Rainbow Gap

by Lee Lynch

  Probably, Jaudon needed to try on the many ways of being Jaudon. Coming up was rough on her, but she fit—was born to—the Beverage Bays. She wasn’t obligated to be as hard as Momma. She was a boss with a heart; once they got past Jaudon’s difference, her employees became friends if they weren’t already. All this talk about competition and gas pumps and changing the basic concept of the Bays—she suspected that was over-ambition talking. She had high hopes Jaudon would return to her roots before the Jaudon that Berry loved changed.

  And if not? She herself was changing too, wasn’t she? She planned on becoming a woman who saw blessings, not faults. Supported rather than discouraged. Whose bottom line was patience, kindness, acceptance, and lots of humor. She wanted to evolve into such a woman.

  How? She wasn’t making much progress. It was her fault that Allison had come into their lives, her fault Jaudon was roughed up by the cops and lost her hearing.

  The next day she realized that she worked in a place that was a fit laboratory for making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. At least once a day her patience was tried by a ranting widow or a waiting room full of kids who needed a good walloping. What she found most upsetting were the mothers who let those kids run wild as leaves in a hurricane. The Beverage Bays were shaping her Jaudon, and what better place to mold herself than in a medical office?

  It was about three thirty in the afternoon when she stopped herself from losing her cool, as Judy Fish would say, over a pesky patient who told the receptionists she was waiting too long to see one of the doctors. The back office LPN said, “It’s a first visit, unscheduled, and late afternoon—of course the woman has to wait.” They whispered in commiseration with each other.

  She was shocked to see the name on the file was Larissa Hand. Were there two with the same name? She was Lari’s age. The complaint was back pain and bleeding.

  At the entry to the waiting room she called, “Miss Hand?” She led the way to an exam room. “Lari, what’s wrong?”

  Lari was not her usual neat self. Her hair was oily-looking and tangled, her black T-shirt stained, she reeked of tobacco and marijuana, and her black cutoff jeans sagged on her. A seam was torn. Her legs, full of red bumps and scratches, must be serving as happy hunting grounds for mosquitoes. Like Eddie Dill had, she looked as if she was spending too much time in the woods.

  “These goddamn doctors are all the same,” Lari said in a voice that broadcast throughout the open-plan office.

  Berry recoiled at the loudness. This was Lari, wasn’t it? Quiet Lari, always lurking, never speaking much above a whisper?

  “They think my time is worth nothing,” Lari said, “and theirs is gold. These men scheme to charge more while we wait and wait.”

  Lari leaned close to Berry and pushed the file folder to the floor. Moisture flew from her mouth along with a foul odor. “I got sent to Florida because the Southern pace was supposed to settle me. Well, it’s slow here. Slower than slow.”

  What was making Lari act so strangely?

  “Why did I have to fill out a hundred pages of paperwork? I want you to look at my back, Nurse Berry, that’s all I’m asking.” Lari used her title with heavy sarcasm.

  “You do realize we’re an obstetrics and gynecology practice?” Berry regretted the coldness in her words. She wanted to be home, on the rough old pond bench, breathing in the peace of the wildlife on the pond. The swallows would be skimming the water for mosquitoes, the long-legged birds would be high-stepping, beaks plunging for fish. Was the Great Spirit teaching Berry some lesson?

  “My aunt’s damn doctor won’t see me at all today. No other office was willing to fit me in. I told the front desk I was friends with you and that homely gorilla you live with. Are you gyno people too good to look at my back instead of my crotch?”

  She had a spell of nerves when, without warning, Lari pulled her T-shirt over her head and turned from Berry.

  She saw patches of purple formed above and below what appeared to be a ragged puncture wound with bloody edges. “What were you doing when you first noticed it?”

  “Trimming palm fronds in my aunt’s yard. Mosquito bites itch, this burns. I can’t sleep, it hurts too much to eat. Would you get someone in here who knows what they’re doing, goddammit?”

  “You’ve been scratching it.”

  “Of course I scratched the thing—it’s itchy. It’s too big for a tiny mosquito bite or a spider bite. Or skin cancer. You’re not much of a nurse.”

  Berry was short of breath and scared as much as insulted. Lari’s Wisconsin accent grew more nasal with every word. Had the demonstration left her unbalanced? Had her family sent her away for reasons other than college? In her gentlest manner she explained, “The scratching may have infected it, so it’s swollen, that’s all. I’ll clean it up—”

  “Not you. I want a doctor in here. People die from infections every day.”

  “Lari, what is it? Are you reacting to a drug?”

  “I’m here for this itchy stingy thing.” Lari raised an arm as if to strike her.

  Berry stepped out of range. She’d tried not to hate Lari since the incident with Jaudon. Lari wasn’t making her effort any easier. Allison had said Lari was acting off the wall these days.

  “All right.” Berry sighed and picked up the blood pressure cuff. “I need to finish some preliminaries.”

  Lari wrenched the cuff from her hand and hurled it onto the desk. “You don’t need my blood pressure for a bug bite.”

  Now she wanted to knock Lari clean into next week and then some.

  By this time Lari’s face, always such a pale white, was very red, and her eyes seemed to protrude. Her hand rhythmically rapped on the desk. Lari reminded her of a pot on the stove about to commence a rolling boil. Lari was disturbed. She thought, Of course the movement would draw mentally ill women. They must have a harder time than most.

  Berry clutched the file to her chest and hurried to the nearest doctor.

  “I think I have an emergency for you, Dr. Gara.” Berry was new enough at this to be nervous about her conclusion. She’d handled patients who declined routine vital signs at the rehab center and calmed agitated patients, but they were nothing like Lari. “The patient shows signs of dangerous high blood pressure but won’t let me use the cuff, possible hyperthyroidism, a tendency to violence—and what may be an infected insect bite.”

  Dr. Gara looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  Berry looked at the floor. “I know her outside of work, Doctor. She’s strange, but I never saw her act like this.”

  “She frightened you, didn’t she? Let’s go.”

  She jogged to the room and opened the door, Dr. Gara close behind her. Lari was gone.

  Berry headed for the waiting room and stopped at the sound of pounding on the bathroom door. She beckoned to the doctor and ran for the key to unlock the door. Lari yanked the door open and rushed into the room.

  Dr. Gara tried to stop her. Lari grabbed the doctor’s wrists and shoved her away, screaming at her. The two male doctors came running, took hold of Lari, and got her into an examining room. Dr. Gara, rubbing her wrists, joined them, picked up the phone and told reception to call 911.

  Berry sat on a stool in another room down the hall, her clipboard shaking as she tried to catch up on her notes.

  About half an hour later, Dr. Gara stopped by, wiping sweat from her forehead. “The patient calmed enough to remember being hit at the wound site by a falling palm frond. Fragments of thorn inside the wound caused infection. Very dangerous. You did well with a difficult patient.”

  The police spoke at length with Dr. Gara. Someone must have sedated Lari as she seemed to be sleeping when she was wheeled out to the ambulance. Berry spent the next hour dropping and forgetting things. On the way home, she went clear through a stop sign, never noticing it until she heard a screech of brakes and a horn.

  The next day, a Saturday, the windows were so splashed with raindrops that the yard, through the wet glass, was a wavery green me
ss. She told Jaudon and Gran her story in bits and pieces as they worked together cleaning house and doing laundry. Rigo stopped by with a big bag of Chinese takeout for lunch and listened to Berry’s story again, but she didn’t use Lari’s name.

  “What are you worried about?” he asked.

  “I was too scared of her to be compassionate. And I never learned about any palm tree infections in school. I’m not taking one more advanced class at Cloud Christian. There are too many gaps in my training. I’ll bet there are better schools around.”

  “She sounds like her cheese went and slid off her cracker,” was Gran’s comment as she put her china cups and saucers on the table for oolong tea.

  “Lari is bound and determined to ruffle every feather in this household,” said Jaudon.

  “Jaudon, no naming names. I told you her name in confidence.”

  “Rigo needs to know. What if Lari shows up at the bar acting nuts, Rigo? You can help her.”

  Berry hated herself at that moment. She’d betrayed a patient’s trust out of insecurity, because she needed reassurance that she did everything as best she could. What if she’d made Lari leave for acting crazy? Lari could have died. If she faced the truth, she saw that she’d wanted to disclose Lari’s name. There was comfort in company. How selfish she was; how far she needed to go to become a good person.

  She needn’t inflict her disappointment in herself on the people she loved. “It’s not impossible that she wants to ruffle feathers,” she said. “Or she could just plain be a very sick person who needs friends.”

  Jaudon berated herself too. If only she hadn’t let Lari rile her in the first place. Lari must have sensed Jaudon was the soft underbelly of the family, the way to entangle herself with somebody else’s happiness and ruin it in any way possible. “She’s jealous of what we have. You’re not going to be fired, Berry. You gave the kook everything you had.”

  Berry looked at her sideways and Jaudon realized she’d spoken with an edge of anger, though the anger was at herself. She remembered the few times Berry got so mad, how it made her feel sick. That didn’t happen anymore. She needed to learn to control her own anger. She reached to touch Berry, to explain, but Berry turned away.

  “It wasn’t enough, Jaudon. It wasn’t hardly enough.”

  For the first time, Berry skipped her Sunday afternoon woman’s group. Dr. Gara had called to let her know Lari was about to be released from the hospital. She wasn’t going to take the chance that Lari might show up.

  She worried about her competence as a nurse when she went to the Monday lunch meeting at work. Each week the doctors chose a few cases to review with the staff. The first one they discussed was Larissa Hand.

  “Berry. I hope you know that nothing you did triggered the patient’s bizarre behavior,” Dr. Gara said.

  “How can I deal better with someone in such a state?”

  “You can’t at your current level of knowledge and experience. I checked the college program you attended and there was not an iota of course work in mental health. I’ll be contacting the nursing program there and suggesting that they require classes on the subject if they want their students to get jobs.”

  “So she’s mentally ill, not physically?”

  “The patient was released, but later the police had her aunt commit her to the psych ward at Four Lakes General for evaluation.”

  Berry covered her mouth in shock. “I’m so sorry.”

  Dr. Gara leaned forward and assured her that she’d done well. She suggested that Berry have someone else see any patients she knew socially. It was better for both nurse and patient. “I contacted her regular physician over the weekend and learned that his office terminated services to her based on behavioral issues.”

  Berry wanted to say that she took Ms. Hand to the exam room because of the distress she was causing waiting patients and staff. That wasn’t entirely true, she realized. She had been shaken and curious too.

  Another of the partners said, “We’ll bring in an expert to give training sessions. Every one of us needs to be able to recognize the symptoms of mental illness and to understand it so you can replace the alarm it inspires with empathy and confident know-how. Berry, call it a learning experience. Staying calm and asking for help were the correct steps to take. I’m sure you initially thought the patient was obnoxious.” The doctor smiled. “She was, of course, but nothing is simple about mental health.”

  The meeting went on. Berry paid attention, but didn’t take much in. She wanted to make something of herself—to do Gran proud. To do Ma and Pa proud if one or both of them showed up out of the blue. There are miracles, she told herself. Jaudon once suggested the idea of raising a kid might have panicked her fun-loving ma and pa. In that case, she was lucky to be alive at all, when getting rid of a baby back then was illegal, but possible. They ought to know she wasn’t a burden to anyone at this late date. She’d take care of them when they got old.

  Dr. Gara was asking her a question. She prodded herself away from her fairy tale.

  By the time she drove home that evening, she began to accept that while she hadn’t failed in the eyes of the doctors, and while it was fitting for Jaudon to be peeved at her for carrying on, she was disheartened at her lapse of compassion, understanding, and tolerance. She trusted the Great Spirit to teach her, but there was no end to what she needed to learn.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Hurricane season was passing without much activity. It was a cooler October than usual. A freak cold snap was expected for the next two nights and they were covering Gran’s late summer seedlings with bedsheets tacked together by clothespins.

  As she tried to spread a sheet across the chard and spinach, Berry kept dropping the pins and the fabric’s edges. She hadn’t recovered from her tailspin after the Lari incident, and was brooding, losing weight and her self-confidence, anxious about every blessed thing.

  Jaudon missed Berry’s playfulness and calm support like crazy. She kept trying to give Berry whatever she needed, but it didn’t help—Berry was downright fearful.

  “The doc said you did good,” Jaudon reminded her once more. “What’s got you all stirred up?”

  The temperature was dropping and the air was calm, heading into the freeze. They decided to cover the old sago palm they loved. It was almost twice their height. Jaudon staggered as she pitched a blanket up over half of it from a ladder on one side while Berry struggled on her ladder to shroud it from the other side. Berry threw and threw, unsuccessfully. They both descended. Berry stood across from Jaudon, a doleful figure hugging the blanket to herself in the dusk.

  “What is it, my sad swamp flower?”

  Berry let her head drop toward a shoulder. “Disappointment, Jaudon. In myself.”

  “Because the sago tree has outgrown us and our blankets?”

  “I try and try to at least tolerate the staff and every last patient, but sometimes, someone or some office procedure will stick in my craw. It doesn’t take a Lari to set me off.”

  “I don’t work in an office, but I come unglued—it’s natural, Berry. Who doesn’t go through it?”

  “That’s not how I want to be.”

  Berry ran up on the porch. She unfurled the blanket from there. Jaudon caught it and went up the ladder to attach it. Berry gave up and went inside. She let the door slam behind her. Berry never did that, and the loss of control filled Jaudon with heightened apprehension. Was Lari’s mental illness caused by the women’s movement? She wouldn’t be surprised.

  There was a stack of towels on the steps and she used them to cover the patches of fall flowers they’d planted since Momma and Pops had moved out. Momma had never cared about flowers, except to cut and sell. Berry loved her fall flowers: the reliable lavender-colored society garlic, the busy plumbagos filled with blue flowers, the red and purple bougainvillea growing by the house. Weeds, Momma called them. Berry took such pleasure in them. The gladiolas, daffodils, and other bulbs were well-protected underground.

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p; Headlights went by on Eulalia Road. The vehicle inched away. She suspected trouble of some kind, but the engine sound faded. With Allison long since moved to Cullie’s, Jaudon didn’t expect any more trouble. The police wouldn’t have a problem finding a city council candidate if they wanted her. Allison’s lawyer had succeeded in arranging for her to give a deposition rather than go to Puerto Rico.

  Enough had gone on in the past year that Jaudon was antsy. She went in the house and made sure all the doors were locked.

  Berry was on the couch, worrying the hem of the old beige sweater Gran knitted so long ago it had shrunk too small to button. A healthy fire popped and sparked in the limestone fireplace. Gran had the house TV on and was red-faced with hilarity as she watched All in the Family. Berry watched too, though she told Jaudon some time ago she was aware Archie Bunker was an ignoramus.

  Jaudon exhaled in relief when she saw Berry laugh. “I’m thinking it’s time for you and me to run away and have some fun for a day, Berry.”

  Gran nodded her agreement.

  “Let’s go exploring once the weather warms up. I’ll schedule coverage at the Bay. I reckon we’d enjoy a daytrip to some lake.”

  “That sounds peaceful,” said Berry. “I could do with some peacefulness.”

  “I could do with some fishing. Hey, let’s stop at a barbecue stand after and carry home dinner. We’ll take Zefer. She’s older and calm enough to stay put in the boat with us, don’t you think?”

  “After all, we can’t work every minute,” said Berry. Jaudon saw the excitement in Berry’s eyes. “I’ll hold her leash, Jaudon, if you row.”