It had snowed earlier in the week, but by its end the weather had warmed and all that white, wet and heavy, had sloughed away, leaving only a thin layer of chipped ice in its wake. It was a process that had repeated itself since Catherine took the traveler job just after New Years. January was nearly over now, and the winter kept starting and stopping, never really arriving. She had been brought up to the North Country by the agency and put up in an overpriced rental house, settling into the small strangeness of the hospital nestled in the mountain valley town. 

She had been assigned to the cardiac wing, where men — it was always mostly men, no matter where you went — recovered from their minor heart attacks or preventative surgeries in shared rooms overlooking a graveyard. It was unhelpfully mournful, Catherine thought, but it predated the hospital’s existence, she had been told by the supervising nurse, and it was thought by community leaders at the time to be convenient. 

It was in the cardiac wing she had met Richard. Like many of the men with cardiac issues she had tended to, he had a ruddy face and a thin charisma. He knew why he was there, and he knew it was mostly his fault. A salesman who had spent too many nights out with clients and mistresses, who washed down his hangover with grease and coffee and cigarettes. The kind of man that might have hit on her, had he not been so depleted in that moment, who offered the kind of leering attention that was undesired but not threatening. He was calm, unafraid of dying, as a certain kind of person always is right up until the moment they actually go. 

So you’re just visiting too, he had said to her. Catherine the traveler. Just visiting. 

She had laughed then. She had taken the job because of the money, but New Haven had also been wearing on her. The early pandemic days had passed in crushing mundanity. A glut of busy work papering over a spate of death. It never fully subsided, only dissipated to a certain extent. She was also lonely, and it occurred to her one day that she could be lonely anywhere. Her best friend in high school always talked about skiing with her family in Vermont. The blinding whiteness at the summit, the thrilling exhaustion at the end of each day. The night she responded to the recruiter’s email she dreamed about what she imagined skiing down a mountain felt like. 

The month she arrived, Catherine was told, was the busiest the cardiac unit had been since the hospital had reopened for regular surgery. She had been thrown right into it while still learning the functionary order of things, both technical and social. Even with an influx of travelers like Catherine, the nursing staff was stretched thin. There was the uncomfortable fact of money. These strangers arrived making twice the local wage just to have to lean on the locals for guidance. After all, it was the locals who did all the living and dying in the towns the hospital served, who knew every family that gave birth or receive cancer treatment or was sewn up after a horrible wreck on the highway. 

What can you do? Richard had said when Catherine explained this disparity to him. You’re damned if you do and if you don’t. I always remind myself, if I’m unhappy with the way something turned out, it was the choices I made that led me there. So it’s better to be damned for what you’ve done than what you haven’t. 

Catherine was used to hearing these sorts of vulgar koans from the post-ops. There was something about getting sliced open that made these men so sentimental. Richard, though, had a touch of nobility about him. In a lounging position in his hospital bed, his excess flesh took on a holy glow beneath the fluorescent lights, like a laughing Buddha that could sell you a car. The paper gown had a way of making most patients appear more vulnerable, but Richard wore it like the purple of emperors of old, relaxed and self-possessed. He never spoke of a wife, a girlfriend, or children. He had no visitors. The nature of his work never came up. They spoke about the weather, which he could only see from the window. He joked about the graveside views, but he was never maudlin, never gripped by the wistfulness and nostalgia Catherine often witnessed in many post-ops, especially those with a bad prognosis. His cardiac event was a minor one. 

Catherine always preferred to be there when it happened. The seizing and gasping end of the terminal patient — his aortic system already so clogged and worn out by the time they went under the knife — was no less dreadful a death for having been so well diagnosed. The unexpected death was always worse. A sudden twisting of the aortic valve revealed the secretly ruined heart. The terminal patient fought all the more bitterly for the inevitability of it all, but the unexpected death rarely fought at all. He simply slipped away with a small gasp, imperceptible save for the wailing of the monitors, the heart stopping before an emergency could even be declared. 

Catherine came into his room that morning to find his sheets stripped. Richard took his place among the many patients she had missed on their way out. She looked out the window and thought for a moment that she might see his casket being carted to a freshly dug grave, a ridiculous notion that she immediately pushed away, but she did begin to wonder uncharacteristically about his arrangements. Did he have a will, relations to decide? Surely there was someone. His obituary would appear in the local weekly at some point, copies of which were always left at the nurse’s station.

The day was already in retreat when Catherine’s long shift ended the day Richard died. Blushing dusk rimmed the horizon as the sun faded into the hills as she made the long drive back to the rental. Her little sedan stood out in the line of trucks and SUVs trickling down the single-lane highway. It made her feel as if she had unintentionally joined a funeral procession, one where the hearse was just up ahead, beyond the next bend, always out of sight. Eventually she discovered it was a salt truck that was responsible for the slowdown. One by one the vehicles that had been drafted into the procession passed the truck and drove off into the night. 

She stopped for gas in the village and bought a pack of cigarettes, not her brand but the brand her mom smoked. Catherine had quit years ago. The rental was a house on the hill looking over the village. It was decorated with cheap decor in a rustic theme that felt impersonable to the point of alienating, a sure sign that no one really lived there. An obviously fake moose head hung from a wood-paneled wall. A false trophy, the corpse of something that was never alive. 

She smoked half a cigarette on the back deck. The air around her grew colder even as the mists rising out of the snowmelt obscured the metal roofed homes, the pale steeple of the village church, the damp and vacant fields of corn, and the hills that cast a shadow upon them all.

Catherine thought of a story Richard had told her while she was adjusting his fluid intake the morning after his surgery. He had asked her if she liked to swim. She said she wished she was better. Her mom never wanted to pay for the pool, she explained, and said Catherine should just go to the ocean instead. But Catherine was scared of the ocean, so she never really learned how to swim very well. 

When I was a kid, he said, we used to go to a swimming hole every summer. Used to be called Bolton’s Gorge. Big, beautiful rocks you could dive from into a deep pool below. So deep you couldn’t see the bottom. One winter, a moose fell into a gap between two boulders and became stuck where the river flowed down the gorge into the swimming hole below. When the thaw came, the body of the moose thawed too. It was a long, hot summer, and we had to go to the next town over if we wanted to go swimming. The day the road crew pulled the moose out of the gorge, all of us rushed to get a look. We expected to see something horrible, something we would remember forever. What we saw raised up in the crane that day wasn’t that though. It didn’t look like anything at all.