by Kris Calvert
I sat in one of the leather chairs that faced Jonathan’s desk and scanned the basic taupe-colored room, wondering if decorators ever got a chance to use colors they’d like in an office. Earth tones were supposed to be calming. The fact they used the same color palette in mental hospitals as they did corporate settings was a little off-putting and one of the many reasons I never wanted to work in an office.
I fiddled with the hem of my skirt as I sat with my back to the door, scanning the photos on my boss’s bookshelf. I’d already decided if Jonathan wanted to move me to a new division I wasn’t going without a fight. We were great friends and I wasn’t above pulling that card to get what I wanted.
“Good morning.”
I could smell Jonathan Raye before he ever came into view and his cologne would stay with me for a few hours, gently reminding me of his presence. Jonathan was handsome, man–mid forties, dark and always sported a contagious smile. Also a nurse, Jonathan was gay, flamboyant and wielded the kind of humor that was brash and completely wicked. A former hospice worker at The Path, he’d only recently taken on his new role as a supervisor. It was a natural progression for him. His patients and coworkers adored him equally. He was the perfect choice when our former supervisor retired. Jonathan understood what most who worked in our type of healthcare with a high mortality rate knew—losing your sense of humor would be the end of you, mentally and physically.
Today Jonathan’s smile was non-existent and he didn’t lead with his usual snarky statement. Instead, he looked weary. “How’ve you been?” he asked.
“Fine.” I shifted my weight in the chair causing the leather to belch under my exposed bare leg. “That was the chair,” I said with a giggle as I waited for him to make a fart joke. It didn’t happen.
“I know.” His expressionless face told me everything I feared. “I need to chat with you about something. Can you keep an open mind?”
A shot of panic charged my body and I hid my anxiety as best I could. “I think so.”
“I want to pull you out of the field for a while.”
“What? Why?” I raised my voice from my usual quiet tone. “Is this about burnout? Because I’m not burnt out. At least not yet.”
“No.”
“Is it about Jacob? Really, I’m fine. It’s been almost a year–”
“Indie,” he sighed, sitting back in his chair. “Stop. It’s not about either of those things.”
“Then what? Have you had a complaint or something from one of my families?”
“On the contrary. You’re our most highly rated employee. The families you’ve served have always had nothing but praise for you and the care you give—to all of them. In fact, in our follow up with the hundreds of families Path serves, your clients by far have assimilated the easiest to a new life.”
“I don’t get it. Why are you doing this to me?”
“One of our biggest supporters,” Jonathan began as he reached into his stack of files and pulled out a single red folder. I knew what that meant. This was a special kind of patient. “He and his family give millions to The Path. And…he’s dying.”
I sat back in the chair and exhaled nervously. “Who’s he?”
“Lewis Thornbury.”
“The guy on the news all the time? The one who spends his weekends at the White House and plays polo with Prince William? Mr. Telecommunications Monopoly, screw you, I’m taking over the world? That Lewis Thornbury?”
“One and the same.” Jonathan didn’t look up as he continued to forage through the file in his hand.
“Why me?”
“He asked for you personally. I got the call yesterday.”
I knew I should feel flattered. I had no idea how a man of such power could ever know me or what I do. My life seemed insignificant compared to his jet-setting existence. Yet at the same time it didn’t matter that I’d been asked for by name. I had two families and I was deep into the care of their terminal loved ones. Just because Lewis Thornbury had more money than God didn’t mean he could take me away from the work I’d been doing. “Yeah, keep talking. Why me?”
“Maybe he knows of your reputation around here, Indie. All I know is he asked for you by name.”
“He called personally and said he wanted me. He actually made a phone call to this office and said, I want Indie Luce to be my hospice nurse.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Indie. Around here if Lewis Thornbury says jump, the board of directors says how high? He is far and away the largest donor we have, or might ever have. And he wants you.”
“What’s his diagnosis?” I sat back and lowered my voice. I felt a little ashamed for being so disrespectful of someone who was dying, not to mention giving my good friend a hard time.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. It’s all extremely confidential. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s sick or how sick he is. They’ve closed ranks at his company and his foundation knows nothing. There are a handful of people in the entire world that know Lewis Thornbury is dying. He intends to keep it that way.”
“He doesn’t want to show any weakness,” I said as I dropped my head into my hands and leaned forward, trying to catch my breath. “In business or in his personal life.”
“I have some forms for you to sign.”
“Wait,” I said, sitting up and taking notice that things were moving forward as if I’d already agreed. “I need to think about this. I have other families who need me and I don’t even know if I want to take on this patient.”
Jonathan finally made eye contact with me and forced a smile upon his usually bright face. “Indie, I’m saying this not just as your boss, but as your friend. Take the assignment.”
I stared through Jonathan’s eyes looking for something more than what he was saying. I saw nothing. I felt nothing.
“Something’s not right about this, Jonathan. What aren’t you telling me?”
“I’m telling you everything I know. I promise. I wish I knew more. I wish I had the right words to say.”
With apprehension I craned my neck to read the top of the papers sitting in front of me on the desk without moving from my seat. “What do they want me to sign?”
“An NDA. Nondisclosure agreement.”
“I’m a nurse, for pity’s sake. I’ll take more confidential information to my grave than any human known to man. Doesn’t he know we have a code of ethics, not to mention HIPAA regulations?”
“This is business, Indie. It’s not personal.”
I slid the stack of papers from his desk and quickly glanced through them. “I’ll need my own attorney to look through these to make sure I’m not signing on to do something I don’t plan on doing.”
“Indie,” Jonathan said with a chuckle. “Do you even have an attorney?”
“No,” I replied without looking up from the papers. “But it seemed like the thing to say. Should I find one?”
“Look, Indie.” Jonathan stood and walked around his desk to sit on the front corner. His navy pinstriped pants folded in creases around his muscular legs and I had my usual thought about Jonathan—why did he have to be gay? He was the one man who halfway understood and tolerated me. “I know you need your job. And you’re the best damn nurse this place has ever seen—the best damn nurse the place might ever see, but I also know you’re strapped for cash. This would be a great way to begin to dig yourself out of the hole your brother left you in.”
My head snapped from the page. “I can’t believe you went there.” The words seethed from my lips. He’d hit a raw nerve.
“So he wants you to sign something saying you’ll deny the fact that he’s sick. You’d never tell anyone anyway and when he’s dead and gone no one is going to know you were ever involved in the first place. And there’s this.”
“What?” I asked as he added a single sheet of paper to the top of the stack.
“If you take the assignment he’s prepared to make it worth your while financially. Extremely pre
pared.”
I took a moment just to breathe. I was deep in debt and working my ass off. Jacob and I had been left a hefty trust fund by our parents after they died but Jacob, unable to deal with their sudden death, had used heroin to numb his pain. It wasn’t until after I found him dead I’d discovered he’d not only emptied his trust fund, but the one I’d given him access to—mine.
I took a deep breath and left the papers in my lap. “How prepared?”
“It’s four times your annual salary. Guaranteed.”
I inhaled sharply. “That’s two hundred thousand dollars.”
Jonathan nodded slowly in a way that told me he fully understood the life-changing possibilities of the deal.
“How do you guarantee a salary?”
“No matter how long or short of a life Lewis Thornbury may have, as soon as you sign on to care for him you’ll receive two hundred thousand dollars annually—sixteen thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dollars a month—until he no longer requires your services. At that point you’ll be paid until the anniversary of your contract even if Mr. Thornbury is deceased, at which point you’ll be released.”
“He’s going to pay me even after he’s passed?”
“There’s more, Indie.”
“What? A trip to the Bahamas? No, let me guess—a brand new car,” I bellowed in my best game show voice. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and nervously began compensating with jokes so I wouldn’t be forced to take Jonathan seriously.
“There’s a fifty thousand dollar signing bonus to take the position.”
I slowly came to my feet and paced the small room as I rolled the proposition over in my head, feeling dizzy. This was nothing to joke about. The money couldn’t have come at a better time, as the government was hot on my heels for taxes that had gone unpaid. It was a day-to-day struggle juggling bills and work. If I took the job I might even have a chance at a social life—something my talented psychiatrist thought I needed to balance my existence.
“Don’t let this opportunity slip away, Indie. This is right for you for so many reasons.”
I gave Jonathan a steely gaze. “You know I trust my intuition above all else. I’ll never walk away from anything that feels right.” I quickly sat and began to take deep breaths to calm myself. I took the folder from his desk and stared at my legal name at the top of the page—Indriel Angelina Luce. “What about the families I’m caring for now?” I asked without looking up.
“You’d have to transfer them to another nurse.”
I blinked hard and shook my head at Jonathan. “I can’t do that. These families bond with me. They welcome me into their home and allow me to bear witness to the crossing of their loved one.”
“I don’t think you’ll have a choice but to leave them.”
“So it’s either them or Thornbury?”
Jonathan nodded his head slightly and quickly looked to the floor. He knew how much I valued the relationships I had with the families I served. “Then my answer is no.” I stood and handed the stack of papers back to him.
Jonathan carefully took me by the arm. “Indie, you’re never going to have this kind of opportunity again. Think about what you’re doing.”
“I am thinking. I’m thinking about an eight-year-old girl with leukemia and a seventy-two year old man with Hodgkin’s. What did you imagine was going through my head?”
“Think about yourself, Indie. For once think about what you need.”
Before I could even begin to respond my phone rang out in Idina Menzel’s voice. Let it go, let it go, can’t hold it back anymore… It was my cue that my tiny patient, Ellie Simpson, needed me.
I fumbled with my shattered and duct taped phone as Jonathan shook his head at the sight of it. “I have to go. I have a dying girl waiting for me. She doesn’t have a gazillion dollars but she’s going to leave this world behind just the same. And guess what? She’s taking the same amount of money with her that Thornbury will. Zero.”
“Take the papers. Think it over. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jonathan said as he shoved the legal file into a manila envelope and under my arm.
“This is Indie,” I said as I reached for the door behind me and watched Jonathan mouth the words, Do this.
TWO
“Tell me about your dream.”
Dr. Nabi was a brilliant psychiatrist and possessed all the right attributes for managing crazy people and their problems. He was an atheist, spoke with a Turkish accent and was quite handsome in a fatherly figure way. Whenever he spoke I felt like I was being interrogated by the KGB or chatting with Sigmund Freud. I never talked about God and the beyond with him because I knew he didn’t believe. It actually made it easier for me to never mention Spirit.
“It was different this time. I was in the usual crazy old fashioned nightgown walking the same endless dark hallway, but there was something else.”
“What?” he asked as he leaned back into his chair and took a sip of his hot tea.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I really don’t like it when you ask questions when I’ve just said that I don’t know. I really don’t know how to describe it.”
“Try.”
I closed my eyes and thought of the image in the mirror and immediately opened them to find Dr. Nabi staring at me intently over his readers. “My mouth was sewn shut.”
He cocked his head to one side and narrowed his gaze. “Sewn shut?”
“I was trying to scream, but nothing was coming out,” I recalled for him as I touched my lips. “I was in the bathroom and I looked into a broken mirror and a thick black cord had been used to sew my mouth shut.”
“And then what?”
I took a deep breath. I’d been down this road with him for the past year and I’d told him the same dream more than I cared to admit. “Then I saw Jacob in the tub. You know the rest.”
“Is that when you woke up?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?” he asked.
I bit my lip and looked to my hands as I twisted a Kleenex around my index finger.
“Indie?”
“There was water in the bathtub.”
“In your dream?”
“There’s always water in the bathtub in my dream. I mean that’s the way I found him. Dead and floating in the tub…with the needle—whatever.”
“Tell me about the water in the tub.”
“After I woke up I went to the bathroom to take two Advil and get a drink, and when I turned around the tub was filled with water. And not just a little water,” I said with a sarcastic laugh as I tried to make light of the situation. “It was filled to the brim.”
“Did you draw a bath before bed and forget?”
“I’m not crazy, Dr. Nabi. I might not be able to sleep, and I might see things from time to time, but I would remember if I’d run the bath all the way to the top and then just casually gone to bed. I mean, the water was precisely to the top of the tub. Anyway, I hate that tub. I only take a bath when I’m forced to for some reason.”
“And what would that reason be?”
“I don’t know. Escape from a really shitty day? But I have to admit, lots of my days are shitty considering everything.”
“Are you still writing down your dreams in your notebook?”
I pulled the dog-eared blue spiral notebook from my messenger bag and held it in the air. “Yep.”
Dr. Nabi nodded and shifted his weight in the worn leather chair I imagined he’d used for twenty years. “Why do you think you always dream of your twin brother Jacob in the same way?”
“Isn’t that what I pay you to know?”
He chuckled and looked to the folder in his lap. “You pay me to talk through what you’re feeling in a safe and nonjudgmental environment.”
“No offense, Dr. N., but I could spill my guts to a squirrel in the park and feel like I’m in a safe and nonjudgmental environment.”
“Tell me what you wa
nt me to say, Indie.”
“I want you to tell me I’m not crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“Can you be a little more convincing?”
“What’s been going on this week? Have you had any reason to be overly stressed?”
I watched him open the file folder and jot down a couple of notes before I even spoke. So many times I was tempted to say out loud What the hell are you scribbling in there? How nuts I am? Or are you writing a grocery list for later? Instead I stuck with the treatment plan just like I always advised my families. “I lost a patient this week. She was fourteen. Osteosarcoma.”
“How did that make you feel?”
I shrugged my shoulders and sat back into the oversized comfy chair designed to make me feel safe. “Empty. I guess I always feel a little guilty for not being able to do more.”
“What else could you have done?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” I looked to him as if he had answers. “It just seems as if there should be something else I can do. More than just watch them die.”
“We talk about guilt frequently, Indie. Have you ever noticed that?”
“Why? Because you think I feel guilty about my brother’s suicide?”
“Survivor’s guilt is a real thing. Surely you’ve seen it in your own field.”
I nodded. I’d felt the emptiness, the hole in my heart from losing Jacob.
“Not to mention the circumstances surrounding his death,” Dr. Nabi said as he put his pen down to look at me squarely in the face.
“What’s that supposed to mean? That I feel guilty because we fought that day? That I chose to go out on a date with a man I thought was interested in me instead of coming to his beck and call for the millionth time?” The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I could tell by my sweating palms that my face was red with agitation. “Is that what you mean?”
“I think you need to work through some of those emotions, Indie.”
“Why?”
“Because your life is worth more than just caring for others. Eventually you need to take a good long look at yourself and decide why you feel empty.”
“Don’t you think I do that?” I asked the question knowing I avoided looking at my life with every fiber of my being.
