paranoid right now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Just keep your head up, and if I feel the need to walk you to your car, just let me.”
“All right. You’re a good man, Denny. Santa won’t put any coal in your stocking tonight.”
He gave me a sad little smile.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jude
Cravings meter: 1
“How’s your pain?” the nurse asked me. It wasn’t Angela today. This nurse was older with a dour look on her face. But she used gentle hands to check the dressing on my surgical wound.
“It’s…still there,” I grumbled. “Whenever it’s time for the next dose of ibuprofen, I’ll be ready.”
“I bet you will. For now, it’s time for this.” She removed a little piece of what looked like tape from an envelope with my name on it. “Under your tongue,” she said.
I placed the strip of Suboxone in my mouth and it began to dissolve right away. The stuff didn’t taste good, but that was the least of my problems. Almost twenty-four hours after those first doses I had no cravings at all. I didn’t have the shakes, and I didn’t want to puke.
If I were a religious type, I’d be down on my knees thanking God for a miracle right now. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When can I have a shower?”
The older woman smiled at me. “You must be feeling better. But we don’t want to get your wound wet.”
“Can’t I, like, tape a plastic bag over it or something? I’m desperate here.” The smell of detox lingered on me—sweat and worse.
“I’ll make a deal with you. Eat everything they bring you for lunch, and then afterward I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
She walked out, and I looked up at the muted TV, wishing for something to distract me from all the things I couldn’t fix. Now that my cravings were gone, all my other troubles came into sharper focus. Mostly I was worried about Sophie. Next on the list came work—I was probably going to lose the paint job for the guy who ran the solar business. My right arm wasn’t going to be functional enough to hold a paint gun for who knew how long. And yet I’d have a whopping hospital bill by the time I was ready to work again.
Everything was fucked up, but I felt better than I had in months because I didn’t have any drug cravings.
Weird.
* * *
I’d never stayedin a hospital before now. Overall, I found the experience only slightly less humiliating than prison.
To shower, I had to strip down in front of my nurse. She stuck a big watertight bandage on me. Then I took a quick shower while holding my right arm out of the curtain. Luckily the shampoo was in a dispenser on the wall. I was able to clumsily squirt some onto the edge of my hand and then slop it onto my head.
The hot water felt divine, and I would have liked to stay there a good long time. But the nurse was waiting for me, and my knees felt shaky. So I shampooed and swiped more of their liquid soap all over my body. Then I rinsed and got the heck out of there.
A one-armed guy can’t easily wrap a towel around his body, so she left me alone to dry off, and then she slipped a clean hospital gown over my shoulders. When I emerged from the bathroom, someone had already changed the sheets on my bed.
Things were looking up.
I did the splenectomy-patient shuffle over to the bed and sat down on it. The nurse was just tucking me back in when a uniformed police officer stepped into the doorway. I recognized him from the bakery—he was the same cop that Sophie had sat with over coffee.
Don’t hold it against him, asshole, I coached myself. I’d jump at the chance to linger over coffee with Sophie, too. Who wouldn’t?
