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Adriana felt a shiver down her spine. She could barely think. Teeth chattering, she put on her jeans and sweater, and went to find Elspeth. She was in the office behind the nursing station. Adriana could see she was deep in thought. When she saw Adriana standing there, Elspeth's face changed, like a cloud had passed over it. Adriana wrapped her arms around herself and waited. Elspeth spoke in a low voice. “You look like you just ran into an iceberg,” Adriana nodded. Elspeth, slightly confused, asked her “What can I do for you, my dear?”

“My friend is in the hospital,” Adriana stammered. “Something went wrong. Can I go visit her?”

Elspeth's brow furrowed. “I'm sorry to hear it. I'll talk to Dr. Burke to see if he'll be willing to give you back level six privileges. Don't get your hopes up though. I'll let you know if the doctor will see you before he leaves this afternoon.”

Shaking inside, Adriana returned to her room. She took out the knitting needles and yarn that she'd scrounged in the OT room and began to knit a scarf, but her fingers trembled and made it impossible to work. She put the knitting aside, stood up and made her bed, automatically it seemed, but it still helped calm her nerves.

After lunch, Adriana sat down in the common area. Someone had started doing a puzzle of some llamas standing in a field. They had managed to finish the llamas but the grass around them, the more difficult part of the puzzle, was still in pieces. To distract herself, Adriana began to work on those areas, and soon lost herself in the activity. It felt good to be absorbed by something, even something as inconsequential as a puzzle.

Marlene sat on the other side of the room, watching her. Adriana hadn't noticed her come in. Suddenly the elevator opened and a woman in a hair net pushed a trolley of supper trays into the hall. “Trays are up,” Marlene crowed, and Adriana looked at her, startled. Could it be supper time already? That meant she'd been sitting there for at least four hours. Marlene cackled as though she'd played an enormous joked. Adriana wondered where Redgie was. It wasn't like Marlene to be without him.

Adriana waited twenty minutes before she went for supper. She didn't like to sit there amid the silent, shaky-handed, old people, some of whom had been waiting for their meal for half an hour. She preferred to go as they were leaving, and eat alone. She knew it was because she didn't want to be reminded of what awaited her, fifty years from now. It was unfair and ungenerous of her, she knew, but being among these debilitated older folks tightened the knot in her stomach, and she felt she had no control over it.

As she sat down to eat, something told her that she wouldn't be seeing the doctor this afternoon. Her stomach swooped. She ate her baked chicken leg slowly, with dry eyes. She felt like a desert. Jazz would be lying in her hospital bed, pale as sand, with her mother beside her.

Elspeth peeked her head in the door. She came to sit down across the table from Adriana. “Dr. Burke didn't have time to see you today,” she said regretfully. “But he'll see you first thing in the morning tomorrow. I'm sorry,” she said and shook her head. “There are just so many things going on, with the hurricane coming tonight.”

Adriana had forgotten about the hurricane. How was it possible, she wondered, for the mind to have so many compartments? She had been feeling anxious about the storm and then she put it completely away in a drawer, so she could worry about Jeff, and then Jazz. It seemed incredible that the mind allowed for such forgetfulness. Was it the hippocampus, floating around in the slosh of her brain, that had lost its power?

Adriana returned to the llama puzzle but she didn't have the heart for it anymore. Instead she sat beside Marlene and some of the other patients, watching the storm track north on the television weather map. Marlene rocked silently, not really watching the TV. “Where's Redgie?” Adriana asked. Marlene cackled and put her finger to her lips and hushed her loudly.

Someone changed the channel to an old sitcom Adriana had never seen before. It was stupid. She got up to leave, pushing the table with the puzzle away from her. The puzzle slid off, onto the floor. Everyone in the room turned to look, and Adriana began to cry. She started to pick up the pieces and to put them back together but nothing fit. Other patients tried to help. The depressed woman that Adriana had seen combing her fine brown hair as she walked down the hall bent down and picked up a few pieces and an old man shuffled some pieces into a pile with his feet. Marlene sat impassively and rocked.

Adriana escaped as soon as she could, returning to her room. She climbed into bed. Really, she didn't care about the puzzle or the hurricane or anything else. She was aching for Jazz, and for Jeff, both lying in beds in the hospital just up the street. She hoped the evening would bring them peace. She wished she could shake the sense of dread that gripped her.

Chapter 27

Adriana lay awake until a nurse called, “Medication time.” She went to stand in line with the other patients from the unit. The woman who combed her hair was there, but Jeff was missing of course. So was Redgie.

Redgie's nurse Tony, the one that Samantha was smitten with, examined the sign-out book. When he straightened up, his smile was gone, and he quickly walked toward the nursing station. Adriana overheard him on the phone, talking to security. “He's been gone for hours,” he said, pulling his hand over his face. “No, I didn't notice. The sign-out book says he's going to stop the hurricane.”

Adriana, standing at the window in the common room, watched security combing the grass below the hospital and disappear over the bank down to the railway track. The police had been alerted, and were checking the bridges. Adriana wondered if they thought Redgie would try to make a human sacrifice of himself. Elspeth was long gone for the day and Adriana didn't feel there was anyone else she wanted to talk to. She went to her room and sat on her bed.
Please let them find Redgie
, she prayed.
Please let Jazz be okay. Let Jeff be fine.

Adriana felt she had done all she could. She lay down on her unmade bed, exhausted, and slipped into unconsciousness.

At midnight she was awakened by the enormous sound of the wind and rain lashing the windows. It was a wild and unholy sound, as though the hospital were being attacked by ravenous animals

Adriana, quaking, got up to go to the toilet. In the nursing station, Tony was on the phone, his face taut with anxiety. The other nurses were speaking to one another in hushed tones that she couldn't hear through the glass that encased the nursing station offices. Adriana had never heard such wind before. The wind often moaned around the building, like a pack of ghost wolves. Now it was the booming, hysterically angry voice of her mother writ large. It had been weeks since her mother had bothered her and now here she was, circling the hospital and shrieking accusations. Adriana sat on the toilet, her hands over her ears.

When she came out of the washroom, she saw Marlene sitting in a chair by the common room window. Adriana thought she watched out the window the way women have for centuries when their men went to sea. Was Redgie out there somewhere, battling the elements? She imagined him standing on the stony finger of land on which the McNab's Island lighthouse was built, arms upraised shouting into the hurricane to stop, be calm, to return whence it came. And the hurricane, like a dragon, encircling him.

Back in her bedroom, Samantha was pacing between the bedroom door and window. She barely acknowledged Adriana's return, except to shorten her path on the way to the door. She was keyed up, ready to explode. Adriana slipped under her covers, and closed her eyes tight, hands over her ears.

There was a sudden flash of light and the sound of sparks like an old-fashioned camera bulb going off. One of the outdoor lights had blown and the room grew darker. Samantha stopped in her tracks like a deer in the headlights, and then she began to howl. “Make it stop!” she cried, as though in agony, then moaned as she collapsed to the floor. Adriana threw the covers off the bed and stood up. But what could she do? Samantha was too big to lift.

Adriana knelt down beside Samantha and stroked her hair with a trembling hand. She began to hum a lullaby, whose words she knew, but didn't understand. It was a Slovak song her mother used to sing to her. Adriana's voice jerked when she jumped at the sound of tree branches cracking and power lines come loose and sparking. Samantha muttered and blubbered till her sobs grew quiet, and her breathing slowed. Adriana, calmer now herself, followed the lullaby with another mournful tune about the Slovak countryside and then with “Let it Be” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Samantha lay quietly, her enormous knees pulled up to her chest. Adriana took the blanket from Samantha's bed and covered her with it, leaving her asleep on the floor, then crawled back into bed herself.

But Adriana stayed awake, eyes dark and fearful. The violence of the storm—overwhelming, unrelenting—had driven patients out of their beds. She heard them moaning in the hallway and the nurses trying to soothe them in low tones. Someone, perhaps the brown haired woman, sounded inconsolable. Eventually Adriana managed to tumble unconscious, as though into a lightless passage. Sleep had always been her refuge, and it remained so, even in the face of a hurricane.

 

Adriana woke up slowly when the sky began to lighten, afraid almost to open her eyes. Outside, the sun was burning its way through the cloud. She sat up slowly, pulling her blanket around her. The trees had been partially stripped of their leaves , which were strewn all over the ground or plastered to the windows. Branches had come down, some of them blown across the parking lot. Everything looked new, freshly washed, chaotic. Adriana felt a surge of feeling in her throat that she couldn't recognize.

Her watch ticked loudly, as though it were the only thing that had survived the storm. It was almost 7 a.m. and Samantha was gone. Eventually, Adriana made her way to the kitchen, past a few people in the common room, stunned and dishevelled as refugees. As they waited for breakfast in the kitchen, patients looked out the window and shook their heads, exclaiming, in voices thick with medication and dulled by illness. Marlene was on the phone. “They didn't find him. No,” she said, blowing her nose, her voice loud and teary, ending in a howl. “I thought he'd be back by now.”

Adriana realized she hadn't called her father and that he hadn't called her. After Marlene finished, she dialed her home number on the kitchen phone. It rang and rang, but her father didn't pick up.

She tried to reassure herself. The battery charger for the phone at home was plugged into the wall and it was unlikely it was working. Her father had Beth to occupy his thoughts and it was likely they were busy surveying the storm damage and cleaning up the yard. She pictured her father shaking his head at the downed trees and power lines. That's about as upset as her father would get about a situation like this. It was only if the people he loved were in danger that he would worry, and he would know she was in a safe place. At least it was as safe as the patients it sheltered. She shivered, realizing he had not yet heard what happened to Jeff.

Adriana made an instant decaf, then toast slathered with Cheez Whiz. From the kitchen window, she watched a handful of security guards survey the damage to the trees, cars and buildings. A few nurses also stood in a group, including Elspeth, who was just coming on shift, and Tony, whose shift just finished. They spoke together in what looked to be low and urgent tones. Elspeth put her hand on Tony's arm and he wiped his eyes with the palm of his other hand.

Adriana wondered if they had found Redgie. Maybe that's why Tony was crying—maybe they'd found him. Maybe he had washed up under the bridge. Maybe he was pinned under a tree. But maybe they hadn't found him and they didn't know where else to look.

Marlene had hung up and was making herself two cups of coffee. She wore her parka as usual, but now completely zipped with the hood up. Her hands shook, and coffee sloshed onto her fingers and the floor. She carried the two styrofoam cups to the table where Adriana stood, and sat down across from her. Marlene didn't say a word to her but drank the coffee in small, regular slurps. Then she drank the next cup, more quickly, since it had cooled, but with the same mechanical motion. After she was finished she threw the Styrofoam cups in the garbage and stalked from the kitchen. As she left, she let out a tremulous wail, which continued down the hall. The sound sent ice through Adriana's blood.

Adriana made her way to the common room. Everyone at the nursing station was discussing the storm. “They're telling people to stay off the roads,” one woman said.

Another snorted and said in a loud whisper, “No way I'm staying here all day! I'll end up crazy like the rest of them.” Adriana straightened up as she walked by them, glancing disdainfully at them, her head in the air like a queen. She hoped they felt ashamed of themselves.

On television there was news that a paramedic had been killed when a tree fell on his vehicle. Adriana couldn't imagine what that would be like, to be crushed to death in the back of an ambulance. She wondered, aimlessly, whether there had been a patient with him. What if Redgie had been in that ambulance?

Adriana's brain jangled. What were things like at the Dartmouth General, she wondered. There were no trees to come crashing down on an ambulance or pierce a window. Surely they had generators to keep the place going. She imagined Jazz, a small bump under the covers of her hospital bed, pale and exhausted. And Jeff, taut and fearful after being awake all night, gradually loosening his grip on consciousness, now that the wind and rain were over.

Adriana made herself have a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, with a johnny shirt around her shoulders. She combed her hair, which was growing out but still lopsided, and gathered it into a ponytail. She felt as ragged as a leaf torn from a tree. This year, she would turn 20 and her father was already 50. She had noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, and saw the same crow's feet beginning at the corners of her own. How was it possible that she had grown up, and her father had grown old? It seemed like her mother's funeral happened yesterday. But that was what everyone said, about the passage of time. It must have some mysterious property, which allowed the seconds to contract, until they barely seemed to mark time at all. Like a thread pulled tight, bunching fabric into a series of pleats.