“It will be my pleasure,” Durell responded.

Chapter 7

OCTOBER 15, 2007
MONDAY, 7:54 P.M.
LOS ANGELES, USA
(SIMULTANEOUS WITH THE TIME THE NURSES INTERNATIONAL MORNING
MEETING IS BREAKING UP)

Neil McCulgan put down his pen to rub his eyes. The schedule he’d been working on was still unfinished. The software company whose program was supposed to do the schedule had recently changed hands, and without the original CEO’s keeping everything under control, the software was getting things mixed up, ergo the need for Neil to painstakingly redo it by hand. He looked at his watch. It was already close to eight and he was supposed to have been off at seven, and he was exhausted.

The fact that he’d not managed to get the schedule completed was based on two things. The first was a major pileup on the 405 freeway causing several deaths and a number of very serious injuries, all of whom had begun to arrive in their respective ambulances less than a half-hour after Jennifer Hernandez had childishly stalked out of his office. All that took a number of hours to handle, meaning separating the dead from the living, stabilizing the most seriously injured and sending them up to the OR, and finally dealing appropriately with the less severely hurt by setting and casting broken bones and suturing lacerations.

The second reason the reworked schedule wasn’t done was because he wasn’t concentrating well. “Damn!” he shouted at the wall, then felt guilty and foolish. Spinning around in his chair, he looked out into the triage area. Two patients were looking in his direction with raised eyebrows. Embarrassed at his outburst, Neil got up from his chair, and after giving the two startled patients a reassuring wave, he closed the door and sat back down.

Neil couldn’t concentrate because of Jennifer. Although he’d inevitably used what he called her puerile behavior as further justification for his decision not to go to India, he slowly began to admit that he’d handled the situation miserably. First off, the real reasons were simply more selfishly motivated. He eventually admitted that the excuse he’d given her—namely, the reworking of the ER schedule—had been a transparent lie. He should have been more up-front so that there could have been, at a minimum, an honest discussion. And finally, the part that made him feel most guilty was that the excuse he gave himself—that he would have been more receptive if the death involved her mother, not her grandmother—was also a lie. He was well aware that Jennifer’s grandmother, for all intents and purposes, had been her mother.

At one point Neil called Jennifer’s cell phone, but she didn’t answer. He had no idea if it was because she noticed it was he who was calling or if she’d already departed, and there was no way to find out. He even thought, in a moment of irrationality, about running out to LAX to catch her before she did leave, but he dismissed the idea because he had no idea which airline she was taking. From having made travel arrangements to India five months ago, he knew there were multiple carriers flying from L.A. to New Delhi.