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Claire couldpiece together from her own first-aid kit; all she has verified has been the assurance they could be airlifted back to Seattle.
    She follows signs to the back of the building near the emergency room entrance and parks in a visitors’ lot next to two ambulances. There is a helicopter landing pad to her left, and beyond that are rolling fields that climb and climb into hills and then into mountains spotted with dense green stands of ponderosa pine. At the lower elevations the shadows lace the snow blue on the undulating slopes. The tops of the peaks disappear into flat, gray clouds.
    The lobby of the emergency room is uncharacteristically calm, at least compared to the inner-city public hospitals of her residency. An old man leans forward on his chair with his hands pressed against his eyes; his younger friend or son reads a newspaper to him, jumping from headline to headline as if he took no real interest in any of them. A few whining children squirm in their mothers’ laps, a few more squall behind shut doors, struggling against stitches or tetanus injections or close inspection of ears and throats. The triage nurse asks Claire if she is a new drug rep, and brightens when Claire answers that she’s a new doctor in town, hoping to meet the medical staff. The nurse doesn’t react to the self-conscious note Claire hears in her own voice and points the way to the offices down a hallway. The chief of medicine has taken the day off to go ice fishing, the woman says, but there should be a secretary around who can let her know his schedule.
    The newly cleaned carpets smell of disinfectant vaguely camouflaged as citrus. The walls are covered in a shiny washable plastic; the chairs and love seats with industrial upholstery, all their colors muted to an unnatural hue by the fluorescent lighting. And the chill—hospitals are never warm. She remembers working call shifts, roaming the nearly empty halls of Harborview Hospital at three and four in the morning with a blanket wrapped around her like one of the homeless souls she doctored. She could be blindfolded and know the function and purpose of this building. It leaves her feeling even more out of place, an uninvited guest in a house she used to own. She should scrawl a name tag declaring her purpose here: “No, not a patient. Not a visitor. I’m one of you, an insider. I’ve just forgotten where I left the doctor in me.”
    She puts her briefcase on a chair and pulls out one of her résumés. The top two-thirds encompassed ten and a half years of her life, from college until she left her residency three months before graduation. All she sees is the empty space at the bottom of the page; she would have to write a book to fill in that blank. It’s the details she’s left off that critically define her, she thinks. Everything had crowded together at the end. That last terrible call night working in the emergency room; patients were waiting eight, ten, twelve hours and both of her interns were busy in the trauma room. There hadn’t been time to listen to every complaint as carefully as she should. She had been overwhelmed. She didn’t learn the consequences of her triage decision until days later. She can hear her adviser’s voice as clearly in this lobby right now as she’d heard it in his office fourteen and a half years ago: “Every doctor makes mistakes. Medical instinct, that sense that someone’s sicker than they look, that’s not in a book, Claire. It takes years of experience. Take a day or two off. Get some rest.”
    But the next day her uterus began the slow process of expulsion, doing the proper work of labor at the improper time. Jory was delivered almost three months early and Claire began the weeks of vigil in the neonatal ICU, willing the power of her mind and her love to do what her body could not: keep Jory alive. She remembers being enraged at fate, at God, at her corporeal self for its failure. There had been moments in the middle of the night,