Excerpt from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Two hours had passed when my name was called again, and a different nurse took me to the same alcove, where she drew blood before sending me out to wait some more. I was texting L every fifteen minutes or so, and as time passed he grew more indignant, I don't understand this country, he said, you wait so long and you pay so much. But his indignation didn't help. I was spending more time with my arms wrapped around my stomach, my eyes closed; the pain still wasn't as bad as it had been on the first day but it was getting decidedly worse, it was all I could think about. I stopped answering L's texts as they came, only after he had texted a second or a third time did I reply. It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence; I wasn't impatient or bored, there was something fascinating and dreadful about the experience of my body. I began negotiating with it, with the pain or with my body, I'm not sure which, or if a meaningful distinction could be drawn: if it stays here, at this level, if it doesn't get worse, I can bear it, it isn't unbearable yet. I was surprised, when I was called into the ward a third time, to see that four hours had passed. It was as if the room were exempt from time, a little enclave outside its regime: many of the people I passed, as I walked toward the woman holding open the door, were the same people, the room was more crowded but it seemed hardly anyone had moved. I hadn't seen this woman before; she led me to the alcove and told me she was the nurse practitioner on the ward, a distinction I didn't understand except that it marked some degree of authority, a rank in a hierarchy, we still don't have a room for you but we want to keep the ball rolling. She was friendlier than the first nurse I had spoken to but the friendliness didn't mean anything, it was just her way of bearing up. The news was full of nurses and doctors who weren't bearing up, there were too many patients and too many of them were dying, and not just dying but dying alone; videos circulated of nurses, still in their scrubs, in tears recounting how they held phones or iPads so patients could say goodbye to their families, how even then they had to ration the time, five minutes and no more, so many patients were dying and waiting for their chance to call. It was her way of enduring, I thought of the nurse and her grating cheer, who was I to judge it. She asked me to repeat the story of what had happened but kept interrupting, wanting me to speed things up. When I said that the urgent care nurse had been concerned about appendicitis she cut me off, saying they weren't too worried about that, my blood work had come back and there weren't any indications of appendicitis, we'd expect your white blood cell counts to be higher; but she wanted me to have a CT scan anyway, to see if they could figure out what was going on. Her tone suggested there was no reason to worry, it dismissed all doubt, and I thought of the things I had said to L over the past days, that it would be a waste of time to go to the ER, that they would just send me home and tell me to wait it out; I felt vindicated by her tone.

She had drawn a curtain across the front of the alcove, making a private space, and now it fluttered, someone on the other side had taken hold of it but waited to pull it open until the nurse said to come in. A short broad woman in a set of green scrubs entered—the scrubs were part of the hierarchy, too, I realized, a code I would try to decipher. She pulled a small metal cart behind her. You'll need an IV for the scan, the nurse practitioner said, we'll get that in and then imaging will come get you when they're ready. And then she was gone, closing the curtain behind her, and the new woman and I were alone. She asked me how I was and reflexively I said fine, and then after a pause we both laughed a little. Yeah, she said, she spoke with a South American accent, Colombian maybe, I guess if you were fine you wouldn't be here. She took her time, opening drawers and pulling out various supplies, unfolding a pad over the top of the cart, on which she set her instruments as she asked me if I had had an IV before. Many times, I told her, though it had been years; I had never spent the night in a hospital before but I had had a couple of surgeries when I was young, normal childhood things, and then when I was desperate for money in graduate school I had taken part in a study that required me, once a month for six months, to spend an afternoon sitting with a line in my arm. It was an HIV study, research for a vaccine, there was a bag of medication followed by a bag of what they called fluids; I don't remember the drug but I was paid a hundred dollars for each day I spent there. Sometimes they have trouble with my veins, I told the woman as she tied the tourniquet on my left bicep—she had asked which hand I used more, whether I was a righty or a lefty—and she hummed noncommittally, turning my arm so she could examine it. She ran her gloved fingers from the crook of my elbow to the wrist, pausing about halfway, where the scars began; this always happened, sometimes doctors ask about them and sometimes they don't, sometimes they ask about mental health, about depression, ideation, and I say it was decades ago, a quarter century, ancient history—she paused but just briefly, she didn't say a word. I liked her, I decided. She made a noise of disappointment, then started tapping my arm with three fingers, asking me to make a fist and release several times. She sighed then, They weren't lying to you, she said, they are a little hard to find, let's try the other arm, and she drew my right hand toward her. She repeated the same motions up and down, tapping the veins while I made a fist, and then she returned to the crook of my arm and pressed again with her fingers. There you are, she said, why were you hiding, and it made me like her more. Then there was a quick swipe of alcohol and she asked me to release my hand, to breathe deep and relax, and the needle slid in. It hardly hurt at all, she was good at her job, but then as always happens she had to adjust the needle, pushing it in more deeply and moving it side to side, that's the real pain. Her head was tilted forward and I looked at her hair; it wasn't long, maybe shoulder length, but it was thick and brown, and she had bound it with a pink elastic, something a schoolkid might wear, frivolous, needlessly pretty, I liked her very much. This is just saline, she said, screwing a syringe into the IV, and as she pressed the plunger there was a taste or smell at the back of my throat, something like rubbing alcohol, a kind of ghost impression. She saw me sense it, Weird, right, she said. We call that the taste of victory, it means the IV's working, I thought I lost the vein for a minute but it behaved. She placed a broad piece of transparent tape over the needle with its two wings, another narrower piece of tape securing the plastic tube she coiled beneath. Okay, she said, you're all set. She told me to go back to the waiting room, someone would call me for the next step; I wondered how many steps there would be. How long have you been waiting, she asked as I stood, and I shrugged, Five hours or so, I said. She sucked her breath between her teeth. It's been bad the last few days, she said, I'm sorry. I hope you can go home soon.

Excerpted from Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Copyright © 2024 by Garth Greenwell. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.