Chapter 1
Stay away from Saint Raguel’s Hospital. I can’t stress this enough. If you take away anything from reading this, remember to avoid Saint Raguel’s Hospital like the pestilence. It’s getting hard for me to think clearly. The drugs that they injected me with are probably going to prostrate me in a couple of hours or so---if I’m lucky. I don’t have much longer until the nurses realize that I’m not in my room and figure out that I’ve stolen the front desk’s laptop. They say that once something’s on the Internet, it never disappears. I’m counting on that to get my story out there. If only I can remember it. Damn! The meds are making it difficult to remember things clearly. Everything feels like a drunken blur. The chemicals bury my memories in a sea of fog inside my head. It’s like a listless cruise ship floating through the opaque fog of new moon darkness. Only a few of them stick out clearly: a faint light in the shadows. Luckily, one of them is the beginning. So I think I’ll start from there and try to remember more as I go along.
My name is Donnie Smith. I used to be a nurse at Saint Raguel’s Hospital. The events that led to me being thrown in the forensic ward at the mental hospital started when Aurora Waker died in her coma. The autopsy report said that the 62 year old finally passed away, from complications of head trauma that caused her coma, at roughly 3:00 AM on Sunday. Due to the 35 years she spent in her coma; she had become a fixture in Saint Raguel’s Hospital. From the medical director to the custodian that buffed the floors after everyone else went home, everyone knew about their very own Snow White in her eternal sleep in Room 1001.
People began, grew, and ended their entire careers at the facility. Simultaneously, Aurora slept for decades and provided water cooler conversation between the nurses who tended to her, including me. It felt like a small but undeniable part of everyone’s life went with her when she was gone. She had no funeral and was unceremoniously buried in the city graveyard under a simple tombstone that bore her name and little else. Any family she might have had passed long before any of her current nurses entered the picture. The only reason she was kept alive, in her broken state, for so long was because of the hospital’s religious views on euthanasia. None of us were terribly close to her as a person, considering that she was asleep the entire time we knew her. Still, several members of the staff felt like they should mark her passing with some sort of event. I wasn’t one of them but when Josie invited me out to dinner in Aurora’s memory, of course I couldn’t say no.
Josie was a relatively new nurse here but was bubbly enough that she easily made friends. Plus, she was pretty hot. I had a thing for her; I think. Yeah, I was chatting her up at work for a couple of weeks before she invited me. She seemed receptive enough, but apparently not enough to make the dinner a one-on-one thing. She had asked a bunch of people to dinner at the Chinese hot pot restaurant just across from the hospital. A lot of people had been looking for an excuse to eat there in a group but never found one until Josie suggested they take a night out to honor the hospital’s longest tenured patient. However, not everyone she invited could come. I can’t say that I blame them. Work is busy when lives are on the line every day. In the end, only five people, including me, said they’d be able to make it, and four showed up. Not enough to make it a proper party, but enough to justify ordering a buffet set for the hot pot. Nobody wants to be the sad fatass who orders ten boxes of beef at a hot pot restaurant by themselves after all. I sat next to Josie as she scraped a box full of beef tenders into the boiling pot at the center of the table: such graceful placement of the tenders into the pot. On my other side were Sally and her boyfriend, John. The three of us, Josie, Sally, and myself, had taken care of comatose Aurora for most of our nursing careers. I think that’s partly why we all felt obliged to come out to honor Aurora. However, I remember feeling seriously disappointed when there weren’t more single ladies out that night. Still, the excellent food and Josie’s positive attitude made up for it. If I had to pick just one girl to be at the table with us that night, I probably would’ve picked her anyway. “It’s a shame that Tyler couldn’t make it,” Josie said, looking at the empty seat that she’d already booked for him. “It’s not like him to just up and cancel like this either.” Sally swished a slice of beef in the hot pot before placing it in her bowl. “Yeah, it’s a bit weird. I always pegged him as a straight-laced guy.” She turned to her boyfriend. “John, you two are close, right? Did he tell you anything?”
“Nothing much,” John said through a mouthful of noodles. “He just told me during lunch that he was going to be tending to the new comatose girl in room 1001 before meeting us tonight.”
I scooped a ladle’s worth of soup and meat into my own bowl. “The one who overdosed on drugs, right?”
“That’s the one.” John continued to pile his bowl with slices of flash boiled beef. “With a little luck she’ll be out in a week or so.”
“It’s surreal knowing that Aurora’s gone now.” Sally tossed some Chinese cabbage into the pot to keep all our arteries from clogging. “We all cut our teeth tending to her. Now that our time with her is over, it feels like we’ve graduated from a part of our lives with her passing.”
“Kind of bittersweet, isn’t it?” I asked, trying to sound more poetic than I really was. “I mean we all knew that she was going to go soon. Hell, it’s a miracle that she’s lived so long.”
“Yeah. At least now she can rest somewhere better than a hospital bed.” Josie held her glistening beer mug up in the air. “To Aurora, Saint Raguel’s Hospital’s “Sleeping Beauty.” May the patron saint of our hospital guide her to a better place.” We all echoed “To Aurora” and clinked our mugs together, spilling splashes of beer onto the wooden table that resident neat-freak Sally quickly cleaned up.
“Though, to be honest,” I gave her a smirk that I hoped was roguishly charming, “She’s not exactly a beauty. A solid six at most.”
“To be fair, you’ve never seen her with make-up,” Sally said.
“I don’t think make-up can make that much of a difference to a face so plain. I mean, seriously, she looks like the textbook definition of a vanilla white girl.”
“You’d be surprised what make-up can do,” John said casually, earning him a playful elbow to the ribs from Sally---.
Josie gulped down a quarter of her beer mug and set it on the table. “All women are beautiful in their own ways.”
“Yeah!” Sally agreed. “Besides, looks aren’t the only thing that makes someone beautiful. It’s just too bad none of us knew much about her personality because of the coma n’ all.”
“Speaking of which, be honest,” Josie turned to me, “what kind of girl would you consider to be a ten?”
“Let’s see-” I paused to pretend to think of an answer long after I thought of the comeback, “I’d say someone like you, Josie.”
“Oh, you!” Josie waved off the comment but let out a flattering chuckle all the same.
Sally rolled her eyes while Johnathan nodded in begrudging respect for a smooth line well delivered.
“Hey, you did tell me to be honest.” I flashed Josie, my pearly white smile. “Now it’s your turn. What kind of guy would you consider a ten?”
