Page 100 of One Year Ago in Spain
She clearly was not going to get into the hospital through the emergency room.
“Um, okay. Gracias,” Claire said, backing away.
The security guard eyed her suspiciously.
She held up eight fingers. “A las ocho. I will come backa las ocho.”
He nodded once before she turned and went back toward the main hospital entrance.
But there must be another way in. Even though visitors could only be at the hospital for twelve hours of the day, the hospital itself had to run 24/7. They had patients to care for and to feed and clothe.
There’s got to be a back entrance for food and linen deliveries,Claire thought.
—
The loading dockat the back of the hospital was in full swing. As with other organizations, the wee hours were the best time for deliveries to be made because it interfered less with daytime business. Crates of milk cartons and vegetables were being unloaded from a massive refrigerator truck, and a laundry truck was backed up to a separate loading bay.
In the bustle of work being done, Claire grabbed a patient gown from a rolling rack of clean linen and dashed in through the laundry door.
Inside, she ducked between two giant hampers of dirty clothes—holding her nose because the hospital gowns were soiled in a very different way from ordinary clothes—and quicklyslipped thecleangown on. Claire tucked her purse into her waistband against her stomach. An actual patient wouldn’t be walking around with a purse. But hers was small enough that if she hunched and let the gown’s fabric hang in the front, it could just look like a stomach bulge.
Dressed “appropriately” for the hospital, she darted in and out between the hampers, toward a set of double doors that seemed to lead into the main corridors of the hospital. Twice, someone almost caught her, but she dove and found cover behind adjacent rolling shelves and bins.
Finally, Claire made it through the double doors. She branched off that hallway as soon as possible and found an elevator.
It got her to the third floor, but the elevator was on the other end of the building from Matías’s ward. Claire was halfway there when a nurse exited one of the wards and frowned at Claire.
“¿No debería estar en su cama?”
Claire had no idea what the nurse had said, but Claire had already prepared her story while she was sneaking through the hospital. “Ejercicio,” she said.Exercise. She had seen how the nurses encouraged the ambulatory patients in Matías’s ward to walk laps in order to getsomeexercise during their hospital stay. The nurses beamed at the patients slowly shuffling around, because they understood how hard it was for any of them to move, and how much easier it would’ve been to just stay in bed.
“Es un poco tarde,” the nurse said to Claire. That one, she understood:It’s a bit late.
“Un poco más,” Claire said.A little more.She pointed toward Matías’s ward at the end of the corridor to indicate her destination.
The nurse hesitated and thought it over.
“Vale,” he said, motioning her on.
Because what was he going to do anyway if Claire was already on her way back where she belonged? Make her stop exercising so he could go get a wheelchair for her? That would defeat the nurses’ goal of encouraging their patients to move on their own whenever they could.
“Gracias,” Claire said. “Buenas noches.”
—
Once in Matías’sunit, she ducked down so the nurses wouldn’t see her from behind their desks in the middle of the ward. Claire wouldn’t be able to pull the “patient out for a stroll” trick here because the nurses would either recognize her from her visits ornotrecognize her but know that she wasn’t one of the patients under their care. Claire removed her shoes and shuffled in her socks past ten different rooms before she reached Matías’s.
But then she hesitated. Her heart battered her ribs, and her whole body shook as she crouched on the linoleum.
Please be all right, Matías. Please please please be awake and smiling…
She didn’t want to open the door.
But she had to.
Claire took in a shaky breath, turned the handle, and slipped inside.
“No…”
