Rushing Waters by Danielle Steel

minutes later, and gave Juliette a surly look.
    A little while later, as they both consulted charts at the nurses’ station, Juliette asked him a question in a monotone, so as not to start anything between them. Whatever she said to him would irritate him and set him off, as the nurses had observed countless times. Sometimes it was almost fun to watch them, like a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. You could count on it every time.
    “Are we doing anything to prepare for the hurricane, if the city goes on full alert?” she asked him. She had been wondering about it all day. Having lived through Sandy at NYU Hospital, she knew how important it was to be prepared.
    “Hardly. We don’t need to borrow trouble. We’ll deal with it when they tell us. We don’t have time to waste before that. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got double my normal workload without worrying about the hurricane.”
    “So do I. But someone should at least check the generators
before
we’re on full alert. That’s what did us in at NYU last time—the backup generators failed.”
    “Are you working for the Office of Emergency Services now?” he asked tartly, his mouth set in a thin line. “Why don’t you call the head of the hospital and tell him?”
    She ignored the sarcasm of his comment, but persisted. “We can at least be prepared down here. We’re below sea level and close enough to the river to get flooded.”
    “Then wear your rain boots to work tomorrow. What do you expect me to do? Set up sandbags myself? I’m the chief resident here, not the maintenance staff. Stop panicking—your patients will pick up on it,” he scolded her, put back the chart he’d been studying, and walked off, as Michaela raised an eyebrow in silent comment.
    “We should be prepared,” Juliette said to her in a quiet voice, and Michaela nodded.
    “He’s right, though. No one has time to deal with it unless we have to. And everyone is aware of what happened at NYU. They won’t let it happen here,” she tried to reassure her. Juliette nodded and walked into the cubicle where the ninety-year-old man with the broken hip was waiting for the orthopedic surgeon to come and see him. They were going to operate on him that night, and his daughter and grandchildren were with him, telling him for the hundredth time that he shouldn’t have been on a ladder in the first place. He was alert and intelligent, not senile, just old.
    “Are you doing all right, Mr. Andrews?” Juliette asked, smiling at him.
    “I was checking out a leak in the ceiling. The building has very old pipes,” he explained to Juliette again. She agreed with his daughter about the ladder, but he was a sweet old man, and she felt sorry for him. His daughter was saying that he had just proved that he could no longer live alone, and he looked devastated. He had passed the mental exam with no problem and clearly didn’t have dementia. He was just independent, had wanted to check out the leak, and had lost his balance. His problem was that he was ninety years old, and no longer as steady as he had been, or as agile, and lived by himself. He said his wife had died two years before.
    “How are you doing with the pain?” Juliette asked him gently.
    “I’m all right,” he said, looking embarrassed, as she touched his hand.
    “You’ll be fine after the surgery,” she said quietly, and he nodded, as the surgeon walked in. Juliette asked his relatives to step outside for a moment, and left them as they continued to complain about him in the hallway, that he just wasn’t sensible, was much too independent, wanted to do all the same things he had done as a young man, and refused to act his age. That sounded like a good thing to her—he was still full of energy and life.
    She went to visit the child who had swallowed the turtle after that.
    The little boy was dressing to go home, and his mother looked enormously relieved. He had just admitted that he hadn’t swallowed it, as he