Amid the chaos, we pressed on with the other versions of our lives. My mother needed to drive my sister to a friend’s birthday party. Since I had recently obtained my learner’s permit, I volunteered to take my brother to the closest ER we could think of, a ten-minute drive away, in Silver Spring. My mother agreed, and the four of us dispersed in two cars.

As I drove my burnished tan Corolla, it was hard to avoid staring at the bandaged hand resting in my brother’s lap. When we arrived at the hospital, I followed the red arrows to the circular driveway for the emergency department drop-off area. My brother had to reach across his lap with his uninjured hand to liberate himself from the seat belt before getting out of the car.

I watched him start the long walk toward the fluorescent lights beckoning from the ER and then I drove around to the hospital parking lot. I parked and got out of the car, huddling into my sweater as I took note of the majestic maple and elm trees beside the stoic pines that remained forever green along the path toward the imposing gray high-rise. I belted my sweater and headed inside. In stark contrast to the chill of the bright white ER lights, the hospital entrance was warm and dark.

It was quiet inside, and I saw no one walking the shiny linoleum floors. I found my brother in the waiting room filling out some forms, and I took a seat next to him. An older man sat at the other end of the room, his hair disheveled and his skin creased from what even at my young age looked like a lifetime of hard living. He had pulled his heavy brown trench coat over him as he slept in the unyielding waiting room chair, his head bobbing with each big-bellied breath. For long moments at a time he would stop breathing altogether, and I found myself watching anxiously until he took another breath. I figured that if the next one didn’t come, at least he was in an ER.

A young man was sitting in a chair toward the middle of the room with his discharge papers, an inhaler, and a bottle of medicine. He kept looking out toward the parking lot, and I gathered he was waiting for a ride. The ER doors slid open, and a father hurried in carrying his little girl, who had a nasty gash on her leg just below the hem of her purple dress.

All of us were there, I realized, because we were damaged in some way. Wounded. Broken.

A few minutes later, my brother was called into the inner recesses of the ER. I watched him disappear into a triage area and then out of view. I settled in for the wait.

Flashing lights and high-pitched beeps pierced the lull, announcing the arrival of an ambulance backing up to the ER doors. The vehicle parked, and then the crew proceeded to unload a portly older man lying on a gurney. A medic held up a bag of fluid that dripped into the man’s arm. He secured it to a metal pole and then continued to pump air into a tube that went into the man’s mouth. Another medic performed compressions on the man’s chest, but the man did not move, save for the intermittent involuntary jerking of his body in time with the thrusts to his chest. At one point, an ashen arm dangled off the gurney as they rushed the patient into the emergency department.

Moments later, what appeared to be a family flooded into the waiting room: Women and men came in crying, asking about their father, husband, son. The clerk at the intake desk quietly asked them to wait. I picked up a magazine and tried not to stare as wounded people came in, nurses arrived to call out names, patients walked or were wheeled into rooms, and curtains closed around their beds. The wounded little girl, the old man, the family—the whole gamut of life seemed to be converging in this space.

All of us sat there waiting, nervously averting our eyes from one another. At one point, a burgundy car pulled up outside and the young man with the inhaler and discharge papers exclaimed, “Finally! Thank God!” gathered his belongings, and rushed for the door. The old man under the overcoat, who I decided must be homeless, continued to sleep. The family members, still crying, eventually were ushered into an interior room. The little girl with the gash on her leg skipped out, hand in hand with her father, wearing a brand-new pink Band-Aid and clutching a lollipop; she was smiling as if she’d just been to the circus.

I glanced at my watch: It had been slightly over an hour and there was still no sign of my brother. Later, the family of the man who’d arrived by ambulance came out one by one, arm in arm, shaking their heads and wringing their hands. As they headed out into the night, there was talk of arrangements and who would call Aunt Jo.

Now it was just me and the Sleeper. Dusk set in as I continued to wait. Finally, my brother emerged, his hand bandaged in thick white gauze. He was ready to go.

“How is everything?” I asked

“Fine. They just did an X-ray and cleaned it up. I have to have it checked in a couple of days to make sure it’s healing all right. They said something about how they could only put a couple of stitches since it’s a bad bite wound, and I have to take these antibiotics.”

As my brother and I left the ER, I marveled at the place, one of bright lights and dark hallways, a place so quiet and yet so throbbing with life. I marveled at how a little girl could be carried in cut and crying and then skip out laughing; at how a bloodied brother could reappear with stitches in his repaired hand; at how the family of a man who had presumably been fine that morning could manage to leave without him to start a new stage of their lives, one in which he would play no part; at how the man without a home could find somewhere to rest until he, too, would have to go back outside to figure out the rest of his day, the rest of his life; at how all of us had converged in these hallowed halls for a chance to reveal our wounds, to offer up our hurt and our pain to be eased. If my brother’s body could be patched up, then certainly, in its own time, his spirit could mend, too. If we looked, if we named the problem, identified and examined it, then there was the opportunity to fix it, the chance for us to walk out under the stoic pines healed, or on our way to being so.

On the drive home, my brother and I assumed our usual silence. The city at dusk was cloaked in shadows, and the full moon played mischief among the clouds. I pulled my Toyota into our driveway behind my mother’s Lincoln Town Car and alongside my brother’s sports car. We went into the house, and John headed up to his room and turned on his music—this time A Tribe Called Quest. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice, then sat at the kitchen table and thought about how I wanted to leave this haunted house and fix people. I figured that if I could find stillness in this chaos, if I could find love beyond this violence, if I could heal these layers of wounds, then I would be the doctor in my own emergency room. That would be my offering to the world, to myself. Unlike in the war zone that was my childhood, I would be in control of that space, providing relief or at least a reprieve to those who called out for help. I would see to it that there was shelter in the spaces of which I was the guardian. The formless angel with a voice as clear as my own had told me the secret many years ago. Let it be so.

TWO

    Dr. Harper: The View from Here

It wasn’t at all how I had pictured graduation from my emergency medicine residency at Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx would be, but it certainly was a blistering end. I sat near the aisle, next to my mother, who was next to my stepfather. I had told my brother and sister not to bother with the trip. I figured my sister would be busy with her obligations as an army lieutenant. I assumed that my brother would be preoccupied with his family or with landscaping his new home. That’s what I told myself. The truth was closer to my not wanting them to see me like this. I didn’t want witnesses there to confirm that this had really happened, that this celebration I had looked forward to for the last four years of medical school, and then during the four years of residency, felt more like a funeral. There was a noticeable absence by my side, where I had always imagined my husband would have stood.

Husband. The word cut like a slur.