The Pain Nurse - [21]

“I don’t need a nurse!”

“I can’t give up the rest of my life. I’ve given up so much already, for you, for Sam, and he won’t even talk to us. I have a career. I’m still young. I’m entitled to a life, you know.”

He had met her at a bank robbery. She was a teller and he was a young patrolman. Somehow he had found the courage to come back and ask for her phone number. She had been a young woman with a shy smile and a two-year-old baby. They had married six months later. It had all happened too fast. Eighteen years had happened too fast. He now recalled how, two days after his surgery, a nurse was helping him from the bathroom back to the bed. He had been constipated for a week, and suddenly he shit on the floor. Just shit on the floor. He couldn’t move fast enough to get back to the toilet, or even take a step. He could just move enough to see, in the mirror, the horrible brown cord snake out of him onto the floor, and to see Cindy’s expression of disgust. He knew she was thinking: I had married this?

Now he said nothing. The speakers called trauma team one to the emergency room, and then trauma team two. His mouth was too dry to speak, his lungs too tired to force out any words.

“I’ll help you with money, Will. You won’t have to worry.”

“Just go.”

“I’ve talked to your brother,” she said.

He waved it away. “I asked you to bring me something else. Did you?”

“Damn you, Will.” She reached into her purse and handed him the black leather case. Inside was his badge and identification card. “I shouldn’t have done this. Julius will be…”

“Thanks.” He spoke in a rough monotone. Then he violently wheeled around to face the city, provoking his back to spasm with pain, the one reliable in his new life. Night poured down on the city and lights pierced the puffy blackness. She spoke to his back. She had made plans for him. She was always good at planning. But Will wasn’t really listening. For a long time after she left he just sat there, watching the city lights, knowing he was past due for his pain meds, not moving. He slid his wedding band off for the last time-Cindy had kept it during his surgery-and dropped it into his fanny pack. He thought about pawning it, or just walking out on the Roebling Bridge and letting the river take it away.

Chapter Ten

Cheryl Beth stood in the wide doorway into the solarium, watching the man. His back to her, he was framed by the darkness of the lonely broad windows, his posture rigid with pain. His shoulders heaved slightly. She knew he was crying and thought about checking on him. This was in character for her, checking on strangers, with or without a referral. She had the run of the hospital, something she thrived on. She loved to help people. Andy had said it was actually a character flaw, a selfish compulsion to be needed-those had been his words-not so much to help anyone as to feel secure herself. But he had only said that toward the end, as they were spiraling into the place where every sentence was an accusation, every phrase the quicksand of further estrangement. It was odd that the words still stung her, so many years later.

She watched the man in the wheelchair and almost went to him. He seemed too young and vital to be here, to be in that chair. But something in her hesitated. She hated that it was getting dark so early, that her home seemed almost violated by the footprints she had seen. She felt off her stride, Christine’s bloody face and mutilated hand still hovering in her thoughts, deep footprints in her flower beds-she looked down at her own shoes as if to reassure herself that she wasn’t standing in Christine’s blood…Ah!

“I’m sorry. Everybody’s jumpy right now, and you have the most right to be.” The hand on her shoulder and the voice in her ear belonged to Dr. Jay Carpenter, the chief of general surgery. He was tall and rumpled, as usual the only neat thing on his body seemed to be the expertly knotted bowtie he wore. It was amazing how many docs still didn’t realize their conventional ties could fall on a patient or a surface, picking up bacteria to be deposited elsewhere. Dr. Carpenter always wore a bowtie. Above it was a goatee of gray and brown, setting off a creased, craggy face, all topped by thinning white hair. His voice was always ready to assume its distinctive thundering tone. He was a notorious and highly successful ladies’ man.

“Any Christmas plans?”

“I guess I’ll go see my brothers in Kentucky.”

“Walk with me, Cheryl Beth.”

Visiting hours were coming to an end, so the halls were emptying out.

“Were you in the ER for the shooting du jour?”

She had been called in. The aftermath of gunshot wounds could be especially painful. The patient was a fifteen-year-old with a stomach wound. As usual, poor and black. As usual, from the violent ghettoes that separated downtown from the hospital district on Pill Hill.

“It’s going to be a pain grenade,” she said. “You know he’s probably not opiate naïve.”

“Not with all the addicts in that neighborhood.” They knew the drill: a patient with a history of addiction didn’t respond to doses of painkillers that would work in a normal, or “naïve,” patient.