The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 8

“She's standing. Look at her. She is standing up on her own.”

A nurse near the back of the gathered crowd pressed both hands flat over her mouth, her eyes wide and glassy, watching the lady mother stand at the side of the gurney with her feet flat on the linoleum and her back straight and her hands moving, opening and closing, testing herself the way a person does when they are relearning the geography of their own body.

The young woman in black, the one who had been crumpled on the floor not five minutes ago, was standing now too, both arms wrapped around her mother, her face pressed into her mother's shoulder, shaking without making any sound.

“That's not possible,” someone in the crowd said. Not meanly. Just honestly. 

 “That's not medically possible.”

“I watched her flatline,” a nurse said to the colleague standing next to her, her voice low and very careful, like she was reporting something she was not sure she had permission to report. 

“I was standing right there. I watched the monitor.”

“So did I,” the colleague said.

They looked at each other.

Around them, the crowd had begun to shift and buzz, the initial shock curdling into something louder, voices overlapping, people turning to the people next to them and grabbing their arms, pointing, asking questions that nobody in the hallway had the answer to.

“Could he actually be a real doctor?”

“He brought her back. With needles. She was gone and he brought her back.”

“I have never seen anything like that in my life. Not once.”

“If he wasn't real, if he was just pretending, then explain to me how that woman is standing there right now. Explain it to me.”

Nobody could.

The crowd turned.

Not all at once, but the way crowds turn when a single current moves through them and redirects the whole thing, they turned toward Director Hale. He was still standing in the spot where he had planted himself earlier, still in his white coat, still with the authority of his position sitting on his shoulders, and none of it was doing him any good right now because the expression on his face was the expression of a man who had run out of things to say and knew it.

“You told her she was dead,” someone said from the crowd. Direct. Not shouting. Just stating it.

Director Hale opened his mouth.

“You told her there was no saving her,” the same voice continued. 

“You said it to her face while she was on the floor crying. You said it.”

“The patient's vitals indicated—”

“She is standing up,” another voice cut in, sharper now. 

“She is standing up and walking around and you are the one who said she was gone. You. The director of this emergency wing. You said there was nothing to be done.”

“And then a man with no white coat and no hospital badge walked in off the street,” someone else added, “and he did in five minutes what your entire department apparently could not do.”

The director's jaw tightened. He straightened slightly, the instinct to assert position overriding the shame for just a moment. “Acupuncture is not a recognized emergency intervention and the patient's condition—”

“The patient is standing right there,” a woman near the front of the crowd said, and her voice had gone quiet in the way that is more cutting than volume. 

“She is standing right there and you are the one who gave up on her. So whatever you are about to say, I would think very carefully about it before you finish the sentence.”

The director said nothing.

His face had gone a particular shade of red that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with a man sitting inside the full weight of his own public failure with nowhere to move.

Someone began to clap. Slow at first. Then someone else joined. Then it spread through the corridor. People clapping for a man who was no longer there to hear it.

Because when they looked for him, he was gone.

The space where Otis had been standing, at the side of the gurney with the needle case in his hand and his ruined shirt and his steady hands, was empty. Nobody had seen him leave. Nobody had watched him go. One moment he had been there and the next moment the space simply did not contain him anymore, and the corridor full of people was left looking at each other with the specific baffled expression of those who have missed something important by looking away at the wrong second.

“Where did he go?”

“He was just here. He was standing right there.”

“Did anyone get a picture?”

Several people reached for their phones at the same moment, the universal reflex, and several people came up with nothing, because the moment for a picture had already passed and none of them had thought to take one while it was happening because none of them had believed, while it was happening, that it was real.

“I didn't even look at his face properly,” a man near the back said, and the frustration in his voice was genuine. 

“I was watching her. I wasn't looking at him.”

“I couldn't tell you what he looked like,” a woman admitted, and she sounded almost angry at herself. 

“I couldn't pick him out of a group of five people right now.”

“He just healed a dead woman and walked away,” someone said. 

“He didn't ask for anything. He didn't wait for a thank you. He just did it and left.”

The corridor sat with that for a moment.

“Do you know what people could charge for that kind of thing?” a man said, half to himself. 

“If word got out that someone could do what we just watched? Millions. People would pay millions.”

“And he just left,” the first voice said again.

The young woman in black, still holding onto her mother, had lifted her face from her mother's shoulder and was looking at the empty space where Otis's had been. Her eyes were dry now but the redness was still in them, and there was something in her expression that was past gratitude and sitting somewhere quieter and harder to name.

She pressed her lips together. “I don't even know his name,” she said softly.

Her mother reached up and put a hand against her cheek.

“Whoever he is,” her mother said, her voice still finding its full strength, still carrying the slight roughness of a woman who had just traveled somewhere very far and come back, “he is someone worth finding.”