The Pain Nurse - [2]

She said, “The truth is, if I waited for every doc to return calls I’d never get anything done. That’s why I have my guardian angel docs who will sign off on my orders.”

“You know more than half of them anyway. You ready for Christmas, baby girl?”

“I haven’t begun.”

“Christmas, 2000.” Denise shook her head slowly. “Can you believe it? A whole new millennium and old Cincinnati just seems the same.”

Cheryl Beth laughed. “About the best I did today was to rake the leaves out of my flower beds and buy a couple bottles of wine. Is that Christmas-y?”

“I’d love to go have a drink with you right now. But since they stuck me on this night shift, about all I can do is drink a little scotch on my days off. Salve my pain, pain nurse.”

“Actually, tequila has the best pain management properties. And that’s data driven, not Cheryl Beth driven.” She finished her charting and replaced the pen in her white lab coat, which tonight she wore over her street clothes. She slid the chart in its place, which at Denise’s station was neatly kept.

“Dr. Lustig called for you.” Denise dropped a pink message slip on the desk beside Cheryl Beth. She checked the pager on her belt, but it was blank. Why hadn’t Christine just paged her?

“Can you believe we’re still using this ‘While you were out’ shit?” Denise folded her arms over her large breasts and surveyed the station’s file drawers, shelves, chart caddies-all the paperwork grown high around them. “My kids have better technology than this place. We’re still doing charts by hand like when I got out of nursing school. If we weren’t buried in paperwork all the time we could actually commit medicine.”

“I hear they’re working on a big new system, put all the records on computers. Dr. Lustig’s one of the big movers behind it.”

“Well, I guess she’s working late tonight. I can’t believe they put people in those offices off in the A-wing basement, especially a woman. Want me to walk with you?”

Cheryl Beth did a fake karate move. “I don’t scare easily. Anyway, it’s just where the residents go to screw in privacy.”

Denise gave a knowing nod. “Not just that, baby girl. Used to be the morgue down there, the mental health wing. There’s lots of stories. Some say it’s haunted. Back in the day, they started having the toe tags disappear from the corpses down there. About a year later, they found out this girl who was working there had taken them and made them into an art project-it was on display in some gallery!”

They were both still laughing as Cheryl Beth walked to the elevator.

Dr. Lustig. Dr. Christine Lustig. Christine. The name conjured a mess of emotions inside Cheryl Beth as she rode down in the big empty elevator. She was glad for the distraction when the door opened two floors down and one of the patient transport guys wheeled in a heavy gurney. He was a tall, thin man with very dark skin. She had seen him before but couldn’t remember his name.

“Where to?”

“To one,” he said. “Imaging. But they already told me on the way back I got to go through the basement. Can you believe that? Got to go the long way. They brought a shooting victim to the ER and they’re going to close off the first floor in a few minutes. ‘Security concerns,’ they say. What they mean is they don’t want black folks coming down to see what happened.” He gesticulated fiercely. “This man in ER was shot by the cops. Man was unarmed. What is it? Fifteen black men shot by the police the past five years? Nights I go home I think I could be next, know what I’m saying? They disrespect the whole black community. Last month, police pointed guns at my neighbor right in front of his kids.”

He shook his head in disgust, then stared at Cheryl Beth. “Now everybody’s going nuts, afraid his friends and family are gonna come down and start trouble.” He looked around the elevator, up at the ceiling, then back at Cheryl Beth. “Some day this town’s just gonna blow, you know? Down there on Main Street, all them white yuppies coming to the new nightclubs, coming in from the suburbs. A block away you got six kids living in a room of a tenement, no heat, and a black man can’t walk on the street without a beatdown from five-oh. How long before those black folks look over on Main Street and see how goddamned poor they really is? Then what’s gonna happen, huh?”

Cheryl Beth looked at the patient on the gurney. He was a big man with wavy dark hair and a handsome face, even with the nasty blister on one lip. He must have been through a long surgery. He briefly looked at her, smiled, then closed his eyes. His eyes were tired and afraid. She had seen the look thousands of times. When the elevator opened at the first floor, she held the door while the patient was wheeled out. The transport guy was moving fast. He probably had a dozen more transports waiting for him, even at this time of night. Then she rode down another floor alone.

In a few moments she stepped out into a dim corridor. The floor was a uniform checkerboard, aged and scuffed. It was narrower than in the more modern parts of the hospital, and most of the lights were off to save money. This had been a main part of the original hospital, when the twenty-story, art deco tower had been a proud civic monument and Cincinnati Memorial had been one of the top hospitals in the Midwest. Generations of docs had trained here. Now the hospital was struggling and the basement was mostly forgotten. It still had a black-and-white tile floor that seemed right out of the 1930s. The wall was plaster, fading white with an institutional green stripe running horizontally. Cheryl Beth liked to imagine the medicine that had been practiced here once, when nurses had worn white uniforms and neat caps, when pain management had been, if someone was lucky, morphine.