Beyond the Pale by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online Page A

in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting and somehow still smile at the perfect smallness of a premature baby’s toes … if they meant she could get called away from the other residents in the TV lounge to resuscitate the elderly victim of a hit-and-run and still make it back before the commercial was over … if that’s what people meant, then Grace supposed they were right. She was good, she knew she was, and she knew it without any senseof hauteur or self-importance. It was simply a fact. Everyone had a talent, a gift—something they did better the first time they tried than most people could do after years of practice—and this was hers. Grace could put broken people back together.
    She always knew when a rush was coming.
    Of course, there were all the usual signs even a first-year intern knew—a full moon, a rising barometer, a hot Friday night in June. But even when there were no signs, when the city drowsed, and there hadn’t been anything more serious than a sprained thumb all day, somehow she could feel it about to happen, like a prickling on her skin. Even as the others played broom hockey in a slick-tiled hallway—a game they resorted to in those rare ebbs—Grace would slip on a pair of latex gloves and stand, expectant, before the automatic doors.
    With a hiss the doors slid open. Then they were there, streaming into the Emergency Department of Denver Memorial Hospital, pulled from an overturned bus, or a burning hotel, or a twenty-car freeway pileup. While the others scrambled to grab gowns and stethoscopes, Grace already weaved her way among the wounded, the frightened, the dead, soothing hurts and fears with precise hands. Some in the ED mistook this cool and focused efficiency for aloofness, but Grace never bothered to correct them. She had not come to this place to make friends.
    Yet, sometimes, in the quiet hour that always came at four in the morning, when everything in the world seemed to sleep and the Emergency Department grew still and tomblike, Grace would sit in a vacant wheelchair, holding a foam cup of dull beige coffee drizzled from a dull beige vending machine, and she would think that people were wrong—awfully, utterly, hilariously wrong—and that it was really just the opposite. Grace didn’t have a good grip on reality.
    Reality had a good grip on her.
    Bullet wounds, mangled bodies, burnt children … despite her effort to keep each instance distinct and sharp and tragic, all inevitably blurred into one endless tapestry of suffering. For every hole she patched, for every shattered limb she straightened, for every heart she shocked and batteredand cajoled into beating again, there would be another to take its place.
    Still, in all her wheelchair reveries, there was no prescience that could have warned Grace of, or even hinted at, the queer happenings that would weave themselves around her on that purple autumn night. Not that it mattered. For in the end, whether she gripped it, or whether it gripped her, the result would have been exactly the same.
    Grace Beckett’s reality was about to unravel.

8.
    Grace watched as two interns pushed the gurney down the institutional green hallway. One of the thing’s wheels was askew and rattled like an old grocery cart as it hurtled along. Neither of the fresh-faced young men seemed to notice. Elevator doors lurched open, and a moment later interns, gurney, and patient—victim of an apartment building fire—were gone. Grace leaned against the wall and pressed her cheek to the cool tiles. The doors of Trauma One flapped behind her like the palsied wings of an old bird. She let her eyes droop shut for a delicious moment, then forced them open again. She shucked off her papery sterile gown, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into a receptacle where it could await the cleansing fire of the incinerator. With a deep breath she started toward Admitting to get her next injury. The day wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
    She navigated her