Beau had been intubated in the ambulance by a woman in a full biohazard suit and placed on a ventilator on arrival to a segregated section of the emergency department. After a blitz of central lines and imaging and medications, he’d been wheeled up to join Rorie. Since there wasn’t room between the beds for a chair, I slumped between them on a wheeled stool, my head resting on Beau’s bed atop my crossed arms. The ventilator shooshed and shushed and puffed into the dim room, the green numbers from its electronic display casting little beads of light into the semidarkness. A band of fluorescence flickered out from the gray control board behind the beds, and a ridge of white light seeped from the cracks underneath the doors leading to the hall and to the bathroom. Finally, the window shade remained open, ushering in the dusky orange sky of the medical complex at night.

From outside the room came a dull but rapid thudding sound. I raised my head, listening. The sound intensified as its source drew nearer: the unmistakable noise of at least several people running. Barring some remarkable occurrence—a fire, or a threat—only one event produced a crowd of people hauling ass down a hospital corridor.

A code.

You never wanted a code to occur in any part of the hospital, of course, but someone coding on a pediatric floor produced an urgency all its own. The footfalls moved past our room to a room three or four doors down. Even from that distance and through the closed door, I could hear the urgent dinging of the monitor alarms and the muffled sound of people shouting through their masks.

This kept up for thirty minutes or so before an abrupt silence descended. The silence stretched and stretched, and I drifted into an uneasy, uncomfortable half consciousness, my body’s desperate attempt at sleep sabotaged by a jumbled mental horror show of sights and sounds from earlier in the day. My brain would not shut down. Every time I neared sleep, I’d replay the frantic beeping of a monitor or the clipped staticky bursts of an EMS radio or the sound of Rorie’s cries when she’d realized the extent of her brother’s illness. I sat up, grinding my knuckles against my closed eyelids.

The ventilator continued to shush. On the wall behind me, a clock ticked.