When the Wind Turned (7)

A Katrina family story / Chapter Seven

Previously on When the Wind Turned (Chapter Six)

Jeremy and the team at Charity Hospital operated by flashlight as the storm shredded New Orleans. Patients poured in faster than the staff could save them. A boy — maybe fifteen — died on Jeremy’s table, breaking something inside him he didn’t have time to name.

Meanwhile, Frankie, Jacob, Noah, Eve, and Maisie were evacuated out of the city on a National Guard truck, carried north through rising water and debris toward Baton Rouge. The flooding hospital dissolved into chaos. The shelter dissolved into chaos. And just before the chapter ended, a guardsman told Frankie what she most needed — and feared — to hear.

CHAPTER SEVEN — Where the Waiting Begins

Charity Hospital

The storm had turned Big Charity into a shipwreck.

Generators sputtering.

Water sloshing in the hallways.

Flashlights swinging in panicked arcs across flooded tiles.

Nurses and residents move like ghosts, soaked to the knees, hair plastered to skin, eyes too wide to hide the fear.

Jeremy scrubs in again, the water a sickly lukewarm from failing systems. His gloves slide on damp. Ink from the initials he’d written earlier—F • J • N • E—a smeared mess of black ink. He rewrites them with shaking hands.

A superstition.

A tether.

A prayer he’ll never admit he’s praying.

“Dr. Rosenfeld!” someone yells from down the hall. “We’re losing pressure! We need to move!”