In His Arms Again

I 'll see one more patient and then I'm done. I'm on vacation the week that "He's coming, and I'm starting them at midnight tonight. So, what's going on?" Dr. Walker asked the ER nurse he was working with. "We only have one patient left," the nurse replied. "It's the second week of October. First snowstorm of the year, icy roads... She called from a phone on the outskirts of town. She says she's fine, but the airbag deployed, and you know the police policy in this area... When an airbag inflates, they take them to the ER, no matter what the occupants of the vehicle say. Her name is Chloe Carmichael." Reid froze. —What do you say his name is? "Chloe Carmichael," the nurse repeated. Then, unaware of the effect that name had on Reid, the nurse added, "I'll discharge the girl with the flu, so you can take care of the car accident…" And that wraps it up. The next shift starts in a moment. So after this, they'll be the ones to take care of whatever comes next. Reid didn't respond as the nurse left. He stood motionless beside the counter that surrounded the area called "the fishbowl" by the medical staff, a sort of office where they talked, collected charts, retrieved supplies, and did administrative work. The emergency room of Northbridge, Montana's only hospital had four rooms branching out from the fishbowl. Two of them were dark and empty. Reid had just examined a teenage girl in the third room. The girl had thought she was pregnant and was relieved to discover she was pregnant. What she had was a simple flu. So the new patient could only be in the fourth ward. "Chloe Carmichael," Reid thought. It was a quarter to twelve on Sunday night. A bad start to his vacation, he told himself. Reid looked at room four. The lights were on. The wall facing the fish tank was glass, and the curtain wasn't completely closed, so Reid could partially see his patient through the clothing and medical equipment hanging on the racks. She was sitting up in bed in hospital clothes, apparently looking better than she had fourteen years ago, despite the car accident. At that time she was seventeen and he was eighteen… Reid remembered her and it seemed like it had been yesterday. Chloe's family had settled in Northbridge when she was a child. They lived near Reid's family home, where her mother still lived. The Carmichaels had remained there until fourteen years ago, when they abruptly left town. Since then, they had rented the house in Northbridge. A few months earlier, the house had been put up for sale, and Reid and his brother had wanted to buy it, since renting was a good investment in a college town. Even though the house was still linked to Chloe Carmichael. Reid and his brother, Luke, were closing on the house she had inherited from their parents. But Reid had been told that a real estate agent would act as Chloe's representative because she didn't want to return to Northbridge. So what was he doing there? "Oh, good, you haven't been in to see the patient yet," the nurse said, startling him. Reid had been so caught up in his thoughts that he hadn't noticed the nurse had returned. "You were going to prescribe birth control for the girl, so she wouldn't have any more scares," the woman reminded him. —Contraceptives… Yes…, they are a good invention —he replied. -I think so. Reid wrote the prescription, signed it, and gave it to the nurse.