Right of Way
Tess Calloway had cried in worse places. The break room at St. Agnes, twice. The supply closet, once, while still holding a box of gauze she never did end up using. The parking garage, regularly, in the specific way that didn’t count if no one saw it.
Tonight it was the car.
This felt, on some level, like an upgrade. The car had a radio she could turn up loud enough to cover the crying and the open-mouthed breathing that came with a stuffed-up nose, so that none of it would be audible — not that there was anyone around to hear it.
She was getting ready for a twelve-hour shift. It was eleven at night, and before she’d left the house she’d texted Mike.
He turned thirty tomorrow, and she had the perfect gift waiting in her backseat: a life-size, one-to-one scale Yoda statue. Mike loved anything Star Wars — Jedi, lightsabers, the whole sprawling fantasy of it — with the focused, unembarrassed devotion of a man who had simply decided, somewhere around age nine, that this was who he was going to be.
It was a gift she had driven four hours for. That didn’t count the two hours she’d already spent before that, chasing down a listing that promised a full-size Yoda and turned out, on arrival, to be a full-size Gollum — sickly, crouched, holding out one clawed hand and asking, unhelpfully, for my precious. She’d had a small private crisis in a stranger’s driveway, recalculated, found a second listing forty-five minutes away, and gotten home close to one in the morning with an actual Yoda strapped into her backseat like the smallest, greenest passenger she’d ever transported.
So she had every reason in the world to be happy. She’d texted him: Hey. Tomorrow’s the big day. How do you want to celebrate? Because I have a BIG surprise for you. Kisses.
She was at a red light when she heard the phone. One ping. She picked it up off the passenger seat and read it.
I think we need to take a break. I just don’t think this is working anymore. It’s not your fault.
She read it three times, still processing it, when the car behind her started honking. She put the phone down — threw it, really, more than put it — and started driving, already composing the reply in her head. Why. What happened. We had dinner last night and it was perfect.
They’d had dinner last night.
That was the detail she kept circling back to.
For one disorienting second she wondered if he’d sent it to the wrong person — some mix-up of names in his contacts, some other woman entirely — and then realized the alternative was somehow worse, because wrong person meant another relationship, and that thought didn’t sit any better than the first one. So if it wasn’t a mistake, what was it?
She thought about the year they’d had. How sweet he’d been — remembering her coffee order, texting to make sure she’d eaten on long shifts. He worked in IT, kept odd hours himself, never once complained about hers. Never once complained about the smell of hospital that came home with her on her clothes either. Such a good guy.
And now this.
And the tears kept coming.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, which did nothing, because her hand was also wet. She’d apparently been crying for longer than she’d noticed.
The road out past the reservoir was unlit and empty at eleven at night, which was usually the appeal — no traffic, no other cars to witness a twenty-four-year-old woman sobbing in motion — except tonight it meant nothing to catch her attention except the radio and her own thoughts, which were doing laps.
I just don’t think this is working anymore.
One year.
She didn’t see the man.
She felt him.
A sound that her brain, in the half-second it had to process it, filed under not pothole — too soft, too wrong-shaped — and then the car jolted and something rolled off the hood and Tess slammed the brakes so hard her seatbelt cut into her collarbone and the radio kept playing, cheerfully, as if nothing had happened.
She sat there for one full second doing absolutely nothing, which was not a second she was proud of later.
Then she was out of the car.
He was on the asphalt, on his side, in running shorts and one shoe, the other shoe sitting in the road eight feet away. Dark hair. Tall, even folded up wrong like that. Not moving.
“Oh my God,” she said, to no one, to the empty road, to the universe. “Oh my God, oh my God—”
She dropped to her knees beside him, and the part of her brain that had spent six years becoming a nurse elbowed the part of her brain that was currently having a breakdown and said, with some authority, assess the patient.
Airway — open, breathing, fast and shallow but there. Pulse — present, quick. No blood she could see except a shallow scrape along his temple, already swelling into something purple. His right leg sat at an angle that legs did not naturally sit at.
“Hey,” she said, hands hovering over him without quite landing, the way you hover over something you’re afraid to break further. “Hey, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She should call an ambulance. She knew this with total clarity, the way she knew her own name, the way she knew the dosage for adult ibuprofen.
She did not call an ambulance.
What she did instead — and she would spend a significant portion of the next several weeks trying to reconstruct the exact logic that got her here — was decide, with the specific panic-logic of someone who worked twelve-hour shifts surrounded by the consequences of bad decisions, that the fastest and safest thing was to put him in her car and drive him to St. Agnes herself, where she knew the doctors, where she knew the process, where she would not have to stand on a dark road waiting twenty minutes for a siren while a stranger’s leg sat at an angle legs did not sit at.
This was, on reflection, not actually faster. It was also, on reflection, the moment everything else became inevitable.
Getting a six-foot-something unconscious man into a sedan by herself was not a skill she’d been taught in nursing school, but adrenaline made up for a great deal of this missing skill. She got him into the backseat at an angle that probably wasn’t ideal for a possible spinal injury, made the executive decision that she would deal with that guilt later, and drove to the hospital faster than she had ever driven anything in her life.
It wasn’t, she reasoned, like she was going to hit someone else tonight. There was a limit. There had to be a limit.
“You’re fine,” she told him, or told herself, or told the empty passenger seat. “You’re going to be fine. I’m a nurse. This is — this is actually a great place for this to have happened. Statistically.”
He did not respond to this, which was for the best, because it was not a good sentence.
St. Agnes at eleven-forty was the version of busy that looked calm from the outside and was, underneath, a controlled emergency. Tess pulled up to the ambulance bay, threw the car into park at an angle that would earn her a parking violation if anyone official noticed, and ran inside shouting words that got people moving — trauma, unconscious, possible fracture, possible head injury — and within ninety seconds there were four people around her car and a gurney and the specific organized chaos of people who did this for a living.
“Tess?” Marisol, from triage, blinking at her. “What happened, what is this—”
“I found him,” Tess said.
The words came out before she’d decided to say them, fast and flat and final, the way a lie sounds when it arrives ahead of the thought that produced it.
“On the road. Out by the reservoir. I was driving here and I found him like this.”
It wasn’t, strictly, untrue. She had found him. The part where she’d found him because her car had found him first was a detail that stayed in her mouth, behind her teeth.
“Okay.” Marisol was already moving, already calling for Dr. Madina, already not particularly interested in the philosophy of the sentence Tess had just produced. “Okay, let’s get him in.”
Tess stood in the bay for a moment, hands shaking, watching them wheel him through the doors, and then did the only thing that made sense to her, which was to follow.
