The Sisterhood

by Michael Palmer

  The sunlight hit his eyes like a flashbulb. It was one of those days New Englanders boast about when they tell outsiders that there is nowhere else on earth to live. One of those days that renders February little more than a distant memory, and helps them forget the muddy drizzle of April and the oppressive, steamy heat of mid-August, at least for a while.

  Stiffly at first, but with rapidly developing fluidness, he jogged the few blocks toward the esplanade. Elms and oaks flashed by, heavy now with reds and oranges and golds. The air, unwilling this day to succumb to commuters’ exhaust fumes, tasted like mountain water.

  David crossed over Storrow Drive and picked up his pace as he turned onto the tarmac path paralleling the river. For a time he ran with his eyes nearly closed, breathing in the day and taking increasing delight in the responsiveness of each muscle in his body.

  He watched a lone oarsman sculling the Charles like some giant water bug. Even at such an early hour there were people scattered along the grassy bank reading, sketching, or just soaking in the morning. Cyclists glided silently past him in both directions. Dogs tugged their masters along. Intense-faced students, wearing their books on their backs like hair shirts, shuffled reluctantly toward classrooms where sterile fluorescence would replace the autumn sun.

  David checked his stopwatch and glanced around him. Under six minutes to the bridge. He had won his first bet of the run. Sooner or later a Rolls Royce and an A-frame in the Berkshires would be his. Wiping sweat from around his eyes, he picked up his tempo a bit.

  To his right a barefoot girl wearing jeans and a bright red T-shirt sent a Frisbee spinning toward her boyfriend. “Two Twinkies and a Big Mac says he catches it,” David panted just before the disc spun sharply toward the river, hit the ground, and rolled down the bank. “Thank goodness,” he laughed out loud.

  At the three-mile mark he turned and headed back. “Everything is getting better,” he said out loud, matching each syllable to the slap of his Nikes on the pavement. “Better and better and better.”

  Christ, it felt good to be alive again.

  CHAPTER II

  Christine Beall eased her light blue Mustang past the guard at Parking Lot C, forcing a thin smile in response to his wave. She cruised past several empty spaces without noticing them, then spotted one in the corner farthest from the gate and pulled in. Stepping onto the gravel, she adjusted her carefully tailored nurse’s uniform and squinted up at the afternoon sun, but quickly gave up trying to absorb any of the magic of the brilliant autumn day. Her preoccupation with other thoughts, other issues, made it impossible.

  Lot C was one of three satellite parking areas appropriated by Doctors Hospital to meet the needs of an ever-expanding staff. Christine started toward the minibus stop, then decided she needed the time and the three blocks’ walk as a bridge between her outside world and the hospital. Up ahead, two other evening shift nurses waved her to join them, but after a few quick steps, she stopped and motioned them to go on. Pausing by the window of a secondhand furniture store, she studied her image in the dusty glass.

  You look tired, she thought. Tired and worried and scared.

  She was not a tall woman, barely five foot four. Her sandy hair was tied back in a ponytail that she would pin up beneath her nurse’s cap before starting work. Scattered freckles, still darkened by the summer sun, dotted the tops of both cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

  “What are you going to do, kid?” she asked her reflection softly. “Are you really ready to start this whole thing in motion? Peg-whoever-she-is may be ready. Charlotte Thomas may be ready. But are you?” She pressed her lips together and stared at the sidewalk. Finally, with an indecisive shrug, she turned and headed down the block.

  Boston Doctors Hospital was a massive glass and brick hydra with three tentacles probing north and west into Roxbury and another three south and east toward the downtown area. Over the one hundred and five years of its existence several wings had grown, decayed, and died, only to be replaced by larger and higher ones. Ongoing construction was as much a part of its being as the white uniforms scurrying in and out of its maw.

  Never able to snare a benefactor generous enough to endow an entire building, the hospital’s trustees had adopted the unimaginative policy of identifying the tentacles by the direction of their thrust. The sliding doors through which Christine entered the main lobby were located between Southeast and South.

  She glanced at the large gold clock set in a marble slab above the information desk. Two thirty. It would be another twenty or twenty-five minutes before the day shift on Four South would sign out to her three-to-eleven group.

  Christine leaned against a stone column and surveyed the activity around her. Patients and visitors filled every available seat, while dozens more crowded around the information desk or weaved their way across from one wing to another. Scattered wheelchairs punctuated rows of molded plastic chairs. The scene, one she had viewed hundreds of times over the past five years, still filled her with fascination and awe. There were days, certain special days, when she actually felt a physical merging of her body with the fiber of the hospital. Days when she felt its pulse as surely as if it were her own. Slowly, she crossed the lobby and joined the flow heading down the main artery of the South wing.

  Christine’s floor, Four South, like most of the other floors in the seven-story wing, housed a mixture of medical and surgical patients, each with a private doctor. A few residents, widely scattered throughout the hospital, served as emergency backup. On Four South, as on all other private floors in all other hospitals, nurses were the sole medical presence for most of each day.

  Stepping off the elevator, Christine scanned the cor ridor, checking for an emergency “crash” cart or other equipment that might suggest trouble in one of the rooms. The floor seemed normally busy, but an instinct, developed over five years, whispered that something was wrong.

  She was nearing the nurses’ station when the cries began—pitiful, piercing wails from the far end of the hall. Christine raced toward the sound. As she passed Room 412, she glanced in at Charlotte Thomas, who was sleeping, though restlessly, through the commotion.

  The cries were coming from 438—John Chapman’s room. At the doorway Christine stopped short. The room was a shambles. Candy, books, flowers, and shattered vases covered the floor. Seated in a chair, her face buried in her hands, was John Chapman’s wife, a proud, stocky woman Christine had met at the time of his admission. The bed was stripped and empty.

  “Oh my God,” Christine murmured. She crossed the room and knelt by the woman, whose cries had given way to helpless whimpers. “Mrs. Chapman?”

  “My Johnny’s dead. Gone. They all said he would be fine, and now he’s dead.” She was staring through her hands at the floor, talking more to herself than to Christine.

  “Mrs. Chapman, I’m Christine Beall, one of the evening nurses. Can I do anything for you? Get you anything?” Christine ached at the thought of John Chapman’s death. The near-legendary fighter for blacks and other minorities had been up and doing well when she had left the hospital just sixteen hours before.

  “No, no, I’ll be all right,” the woman finally managed. “I … I just can’t believe my Johnny’s dead.”

  Christine looked about. A few vases of flowers were intact, but most had been thrown to the floor or shattered against a wall. “Mrs. Chapman, who did this?”

  The woman looked up. Her eyes were red and glassy, her features distorted by grief. “Me. I did,” she said. “I came up to clean out Johnny’s room. All of a sudden it hit me that he was gone. He’s never coming back. The next thing I remember, the nurse was trying to keep me from smashing any more of Johnny’s gifts. He even got a card and a book from the governor, you know. My God, I hope I haven’t ruined it. I—”

  “You didn’t ruin it, Mrs. Chapman. I have it right here. And here’s the orange juice you wanted.”

  Christine turned toward the voice.

  Angela Martin nodded a greeting, then b
rought over the book and the juice. “I called your pastor, Mrs. Chapman,” she said. “He’ll be right over.”

  At the sight of Angela, immaculate and unruffled despite a difficult eight-hour shift, the woman calmed perceptibly. “Thank you, child. You’ve been so kind to me. And you were to my Johnny, too.” She gestured at the mess. “I … I’m sorry about this.”

  “Nonsense,” Angela said, “I’ve called Housekeeping. They’ll take care of it. Come, let’s wait in the quiet room until your pastor comes.” She put a slender arm around the grieving woman’s shoulders and led her out.

  Christine stood alone amid the wreckage, remembering her initial surprise at John Chapman’s humor and erudite gentleness. Was there anything else she could do now for the man’s widow? Not really, she decided. As long as Angela Martin was with her, the woman was in exceptionally compassionate and skilled hands.

  Christine started toward the door, then stopped and returned for the two undamaged vases of flowers. Mrs. Chapman might want to bring them home, she thought. She glanced at the note taped to the green glass vase. Lilies … from Lily? Good grief, what next? She shook her head. An unexpected death and bizarre namesake flowers. It all felt quite in keeping with a day that from its very beginning had seemed beyond her control.

  Her roommates, Lisa and Carole, had both left for work when the phone began ringing. Christine had made a quick thrust at her alarm clock, then identified the true source of the insistent jangle. She had tried burying her head under the pillow. Eventually she had stumbled to the kitchen, certain that the ringing would stop as soon as she reached for the receiver. It did not.

  “My name is Peg,” the caller had said in a voice that was at once both soft and strong. “I am one of the directors of your Sisterhood. There is a patient on your floor in Doctors Hospital whom I would like you to evaluate and, if you see fit, present for consideration to your Regional Screening Committee. It is not possible for me to do so myself without an awkwardness that might well be noticed, since I no longer actively practice nursing.”

  Christine had put her hand under the faucet, then rubbed cold water over her face. Although mention of The Sisterhood had awakened her like a slap, she wanted to be sure. She stammered, “Well, no one has ever called and asked me to … what I mean is …”

  The woman had anticipated Christine’s concern. “Please, Christine, just hear me out,” she said. “As is always the rule in our movement, you are under no obligation to do anything other than that which you believe in your heart to be right. I have known the woman about whom I am calling for many years. I feel certain that she would not want to survive the situation in which she now exists. She is in great pain and her condition, from what I have been able to learn, is without hope.”

  At that moment Christine knew, without being told, whom she was being asked to evaluate. “It’s Charlotte, isn’t it?” she said. “Charlotte Thomas.”

  “Yes, Christine, it is.”

  “I … I’ve thought about her a great deal lately, especially with the agony she’s been going through these past few days.”

  “Were you planning to report her case yourself?” the caller asked.

  “Last night. I almost called her in last night. Something stopped me from doing it. I don’t know what it was. She is such a remarkable woman, I …” Christine’s voice trailed away.

  “The path we have chosen to follow will never be an easy one,” the woman said. “Should it ever become easy, you will know that somehow you have lost your way.”

  “I understand,” Christine said grimly. “My shift begins at three this afternoon. If it feels right to me then, I’ll call in her case report and let the Screening Committee decide.”

  “That is as much as I could possibly ask or expect, Christine. Perhaps sometime in the future circumstances will allow us to meet. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, but the woman had already hung up.

  Before falling asleep the previous night, Christine had drawn up an ambitious list of projects for the day. Suddenly, with a single phone call, none of them mattered. She carried a pot of tea to the living room and sank into an easy chair, totally absorbed in thoughts of The Sisterhood of Life. Over the ten months following her initiation into the movement a new meaning and purpose had entered her life. Now she was being asked to test that purpose. With Charlotte’s life at stake, the test would not be easy.

  Engrossed in thoughts of Charlotte Thomas and John Chapman, Christine wandered into the lounge to hang up her coat. Two of the day nurses had put aside the shift notes they were writing and were, instead, arguing about which of John Chapman’s medications had most likely caused his fatal reaction. Christine had no inclination to join in. She greeted them with a nod, then said, “I’m going to see Charlotte for a few minutes. Send someone to get me in four-twelve if I’m not back by the time report is ready to start. Okay?” The women waved her off and resumed their conversation.

  It had been nearly two weeks since Charlotte Thomas’s surgery, two weeks during which Christine had walked into Room 412 dozens of times. In spite of the frequent visits, as she approached the door a strange image appeared in her mind. It was an image that came to her almost every time she was about to enter 412. Well, not exactly an image, Christine realized—more an expectation. It was quite vivid despite what she knew in the practical, professional part of her. Charlotte would be sitting in the vinyl chair next to her bed writing a letter. Her light brown hair would be piled carelessly on the back of her head, held in place by a floppy bow of pink yarn. The thin lines at the corners of her eyes and along the edge of her lips would crinkle upward in pleasure at the appearance of her “super-nurse.” She would look as healthy and radiant and alive at age sixty as she had probably looked at sixteen. A woman totally at peace with herself.

  That was the way she had looked each day during her stay in August for diagnostic tests. The moment before she entered the room Christine imagined her voice, as clear and free as a forest brook, saying, “Ah, sweet Christine. My one-woman pep squad, come to bring some cheer to the sick ol’ lady …”

  At the foot of the bed Christine stopped and closed her eyes, shaking her head as if trying to dislodge what little remained of her imaginings and hope.

  Charlotte lay on her right side, propped in that position by several pillows. White-lipped, Christine tiptoed to her bedside. Charlotte seemed asleep. Her coarse breathing, nearly a snore, was labored and unnatural. The oxygen prongs designed to fit in her nostrils had slipped to one cheek, exposing an angry redness caused by their continuous pressure. Her face was puffed and pasty yellow. Hanging from the poles on either side of the bed, plastic bags dripped their fluid into her through clear plastic tubes.

  Christine was close to tears as she reached down and gently smoothed Charlotte’s hair away from her face. The woman’s eyes fluttered for a second, then opened.

  “Another day.” Christine said with cheer in her voice but sadness in her smile.

  “Another day,” Charlotte echoed weakly. “How’s my girl?”

  How typical, Christine thought. Lying there like that and she asks how I am. “A little tired, but otherwise all right,” she managed. “How’s my girl?”

  Charlotte’s lips twisted in a half-smile that said, “You should know better than to ask.” She brought a bruised hand up and tugged lightly at the red rubber tube taped to the bridge of her nose and looping down into one nostril. “I don’t like this,” she whispered.

  Christine shook her head. The tube had not been there when she had left last night. Her words were forced. “You … must have had some trouble with your stomach.… The tube is keeping it from swelling with fluid. It’s attached to a suction machine. That’s the hissing sound you keep hearing.” She looked away. The tubes, the bruises, the pain—Christine felt them as if they were her own. She knew that with Charlotte more than with any patient she had ever cared for her perspective had gone awry. Many times she had wanted to run from the room—from her own
feelings. To turn Charlotte Thomas’s care over to another nurse. But always she had stayed.

  “How’s that boyfriend of yours?” Charlotte asked.

  The change in subject was her way of saying she understood. There was nothing that could be done about the tube. Christine knelt down and with accentuated girlish embarrassment said, “Charlotte, if you’re talking about Jerry, he’s not my boyfriend. In fact, I don’t think I even like the man very much.” This time Charlotte did manage a thin smile—and a wink. “Charlotte, it’s true. I’ll have none of your sly winks. The man is a … a conceited, self-centered … prig.”

  Charlotte reached out and silently stroked her cheek. All at once, through the dim light, Christine fixed on her eyes. They held a strange, wonderful glow that she had never seen in them before. There was a force, a power in Charlotte’s voice that Christine could almost feel. “The answers are all within you, my darling Christine. Just listen to your heart. Whenever you must really know, listen to your heart.” Her hand dropped away. Her eyes closed. In seconds Charlotte was in exhausted sleep.

  Christine stared down at her, straining for the meaning behind her words. She isn’t talking about Jerry, she thought. I just know she isn’t. Trancelike, she walked down the hall to shift report.

  The lounge was filling up. Eight nurses—six from the outgoing group and two from Christine’s shift—were seated around a table covered with papers, charts, coffee cups, ashtrays, and several squeeze bottles of hand lotion. One of the women, Gloria Webster, was still writing notes. Gloria was Christine’s age, had bleached platinum hair, and wore thick, iridescent eye makeup. She looked up, took a sip of coffee, then returned to her writing. At the same time, she spoke. “Hi, Beall.”

  “Hi, Gloria, busy day?”

  The blonde continued writing. “Not too bad. The same old shit. Just more of it than usual, if ya know what I mean.” She put down her coffee.

  “Report soon?” Christine asked.