Mercy 6

“I don’t know.” The patient stared at the empty space above her knees. “We were having some tea. From my tray. Lana was standing about where you are.” She looked at Silva.

“Was the tray over you?”

“No. Lana had pushed it aside and was serving us. Was saying how we’d get together and have a proper tea somewhere nice.” Her eyes widened. “Somewhere they didn’t serve Jell-O. Then … she kind of blew out a little breath. Just a tiny puff. Then she fell over, right across me.”

“How did she present?” asked Silva.

The woman stared.

“What did she do right before she fell over?” Mendenhall offered her a bottle of water. “How did her eyes look? Her arms.”

“It wasn’t sudden. It was calm. Like she had grown tired. Tired from something she was remembering. She just looked down and breathed that one puff. Her arms? Her arms didn’t do anything.

She even held on to the tea mug. It spilled across my bed. Like her.

Just. Spilled.”

“Her elbows bent?”

“Yes. Like when you lie down to sleep. Everything like that.

Like lying down to sleep when you’re very, very tired.”

“I’m going to place myself over you,” Silva told her. “You direct me. Try to place me as best you can just like Fleming was.”

Silva laid herself over the patient. Her hair fell across her face, covering her mask. The patient reached to adjust the cool black strands, but Mendenhall caught her by the elbow. “Don’t touch, just direct. Let her do the arranging.”

“One arm was out and over. The other was back and down. She fell more over than that, more over me.”

Silva positioned herself much like a mourner would onstage, a daughter flung across the body of a mother. Again the patient reached, her palm nearing Silva’s shoulder, before catching herself and gazing up apologetically at Mendenhall.

Back in the hallway, Mendenhall relayed the measurements she had taken while Silva recorded them on her tablet. She had taken two photographs with the lab tech’s cell, one from each side, of Silva lying across the patient. She had plumbed the line from waist to floor; then Silva had triangulated that mark with the walls. As they strode to the elevators, Mendenhall stripped off her mask and gloves and tossed them into a trash receptacle.

Silva spoke as she recorded. “No posturing. One prominent exhale. Relaxed fall.”

Her tone was punctuated, so Mendenhall did not expect the quizzical look from Silva. She almost appeared sad.

“Can we do this by phone?” Mendenhall asked.

Silva shook her head as they neared the elevators. “My texts scroll on an overhead screen as he takes digitals and examines the body. If he taps a line of text, it registers here,” she lifted her tablet,

“as pursue.”

“Tell him to take a lateral digital of her upper chest. Center on the lower trachea, right above the bronchus.”

“I can’t tell him that.”

“He’ll figure it out.”

Mendenhall showed her express key. “ICU?”

Silva nodded as she entered her text to Claiborne. She winced at an immediate reply.

“What?”

“I’m fired.”

The bell chimed, and the elevator doors opened. Two nurses were inside, confused by which floor they had been pulled to. They frowned when they recognized Mendenhall.

“He’ll know it’s me,” she told Silva as they stepped into the elevator and Mendenhall hijacked it to third floor ICU.

Seconds later they were free of the scowling nurses. “They’ll all end up in the cafeteria,” said Mendenhall as the doors closed. The ICU hall was empty in the long stretch between the waiting area and the nurses’ station.

Silva winced at another text, bit her lower lip. Anyone would have thought she was playing a game on the handheld. Anyone would have wanted to join her.

“And?” asked Mendenhall.

“He said to ignore you.” Silva started for the nurses’ station.

“No.” Mendenhall touched her sleeve. “Let’s go to waiting.

Where Verdasco was found. I’ll get your nurse to come to us. Save you that trip. That round of chatter. You having to submit.”

Silva went with Mendenhall.

“How do you know it’s the trachea?”

“The way she described that breath. Fleming’s little puff. Then forward collapse. That’s trauma right above the bronchus. Extreme trauma. Maybe involving the heart, too. A really hard punch to the middle of the chest or back. Commotio cordis.”

“That kills boxers?”

“And schoolkids.”

“You think that woman punched Fleming?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Not an infection.”

Mendenhall stopped Silva with a simple elbow touch. They stood midhall, that given privacy in hospitals. Silva squared herself to Mendenhall and raised her chin in a straight manner, not a tilt of skepticism, irritation, or humor. She just waited, open.

“Look,” said Mendenhall, “that stuff with Fleming’s roomie. I wasn’t trying to counter you or put you in your place. Or get you fired. It’s just more efficient sometimes to be … personable. It’s not bedside manner. It’s a form of examination, a safe way of opening up the wound. And I mean that literally. The psychological and emotional wounds start to clot immediately, too soon, screwing up memory, screwing up facts.”