Morning rounds took longer than expected – although that wasn't much of a surprise – and it wasn't until her lunch break that Dorothy was able to catch up with the on-call admitting who had been there when she had brought in her mystery patient. Her? she thought, rolling her eyes at her own ridiculousness even as the corner of her mouth ticked up in a tiny smile. There was no reason to get attached. He wasn't a stray dog, and he definitely wasn't up for adoption.
Dr. Solomon was reviewing charts by the first floor nurses' station, and with a little wave Dorothy was able to grab her attention.
"So that patient that came in last night…" she asked, "with the abdominal wound…?"
"Oh, right, right," said Dr. Solomon, pushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear as she glanced up. "The John Doe."
"We never ID'd him?" Dorothy asked. She had assumed that he would end up having ID in his wallet – or at least something personal – that would give them a hint of who the hell he was and what he was doing out there in the middle of a violent storm.
Dr. Solomon shook her head. "We didn't get much out of him, either. As he was coming to in recovery, he got pretty agitated and we had to sedate him again. He's been out most of the day."
"Agitated?" Dorothy felt her eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
"Started yelling, like he didn't understand where he was or what was happening. Nearly ripped his stitches out."
"So how bad was the wound?"
"Could have been worse," Dr. Solomon said, shrugging a shoulder. "But there ended up being a minor perforation to his colon. You were the one who picked him up?"
Dorothy nodded.
"Good thing you did. He lost a fair amount of blood, and without the repair, he could have easily gone into sepsis."
Dorothy offered another nod of acknowledgment, her mouth settling into a solemn, tight-lipped grin. She had almost left him there on that road – or at least part of her had seriously considered it – and the shame of it struck deep, rooting into the narrow spaces between her ribs. She could see him there, in her mind, see the look on his face as he pleaded for her help, so much pain and fear written into his eyes, and then all she could feel was an overwhelming sense of relief that she had ultimately decided to stop and get out of her truck. He was still alive, and that was all that mattered.
Even so, the mystery of who he was continued to gnaw at her, an itch she couldn't help but scratch.
"Do you have any idea what caused the wound?" she asked. "I thought it might be something from the storm. A branch or a rock, maybe?"
"It looked too clean for that," Dr. Solomon replied. "And the wound was fairly uniform, without much dirt or debris. I would guess a knife or something pretty sharp."
"He was carrying a sword when I found him…" Dorothy offered.
The doctor's dark eyebrows turned up in surprise.
"A sword? An actual slaying-dragons-and-rescuing-fair-maidens sword? God, I thought I'd heard just about everything…" She made a soft breathy huff, her eyes warm with amusement. "But, maybe, assuming the blade wasn't too wide. You think he did it to himself?"
"I didn't see any blood on it," Dorothy shrugged. "But, you know… a guy with a sword probably knows another guy with a sword."
The doctor laughed and Dorothy gave her a quick thanks, letting her get back to her paperwork.
The rest of the afternoon passed, like the morning, in a rush of patient checks and minor emergencies, just enough to keep her most of her mind occupied on the task right in front of her. But still, she found her thoughts occasionally drifting back to him, wondering if he had woken up yet, wondering exactly what had brought him to that place on the road where she had stumbled across him. More than once, she considered the possibility going to check in on him once her shift was over, a tugging impulse that she felt obligated to ignore. Because she knew the whole thing wasn't really any of her business; it was probably just some accident that could all be explained, and undoubtedly he had a family out there who was trying to find him – who would find him, if they hadn't already – and then he wouldn't need her to worry about him at all.
By the end of her shift, she was dragging, having caught herself yawning on more than one occasion. But even her regular mid-afternoon Diet Coke pick-me-up was no match for the fact that she had spent most of the day on her feet – and that she hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, owing to the images of spiraling tornados and lifeless bodies in the road that danced across the back of her eyelids even as her body clamored for rest.
Em and Henry had been beyond worried – even though she had called them from the hospital as soon as she could to explain what had happened – and they had started fussing over her the moment she had gotten home. Well, Em hadn't fussed as much as made multiple cups of herbal tea, pressing each warm mug into Dorothy's hands before perching herself just on the edge of Henry's leather recliner. Her questions were practical – and seemingly never-ending – but Dorothy could see the fear written into the deep arches of her face. Henry, of course, had found a place right next to Dorothy on the sofa, his weathered palm curling protectively over her shoulder, deep sighs punctuated by quietly muttered endearments in Spanish.
As she had laid in her bed, unable to sleep, she had thought back to Em's questions, and the unspoken implication in them: had she been unnecessarily reckless? Had she really exhausted all her other options before she decided to deliberately put herself in harm's way?
Even today, she still wasn't sure. But the fact that she now knew that he was alive because of her – it certainly made those doubts easier to set aside.
She was walking down the hall, on her way to the locker room, wanting nothing more than to change out of her scrubs and be on her way home, when she almost ran right into him. And then she realized she hadn't thought about him once since she had left his apartment the night before.
"Hey, there," Sam murmured, his hand brushing along the top of her arm as he sought to steady them both on their feet. "Heard you had a crazy night."
"Oh, yeah… kind of," she demurred.
He grinned, his cheeks rounding warmly. "Everybody was talking about it in the on-call room. Nurse Gale, battling a tornado…"
She smiled back, despite herself. "I wouldn't call it battling, Sam, so much as running away from it as fast as humanly possible."
"And then you found somebody unconscious in the road and got them to the hospital? Sounds pretty heroic to me." He tilted his head as he gazed down at her, his fingers now gently clasping the curve of her upper arm. "You want to come over and tell me about it? I could make dinner – like, real dinner, with plates and napkins and silverware. You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I make a mean spaghetti carbonara."
The sigh was caught in her throat, and she felt so terrible, because it was thoughtful and sweet, all those things that – in theory – she should want. He was trying to be her boyfriend, trying to be there for her in a way that made it clear he wanted more than what they had, and yet her immediate impulse was to start sprinting in the opposite direction.
At some point, she knew she would have to end it – they couldn't go on like this, with him needing more than she could give, or, even worse, with him imagining that she would eventually change her mind – but she was more of a coward than she wanted to admit, and there were nights she just felt so alone, in need of someone to help her chase the darkness away.
She pressed her lips together, offering what she hoped was enough of a consoling smile. "That's really nice," she said, "but it's been a long day and I'm pretty exhausted… I just need to get home."
He nodded, the warmth in his gaze undiminished. "Yeah, that's fine. Some other time, then."
And as soon as he was gone, she did sigh, expelling a rough breath as she pushed open the door to the locker room.
She was sliding her jeans on, one hand reaching for her long-sleeve t-shirt, when she remembered what she had been wearing yesterday, the flannel and the scarf that she had used to bind up his wound. They were probably around somewhere, stuffed in a clear plastic bag with the clothes he had been wearing, which, now that she thought about it, was no doubt sitting on the floor of whatever room they had put him in.
It wouldn't be too much to see if she could get them back, would it? She wouldn't need to bother him, and maybe, if she were lucky, he would still be asleep, and she could grab her things without him ever knowing.
She hastily tossed her scrubs into her duffel and threw the whole thing onto her shoulder, before making her way down to reception.
"Hey, Ollie," she said, acknowledging her colleague seated behind the desk. "The John Doe from last night, the one with the abdominal wound – what room did they put him in?"
Ollie glanced up at her, and then at her screen, her hands moving rapidly over the keyboard.
"Um, let's see…" She paused, her mouse clicking again and again. "312."
"Thanks," Dorothy offered, already taking a quick step towards the central bank of elevators. "Have a nice night, okay?"
"Yeah, you–" Ollie said, the rest of her words falling away as Dorothy turned and headed for the stairwell rather than wait for the next available elevator.
The third floor was fairly quiet, and she waved to the solitary nurse sitting behind the counter as she made her way down the corridor. Focusing her attention on the room numbers, she watched as they steadily grew larger until she was nearly to the end of the hallway.
There was nothing particularly interesting about 312, nothing besides the number to mark it as anything different from the dozen or so other rooms lining the hall, although that thought did little to displace the strange flurrying in the bottom of her stomach. Through the narrow glass window adjacent to the door, she could see that the lights were off, which meant than he was probably still asleep. It was with that reassurance that she finally turned the door handle and slipped into the room.
It was dark inside, but only partially. At some point, someone had opened the blinds a little, and now the soft light of the late afternoon was skimming across the floor, casting everything in burnished gold and bronze.
Her eyes, though, went straight to the patient in the bed, and all at once, she felt her mouth dropping open in surprise.
They had cleaned him up, wiped away the dirt and blood, revealing a face that she already knew, but was somehow seeing for the first time. Even in the low light, with a butterfly bandage marking a cut under his cheekbone, she could take in the long planes of his face, the wide and serious forehead, the sharp nose, the full curve of his bottom lip as it turned and gave way to his heavily-stubbled chin. God, he was absolutely beautiful. And asleep, he seemed calm, almost at peace, a far cry from the expression of pain and distress she had seen the day before.
Who are you? she wondered. Where did you come from?
She glanced around, seeing no indication anyone had been in the room aside from the nurses. There were no flowers or cards, no balloons floating up in the corner of the ceiling, nothing written on the small white board next to the door besides a name – which wasn't even his – and a patient number.
Quietly dropping her bag onto the floor, she pulled his charts from the rack on the wall and began to flip through them as if they might hold some clue, something that she could use to piece together the mystery that was this man.
Across from the bed there was a chair, upholstered in beige vinyl, and still feeling the weight of fatigue, she walked over and sat down. Within a few moments, she had pulled her feet up and curled into the seat, letting the charts lay open in her lap. There was little there she didn't already know, but still she found herself paging through it, determined to have it all make some kind of sense.
Scar tissue across upper back and right deltoid, indicating previous trauma of unknown origin. Older damage to the metacarpals of the left hand and left tibia, indicating possible fracture.
Dorothy let her head rest against the cushioned back of the chair, glancing up at him once more, her gaze catching on the golden light as it fell across the side of his face, at the long dark lashes that fanned down towards his cheeks.
The room was warm with the strands of fading sunlight, and her eyes felt so tired. She could close them, just for a moment, and no one would ever know. She was fine, she was safe here, wasn't she?