“Wait, wait, Dr. Doogie,” Shelia had stammered when she finally caught her breath. Shelia relished in calling Jane by the nickname she’d earned by becoming the youngest resident in the hospital’s history. Now everyone on staff, even the janitors, called her Doogie Howser. “I want this dream. But in my dream, it’s going to be Denzel. Malcolm X Denzel. And he’s gonna be floating just like your William. I don’t even care if I drown, if Denzel is with me.”

Jane had laughed at that, but then the ambulance had screamed up to the emergency room with an older couple that’d refused to leave the city. The man was in the throes of a heart attack, and his wife had soiled herself because their bathroom was flooded. Nothing was funny from that point on.

She’d slept since then, hadn’t she? She truly couldn’t remember. There were so few doctors left to go on rotation.

And, she’d been walking; it wasn’t like she had stopped to lean against the wall or something. She hadn’t passed out, otherwise she’d have been on the floor with a wicked headache.

But she hadn’t injured herself either when she’d blacked out before. And substantial time had passed then.

Had it been a year now since that happened? A fellow runner had found her lying on the edge of the tree line along the Mississippi levee trail. She’d been so confused. She’d just gone for a long run. How had she ended up practically in the trees?

When the runner told her it was noon on Sunday, Jane had panicked. She’d gone for a run at one in the afternoon on a Saturday. She’d been lying there an entire night and morning.

The cops had been called. She’d undergone a full physical checkup. No drugs in her system, no signs of an attack. An MRI showed no tumors, no brain abnormalities. Everyone had come up with theories. You pushed yourself too hard, you collapsed. Your blood sugar was too low. A car sideswiped you and thought you were dead and left you.

Why, then, weren’t there bruises? How can I have simply no memory of being gone for an entire twenty-four-hour period?

Jane hurried down the hall to the nurses’ station. Shelia was there, sipping what must have been her sixth cup of coffee of the day. There weren’t many nurses left either.

“Word is the National Guard is going to force us to move,” Shelia said.

“They can’t. There are too many terminal patients. They can’t be removed from their life support, even for a minute.”

“They say they’ll airlift them out.”

“During a hurricane? That’s impossible. What does Dr. Parker say?”