Hurricane Nurse Read Online Free Page B

appeared at the door. "Did you see the groceries? I put them on the table over there. I'd started out to garage my car when it occurred to me that you might have need for some medical supplies that you don't usually stock for school use. There's no telling what might happen. Flying glass. A fight. We've had almost every kind of emergency in the schools during hurricanes. I thought if you could give me a list I'd go by a hospital and get supplies. Okay?"
    It was funny the way Cliff kept balancing her opinion of him, first one way, then the other. Just a little while ago, she had felt he was little better than a criminal. Now she wondered who else would have thought of taking care of emergencies during the hurricane.
    "You probably know somebody at the hospital who'll know a lot more about what we are likely to need than I do. There are so few things a nurse is supposed to do without the directions of a doctor. We have bandages. I think all we'll need. I don't know what else."
    "Ben Rogers'll know," he promised her. "He's a doctor I went to school with. He'll give me what I need. You may find yourself performing an appendectomy before it's all over," he threatened, and disappeared as suddenly as he had come.
    The supplies the school offered were scarce enough. As Donna had said, there were bandages and aspirin. She found too, a large jar of Ungentine for burns, a bottle of a hundred aspirin. Almost any family medicine cabinet would be more plentifully filled. She felt helpless, thinking of the things that might happen. What would she do in case of a heart attack, or a diabetic coma? Until she came to Flamingo, she had never done anything except under a doctor's direct order. Here, she wasn't allowed to give so much as an aspirin to a child. Only to put on temporary dressings, to check eyes and ears, heights and weights, and report to mothers and fathers. Whom would she turn to in a real emergency? Her training hadn't taught her independence.
    She didn't have long to mull over her plight. Hank came in looking as pleased as punch. "Mrs. Saunders never stays during a hurricane. She has children and is a widow. But she's prepared lunch for those who are here. You and Mrs. Saunders will be the only ladies. However, Mary Hendley phoned that she would be along in midafternoon."
    Mary Hendley was a first-grade teacher who looked at Hank as if she were a hungry child at a bakery window. Donna wondered if Hank had gone with her before she herself was added to the staff, or whether it had always been a hopeless crush.
    The covered passageway went along one of the five inside patios about which the school was built. Again, she noticed the uncanny silence of the out-of-doors. Not a palm frond stirred. The fountain which the class of '37 had given had been shut off. The scarlet blossoms on the ixora hedge that ran about the four sides seemed to exude a heat of their own. The footsteps of the faculty members echoed hollowly on the tiled floor.
    "There's nothing quite so empty as a school when the pupils aren't there," Hank said, and his words echoed hollowly from the opposite wall.
     
     
    They were arranging two desks at the entrance, placing paper and pencils to keep records there, when on the dot of twelve-thirty as Hank had expected, Dr. and Mrs. Ward arrived. Both old people were cobweb-frail, with white hair, faded blue eyes, and thin, liver-spotted hands. As often happens when people live together for great lengths of time, the old professor and his wife had grown to look alike. Mrs. Ward sat in an ancient wheel chair, an afghan bright with every conceivable color spread over her knees. The beauty of good bones and kindly, optimistic thinking was hers. Donna looked up at the man who pushed the chair and found humor and contentment there.
    She pulled up a desk chair, took a piece of paper from the folder the Red Cross had furnished and began to take down the answers to questions, their names, their address. There was no next of