16 True Night Shift Nurse Horror Stories | I Was the Only Nurse in the Building… and I Wasn’t Alone 😱

Hi, I'm Karen Slaughter. If you love untangling mysteries and uncovering the truth behind what really happened, I think you'll love "The Good Daughter." Charlie, go! Sam! Now my best-selling novel is finally coming to life, and I got to write every episode. You should have died in them woods. Your father should have been a better shot. Starring Rose Byrne, Megan Fahey, and Brendan Gleeson. From page to screen, don't miss "The Good Daughter," now streaming only on Peacock. I'm here, Charlie, and I'm not going away. This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. If you're looking for a better way to save on electricity, both night and day, look no further than TXU Energy Free Nights in Cool Summer. It gives you free energy all night, every night, all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use every summer. It's the only plan that lets you use free energy to get more savings. So while nights are always free, summer days are now always discounted. With savings like that, you'll never look at a free night's plan the same way again. Learn more at TXU.com. Rep number 1-0-0-0-4. I'm not giving my name because Ilwaco is tiny and half the town has had me start their IV. My unit over in Astoria had shut down, and after 14 years of nursing, I'd taken nights at the little hospital there. Forty-six years old and three weeks into a 90-day probation at a place already talking about trimming nights. We could not get by without my paycheck. Nights meant me, one aide, and whoever was working the ER next door, and my aide was Kaylee 19-19. She'd been in her second week. April 1999. Rain was coming sideways off the bar and hitting the window at the end of the hall like somebody throwing pea gravel at it. About half-past one, an old fisherman who'd come in after a fall stopped breathing in room two. The emergency room doctor pronounced him, and because it was a fall, the county had to see him before anybody moved him. That meant Dale, the deputy coroner, driving in from the far end of the county. It was Kaylee's first death. His face went the gray of wet newsprint. So I talked her through sitting with him, straightening the sheet and turning the lights low. One of us on each side, because you don't leave a kid alone with their first one. Then I walked her out, sent her to restock linens, and parked myself at the desk to wait. At ten after two, the back ambulance door chimed. From the nurse's desk, the crow's nest, I can see straight down the back hall to the little entry with the coat hooks and the rubber mat. And nobody was standing in it. There was a yellow slicker on the first hook, though. Pacific County stenciled across the back, dripping onto the mat. I walked down and lifted it. The outside was soaked, but the lining was bone dry and smelled hot. Like road dust and dry grass. Like an August afternoon way inland. "So what do you do with a coat nobody's wearing?" I said, right out loud to the empty hall. I hung it back up, is what I did. Dale must have beat the clock and ducked through to the emergency room. And the smell was just a coat that rode around all summer behind a truck seat. I called the ER to tell Dale his man was ready. It rang twelve times, fifteen in a building you can walk end to end in under a minute. Meanwhile the IV pump in room four was beeping at me. Mrs. Leonard's, my lady, we were expecting to lose that week. An occlusion alarm because her arm had curled up under her in her sleep. I figured Lorna, the emergency room nurse, was tied up with somebody so I hung up, straightened her arm. Reset the pump and watched the drip run clean. When I sat down again I looked straight down that hall and there was one slicker on its hook. Then the phone rang and it was Lorna out of breath. "Did Dale come through?" I asked. "Nobody came through here," she said. And dispatch says Dale just called in from Nacelle. Nacelle meant twenty-five minutes out, on the road in from the east. I'd been facing that back hall the whole call and when I looked down it again there were two yellow slickers, side by side, both dripping. The door hadn't chimed a second time. Under the wet rubber smell of the mat, the hall smelled faintly of dust. "There's two county coats back here and nobody in them," I told her. I was gripping the receiver so hard the cord was shaking against the desk. "Leave them," Lorna said right away. "Keep your girl off the back hall." And she hung up, except my girl was freezing. "Let's go." I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing." I yanked the coat out of her hands and hung it up, because I was scared of what it meant if that kid walked out the back door wearing it. I gave her my own cardigan and sat her at the desk, and she didn't argue, which told me how bad my face looked. My stomach stayed in a knot for the next half hour. Then the door chimed and Dale came in soaked in his own Navy County jacket, which he hung on the last hook. There were three yellow slickers now, and I hadn't seen the third one come, though I'd looked down that hall every time I breathed. Dale lifted one yellow collar, smelled it, and said it back without a word. He radioed that he was on scene and went straight to room two, not looking at me, not looking at the hooks again, the way you don't look at a dog you don't want following you home. Down the hall I could hear Mrs. Leonard breathing slow and far apart. Three coats for one body, and it was coming up on three in the morning. "Keep the girl at the desk," Dale said. "You sit with her in four." So I held Mrs. Leonard's hand while he loaded the old man onto his gurney. Her fingers were cool and light. From her doorway I watched him wheel the gurney down the back hall past the hooks. When it cleared them, all three yellow slickers were gone, and Dale's Navy jacket hung there by itself over a wet mat. The door never chimed, and Dale hadn't put a hand near them. I checked Mrs. Leonard, still slow and even, and walked down to the door. Dale pulled on his Navy jacket. "County hasn't bought yellow since '86," he said, and pushed the gurney out into the rain. I stood in the doorway in my scrubs, cold to the bone, and watched his taillights go up the hill toward 101. Then I turned the deadbolt on the ambulance door myself, without asking anybody. Story Two This was the July I gave up nursing for my son. After 44 years of it. I was the night nurse at a little nursing home on the edge of Harlan, and that Thursday was my last shift ever. My husband, Delbert, had set two lawn chairs on our porch for Friday night, the first dark I'd sit through at home in 30 years, and I'd promised him I'd walk out at 7 sharp. Around supper a storm came off Pine Mountain and took the power. The diesel generator out back kicked on with a rumble you felt in your fillings, running the lights at half and not one breath of the evening. So the building started to stew. Our second aide called to say water was over the road, which left me in Kenzie, twenty years old. My head was pounding with the heat, and my hands felt like they belonged to somebody slower. So I drank water and had Kenzie read every pill label back to me. She leaned on the cart and said, "Well, at least it's a quiet," and I put my hand over her mouth. "You don't say that word on nights." Story Three While I was changing a dressing, the front bell rang and Kenzie went, "There's a man wanted to see his mother in the end room." It came out flat, like reading a phone number off a napkin, and all she could tell me was an orange hunting vest. No face, no hair, no truck. The end room was on the back hall, chained shut since the roof leaked in the spring, and empty. From the front window I saw him under our one-lot light, a blaze orange vest in July with nothing in season, walking off slow as a man after church. I blinked and he was at the edge of the road. That long lot crossed in maybe four steps. I put that down to the heat in that building, cooking my eyes, and figured him for somebody casing the place for pain pills, because people did that in an outage. So I slid a spare bed alarm, that flat pad that hollers when somebody gets up who oughtn't, under the mat inside the side door. I plugged its box into a red outlet the generator feeds; Purnell, our maintenance man, always said a fellow casing a place tries the front once and the back twice. So I put it down to the heat in that building, cooking my eyes, and figured him for somebody casing the place for pain pills, because people did that in an outage. I sat Kenzie in the dark dining room with her phone aimed at that door. Call the sheriff, she begged. Every deputy in the county was out with a chainsaw that night, and a man asking after his mother hadn't broken any law. I was scared too, but you don't let your aide see it. I went down the main hall with a flashlight, checking on the ones who fall, since their bed alarms run off plain white outlets, and sat dead as doornails without the line power. Then a lady sat straight up and pointed, then the man across from her, then the next room, all aiming at the chain-doubled doors to the back hall. Miss Ova, who hadn't said a word since Easter, had her finger out too, and she gave me that same sentence about his mother and Kenzie's father. flat rhythm, only lower, like a man reading it. I'd been saying, settle down now, old girl, you've had a hard sum, and I quit in the middle of the word. Her hand was hot and dry. I went to the doors, the generator rumbling right outside that hall's windows. Through the wired glass, way down under the red exit sign, stood the man in the orange vest, whole and clear. The chain ran through both door pulls, padlocked snug the way Purnell left it, and I bent to give the lock a tug. When I straightened up, he was halfway up the hall, still walking easy, farther than any steps I could have missed. A hall of people who couldn't get out of bed, and me the only nurse. My eyes went down to that padlock again, the way you look at your shoes when a dog growls, and when I looked up, the hall was empty clear to the exit sign. Then from across the building, the side door alarm went off, screeching. And Kenzie was screaming, Miss Faye, Miss Faye. Forty-four years on my feet, and I ran. Kenzie was white as a pillowcase with the phone still up, swearing the door never moved and nobody stepped on that mat. I yanked the cord on the shrieking box. Its little gray screen kept the last thing it counted. Pressure on, pressure off, eight-tenths of a second apart, just long enough for one foot to come down and lift. We dragged the old, pew out of the lobby, heavy as sin, squalling across the wax, and shoved it against those doors, because a chain gives a couple inches, and I didn't want him having a couple inches of anything. We sat on the floor with our backs to it. Kenzie whispered, I'm never saying that word again. I laughed out loud, my insides going like a washer off balance, and held her wrist. Deep in the night, the line power came back. The generator wound down. The air handlers groaned on, and in that same breath Miss Ova lay back, and everyone who'd been pointing lay down with her, like a choir sitting. The heat let go of the building a degree at a time. Purnell came at first light and thumbed back through the box's log. One step and nothing after, he muttered. Then a loud that damp and a surge off the generator will set those pads off every time. My daughter Lisa told me, a whole night in a building with no air, mother, you'd have seen Elvis. Kenzie texted me her video. It's forty-some seconds of a dark doorway and the little red light on the alarm box, then the shriek and Kenzie screaming my name. The door never moves, nothing stands on the mat, and there's no man anywhere in it. It's what a bad pad would show anybody, except the very last frame. When Kenzie swings the phone toward my footsteps, it catches that dark doorway once more, and the little window in it is a square of orange. Purnell says that's the lot light through rain. The lot light is white. Story Three Della Pruitt met me at the time clock with a gas station coffee. Miss Charge, she said, like she was handing a kid a toy crown. Don't let it swell your head, Misty. Charge just meant I was the only nurse in a nursing home in Wiggins, Mississippi till morning, me and two aides and every key on my lanyard. Della hadn't spoken to me in three years, not since I reported her for giving Mrs. Tolliver another lady's blood thinner, and that Wednesday in June of 2012 was our first shift together since. It had cream and two sugars the way I take it. She'd remembered, and I stood there about two inches tall. I set the cup in my car, because at clock out I meant to tell her why I filed that report, and that I was sorry. Forty-eight beds sounds easy till you're the one pouring every pill while the aides go bed-to-bed turning folks who can't turn themselves, and it was eighty-two degrees after dark and wet as a dishrag. Della had the front hall, Keisha the back. Mr. Hollis and Nine was dying, with his daughter Charlene, her husband Lamar, and their two kids keeping watch, and the boy Cody was eight and into everything. At eleven-forty, the call light for fourteen lit up at the desk. Fourteen had been stripped and bleached Monday for the next admission. The window screwed shut. I reached for the talk button, and before my finger touched it, a small voice came through, thick and wet, close as if it sat inside the box. Ma'am, could you let Miss Della know she's wanted? What's your—I started, and it was already answering, half a beat ahead of me. I'd as soon not say. The boy from Nine, I figured, playing games. I told him to stay put. I was bringing him a popsicle, and I was grinning when I walked down and opened the door. Well, sugar, who's in here? The room was dark and empty. The call cord, the bed's button on a wire, was off its clip and stretched straight across the floor toward the window. And the room stank like a stockpond gone low in August, mud and dead fish right over the bleach. In the family room, Cody and his little sister Macy were asleep in a knot on the vinyl couch. Ain't neither one of them moved, Lamar told me. I quit explaining it to myself right there, and my hands went cold in all that heat. When I told Della somebody wanted her, she didn't laugh. I'll see to it, was all she gave me, and she went. I did her bed checks for twenty minutes. She came back with one scrub leg wet to the knee and her white shoes caked in red mud, and said she'd been folding linen in the closet by the desk, where the light had been off both times I passed. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know what to do. My neck went hot, but I wasn't spending her first real words in three years on calling her a liar. The next three hours were turns, briefs, and Mr. Hollis' breathing, and Della kept to the back of the front hall. Close to three, Lamar went up the front hall for ice and came back without it, gray in the face. Through 14's door, he said, a boy had asked him, real polite, whether she was coming back. His boy was asleep where he'd left him. Macy said the hall smelled like her granddaddy's pond, and Della wasn't at the desk. Lamar wanted the sheriff. I told him a deputy would take 40 minutes to find an empty room and a pack of scared people. He sat down with them, and I shut the family room door. I could have walked out. Then Keisha would be alone with 48 people, and an aide can't give a pill or call a death, and walking off cost you your license, and I had rent, and Della was in that room. I went up the front hall on knees that half worked and eased 14's door open the width of my hand. Della knelt in red mud on the tile beside the bed. Parking lot light lay white and flat across the bare mattress, and on it lay something long as a grown man, on its back, its feet past the footboard. The arms were too thin for that length. The head hung off the far edge. Down the hall, Mr. Hollis was breathing his long gaps. Keisha's cart squeaked somewhere on the back hall, and the rest of the building slept. All of it a mile off. Della had hold of its sleeve. I know. I hear you. I've kept still such a long while, it said, wet and close, like it was at my own ear. She had one foot under her, ready to stand. It wasn't holding Della. Della was holding its sleeve, and as long as she was the one holding on, she could still turn loose. If I burst in and startled her, the only way she'd jump was toward it. I let the door close. I walked back down that hall with my breath coming short and high in my throat, and about halfway there, something heavy knocked against my hip. In my scrub pocket was a red and white fishing bobber, crusted with pond mud still dripping. Mr. Hollis died a little before daylight. I listened a full minute, then called hospice in the funeral home. Della came back dry-faced, shoes still red. Neither of us said a word about linen. We bathed him together. That bobber knocked my hip every time I reached across him, because I'd sooner carry that pond than leave her alone in a room again that night. At seven, I walked a day shift through the night, my voice catching. I told them fourteen stays shut and nobody gets admitted into it, and didn't say why, because there wasn't a why they'd write down. Outside, Della sat in her car with the windows up. I got in mine. The coffee sat cold and full in the cup holder, the apology still in my mouth. I knocked my door. The bobber sat wet in my lap. I backed out and rolled past Della's car without touching the brake. Story four. Aaron, I'm sending you a stray. That was the emergency room doctor on the hall phone. The stray was a guy named Wade who'd put his pickup in the ditch on 89. I was in my second winter of nights upstairs at the little hospital in Chateau. And that night, it meant the only one. Three patients, a pneumonia lady, a new hip, and Mr. Halverson, an old rancher on comfort care, which is when you quit fixing and just keep them easy. His daughter was stuck in Great Falls with the highway shut, so the only person he had was me. This was January of 2008, twenty below, wind off the front hard enough that the building leaned. My truck was plugged in out back, and I knew damn well it wouldn't start any. Story four. That was the only one. Story four. That was the only person he had was me. Wade was big, polite, smelled like cigarettes and ditch water, and I gave him a blanket and the couch in the family room, right next to the fire door into the old closed wing. around half past one I went for under pads the big paper pads that go under a patient we keep them in the closed wing no heat at all the fire door has a small window of glass with wire inside it and it was fogged over on the inside I touched it with the backs of my fingers and it was warm like a truck window with the heater running in a room colder than my freezer I didn't open that door I called the doctor downstairs boiler line runs under that wing then nothing long enough that I thought the line had dropped inside or out inside keep it shut I'll send Sorenson up that was the deputy who'd pulled Wade out still downstairs on paperwork I was rubbing my fingers on my scrubs when Wade shuffled out in his socks and asked if my buddy found me he'd gone looking for a pop machine wandered through that door and I was in the same room as the doctor at the door and at the far end a kid in a red pizza shirt and a visor was knocking on the glass of the back exit saying he'd come for bug so Wade pushed the bar and let him in smiled the whole time Wade said talked right through it and the smile never moved nobody delivers pizza in Chateau at that hour in a ground blizzard and bug is what my mom calls me nobody else alive and she was asleep in Billings oh hell I said and told the way to get back on that couch because he's the one who opened it and I didn't want him behind me I put my pen light against the glass and got a smear of boxes and dark then steps at the far end a grown man's weight the old tiles popping under each foot they came the whole length of the wing in about a second and stopped right behind the glass close enough that I felt the floor settled through my shoes no breath on the fog no shape just the voice bright like we'd known each other forever bug shut the gate you're letting the heat out mom says that every winter when I stand in her mudroom door gawking a leaking pipe doesn't walk I backed up until my shoulders hit the wall every hair on my arms lifting under my sleeves and called down since Sorenson now my voice came out higher than I've ever heard it Sorenson came up and didn't laugh he took his big flashlight and walked the wing room by room while I watched through the window somebody had wiped a clear spot on the fog from his side the dust past the supply shelves held one set of tracks Wade socks all the way to the back exit and back Sorenson was at the far end his light just a dot when the heavy steps ran right past the other side of the glass in front of my face Aaron he called that you he came back fast the color of skim milk and wouldn't look at the window his mom had worked the night here years back he told me and left it there he wasn't leaving the old man's breathing changed long gaps then a catch I had my stethoscope on him when the voice came back at the glass cheerful as anything come on bug mom's got the truck warmed up you're burning daylight I went out the other two were asleep and Wade was up with his hand on the fire door bar saying my friend was freezing in there I peeled Wade's fingers off that bar one at a time while he looked at me like I was the crazy one if that door opened I'd be going through it after something that moves like that and the old man would finish alone Sorenson planted himself in front of the window behind it something dropped its whole weight so hard the fire door rattled in its frame and the steps tore off down the wing faster than anything with legs I went into his room sat down took his hand and didn't come out he went quiet a little after 4:00 the doctor pronounced him and I got him onto the cart and called the elevator Sorenson rode down with me between floors he gave me his mom's rule flat you don't answer what talks through that glass and you don't go through after it he held the elevator open with his boot the whole time I was in the morgue the plow opened 89 at daybreak and his daughter came in with snow in her hair I told her he wasn't by himself and that's all she wanted outside Jean from maintenance and digging out the back mentioned the exit on the closed wing had been chained from outside since November padlock ice solid and it still was on my way out I passed the fire door the glass was fogged again from the inside so I kept my hands in my pockets and walked out to see if the truck would start story 5 in March the wind up in the top corner of North Dakota lifts the snow off the fields and drags it across highway one in long white ropes Langdon sits in the thick of that a grain elevator a Senex station and a hospital the size of a grade school I'm Brenda I turned 62 on a work night in March of 2025 and I spent it on the night shift at that little hospital like any other Tuesday I was alone on the floor my eight out sick with what I'd bet my pension was a basketball tournament two towns over I rented a room in a farmhouse south of town from two traveling nurses half my age and Delia the one home that week had a chocolate cake hidden in the fridge for when I got off nobody had baked for me in nine years at noon I told Gwen at the Senex counter all of it Delia the chocolate when I'd be driving in and Gwen tells everybody everything on the way in I gassed up and only waved at Gwen through the glass between the Senex and the hospital out on the edge of town a sedan sat nosed into the ditch and a man in a canvas coat stepped out and waved my old Buick down a woman my age picking up a stranger in the dark ends up a picture on the TV news but driving a past at 30 below makes him one so I hit the unlock in the dome light he had my cousin Wendell's whole face the long jaw the seat cap the grin that's mostly gums he said he'd been stuck better than an hour but the coffee in his bare hand had steam curling off the lid and coffee doesn't stay hot five minutes in the kitchen and I was in the room waiting for my husband to come home and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought that was the best thing I could do and I thought empty four, whose call light comes on by itself from a bad wire nobody's ever found. We call it the Phantom. I was dimming the hall lights an hour into my shift when the walk-in bell rang, and there he was. No luck on the tow, cold one you bet, and then, happy 62nd. Is Delia making you the chocolate one or the white? I'd never told him my age, or Delia's name, or one word about baking. One deputy covers the whole county at night, and knowing a woman's birthday isn't a crime, so I phoned the doctor on call, Brecca. He yawned into the receiver, said policy was the door stays open nights so nobody sick gets stuck outside, and that was the end of it. His building, his license, so I flipped the switch, and I liked him a good deal less hanging up than I had picking up. The lady in six was due, so I pulled her curtain and worked her onto her side, which with her takes a while. In both my arms. When I came out, the waiting room was empty, and through the window, the sedan from the ditch sat dark in the staff lot beside my car. The farmer in two woke for water and told me my fella had been in. Real nice talker. Asked was I the birthday girl and did I live in town or out. My scalp went tight. I flipped the door back to locked without walking the empty rooms, since the farmer said he'd been in. Past tense and his car was out there. From then on, I turned six every two hours and charted between, and never once looked into four, because nobody looks into four. At 3.51, the phantom lit over four and buzzed at my desk, and I cancelled it from my chair like always. Then the bed springs in four creaked. The door of four stood open. For half a second, it was Wendell on the edge of that bed, grinning, and my shoulders came down. Then he said, there she is. And it wasn't. Where did I, park? Which road did I take home? The gravel or the blacktop? Would Delia wait up? He'd slipped through that open door while I had my arms full behind the curtain in six. And when I locked it, I locked him in with us. Between him and my two patients, there was only me. My mouth had gone dry as chalk. I walked up the hall, badged the door open, and held it wide with my hip, because I wanted him on the far side of it more than I wanted to be smart. Visiting's over, I said. He came down the hall, still chatting, and passed me with a foot to spare. Through the glass, he laughed at something I never said, then walked out. And I stood there until his headlights swung onto the road. I phoned nobody because he was gone and all that lone deputy could chase by then was snow. I put the hall lights up full and charted, checking two and six more than they needed. At 5.12, the phantom lit again, and this time I walked into four myself instead of cancelling it from the desk. The bed held a dent the shape of a man, and in the wastebasket lay a Sonex cup, lit on half-full. When I pulled into the farmhouse yard that morning, Delia had the candles lit and I let her, and the rest of the cake sat in the freezer till April. Three weeks later, Gwen rang up my gas and asked, bright as anything, "If that That nice fella had found me on my birthday, since she'd told him all about Delia and when I'd drive in, and he'd come back for a coffee to go just before I pulled up to her pump. That sedan had never been stuck. He'd put it in the ditch himself to wait for my Buick. I paid without a word and thought about that lid steaming in my dome light, poured just before I pulled up to her pump. Story 6. The autumn my Medicare card came, I was 65. I worked nights as a traveling nurse, the kind of hospitals hire on short contracts, at a small hospital in Winslow, Arizona, a long day's drive from the Kansas wheat I grew up in. My name is Janet. Nights were easier to fill than evenings at home, and I'll leave that there. That November I had an old railroad man in room 6 who was what we call expectant, meaning nobody figured he'd see the end of the week. Before I drove in that evening, I'd promised his daughter Marisol on the phone that her daddy would not die alone. I have a habit of writing the family's card ahead of time, in my car, because by morning there's nothing kind left in me to write with. His lay open on the passenger seat. He was not alone, and under that, Janet, his night nurse. I got in early and went down to the vending machines by the emergency room for coffee, and to call Marisol once more before shift. A woman sat on the bench there with nothing in her hands. She was about my age, and I paid her no mind. I had the card out to read it to Marisol, and I told her what I'd promised. That her daddy would not be alone. And the machine hummed, and I thought how she sounded like she'd been crying since noon. When I hung up, the woman had stood, and her face was at my shoulder. Close enough I felt her breath reading my card. Drugstore glasses pushed up in her gray hair on a chain of colored beads that tapped the machine's glass. She laid one fingernail on the card. "When?" "Excuse me, I'm late." I put the card inside my coat and took the stairs up instead of waiting on the elevator. At my age, I'd quit apologizing for a wrong feeling. At the emergency room desk, I told the clerk not to let a gray-haired woman with glasses on a beaded chain pass the waiting room, and she wrote it on a sticky note. Back on the floor, I told Amy the eight on nights with me. A Winslow girl of maybe twenty-five who thought I fussed too much. She shrugged and her coat smelled of smoke. Partway through the evening, Amy went down for her smoke and came back with her cheeks red from the cold. I sat a while in six and counted the old man's breaths, slow and catching. Not an hour later, I heard beads clicking on glass. Her face filled the little wired window in the floor's locked door. She was inside the building. Amy got defensive fast. It was his niece, poor thing, crying so hard she could only get out "Uncle." The woman had followed Amy in the staff side door after a smoke break, and Amy had told her he was in six. Then I remembered Marisol telling me there was nobody else, only her. When I looked back, the glass was empty, and the emergency room clerk swore no woman like that had come past her desk. The rest of the night went by in call lights and med passes, and nobody heard from her again till a little before three. The floor phone rang. The clerk had put through a woman on the main line who'd asked for Janet by name. There was a long nothing, then a slow breath, in and out, catching the way his did. Then the line went dead. From the desk I could see into six, the chair by his bed sitting empty. In room three, the confused old lady sat up the way she does about then, and asked me, clear as anything, why her window was fogged on the outside. "Marisol." I picked up on the road just past Gallup, a good two hours out. Then I called the police. Their one car was out on Interstate 40, so I went to six. I owed Marisol that chair, and his breathing had started to change. If that woman was out there, she could see that chair empty through his blinds, and I wasn't going to let her be right. Amy stayed by the phone, blind shut tight. I sat by the bed and held his hand. His breath spread out. Then something ticked on the glass, then again. The beads. Couldn't stand it. Let go of his hand and parted the blinds with two fingers. Her face filled the gap, an arm's length from mine through the pain, her breath fogging it, the chain swinging. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking past me at the bed, and I stood there with my fingers in those blinds and could not make my hand let go, my mouth open and nothing coming out. I could not see. While behind my back the breathing I'd countered all night stopped and did not start again. Let the blind fall and turned. He was gone. Called the emergency room doctor over to make it official and didn't go near that window again. Marisol got there a little before five and held her father a long time. She thanked me for staying with him, and I told her yes. When the sun came up, I walked the outside wall towards six. Under his window lay nine cigarette ends. The newest still there. The newest still sending up a thread of smoke beside a press place against the bricks where someone had sat most of the night. The officer who finally pulled in just crouched there and looked. I was at the blinds with my back to him when he went. The next spring on a contract in Kingman, I found a notice taped inside the staff room door banning a woman from the grounds. No name, glasses on a beaded chain. Security had found her twice that winter sitting under a dying man's window. Down by those Winslow vending machines, she'd laid one fingernail on my card, right on the line that said he was not alone, and asked me the only question she ever asked: "When?" Story 7: I taught chemistry at the high school in Marfa for twenty-two years, until my mother started leaving the stove on. The students called me Mr. V. The nurses in Alpine still do. I went in to check on him. He wasn't home. I went to nursing school at forty-nine so I could stay close to her, and I never went back to a classroom. That September I was fifty-six and five years into nights at the little hospital in Alpine, seven to seven, three a week. Second floor, six patients, one nurse, one aide. That month they gave me my first trainee. Yesenia was twenty-three, a brand new aide, and so nervous she wrote down where the ice machine was. Story 8: The Ice Machine. Story 9: The Ice Machine. Story 10: The Ice Machine. Story 11: The Ice Machine. Story 12: The Ice Machine. Story 13: The Ice Machine. 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Story 51: The Ice Machine. Story 52: The Ice Machine. Story 53: The Ice Machine. Story 54: The Ice Machine. Story 55: The Ice Machine. Story 56: The Ice Machine. Story 57: The Ice Machine. Story 58: The Ice Machine. Story 59: The Ice Machine. Story 60: The Ice Machine. Story 61: The Ice Machine. Story 62: The Ice Machine. Story 63: The Ice Machine. Story 64: The Ice Machine. Story 65: The Ice Machine. Story 66: The Ice Machine. Story 67: The Ice Machine. Story 68: The Ice Machine. Story 69: The Ice Machine. At room six, I smelled it before I saw anything. Mothballs and cedar, like somebody had opened an old trunk where an hour before there'd been nothing but bleach. Mrs. Lutzero, 88 and dying, was awake and smiling. Cheeto came, she said, her brother dead 40 years. In his winter coat with the sheep collar at the foot of the bed, he smelled like mama's cedar chest. Yesenia opened her mouth to correct her. I gave her a look that used to quiet a whole lab and told the old lady, that's nice, ma'am. Out in the hall, my hands had gone cold and clumsy, and I had to put them in my sweater pockets. A man in a coat at a dying woman's bed, and the housekeeper long gone. I walked to the stair door. It was latched, the hall half dark the way we keep it so people can sleep. As I reached for the handle, the landing light clicked off on the other side, and the stairwell went black. With nothing lit behind it, the wired glass turned into a mirror of the hall. My face, my scrubs, and just past my shoulder, a sheepskin collar buttoned up to the throat. I spun around. Nobody stood between me and the nurse's station, so he was on the stair side, close enough to fog the glass. Somebody had reached over and flipped that switch while I stood there. I didn't open the door. I wasn't chasing a man down a dark stairwell while a first-night aid said, alone with six patients and my license. I kept Yesenia at the desk. She asked if the place was haunted, and I told her no, it has a stairwell. At three, I went to room six, because three is when they go. Mrs. Lucero had stopped breathing. The emergency room doctor pronounced her by phone, and Yesenia and I shut the door to wash her. When we turned her, she was heavier than she'd been an hour before, all of her gone loose, her back already cooling under Yesenia's palms. Yesenia gripped my arm hard enough to bruise, and I talked her through it slow, the way I used to talk a sophomore through lighting a burner. I sent her for clean linen from the closet by room four, the one bed we had empty that week. She came back white and pulled me into the hall. On the stripped mattress and floor, the folded blanket had been drawn up over a man lying with his back to the door, a sheepskin collar above the edge. Sir, who let you up here? He didn't turn. I'll only be a minute. That voice I knew, it came back like a smell you can't name until you can. A January night two years before, a man in that same coat at the floor door at three in the morning, not on the family list. I sent him away, and his father in room four died before daylight. I pulled Yesenia into room six, held the handle shut with one hand, and picked up the room phone with the other. Lupe, the emergency room nurse downstairs, couldn't leave a chance to call her. I called her, and she didn't answer. I called her, pain, so she called Alpine police. While I talked, a dark bulk crossed the narrow window in our door, and a little later I heard the stair door swing closed with that soft clunk it makes when it doesn't catch. By the time the officer's headlights swept the lot, I'd taken the penlight down the stairwell myself, every landing bare, and found the dock door shut tight. Nobody on our side had closed it. Back upstairs, I pushed the stair door till it clicked, with Yesenia watching. Before dawn, the funeral home came up from Marfa, and the driver and I carried Mrs. Lutzero down the service stairs on the cot. Under the bottom step, in the dust where the officer's flashlight hadn't reached, lay a visitor sticker from the front desk, with that day's date in room four in marker. He'd signed in for afternoon visiting before I ever clocked in, and he'd waited on those stairs all night. At shift change, I handed the sticker to the day supervisor and kept the rest to myself. Maintenance put a stronger closer on that door. By winter, Yesenia had a new aid of her own, and before every shift, she walked her down the hall and pushed the stair door till it clicked. One cold night in late January, she pushed it, stopped, and called me over. The door had latched fine, and on the stair side, snagged where the wired glass meets the frame, was one tuft of pale sheepskin wool. Story 8. On nights in Bangor, everybody on the floor called me Thibodeau. There were three Sarahs on that unit, and I was the one who'd been there longest. I was thirty-four, eleven years a night nurse in the hospital in Bangor, and I'd sat with more than forty patients through their last night. In July of twenty-eighteen, I drove east to work one trial shift at the small hospital in Macias, just off U.S. Route One. Nobody at my job knew I was there, and neither did my husband, because it was for a job I hadn't told anyone I wanted. I took report, the handoff from the evening nurse, on six patients. Joanne Alley was my aide, a local woman with twenty years in that building, and Maureen Dinsmore, the house supervisor, ran the hospital overnight from the emergency room. The man in room six was eighty-eight and dying, and his family had gone home to sleep. Rain was coming in off the bay in hard bands. The window at the far end of the floor looked down over the closed wing onto a gravel apron, where the funeral home backs its fan to the morgue's outside door. A concrete ramp with a steel rail ran down to it from the lot under one light. Before midnight, doing rounds with my penlight, I looked out that window, pressed into the wet apron, and blocked letters as tall as my forearm. Room six, three-forty. Rain was beating the puddles all around it, and the edges of the letters stayed sharp. I checked six, and he was breathing slow and even. When I came back, there was a hand on the rail at the top of the ramp, right at the edge of the light, and then the rail was empty. My face went hot. I said nothing to Joanne. Somebody was writing a death time outside a dying man's room, family or kids from town, and I meant to catch them. Past midnight, I took a push broom from the closed wing, went out through the lot, and swept the apron flat in the rain until the letters were gone, so anyone who crossed it would leave marks. My clogs barely dented the mud. The broom stripes filled with water inside a minute. Upstairs, I put Joanne at the end window. Nothing comes. I go down at one o'clock and scratch way-cho into it myself. She nodded and turned her back to me, and I charted at the med cart, wet to the knees, looking up at her shoulders every few lines. One o'clock came while I was in room four with a man pulling at his IV. I was in room four with a man pulling at his IV. I was in room four with a man Joanne said my name from the hall, and her face had no color in it. An old woman in a long gray cardigan had come down the ramp holding the rail, slow every step costing her, and the light cut her off at the neck. The rain wasn't on her, and the cardigan never moved while the gust laid the shrubs flat. Then room two rang, and when Joanne turned back, the woman was gone. I looked down. Forty feet out, in my smooth mud, it said no one you know, and I had never gone down to write my question. Four prints led from the ramp to the words. Four steps across, forty feet from a woman who could barely walk, each one sunk to the ankle. Every broomstripe around them had puddled, and the four prints were dry. I told Joanne about the hand. My voice came out too quiet, and I had to say it twice. We agreed to keep working and to watch six. Toward morning I did his turns, rolling him onto his other side every two hours so his skin holds. His breathing had started to space out, long gaps, then a catch. At 3:40 I had my stethoscope on his chest, and there was nothing under it. The death itself was quiet and ordinary. The emergency room doctor came up to pronounce him, which is the official word that he's gone, and he'd brought Maureen's keyring for me. Joanne and I washed him, tagged his toe, and wrapped him in the shroud without a word between us. Maureen said on the phone that the funeral home would be at the outside of the room, within the hour, and I should take him down and unbolt it for them. Policy sends one nurse, Joanne had the five other doors to watch, and Maureen and the doctor were tied up in the emergency room with a chest pain. I rode down with the cart, unlocked the morgue, slid him into the cooler, and started his line in the morgue logbook. Then I put my hand on the bolt of the outside door. Through the wired glass and the mud right under the sill it said "unbolted". At the top of the ramp under the light was a bare old hand on the rail and a grey shoulder. Rain bounced off the rail on both sides of that hand and none of it landed on the skin and the cardigan hung dead still in the gust. The funeral home needed that bolt off. The book needed that line finished. I left the bolt where it was and the pen on the logbook and took the stairs, counting out loud, "14, 15, 16" to the top. From the end window the hand was still on the rail. No clue where it was. I set my pen light on the sill so I could grip it with both hands. Maureen came up a few minutes later. She asked me nothing and didn't go near the end window. She took the morgue keys out of my pocket, said she'd let the funeral home in herself, and told me to clock out. Crossing the lot I passed the apron. The words were gone and every broom stripe was a puddle. The four prints were dry with the rain falling into them. I drove home on route one in the dark, the wipers going as fast as they'd go. I emailed Macias that week and withdrew my application, no reason given. In October my husband carried in an envelope with a Macias return address, set it on the counter, and left it there. And I didn't tell him. Inside was my pen light and one line in Joanne's handwriting. They'd paved the apron in September, and four spots by the ramp sank the first night, and they've patched them twice. Story nine. My red pickup sat off by the fence under the one pole light, gray with harvest dust. Alaska plates on both ends. Kim's my name. I was forty-nine, eighteen years a nurse, three months on nights at the Little County Hospital in Ainsworth, Nebraska. My ex had moved our kids to his hometown, so I followed them outside, which is what we call anywhere but Alaska. I'd driven that truck all the way down from Kenai. And I still owed nine thousand on it. It was September of twenty-twenty-one, clear and dry, low fifties. Nights it was me and Lynn the aide, with Dr. Albers on call from home. An old farmer was dying in room four with his daughter Pam, her son Jake, sixteen, and a little girl asleep in the recliner. A woman with pneumonia had room six. The man in room two slept straight through every night, snoring with his mouth open. From the desk window I could see my truck. I was in the desk window I could see my truck. I never locked it, because nobody locks anything in Kenai. I had the kids that Saturday. The desk line rang a little before eleven. A man with an even voice said he was with the county, checking lot lights along US twenty, and asked if I was the new one. I told him yes, and where from, and that I had the kids Saturday, and a good deal more, because I do that. My ex used to say I'd tell a fence post my blood type. He asked where I was from, and I told him I was from New York. I didn't know where I was from. He asked which rig was mine and whether I locked it, and I laughed and told him never, and that October's payment would be the one that sank me. He never gave a name. Somewhere in there I decided it was a joke on the new nurse, Dr. Albers or Lynn's husband, Okay, County, I said. Read me my plate. He read it back without a pause, and it was mine, and I laughed out loud because somebody was standing in my lot. I put him on hold and called Dr. Albers' cell to catch him, but he answered thick with sleep, his wife asking who it was right beside him. I apologized with my face burning. Lynn said her husband was two states away hauling cattle. When I picked the line back up, it was dead. Later, Jake came in from his car for a phone charger. Two guys are out by your red truck. One's on the tailgate, the other's walking circles around it on his phone. His headlights had swung across them when he parked. One had something shiny across his jacket, like a stripe. It was dark. He couldn't give me ages or faces. Pam came out asking what was going on. The desk line started again in the middle of her question. I walked to the emergency doors, where the wall phone was ringing too. The doors are glass, and the lobby behind me was lit bright. I looked out at my truck, saw nobody, picked up, and drew a breath to ask if he was in it. Not yet. I was earlier. You'll want it locked. You never did in Cannae. I hung up. My fingers had gone stiff around the receiver. If they took the. If they took that truck, I had no way to my kids. And if they waited, I'd walk out there alone at seven. I held my badge to the box beside the doors, which locks the emergency entrance, and heard the bolts drop. Then I called the sheriff's dispatcher, who said she'd send deputy crews. Jake said he'd go out himself. I told him no. He was sixteen. Pam started crying, and the little girl woke asking for her mom. Then the ice machine in the alcove dumped its load into the bin with a crash, and Pam grabbed the doorframe and sat down hard. I walked the three of them back to room four and pulled the door nearly shut. I went back to the desk. Lynn was down in room six with the pneumonia lady. My truck's headlights came on, aimed straight at the glass. The beams ran down the hall and lay on the floor at my feet. The desk phone started again. I let it ring. The wall phone by the door started too. Both of them got to the door. I let it ring. I let it ring. I let it ring. I let it ring. Both of them going at once, and I wasn't turning my back on that glass. Jake had come up behind me, and I took hold of his sleeve and held on. Nobody was out there, only the two headlights. Then the headlights cut out. A couple of minutes later, the cruiser turned in. Cruz came in and stood at the glass with me, and he didn't go out. He said a man who'd sat in that cab long enough would leave the seat warm, and anybody walking out to feel it would be standing in those lights. My knees went loose, and I sat down on the bench by the doors. He stayed at the glass till first light. At dawn, I walked out beside him. The truck was empty, the driver's door unlatched, and on the tailgate, one patch of dust was wiped clean in the shape of somebody sitting. I laid my hand on the driver's seat. It was still warm. The farmer died at 6.10 just after sunrise, with Pam holding his hand. At shift changed the day, nurse said a man by the gate had asked her if the Alaska nurse was off yet. A man in a dark county jacket with a reflective patch across it. I tasted coffee coming back up. Cruz drove me home and told me not to drive that truck until he'd had it looked at. The next afternoon, I went over that cab myself, under the seats, behind them, the floor mats, and found nothing but my own gum wrappers. I left the glove box shut, since nothing lived in it but the payment book. Two weeks went by. I had the kids' Saturdays, and I locked the truck every time now. When October came due, I opened the glove box to tear out that month's coupon before mailing it. Beside the October amount, somebody had made a small checkmark in pencil. I don't keep a pencil in that truck. Story 10. Folks in Petersburg, Alaska called me Texas on account of my mouth. My badge said Angie. I was 34. That winter. A nurse 12 years. The last four as a traveler. Which means I signed on for three months wherever a hospital ran short. And Petersburg is a fishing town on an island with one small hospital. My aide that night, Cassie, was 18, born the summer I learned to drive. It was my last night shift, and my locker was already cleaned out. Nothing left but a line somebody had written in ballpoint under the shelf. Smoke inside after dark. Trust me. I'd laughed at that for three months. Every night around four, I stepped out the ambulance door at the end of my hall and sat on the bench under the overhang to smoke. And when the wind came down the wrangle narrows and slapped me, I'd holler that it was colder than a well digger's belt buckle. My easiest patient was a deckhand named Clifford, whose infected fishhook cut had swelled his hand up like a catcher's mitt. Cassie had the long-term side, where the old folks live, and Terrence ran the little emergency room at the bottom of my hall by himself. I was the only one who had a knife. Around 9.30, Terrence called. A young fella in a brown canvas Carhartt coat, a boat kid by the look, had come up to the emergency room night window, handed something through for the Texan one, and asked him to pass on a message. I went down. Terrence handed me a dented green Stanley thermos, still warm, and gave me the message. Colder than a well digger's belt buckle. That's my line, I said. Word for word. My neck went hot. Terrence just shrugged and went back to his desk. I called it a deckhand with a crush and dropped the thermos unopened into the lost and found bin. That bin sits on a ledge in the little room between the ambulance door and the inside one, a room I called the glass box. The inside door only locks one way, so anybody can push out. I don't drink what strangers leave me. For three hours, Clifford's fever crept up every time I checked, and between checks I charted and helped him out. I didn't know what to do. Cassie turned a heavy lady. When it topped 102, I cracked his window and told him to haul her if he needed me. I was just a ways down the hall. A little after one, I was hanging a fresh bag on his IV when he said, real offhand, that a man had stood out in the lot under that window and talked to him through the gap. Said to tell her she's just a ways down the hall. Somebody had stood in that slush and listened to me tuck in a sick man. Hold her, Clifford said, gray at the temples. No hat, shiny black dress shoes. Like for a funeral in that slop. Same fella's been out there every night this week. That's not Terrence's boat kid, I said. Clifford grinned like it was the best show in town and started swinging his legs off the bed to go look. I latched the window, yanked the curtain, and told him flat he was staying put. My fingers felt like they had mittens on. Walking back up the hall, I caught myself hurrying past every dark doorway, which is not how I walk. Later, Cassie called the floor phone, whispering. Every resident on her side was awake at once, wanting their shoes, wanting to go home. She'd heard somebody walk the gravel past their windows, then the courtyard gate rattle. I told her to latch every window and shut the hall door to the courtyard side. Then I called Terrence. The thermos was gone out of the bin. He'd heard the ambulance door a while back and figured it for wind because that door bangs in its back. I didn't call the police because every write-up follows a traveler to the next hospital and the state board, and I wasn't putting my license in a report over a thermos of coffee. I just decided I wouldn't go out at four. At four, Clifford's bed was empty and his IV pole was gone. Terrence was in the back with a walk-in, which is how Clifford had slipped past the desk. And down the hall, the door alarm was chirping the way it does when something holds that door open. With the ballpoint under my locker shelf, and a man with a blood infection loose in the sleet on my last night, I pushed out into the glass box. That inside door lets anybody out and only wants a badge coming back in. The mat was sloppy and I took the wet for Clifford's sneakers. The outer door had frozen in its track a foot open, and there was Clifford under the overhang, cigarette in his teeth, the green thermos in his good hand. Your guy just walked up and gave me this, he said. Said tell Texas them red boots are real pretty. Said colder than a well digger's belt buckle. I was wearing my red red wing ropers. I hadn't set foot out that ambulance door since I clocked in, and I hadn't hollered my line once all night. Clifford held the thermos out like he'd won it at the fair. I took it and wrapped my free hand around his IV pole, right up above his knuckles. He pointed the cigarette toward the long-term side. Nice shoes, walking real slow. Right then, the courtyard gate opened. I heard a bang twice over there, and inside the floor phone started ringing. That'd be Cassie, and I let it ring because I had a feverish man on the end of an IV pole, and only two hands. I hauled Clifford and his pole back into the glass box. Under the light on the ledge beside the bin sat a shoeshine rag folded in a neat square. Black polish worked into it and bone dry, the only dry thing in that room. It hadn't been there when I dropped the thermos. Sometime before I came through, he'd stood in here buffing his shoes and looking down my hallway. I swiped my badge, shoved Clifford inside, and turned the bolt. I set the thermos on the floor on my side of the glass, and the phone was still ringing when I looked back at my bench, empty and wet under the overhang, where I'd have been sitting out my last four o'clock. Story 11 On nights at a little island hospital, you're the whole floor. Three beds are ten, they're yours, and the emergency room is clear across the building with its own drunks and fish hooks. Ashley, that's me. I was 28, six years a nurse out of Anchorage, on my first contract outside, working nights at the hospital in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. This was April of 2013, a gray drizzle that never made up its mind to be rain. My big brother Vince fishes out of the harbor, and he drove me in that evening, our first time in a cab together since we quit speaking at our mother's funeral four years back. His truck stank of warm herring bait, and I said it was a, and I wonder any woman ever climbed in it. He didn't laugh, but he sat idling in the wet till the door shut behind me. Once the hall lights are down, the only gray left is the big window at the far end, with the ice machine and a little alcove beside it. Every so often it drops a load with a crash like a dishpan of silverware, and it made me jump every time. Later it crashed, and then came the scoop chunking into the bin, scraping, chunking again, slow, like somebody digging out a nice full cup. The hip lady was snoring behind her shut door, and the pneumonia man's oxygen was hissing steady through his. And Mr. Iverson's long breaths were coming slow through the only door I'd left open. So whoever was scooping ice down there wasn't one of mine. Bernadette, who trained me on nights in Anchorage, used to say, chase a noise on nights, honey, and all it gives you is another one. So I turned my back to that end and charted with my shoulders up around my ears. Round midnight, Mr. Iverson's light came on. He was my dying one, a retired ferry deckhand on oxygen, wide awake and cheerful, talking past my shoulder to Agnes, his wife, nine years dead. She says it'll be Thursday, he told me. It's Thursday now. His breathing had those long gaps where you catch yourself breathing for him. Bernadette taught me you don't argue, so I wet his mouth, fixed his tubing, and told Agnes she was welcome. Then he asked, "Have they got their ice yet?" And I let that one lie. Back at the desk, I looked up without meaning to. Down at the far end, clear enough in the little light off the ice machine, stood something the height of a second grader, dark hair, in something gray to the floor. It faced the end window, dead still, like somebody at the ferry landing waiting on a ride, its forehead against the wet glass. That was nobody I had on my floor. My stomach went sour and stayed that way, and I kept my eyes on my charting. Because the emergency room had its hands full and didn't need the new girl from outside seeing things. I sat like that through two rounds of vitals on all three of mine, slipping in and out of their rooms and charting in between, not once looking down that end. After three, the wind came off the straight and threw rain at that window in handfuls. Mr. Iverson went between one breath and the one that never came, on Thursday, like Agnes said. The on-call doctor took the time over the phone, I shut off his oxygen machine, and the room got too quiet. Washing a body takes two, but the emergency room nurse couldn't leave. I rolled him toward me, and the air came out of him in one long tired sigh, like a man sitting down after a double. I laughed out loud once, the worst sound I ever made, and kept washing, eyes on his face telling him I was sorry. I was folding his hands when the ice machine dumped its load down the hall. In that same breath, something small and cold as a freezer door took my left sleeve at the elbow, and something else had my back hem, and both pulled steady toward the dark hall. The warm room filled with the stink of dead seal at low tide. I yanked loose and looked out the doorway. It stood at the far end by the machine, turned my way, no face I could make out. It took three short slow steps, a kid's walk to the bus, and it had come the whole forty yards of that hall, and was at the doorway. Faster than anybody runs, without one sound on the wax. I slammed the door. Patient doors don't lock, so I jammed the bedside chair under the handle the way Vince showed me for a hatchin' weather on our uncle's boat. The hip lady and the pneumonia man snored on behind their shut doors. My elbow ached with cold, and I understood it hadn't come from Mr. Iverson alone. When I finally looked through the door window, it was back at the far end facing the glass. Toward morning, I turned my head. I had to take him down myself, with the morgue key on its red shoelace. I pulled the chair and wheeled him past the empty alcove, down to the basement cold room. Under that hard light, I saw wet little grips on my top. A pair on the left sleeve, one on the right, one at the back hem. More small hands than one body has. They were ice cold, and they stank of seal. I changed into a spare top, and stuffed the wet one in a bread bag from the break room. At shift change, the rain had quit, and the strait was gray as dishwater. Vince was in the lot early. He sniffed the bag on my lap and said, "You smell like the hall out, the rocks back home where seals lay up." Then he rolled his window down and cranked the heater without a word. The way we did in our mother's car, cold face, warm feet. And I let him. And we drove. By afternoon, the wet had dried to salt rings anybody could call a spill. Except they're too small, and too many. That top's in the bread bag in my bottom drawer. Unwashed, and on rainy days, the left sleeve smells like low tide and seal. Story 12 Everybody in that building called me "Willette," even the doctors. I was 56, and for 20 years, I'd been the only nurse working nights on the patient floor of the little hospital on Route 3 in Colebrook. November of 2024, sleet at 29 degrees. I had a 12-year-old named Liam in with asthma, and his mother had gone home to Pittsburgh for the little ones on my promise to call her myself at 6. Before I went in, I sat in the lot with the engine running and the window cracked for the defroster and called my sister, because some women talk about grandkids and I talk about work. "Just me and Delia tonight," I said, "two farmers coughing and a hip and four, and the laundry truck never came, so I'm digging blankets out of the old wing upstairs. And at 6, I call Rhoda in Pittsburgh about her boy. A propane truck sat idling two spaces over, nobody I could see in the cab. Delia was our aide, 23, and with Liam, an old woman with a broken hip and two old farmers with pneumonia, we were full. Mark, the one nurse downstairs in the emergency room, was stitching a chainsaw cut, so Delia fetched Liam's medicine herself. And when somebody knocked on the glass of the ambulance door, she opened it. She came back up with a fleece throw, the gas station's price sticker still on the corner. Nice man brought this for the lady and four, family friend, propane jacket and cap, said the nurse won't need to go up for blankets. That girl would hold a door for a bear if it wiped its feet. I'd said blankets out loud in exactly one place, and my patient had a niece down south and no other soul. The back of my neck went cold under my collar. I had Mark lock the ambulance door, which he swore was always locked. Then I called the town police. Nice doesn't sit idling next to your cracked car window. Officer LaPointe came through the sleet and heard me out without once glancing at the clock. He took a chair by the nurse's station, facing the elevator and the front stairs, and said he'd sit right there till daylight. Liam's room is around the bend of the hall where that chair can't see. Then Mark called up. Guy on the extension in the closet, on the extension in the closed part, it's on my screen, says tell the nurse she won't need to go up for blankets now. There's one wall phone still live on the old building's top floor, unheated since the new part went up, for the furnace man. Mark put it through and I heard nothing but the receiver knocking against the wall on its cord. Then the fast busy. LaPointe radioed the state police in Lancaster. My knees felt borrowed. On my next round I clipped the oxygen reader on Liam's finger. It should read ninety-five or better. It said ninety-one and he was wheezing. While I'd been in four, the stairwell door across from his room had opened a crack and a man stood in it with the stairlight behind him, just looking. He says you don't have to call my mom at six. He'll do it. LaPointe dragged his chair around the bend and set it square against the stairwell door and that's where he stayed. I gave Liam a breathing treatment, a mask that mists me down into him and got him to ninety-six. I didn't call his mother then because the town plow doesn't go out till near dawn and a call that early would have put her on an unplowed route three with two babies in the car. Delia took a chair at his door. Anything nice shows up, I told her, scream. A little before three Liam sat bolt upright pulling at his collar, shoulders by his ears, that quiet kind of bad where nothing whistles because nothing's moving. The reader said eighty-eight, I got the mask back on him and had Mark send the doctor up and Delia held both his hands and my fingers kept fumbling the strap while my ears were moving. Tears stayed out on that stairwell door. Then the phone on his bedside table rang. Room phones only ring from inside the building. Delia picked it up before I could stop her and held it out, and a man's voice said, Easy as a neighbor. You call his mom yet? I can do it. Just tell me the number. Behind him I heard wind and a door banging somewhere high up. I said no and hung up. LaPointe had heard it from the hall. That's the cold floor, he said. Stairs bring him down to me, and the stadies are ten minutes out. He keyed his radio and sent them around back. Then behind LaPointe's chair the stairwell latch clicked, and the door opened the width of a hand against his shoulder. In the gap, a step up, stood a man in a cap and a propane jacket, something square at his hip, looking past LaPointe straight into Liam's room at me. LaPointe came up out of the chair, and the man let the door swing shut, and went up the stairs at a run. LaPointe held that door and didn't chase. The state car came around back and found the fire door off the closed floor standing open on the outside stairs, and tracks running down them and across the back lot toward Route 3, sleet filling them in while they watched. Everybody had forgotten the old fire stairs. Liam came up to 94, then 97, and the doctor let me take the mask off, and I sat on the end of his bed with my jaw clenched till it ached. Later Mark called up. Guy on an outside line's cell number. Says tell the nurse she did fine tonight. Kinda sweet, right? I hung up on him. The rest of the night I did rounds with Delia on my heels, and the phone stayed quiet. Just before six, with the plow already gone by, I called Liam's mother and told her he'd needed a breathing treatment in the night and was sleeping fine now. The morning crew found a propane company delivery slip on the top step of the stairwell, folded once the back of it blank except for pencil. Rota, Pittsburgh 6. Then the week went back to normal. The throw went in the donation bin, and I make my calls with the car windows shut now. The state police kept the slip in a plastic sleeve with my name printed on the label. Story 13 This was the summer Shelby got married two years after I buried Arlie. Everybody on the medical floor of the hospital in Welch called me Miss Bonnie. I was 61, a nurse on nights there going on 26 years, down in McDowell County. My granddaughter was marrying that Saturday afternoon, and since Thursday I'd been up rolling cream cheese mints, because not one soul would swap me a shift. So that Friday in June of 2018 I came on at shift change with powdered sugar under my fingernails. Our sitter called off. A sitter's the aide who stays all night beside one patient so he don't hurt himself. And with her gone, the sitting fell to me. Mr. Mullins was 80-some with a broke hip and a habit of yanking out his IV, the needle line in his arm that runs his fluids. Crystal, the other aide, had the rest of the hall. Junior, our one security man, sat down by the emergency room doing crosswords. My hands were slow and words slid around on the chart. I set Mr. Mullins' chair down, put Mr. Mullins' chair in his doorway across from the desk, facing the big window behind it. That black glass gave the whole hall back to me, and it was the pain Arley reglazed himself back when he kept that building running. His pump beeped whenever he bent his elbow and pinched the tubing, and I'd straighten his arm and it'd hush, regular as a mantel clock. After evening meds I dug in my scrub pocket for my pen light and came out with a brass key on a paper tag. It smelled like the cab of his truck, wintergreen skull and diesel. That stair door had been locked off since the fourth floor closed and facilities scrapped every key to it. Well, hell, he must have kept a spare that rode in the bottom of my purse with his truck papers. Half asleep I took that for the answer and stuck it back in my pocket. The next hours went by in vital signs and straightening that arm. Past midnight, with the windows sweating, something started to come out of my pocket. Something started up the stairwell behind the door at the end of my hall. Those steps came slow, the way a heavy man saves his knees and stopped at the door. "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you this late. I believe you've got my key." Arley's voice. Forty years married, and that man never said "ma'am" to a living soul. He'd have hollered, "Bone, where's my key?" The manners were the worst of it, like a stranger wearing his good coat. Mr. Mullins sat straight up. "There's your fella, honey." In the black window I saw empty hall clear to the stair door, and the pump had gone quiet with his elbow bent double. I quit talking myself out of things right there. A walker came up the hall, step and scuff, and stopped past the desk. The window showed Crystal's card outside room nine, her shoes sticking out the doorway where she was changing a bed. Nothing stood on the tile. Then a carrier thumped into the tube station at the desk. That's the pneumatic tube pharmacy sends medicine up through. I hadn't ordered a thing and couldn't leave him, so I hollered for Crystal. She unscrewed it and brought it to me, and it was empty and cold as a pop can out of the cooler. Then cold came out of the room behind us, more cooler cold with that clean steel smell, in a building so muggy the glass ran. My teeth went to clicking. Mr. Mullins said, "Lord, it's cold." I called Junior on the bedside phone. He came up grumbling about his crossword and walked down to the stair door with his badge out. A foot short of it he stopped, cocked his head, and listened a long while. Then he clipped the badge back on and turned around. As he came toward me, steps came along the hall behind him, and the window showed nothing but Junior's back. At the desk he rubbed his neck. "I ain't opening that door, Bonnie. Something's standing right behind it breathing." He hadn't heard any voice, though, and the emergency room couldn't sit unguarded. So I sent him back down. I got Mr. Mullins into bed and shut his door. At ten till three it knocked. Two soft knuckles. "Maintenance, ma'am. Terribly sorry about the hour. I only need my key and I'll be out of your way." Mr. Mullins fought toward it, clawing at his IV, saying, "Let the man in. He's working." I got both arms around him and held him down, with the call button hanging off the far rail. I tried to holler for Crystal, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my arm shook so bad he must have felt it. "Take all the time you need, ma'am. I'll wait." Out there something breathed slow with that little catch from the mines I'd slept beside for forty years. Under the door there was only the nightlight. I hummed into Mr. Mullins' hair and watched that knob. If I opened it, either my husband was standing there or I'd lost my mind in front of a patient. Next I knew I was at the desk with a pen in my hand. The clock said ten after four. Mr. Mullins was asleep, IV still in, arm laid out straight. The key was gone from my pocket. Laid square on my folded report sheet was the paper tag, string torn loose, smelling of wintergreen. People awake that long do things and never remember a minute of it. But I'd never have torn that tag off. It was the last thing he lettered. I folded my sheet around it, tucked it in my bra and finished the shift. I gave the day nurse my patients and nothing else. Because an old nurse going on about her dead husband gets sent for a brain scan and a sheet cake. I made the wedding. Quit nights by fall. It didn't quit me. Every so often driving past that hospital after dark, I hear a man clear his throat behind my seat. Last month coming home on US 52 from Shelby's Anniversary Supper, I heard that catch right behind my headrest. Evening, ma'am. Mind if I ride along? I pulled into my driveway and shut off the engine, and the cab smelled of wintergreen skull and diesel until I'd opened every door. Story 14 I was 29 and the night nurse at the nursing home in winter South Dakota, a year on nights. The residents called me Zack, my niece called me Uncle Z, and Pop on the phone before work called me the whole night shift. Like I was a crew of 10. Usually it was me, two aides and 38 old folks. I'd moved back after my mother passed. I drove Pop's old feed business pickup with the lettering still on the side, and since the funeral he won't go to bed until I call at midnight and say I'm fine. I'd stuck masking tape on the dash that said, "Call Pop 12" next to my niece's crayon card that said, "Uncle Z." That was January of 2015, 18 below, a northwest wind piling drifts down the east wall. The second aide called off for the roads, so the crew of 10 was me and Susan, who's worked a night's 20 years. I clipped my badge to my coat, Zachary Haruska, LPN, and started the first pill round. Three hours in I went out to plug in the block heater. The cord that keeps the engine oil from setting up like lard, and tried the key first. Not a click. I sat in the dark cab feeling like the dumbest man in Tripp County. A woman wrapped on the passenger glass, 40s maybe, red knit hat, a minivan idling behind her with the hood up and cables out. She had kids mittens on a string. through her coat sleeves. Uncle Z, she said grinning, your pop still selling feed that grows them? That's pop's slogan said over every pot roast. I laughed and let her hook up, and in her headlights I saw what she'd seen. My coat hanging open with the badge, the tape and the crayon card on the dash, and the lettering, Ruska and Sunfeed, that grows them, with a phone number underneath. The truck caught, she waved and drove off, and I went inside, rescued by a soccer mom. I named her Mittens for Susan. Susan eyes went to the window. Somebody reads your truck that close, they're reading this building. At 1140 the minivan was back, dark, at the far end of the lot. My guess was pills, since we keep a locked cabinet of the good stuff, so I made a plan only a man in cartoon scrubs could love. Susan at the dark day room window, me walking out like I was going home. First I went to Ramona's room by the east fire exit because her bed alarm was going. At 91 she's still trying to get home to a farm sold since Nixon. Tater, the home's fat orange cat, was snoring on her feet. I settled her and went out the front. The snot in my nose froze on the second breath. I walked wide past the van, empty, no exhaust, frost on the inside of the glass. Back at the building the east fire door started howling. It's a delayed exit door. Push the bar and a horn goes off, and 15 seconds later the lock lets go whether you're still pushing or not. I ran in. Ramona stood in her nightgown with both hands on the bar. The exit swung wide on the wind. Out in the drift stood Mittens, snow to her knees, her tracks running back along the wall. She was just letting me in. I pulled Ramona back, and dragged the door shut. But those doors don't re-lock because you close them. Somebody has to turn a key in the reset, and the key was on the ring up front. So I hung on that bar like a calf on a rope till Susan came running with the ring, white around the mouth. I got the key turned and Mittens was gone off the step. I kept the ring in my scrub pocket after that. At midnight I called Pop before the sheriff, which is the order a 12 year old would pick. He answered groggy and tickled. "Your friend called," he said. "Nice gal. Jumped your truck. Said you'd be tied up all night and I shouldn't sit up for you. That number on the truck has been the house phone since 1989. My insides went to ice water. I made him promise to lock up and let the phone ring. The county dispatcher said a deputy would come when he could, cars and ditches everywhere." The horn went again. Susan was mid-hall getting the shouting down, and Tater had flatly gotten himself under the pill cart. Ramona was at the exit, palms on the bar. On the other side of the glass stood Mittens, hat white with snow, that string swinging at her wrists. "Let her open it, Zachary. It's cold out here." I knew I had 15 seconds and nothing would stop the clock. I got Ramona off, the latch clicked loose, and I grabbed the bar with both hands and hauled back. The steel burned through my scrubs where my hip pressed it. The cold had curled my knuckles into hooks that wouldn't close, and I dropped the reset key on the tile and held on one-handed while I felt for it. Mittens just stood there, a regular woman in a red hat, waiting. On the second try, the key went in, the horn quit, and she walked off along the wall toward the lot. On the next round, I stood in doorways watching blankets until they moved. The van was gone. Then the main line rang. "That gal called again," Pop said. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do." "I picked up figuring it was you. She asked what time you get off." I told her before I thought. He was wide awake and working hard to sound otherwise. I told him to unplug the phone and stay put, then called dispatch again. The deputy was on a rollover north of town. I sat by the east door till day shift came. The deputy pulled in at gray light, looked at the tracks along the wall, and said he'd swing past Pop's place. I got in the truck and turned the key. Dead again, and the headlight knob was pulled all the way out. A knob I hadn't touched since fall. The deputy put his cables on it without a word, and I drove to Pop's. He was at the kitchen table in his coat, the phone cord unplugged beside him, and I sat down and said it to his face. "I'm fine, Pop." Story Fifteen My wife wrote "Gilbert" on my lunch sack and black marker that evening, big block letters, like I was headed off to second grade. I'd just transferred from the hospital in Gallup to nights at the little hospital in Ganado. We kept the house in Gallup, so every night I drove up past Window Rock and over on 264. It was January of 2004, a Friday, my first night running the floor by myself, and I wanted it to go clean. I stopped at the gas station in Window Rock for coffee, same as every night since the transfer, and parked El Pinto under the light by the emergency room doors. It was four degrees out, and a thin wind came off the mesa and found the gap at my collar. I took the keys from the day nurse, and the floor was mine. We had six patients in the beds. Bed nine was a grandmother who was dying, slow and peaceful, with family all around her. Her granddaughter, Rochelle, 19, wrote down every word her grandma said in a spiral notebook so the family would have them after. Her daughter, Bernice, stood out in the hall by custom and wouldn't come in. A fifteen-year-old grandson, Sean, prowled the room, and a little cousin, Tiana, six, slept on the window bench under a quilt. Grandma counted the people in her room out loud, over and over, and every time she came out one higher than there were. I let that be. You learn not to argue with them. Not long after my first rounds, Rochelle went to the hospital. She said, "I don't know what you're talking about." She said, "I don't know what you're talking about," and waved me over and read from the page. A man by the bathroom was asking did the nurse get his coffee at the station in Window Rock, and was it cold up there. Then Grandma had added, "This one I don't know." My cup sat out on the desk. Logo turned to the hall where anybody walking by could read it. I grinned at Sean. "Tell him it was burnt." Grandma shook her head a little on the pillow. "The man doesn't wait for answers," she told us. "He just asks the next thing." So I set a trap, and I was proud of it. I gave Sean boxes of gloves to stock at the desk, which kept him at my elbow where I could watch his hands for the next hour while I charted and answered call lights. He got bored fast, the way 15 does, tore the cardboard sleeve off my coffee, and started folding it into a bird. I asked him if the bird had a name, and he said, "It's a bird, Annette." And I laughed and figured I'd beaten him. A little before two, Rachelle walked out holding the notebook open, the newest line still in her round hand. Grandma says the man asks why the boy at the desk is making a bird out of paper. Sean's hands were still on it. Nobody in that room could see the desk. I went in. Grandma said the man had come in with them and stood there ever since, never sitting, never tired. At arm's length from the bed, the door to the toilet stood almost shut, and in the gap under it were the toes of two boots, old lace-up army boots with canvas leggings buckled over olive-drab trouser cuffs, the kind I'd only seen in my grandfather's service pictures from the 40s. The boots never shifted, not once, and no sound came from behind that door. I backed to the doorway and started counting because counting gave my hands something to do besides shake. Sean at the desk, Bernice in the hall under the exit sign, Lucille my one aide turning the man in four and everybody else on the floor asleep, the rancher in seven snoring, Rachelle in the chair, Tiana on the bench, Grandma in the bed, and the boots hadn't moved. Then I lifted Tiana off the window bench and carried her past that door, close enough that cold rolled off the door like opening a root cellar in August, heavy and damp and smelling of dirt. And while I was right there with the girl against my shoulder, Grandma said, "Clear as day." The doctor came up to me, that the man was asking if the nurse's truck was warm yet, and was it far to Gallop. Rachelle wrote it down, "My wife was asleep in Gallop. Sean hadn't moved from the desk, the paper bird still pinched in his fingers, and he wouldn't look toward the room." I got the girls into the hall with Bernice and stood in that doorway with my eyes on the bed. Grandma went a little after three, quiet, with Rachelle holding her hand. The doctor came up from the emergency room and pronounced her. Lucille and I washed her and got her ready, and Rachelle showed us how to comb out her long gray hair and tie it back in a bun the way she always wore it. I called tribal police from the desk phone. An officer came out from Window Rock, stood in the hall with his notepad and took it all down from me there, never once stepping past the doorway, and went out to finish it in his car. The door by the bed was pushed wide open now, flat against the wall. Bernice pressed the notebook on me. She wouldn't keep her mother's words in her house. I flipped to the front. The first page was Wednesday, in the ambulance. A man in army boots rode with us. He asks, "Is it far?" I locked it in my desk drawer and put the key in my pocket. At seven, Verna came in for day shift and asked how my first night alone went. I said quiet and held out the floor keys. The drawer key was still in my pocket. I unlocked El Pinto. The notebook was lying on the driver's seat, open to the last line. Is it far? To gallop. I walked it around and set it down on the frozen curb by the passenger door and got in. One knock came on the passenger glass. Nobody was there, just the window and the pages lifting in the wind. I backed away from the doors, and in the rear view, the notebook lay on the curb under the emergency room light, and its pages had gone still, though the wind hadn't. Story 16. Highway 43 runs through Grove Hill past the courthouse, and if you blink, you're out the other side, headed for Jackson. The hospital sits off it on a slope, one story of brick facing the road, with a basement at the back that nobody likes. I'm Jeremy, and I worked nights on the medical floor there, tired in a way sleep didn't fix. That Saturday in November of 2007 was supposed to be my weekend with the boys. I'd told my ex-wife I had the flu and swapped into Alvin's shift for the money I owed her. Alvin's name crossed out on the schedule, and mine penciled in. So nobody outside that building knew where I was. I had five patients and one aide, Tamika. The one on my mind was Mrs. Odom, on comfort care, with her daughter Phyllis living in the recliner and a church fan going in her lap all night. When anybody died on nights, I took them down a closed-off hall, onto the freight elevator, and along the basement to the morgue. At 9.40, the little screen at the desk, the camera on the staff door at the back, had an old man on it. A grey overcoat, a brimmed hat, and a cane he leaned on like every step was a bill he had to pay. He'd hauled himself up the one concrete step and stood in that north wind reading the schedule, we'd tape inside the glass. Every nurse's night's with our floor's direct number across the top. Somebody's granddaddy, I told Tamika, wanting to know who's got his wife. It sounded right, except he read way past finding one name and never tried the handle, and anybody out in that cold wants in. I called Ingrid, the emergency room nurse and the charge nurse. When I gave her my granddaddy, she asked was his left shoelace untied and dragging, and when I squinted at the screen and said yes, it was. She let out a breath like she'd lost a bet. Front or back? Staff door. Keep your door shut up there. She hung up. On the monitor, the old man let himself down off the step, cane first, and went out of the picture. The schedule stayed taped to the glass behind him. By 11, the lights were down, and I knew every sound on that floor, the oxygen machine humming in one room, Mrs. Odom breathing long and wet with gaps in it. Then the floor's outside line rang, and nobody rings that at night but day shift calling in sick. I picked up and got breathing slow, like somebody resting between steps. Downstairs. Along nothing. My ear went hot against the receiver. Tonight. Dial tone. Tamika wouldn't let me say granddaddy after that and went to sit with the man in 104. Ingrid, when I called back, said stay off the backside, and I sat on my hand, to stop them jittering. I made rounds every hour after that, and every hour Mrs. Odom's gaps got longer. At 320, Mrs. Odom quit breathing with Phyllis holding her hand. The emergency room doctor came up and pronounced her, and Tamika and I washed and wrapped her while I kept straightening the sheet at her chin. There's nowhere upstairs to keep a body till the funeral home comes at daylight, and Ingrid couldn't leave the emergency room, so it was me at the East Hall doors with a mouthful of penny. Phyllis came, because she wouldn't let her mama ride alone. The heat's cut off in that hall, cold as the inside of a deer cooler. Phyllis said a sweet old fellow with a cane had asked after her in the lot, and she'd told him her mama was passing tonight and the young man had her. When I said he'd been at the back door, she told me not to scare a grieving woman over a kind stranger. She kissed the sheet at the morgue cooler, and I sent her up alone, because she wanted it, and I wanted her off the backside. The loading door is at the end of the corridor, a wired pane in it, opening onto the red clay out back under one caged bulb. On an upturned bucket a few feet off, the old man was watching me with the cane across his knees. He planted the cane, pushed on his knee, rocked twice, and came up, then walked to the door and put his face to the glass. One word came in under the door, stay. That latch would give to a butter knife, and my knees had gone to water, so I backed to the wall phone instead of the door. Ingrid said come up, and Tamika was alone with four rooms. At the top, I locked the elevator off and bolted the east hall doors. I didn't call the sheriff, because a report would put my name on a night I'd sworn to my ex I was sick in bed, and her brother works dispatch for the county. At daylight, I went back down, because the funeral home man needed me to sign Mrs. Odom over, and Ingrid walked the slope with me. The bucket sat square to the pane, and his brimmed hat laid on the floor. They crowned down in the clay beside it, dew-beatered on the felt, like he'd set it there to hold his place. I sat on the bucket because my legs wanted down, and from there you could see clear to the cooler. He'd read my nights off the glass, called the number on top, gotten the rest from Phyllis, and come down the slope to wait. Ingrid threw the bucket in the dumpster and the hat in after it. I quit that week for a family clinic in Jackson. No night pay, $4 an hour less drive, and I had to tell my ex where I'd been that Saturday. I got every other weekend in writing, and the boys ride with me on mine now, the little one asleep against the window before we clear the courthouse. Alvin took my nights, and I never asked him how they went. Sunday evenings I have the boys home by six, and my own schedule hangs on my refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a fish, where nobody reads it but me. Thank you.