First Wish Read online

  Madison managed a small smile. “The wheel never stops turning.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said with a sigh.

  I hurried after the nurse, trying to put the girl out of my head.

  Three

  Sideways.

  I kept thinking about that as I drove home just after three in the morning, heading out of D.C. proper and into the burbs of Vienna, just past the end of the Orange Metro line. Everything had been smooth and nice and then the trauma had rolled in and it all went to hell—I’d spent the rest of my shift practically running between rooms, dodging patients in the halls lying on gurneys because we had nowhere else to put them, demanding help that we were too overwhelmed to give. Once everything had slowed a bit, I was stuck completing charts for an hour past the end of my shift, a bitter task that revealed the girl’s name had been Vivian, and, even worse, that her bloodwork had been positive for human chorionic gonadotropin—she’d been pregnant.

  Sideways.

  Getting behind happened more often than anybody in the emergency room liked, but there were times it couldn’t be avoided. Part of the backlog was my fault—it was hard to be on your A-game after losing somebody, even if any other doctor wouldn’t have been able to do better. But it wasn’t just the death—my head felt off, my emotions were out of whack, and I was so completely exhausted that I had to admit I wasn’t back to normal yet after my brush with Meningitis.

  I could’ve died…

  True, I thought, staring at the last red light between me and bed, a light that seemed to be interminably long. It’d been scary, the fever coming on out of nowhere like that. And I’d never know where I picked the shit up from. Probably work, but who knows? I hadn’t seen any patients diagnosed with Meningitis that was for sure—believe me, I’d checked.

  Green finally, and I stomped it, afraid I was going to pass out soon from exhaustion—the last thing I needed was to cause a car accident of my own.

  I slumped and slogged through the front door of the house I’d moved into a little more than a month ago, a Craftsman that had seen better days but had the sort of rundown charm that some people, like myself, appreciated.

  My body demanded the bed, but I forced myself into the kitchen—I wasn’t hungry, but I’d sleep longer on a full stomach. Night shifts force you to employ many such strategies in order to survive the turmoil of disrupting your normal circadian rhythms.

  I stuck some leftovers in the microwave long enough to make them lukewarm, gobbled them down while leaning against the refrigerator, then tossed the dirty dishes into the already crowded sink.

  Lights off in the kitchen and I trudged down the dark hallway, failing to avoid the boxes that I still hadn’t found the time to unpack—maybe they’d still be there when I finished my residency.

  The food was sitting heavy in my stomach, making me feel a little queasy. I knew the feeling for what it was though—not bad leftovers, but sheer, complete exhaustion, to which my body did not react well.

  A shower might be a bad idea…

  Normally I hated going to bed dirty, wanting nothing to do with the germs I’d undoubtedly picked up on my shift. Catching Meningitis had only reinforced that feeling. But with every step I felt worse, my stomach doing weird things, my head feeling dizzy and crowded with emotions and thoughts, my vision blurring. I just needed to sleep.

  I tripped over the door threshold going into the bedroom, barely managed to keep myself from sprawling onto all fours on the floor. Wobbling in the dark at the end of my bed, I shed all my clothes and kicked them into a pile by the closet, then threw on a clean t-shirt and underwear.

  What the hell…? I thought as I fell into the bed, struggling to get beneath the bedding. I’d been tired before, more times than I cared to remember, but I couldn’t ever recall feeling so overwhelmingly… wrong.

  Off. I feel off…

  Perhaps I wasn’t over the meningitis yet after all. What if the antibiotics hadn’t killed all the microscopic bastards off and they were coming back? I didn’t feel the way I had during the fevers though—this felt different. Still…

  Either I’ll wake up brain-damaged or back to normal. Too late to do anything about it now…

  The dream started like dreams always do, the abnormal accepted, the weird commonplace—I was back in my childhood home with my mother yelling at me that I’d better put away my stuffed giraffes or I could forget about going out that evening. I was there, being yelled at, seeing it through my own eyes, the way that dreams always work, with the self front and center.

  And then things went…

  … sideways.

  Everything disappeared—my mother, the house, the giraffes, and I was left floating in darkness, my dream-body gone, just my being, alone there in the dark. Then an image appeared out of the surrounding darkness, growing and expanding, until it enveloped me—except I wasn’t inside of me. It wasn’t a conclusion I reached, but something I sensed. I was not inside myself, but inside someone else.

  The someone else was in the living room of a small, run down apartment. There was a tiny kitchen and short hall nearby, and brown carpet ran wall-to-wall, riddled with stains and the occasional bleach-white spot. The walls were a dingy off-white, split by vertical cracks where the sheets of drywall butted up against each other. A large, jagged hole shaped like a five-pointed star pierced one wall. The furniture was sparse, and what there was appeared to be third-hand at least—an out-of-date couch, an ancient recliner, a blocky coffee table covered with takeout containers, wrappers, and empty beer bottles.

  A grungy guy sprawled on the couch, a television remote in one of his hands, a beer in the other. A Redskins hat perched on his head backwards, above blond hair that was lanky and long. A thin cigar protruded from one side of a wide mouth that was surrounded by a scruffy mustache and a Fu Man Chu. The green eyes set above his unremarkable nose were dull.

  “You’re such a Goddamn loser,” the person I was inside of said. A girl from her voice. “I never should’ve taken you back after you slept with that skank Marissa.”

  The guy didn’t look away from the television as he plucked the cigar out of his mouth and raised the beer, taking a gulp before putting it back between his thighs. “Takes a skank to know a skank, Viv.”

  The girl screamed, picked up a boot that resided alone on the ugly carpet, and threw it at his head, missing so badly that the guy didn’t even flinch. He laughed though, and Viv raised her hands, her fingers crooked into claws. Just when I thought she was going to attack him, she instead raised both middle fingers and then turned her back on him.

  I tried to speak and couldn’t—I was inside her and had no voice of my own, a silent passenger along for the ride.

  Viv rushed out of the apartment, jumped inside a beat up Chevy sedan, and sped away, pushing the car as fast as it would go. She turned on the overhead light and pulled down the visor, revealing a small mirror, and for the first time I was able to see her—she had two-tone hair, blond-on-top, brunette-on-bottom.

  Seconds later she ran a red light and the darkness returned.

  Adrian! Oh shit, Adrian, I didn’t get to tell you. I didn’t get to…

  I woke up in my bed, covered in sweat even though I always kept the house cold, the voice filling my head, the images of the dream still vivid.

  Crazy dream… I thought, confused with sleep as I blinked at the dim bedroom ceiling.

  It’s not a dream! I didn’t get to tell him. I have to tell him. I have to!

  I closed my eyes again, still on the cusp of sleep, wading through the remnants of the dream about the woman who died beneath my hands the night before.

  Viv. Her name was Viv… I thought, my eyes opening once again.

  Who are you? How do you know my name?

  My eyes opened wide. What the hell…?

  I didn’t get to tell him…

  I shot upright in the bed and turned on the bedside light, certain I’d see the girl in the room with me, a ghost out to haunt the doctor who
’d failed her.

  But the room was empty.

  Fuck, I thought, searching the room for the source of the voice and finding nothing. I’m losing it…

  Who… who are you?

  It wasn’t my voice. And it wasn’t in the room…

  … only in my head. Oh god I am losing it…

  Who’s head? The voice asked.

  The question was too much. I jumped out of the bed and bolted from the room, flipped on the hall lights, the bathroom lights, the living room lights, every light in the house.

  The place was empty.

  No one was in the house talking to me. But the voice was there. I could… hear?… it.

  “It’s there,” I said out loud, wanting to hear my own voice. I spun on my heel in the living room. Are you there?

  I just want to tell him, the voice said. I have to tell him…

  I fell to my knees, clutching my hands to my head. The voice was in my head. The voice of the dead girl I tried to save a few hours ago…

  It couldn’t be of course.

  But it was.

  Four

  Not knowing what else to do, I got to my feet and ran down the hall to the bathroom, leaned against the sink, and peered at myself in the mirror—I was looking for signs of delusion, insanity, a broken mind. But only regular old Linh Davies was gazing back at me. Disheveled and sleep deprived, yes, but the same old me.

  Is that… you? the voice asked.

  You can see me? I asked, so startled by the question that I couldn’t stop myself.

  Yes, the voice answered, sounding as amazed as I felt. I can see you in the mirror. But how? I was driving and… how?

  I sank to the floor yet again, eyes wide but barely seeing anything anymore. You… died. You… were in a car accident and were taken to the hospital where I tried to save you. But I… couldn’t…

  If I… died… where am I?

  “You’re inside me,” I whispered aloud.

  How though?

  I stiffened. You heard what I said?

  Yes. Why?

  I said it out loud. You heard what I said. You saw me in the mirror…

  I don’t want this. I just want to tell Adrian. That’s all I want. I just want to tell him. I don’t want this!

  Stop, please! I thought, wincing. It’s uncomfortable when you… yell.

  I don’t want this! I just want to tell him…

  Tell him what? I asked, no longer able to ignore what she was actually saying, even if the conversation itself was impossible.

  That I’m… that I was… pregnant. That’s all I want to tell him. That I was pregnant…

  She

  —Viv. She’s Viv from the dream—

  fell silent.

  I sat there, looking at the shower but seeing nothing, trying and failing to comprehend what had happened.

  The Meningitis is back…

  The thought was mine

  —this is absurd. I’m going insane—

  not Viv’s.

  I kept hoping it was all a dream, that I’d wake up in my bed, exhausted but mentally intact. But sitting there on the bathroom floor, the porcelain tile cool beneath my butt, there was nothing dreamlike to what I felt. There aren’t too many dreams, at least not ones I remember, where you just end up sitting somewhere and staring at nothing for minutes on end.

  I went back through what had happened the day before, step by step, trying to figure out what made the day different. I’d forced myself to sleep late in preparation for the coming night shifts. Then I’d taken a long, very slow run, trying to get my lungs and legs back in shape after more than two weeks of essentially bedrest. Running was my happy place, the thing that let me zone out and forget about the emergency room, and I’d missed the feeling of my lungs burning as I ran around Vienna. After the run, which was probably longer than it should’ve been, I had lunch and did a little cleaning. My mother had stayed with me for more than a week—the house had been spic and span when she left, but that had been a few days before and I’d let things start to slide. Next, I’d gotten enough groceries to cover my shifts, then it was back home for a little nap—well, an hour and a half long nap, which wasn’t so little. Finally, I’d gotten ready for work and left the house. Nothing extraordinary about any of that. Ditto for the shift—until Viv had rolled up in ambulance two-seventy-three.

  I saw the name on the chart last night. Vivian. Saw that she was pregnant. My brain just dredged up those details and shoveled them into the dream… I tried to focus tightly on the logic, but the insanity of what’d happened since waking up made it impossible.

  Nevertheless, I forced myself to keep going, to finish replaying the steps of the day before. The girl dying—Viv dying—certainly wasn’t ordinary, but it had happened before and I’d never come away from the experience believing I’d gotten the voice of a dead patient stuck in my head. I had felt a bit odd the rest of the shift, a bit more emotional than normal, but it hadn’t been that remarkable. But the fatigue I felt toward the end of the shift and at the house—that had been odd. I’d never experienced such fatigue before, not anywhere near that degree, and I’d spent most of my residency feeling pretty damn tired. Then there’d been the dream, which, unlike my normal dreams, I could remember with absolute clarity—the apartment, the guy on the couch, the yelling, the accident. That wasn’t normal either.

  So pre-shift—normal, except that I wasn’t one hundred percent healthy yet. Shift—sadly normal, even the girl’s death. The rest of the shift—maybe not normal, but that could’ve been due to losing a patient. Post-shift—definitely not normal.

  The fulcrum from normal to not normal was pretty obvious.

  Viv.

  Something had happened when I’d been with the girl. It was almost like she’d infected me—not with an illness, but with… herself.

  That isn’t possible though. Right? I don’t believe in any of that stuff, no afterlife, nothing spiritual. But you were in there, touching that girl, and she gave you something, that’s for damn sure…

  Touching.

  I’d been giving her chest compressions after her heart gave out for the last time. Touching her when she’d—arguably—died. Arguably, because there was cardiac death and then there was brain death, and even in this day and age of modern medicine the jury was still out when the true moment of death occurred—was it when the heart stopped beating, or was it when the brain finally stopped functioning due to lack of oxygen?

  Either way I was touching her at the end. I had on gloves, but what of it? Perhaps her soul was… there… at that point, waiting around like a hitchhiker, and I was the nearest ride. But why me? Surely I wasn’t the only one touching her then, not with everything that was going on.

  I took a deep breath. Viv?

  Yes?

  Shit. I’d hoped… but hope was generally a waste of time. Feeling crazy and like ten times a fool, I spoke in my thoughts again. Did you… try to get into me? When you—your body—died?

  I don’t remember. I was driving, crying, then I was… here. I just want to tell Adrian the truth. To tell him I was pregnant. He needs to know…

  I sighed. I know.

  Despite what’d happened, the desire to sleep wrapped itself around me. I had no idea what the time was, but I hadn’t been asleep for that long—it was still dark outside the bathroom’s small window. My body needed rest, but surely there was no way I could slow my thoughts down enough to sleep again, not with… her… in there.

  I’m still sick, I thought, the explanation popping into my head. I could sit on the bathroom floor and ‘talk’ with the voice in my head all night, but if I was experiencing delusions related to an infection the voice wouldn’t go away. If there were still bacteria in my cerebrospinal fluid the only thing that would get rid of the voice was antibiotics. I tried to recall how often Meningitis reoccurs after a primary infection but drew a blank.

  I’ve got to get checked out. Now…

  If the Meningitis was back then every minute
counted—the longer it took to get treatment, the higher the chance I’d have brain damage, which could derail my entire career. Meningitis could be that bad, could leave your brain jellied and confused for the rest of your natural born days. It did weird things to people’s brains sometimes.

  I forced myself off the bathroom floor, avoided looking in the mirror lest I spark the voice again. The brain is capable of amazing, and amazingly weird, feats, and who knew what made my hay-wired neurons ‘hear’ the voice of my dead patient?

  I hurried to the bedroom, full of urgency, unsure why it’d taken me so long to realize what was going on. Of course I was sick again. That was what was different—my meningitis had relapsed. I should’ve realized when I got home and felt so out of sorts.

  Where to go? I wondered as I threw on some clothes. Not an urgent care, not for meningitis. It had to be the emergency room. And that meant back to the hospital.

  Five

  The horizon was beginning to lighten as I pulled into the hospital parking garage. I’d thought about taking the train, worried about having an event while I was driving and getting in an accident, but then the voice—Viv god help me—had started talking again, yammering about how her boyfriend had to know she was pregnant. I decided the risk of driving was worth getting to the emergency room sooner.

  Walking into the department, I tried to remember if I’d heard the voice during the first infection, but I couldn’t recall hearing anything—I’d been in a fever blur, so who knows. Anyone could’ve been ranting away upstairs and I probably wouldn’t even remember it.

  I wasn’t about to wait with the other patients—and there were a few still, though the mess from earlier in the night had been cleared out—so I used my ID to get inside. I waved to the front desk clerk on my way by, and she waved absently back, unaware, or uncaring, that I’d left just a few hours before.