| Cleanup on Aisle Hby Patrick MulvaneyBarbara had worked at that hospital for twenty years. Twenty long years. When she first started there she never imagined she’d still be there thirty years later. It was the only job she could get at the time, it was one of those bizarre moments in human history when there wasn’t a shortage of nurses in the world and it was tough to find employment so she took the first job she could get; it didn’t matter that it was in the absolute worst part of Detroit. She figured she’d only stay there a year or two, pad her resume and then go off to greener pastures at some hospital down in Toledo, or even Cincinnati. Any place had to be better than Detroit.
But something funny happened to her along the way; she found she actually liked the people she worked with. She liked the other nurses, and she adored the other doctors. And despite the hardship and difficulty of working in such a difficult part of the world, she started to find her job rewarding. She enjoyed helping people in dire and desperate situations and saving the lives of those people in dire and desperate situations. So when the opportunity presented itself for her to move to a hospital over in Ann Arbor where the most action she’d get would be tending to drunken frat boys, she turned down the opportunity and stayed down in the trenches. She forsake the easy road to undertake a more a difficult life, but a life with at least some genuine purpose beyond cleaning up the vomit from privileged trust-fund undergrads.
She loved the Emergency Room more than anything. She laughs today when she happens upon networks shows like ER. She laughs mostly because such shows have continually elicited comments from her family and friends all mimicking one another in some small way, all of them saying “you worked in a place like that?”
She laughs because she can’t help but say “No, I worked in a place much worse than that.”
December 15th, 1986 started out like any other typical evening at the Emergency Room. A few gun shot wounds here n’ there, a couple stabbings and more than a few other random crazies just randomly dropping in with all manner of cooked up stories in hopes of yielding some free prescription drugs from the old woman. They think because she’s elderly now and kindly looking that she’ll just pass out pain killers like they’re candy.
“They must have me confused with their grandmas” she’d often say to the other nurses.
‘Twas an uneventful night in that Detroit ER, Barbara was getting all set to clock out and go home, but then walked in a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old, eighteen at the most. The girls skin was pale and looked almost rubbery with beads of sweat all across her face any body. Her hair looked as though it might’ve been a healthy golden brown, if not for the fact that it was falling out and the girl probably hadn’t showered in what was probably a few months. But the thing Barbara noticed the most were the pale blue eyes on this sad looking creature. These were the eyes of a person dead on the inside. She saw the track marks on her arms and just as well assumed it was another homeless junkie hoping to score some free drugs and a quick high from a kindly looking old nurse. Barbara was all set to turn the fledgling around and out of the ER. And then the girl’s water broke.
Without going into too many details, Barbara only remembered that it may have been the most difficult child birth she’d ever witnessed that didn’t take the life of the mother. When all was said and done the entire process took over four hours and it wasn’t until five in the morning on December 16th that a three-months premature, heroin addicted baby girl was torn from the womb of this mystery girl.
Of course the police were sent over to get involved. They questioned the girl, asked her who she was and she said her name was Aimee James Richards but that would later turn out to be a fake name but not until after she’d disappeared from the hospital entirely, without her baby in tow.
Maybe she was selfish and just didn’t want to have anything to do with the newborn child. Or maybe part of her said to herself she would never be able to clean herself up to give that child the life she believed it deserved, and felt that running away would give the innocent a clean slate at life without having to deal with a junkie for a mother. Whatever her motivations, nobody ever knew. Barbara had been getting long in the tooth and just happened to doze off, if only for a few moments and it was in those moments that “Aimee James Richards” found a means to an escape. Surely if Barbara had been awake, she no doubt would’ve stopped the new mother, if only so she could name the baby and properly sign her away with all the various adoption forms. But it had been a long day, and a long career in the toughest of places to work.
And so the child went abandoned. Born premature and addicted to heroin and hooked up to all manner of machines just barely keeping the infant alive, and now abandoned and even nameless.
And so it was after those events that Barbara decided it best for her to transfer away to the elysian fields of Ann Arbor where the most action she’d see would be working a stomach pump for some drunken frat boys and maybe the occasional junkie attempting to score some free drugs; but never again anything as earth shattering as the events of December the 16th of Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six. It wasn’t so much that it was a junkie giving birth on the floor of the ER, that had happened before and it’s no doubt happened since. But it was those haunting blue eyes of a girl just begging for something more than what she had but couldn’t have. Whether that thing be more drugs or a better life, Barbara would never know.
Unbeknownst to Barbara or anyone having worked in the hospital that night, the girl would later be found dead of a heroin overdose in a back alley of Detroit. No identification found, and because she’d continued to lose weight after the events of December the 16th of Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Six, her visage failed to match the description that had been given to the police by Barbara and others having worked that night, let alone any other descriptions searching for this girl. She was listed as a Jane Doe and buried away in pine box in a pauper’s field; nameless and numbered without anyone to mourn her, no one to miss her, no one to remember her save for an elderly nurse, haunted forever by her pale blue eyes.
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