J.C. and the Boys - Chapters 10-12

Question: What’s the difference between nuns and nurses?

Answer: Nuns are only required to worship one God.

Chapter 10

           

                  Jeannie stood at the main entrance to the hospital the following morning, steeling herself to begin the day’s work. Again, it was hot out, even at 6:30 in the morning.

                  She was early, determined not to start our this day as she had the one before. Maybe a better beginning would make a better day. She shrugged into the lab jacket before entering, preparing herself for the chill of the hospital’s air conditioning. The movement tripped the door’s photoelectric sensors and the double doors swung open, beckoning her inside.

                  The cold swept out from the hospital and embraced her. Its icy tendrils looped under her clothing like a thing alive and drew her inside the building. Jeannie shivered at the touch and plunged ahead. The elevator was standing open, waiting. A gnarled hand held the sliding door. She stepped inside.

                  “You’re back,” Gus Charon said.

                  “Damn right,” Jeannie answered. “What did you expect?”

                  “I never expect,” Gus said. “I just wait and see.”

                  Jeannie punched the button for the third floor. The doors creaked shut. There was a grinding somewhere down below, then the sudden pressure from the floor as the elevator started up.

                  Gus was balancing a tray of half a dozen styrofoam coffee cups in one hand.

                  “How do you do that?”

                  “What?”

                  “Balance those, without spilling.”

                  Gus grinned at her, his bald wrinkled scalp tightening as his pitted teeth made their appearance. “It’s a matter of concentration,” he said. “You just keep your mind on what you’re doing. You do it all the time.”

                  The bell rang, the doors opened into the corridor outside ICU. Gus rushed ahead to push open the unit’s doors for Jeannie, still balancing the coffee. He never came close to spilling it. Somehow, he managed a mock bow to Jeannie as she passed in front of him. Once she was through the doors, she turned and curtsied, laughing to him for a moment.

                  “I’ll take those in,” she said.

                  “Remember: concentration!” Gus said, handing her the tray.

                  She negotiated the turn around the corner into the conference room and set the coffee down on the table, opened her locker, and stashed her purse. It would have been more convenient to leave it out where she could get at it easily; experience had taught her always to lock it up. But not a drop spilled. At least her hands were steady.

                  “What are you grinning about?” Vivian stood in the far doorway, yawning.

                  “Gus,” Jeannie answered. “What’s important. What’s not.”

                  “Well, I’m glad somebody knows,” Vivian said. “Night shift burned up the coffeepot. Gimme.” She moved to the table, uncovered one of the cups, sniffed, and drank gratefully.

                  One by one, the night shift and the rest of the day people drifted in. By 6:50 everyone was assembled. Report could begin.

                  Report was in informal formality. The night nurses were tired and quiet, speaking only when they described their own patients’ conditions. Jeannie had spent a year working nights and knew exactly how they felt. The whole world ran on a different sort of time from night shift. When everyone else in creation was waking up, including children and spouses, the night nurses were yawning. They finished work too early to do anything useful in their lives outside the hospital. Husbands and boyfriends were either already at work or just getting ready to go. Their children were leaving for school. The stores were closed. They ate supper for breakfast, breakfast for supper. On television and radio, the morning shows were waking people up. They were out of sync with everyone. Thus, they formed a kind of closed society of their own. They tended to hang together, just for the chance of talking to someone who was on the same time track as themselves. They were friendly enough to the day nurses, but there was a distance; they regarded the day people as aliens, even their close friends.

                  The night charge nurse began.

                  “We had one admission overnight,” she said. “White male, twenty-one, septal valve defect. Having some troubles, but not too bad. Physician of record is Jeff Walters. Name’s—”

                  “A young one!” Wanda Sue exclaimed.

                  Everyone stared at her.

                  “Sorry,” she said. “They’re just usually so old.”

                  “Stay away from him,” Vivian ordered.

                  “Aw, you don’t believe that sh—”

                  “Stay away,” Vivian said. Jeannie could see that the head nurse was already feeling frazzled. And the day was scarcely begun.

                  Vivian waited for Wanda Sue to give up her defiance, then nodded for the night nurse to continue. She rattled off the details like a worn-out machine gun, chattering with mechanical regularity.

                  “His name is Peter O’Flynn. He was admitted at 11:45 last night, complaining of difficulty in breathing after exercise. He was brought in by a girlfriend. On examination, he showed an irregular pulse rate and mild dysrhythmia. He’s six-four, and played basketball in high school. He has a history of rheumatic fever at the age of eight, but might also have Marfan’s syndrome. Dr. Walters suspects aortic regurgitation. He’s started him on digitalis, nitroglycerin, and Lasix. Other than his primary complaint, he doesn’t present any other symptoms. Vital signs every thirty minutes; also check heart and lung sounds. Keep track of fluids in and out. Check arterial blood gases every four hours.

                  “Next patient: Joseph Wood shows increased agitation. He slept for a total of about four hours during the night, but it was interrupted by nightmares, which occurred on the average of about ninety minutes after he fell asleep. He was given seconal to aid in sleep, but had a paradoxical reaction. Ten milligrams of diazepam IV knocked him out for a while, but the dreams broke through about five a.m., and he’s been awake since. He’s pretty scared.”

                  The night nurse flipped to the next page on her clipboard.

                  “Jonquil Hennessy slept all night. Ditto Maria Sanchez. No change in either one. Marie Jefferson was physically agitated through the night. It didn’t look like seizure activity, but she’s not conscious, either. No one quite knows what to make of her. Continue monitoring.

                  “That’s about it,” the nurse said. “Over to you.” The whole night shift always seemed to get nervous with the approach of day, and the brighter the morning, the twitchier they became. Jeannie remembered that when she had been on nights, if she saw too much daylight, it was harder to go to sleep. Among themselves, the night crews joked about being vampires, but they did not take well to similar remarks from outsiders. Night shift was usually less hectic than days, but there was a special stress about being out of step with the rest of the world. She recalled that her drapes were never opened in her apartment when she worked nights. She had preferred artificial light to natural.

                  No one mentioned the drug theft specifically, but there was an air of unhealthy anticipation among the day shift nurses, a tendency that Jeannie, at least, felt to look over her shoulder and to think before she spoke. Usually, report was full of banter and even horseplay. Today, everyone looked drawn, tired and wary. Wanda Sue’s earlier attempt at humor had fallen flat. Vivian was brusque, completely businesslike. Prissy-Jo had not spoken since she arrived. She spent all of report sitting in a corner of the conference room, nursing a cup of coffee. Hoss and Maureen, although floated to other units during most of yesterday’s shift, had also had to write detailed reports of their actions for the time when they had been in ICU during the previous day.

                  Bobby Joe Jackman had been called “Hoss” all of his life. He was a native Texan, born, bred and raised within twenty miles of Saint Maggie’s. During his twenty-five years, he had never left Texas, although he had gone to Fort Worth once to show a steer at a stock show. There had never been any reason, he felt, to leave his native state, since it contained everything that a man could want to see in this life.

                  He grew up on the cattle ranch his older brother inherited from their parents and still helped out on the ranch when they needed an extra hand. Sometimes he showed up for work still smelling of cattle.

                  His one visit to Fort Worth explained, he said, why he never wanted to leave the place of his birth. He was, except for his brother, the only Jewish cowboy in eight counties, and as such was misunderstood outside his home territory. He had entered a steer in the 4-H competition, but when he got to the Fort Worth stock show, one of the judges noticed something unusual about Hoss’s steer.

                  “What’d you do to that steer, boy?” the judge had demanded. Hoss was twelve years old at the time and studying for his bar-mitzvah.

                  Hoss truly did not know what the judge meant; in his naïveté he asked.

                  “Look at his pecker, boy!” the judge said. The other judges and the nearby contestants were grinning. Hoss felt himself blush. “I mean, cuttin’ off his balls is one things, but did you have to circumcise him, too?”

                  “He’s a kosher steer,” Hoss tried to explain. But his attempt made it all worse. Everyone within earshot was laughing at him and his prize steer. The head judge got on the PA system and told everyone at the stock show about the kosher steer. Hoss ran from the arena, burning with shame. His older brother found him hours later and took him home. Hoss never left town again.

                  Hoss was an unlikely nurse, on the face of it. Supported by his parents’ estate, he went to the local university. He was hung over during freshman registration, he claimed, and thus distracted by the well-slung hips of a girl walking ahead of him. He followed her, instinct being the only part of his brain still working, and found himself in line to register for the introductory course in nursing.

                  The instructor sitting at the registration table eyed his boots and jeans curiously. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

                  Hoss, his eyes still on the hips of the walking girl, answered, “No doubt about it; that’s what I want.”

                  The instructor signed his computer card and directed him to follow the same girl to another table, where his credentials were examined and more cards signed. He was so mesmerized by the rhythm under her skirt that he went after her like a lost puppy.

                  Later, he lost track of her, came to, looked at his schedule of classes. Hoss was now a nursing student. He went to his advisor to see what he could do about it, but the advisor replied, “You’re not mine anymore. Go see your new advisor,” who was out of her office. Hoss had no choice but to go to Nursing Science 1201. When he arrived, the girl was there, too.

                  Hoss knew destiny when he saw it. In his case, destiny was gently rounded and swayed deliciously in motion. His future was sealed.

                  Hoss was a story-teller. Although he was the rookie on the unit, with only one year of ICU experience and another year on the floors, he acted as if he knew more about everything than anyone.

                  “I’ll bet they pull in a polygraph,” he said. “Make everyone tell all.”

                  “We all have work to do,” Vivian observed. The night nurses scattered, having additional reason for escape. The drug theft was a problem for day shift.

                  “Yeah, just a minute.” Hoss was immune to sarcasm. “Reminds me of when I was in grade school. Must have been fifth grade or so. The teacher—Mrs. Loreaux—no one could pronounce her name, we always called her Mrs. Low-row—always brought an orange with her lunch. Anyway, someone got hold of a syringe and some vodka. She never did find out who did it. He spiked her orange. We sat there after lunch watching her get drunker and drunker. She separated the orange into sections and nibbled on it all afternoon. It wasn’t until about 2:30 or so that she realized something was wrong. Since no one would admit to spiking her fruit, she made the whole class stay after school. Her idea was that the kid who did it would break down and confess, but he never did. No one turned him in, either; no one saw him do it. She quit bringing oranges after that—quit eating them in front of us, too.”

                  Jeannie spilled out the dregs of her coffee into the sink. “If no one saw him do it, how do you know what happened?”

                  Hoss grinned, but said nothing.

                  “Assignments,” Vivian said. “Jeannie, you take La Curandera; Maureen, the Turnip; Hoss, take Jonquil—maybe she’ll do better with you. Prissy-Jo, take care of Mr. Wood and the new guy, O’Flynn. Wanda Sue, stay away from him, you hear?”

                  “Yes, ma’am.” Wanda Sue preened, proud of her reputation.

                  “Maureen,” Vivian said, “Dr. Jeff brought in a new tape for Marie.” She dug in her pocket for the cassette and handed it to the LVN.

                  “She cannot hear,” Maureen said.

                  “It talks!” Hoss cried, mock shock on his face. “What’s been keepin’ you so quiet, Shicklegruber?”

                  “Shut up, Hoss,” Vivian ordered. “Maureen, just play it. It won’t hurt and it might do some good.”

                  Maureen Shicklegruber was the Irish-German product of a union that surprised everyone who knew her parents, including the parents themselves. Her mother and father married only briefly, for the few months surrounding her birth. Her father left the family abruptly at the outbreak of World War II to return to Germany to fight for the fatherland. She had always missed him.

                  “I will follow the doctor’s orders,” Maureen said, “even though it is silly. There is nothing wrong with the Wagner I brought in.”

                 

Chapter 11

           

                  Jeannie gratefully accepted the discipline of the morning routine. There was a comfort in the familiarity of the tasks of checking vital signs, inspecting the monitors, changing IV dressings, and bathing her patient. With a little luck, she could spend most of the day with La Curandera—Maria Sanchez—and little, if any, time wondering what the administrators were up to. The familiar motions, the familiar sights and sounds comforted her after a night spent dreaming about arrest and confinement.

                  She knew that they thought her a suspect in the theft, but the worst thing she could see that she had done was to leave the narc cabinet unlocked for ten or fifteen minutes. Every nurse had done the same thing before, under the pressures of confusion and excitement surrounding a code. Jeannie tried to put the whole business out of her mind. She concentrated on treating her patient.

                  Morning vital signs were normal: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, respiration. The tic was still present, moving across the old woman’s face, but more slowly, less definitely. She wrote it all down.

                  Jeannie shut the door to the room and closed the blinds on the window facing the corridor to give the old lady some privacy while she bathed her. Some reminder of yesterday’s odor remained, but it was mild compared to what it had been. Today’s bath ought to remove even that.

                  Jeannie filled the basin at the sink and moved to the bedside. She pulled back the coverlet and let it fall to the floor. Then she removed Maria’s arms from the hospital gown, noticing again how thin, nearly emaciated, the woman was. She lifted the IV bag from its hook, unsnaked the tubing from the pump, and fed both through the armhole to free the whole assembly from the gown. She replaced the tubing and bag and neatly stripped La Curandera of her gown.

                  Jeannie enjoyed nursing. Sometimes what she faced twisted her stomach with nausea. There was no denying that some things—children with cancer, for one—caught her up in their wrongness. But most of the time she could either be of use in helping someone to heal, or in easing the journey toward death. It comforted Jeannie to care, to know that there were others who cared as she did. Once she had looked up the word care in the monstrous Oxford English Dictionary in the university library. Somehow it had not surprised her that it was an Anglo-Saxon word that meant to trouble oneself, even to grieve or mourn. That was what she did: she troubled herself, she sorrowed over the suffering of her patients—not by crying over them, though she had done that often enough when things had gone unaccountably, unjustifiably wrong, especially with children, but by doing what needed to be done for them that they could not do for themselves. She would sit by the hour, holding the hand of someone terrified by illness and approaching death, who would otherwise have been quite alone. She would bathe the unconscious, clean the filthy, risk sometimes the very disease that brought her patients to her, in order to give proper care. The patients came and went, as they should. There were no permanent relationships between patient and nurse. When the patient began to heal, her job came to an end. She turned her attention to another in need.

                  She knew she could grow maudlin when she thought about the meaning of her work. Self-indulgent sentimentality was an occupational hazard, but she was less afraid of it than she was of its opposite—the smooth, often glittering veneer of selfishness used to distance the self from the emotional violence of the work, the pretense of uninvolvement that treated people like things. It was characteristic of the doctors, but it could also come to own a nurse.

                  Her hands worked almost independently of her thoughts. They were small hands with long fingers, seemingly too weak for the hard work they performed. They were thin, the veins stood out in relief from the skin. She could see the working of the tendons in them, the articulation of the delicate bones. Boyfriends had told her that they were delicate hands, that she was petite, that they coveted her fragility and wanted to protect her. But she felt no need for protection; her hands had jerked the dying back into life. She felt no fragility, not in her hands.

                  But she knew she could break. There was a limit. And it was not the work that would do it. It was the bullshit.

                  Jeannie knew she was a better nurse than most of her fellows. She took her patients more seriously, was closer to being up to date, was more conscientious in her charting and in her care than most of the others. She knew that she could be self-centered, even egotistical, but she believed these things to be objectively true.

                  But the petty requirements of the medical bureaucracy that ran the hospital and the entire medical establishment—they might break her. As good as she was, it was only prudent for her to carry malpractice insurance. Although it seemed silly to sue a nurse, people did it. When something went wrong, the survivors could sue everyone who came into contact with the patient, and some who did not. Every diagnosis brought with it a length of stay in the hospital—a day for this, a week for that. The times were absolute minima, designed to hold the expenses of Medicare and other insurance programs to a manageable level. The goal was not unworthy, but the result for the hospitals was a painful cut in income. The administrative staffs were given the job, nationwide, of cutting costs to keep the hospitals financially viable. In that sense, Jeannie had some sympathy for the bureaucrats. But their attempts to keep costs down and to maintain the hospital’s profit margin (or at least minimize the amounts it lost) found expression in cutting back the nursing staff to a bare minimum. It was just a question of economics, they explained. Cuts had to be made somewhere. So, nursing services were where economy was practiced. The doctors took no pay cuts. The silicon revolution made more and better machinery available for treatment; there were cardiac monitors and CT scanners and NMR machines and electronic thermometers and a thousand other devices. All were useful. Most had become necessary. They made the work of patient care more efficient, more accurate—but they cost money.

                  Jeannie had worked in hospitals all her professional life, first as a clerk, then a psychiatric aide, a pharmacy technician, and finally as a nurse. There were always campaigns to save the institution money.

                  The positions that were cut (and it always “was done”—no one ever claimed the blame) were seldom in administration, never the doctors’. They were always in nursing service. It was cheaper to force a nurse to work an extra shift than it was to hire enough staff to cover all the work that had to be done. Nurses were constantly reminded that they were “professionals,” which meant that they had to put up with working conditions that would cause a factory worker to strike.

                  Damn Florence, anyhow.

                  Modern nursing was a Victorian profession, conceived, born, and grown in the nineteenth century, overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly controlled by those who did not practice it. Physicians policed themselves, and not terribly effectively. They also, through their administrators, policed nurses. Nurses were the handmaidens, who did the dirty work, the “women in white”—or, as in Jeannie’s case, blue—who followed orders as a way of life.

                  Question: What’s the difference between nuns and nurses?

                  Answer: Nuns are only required to worship one God.

                  Some chafed.

                  The hospital asked of its nurses exactly what it told its patients to avoid—long hours, nervous tension, irregular sleeping and eating habits, unpredictability, lack of control over their own activities, unstable expectations—all of it piled layer upon layer upon a stressful, demanding job, where human fallibility could mean death. It was a prescription for heart disease, colitis, ileitis, ulcer and stroke.

                  Jeannie was their perfect victim. She had an overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility, even more so than her sister nurses, themselves a class of people emotionally predisposed to accept responsibility and blame. More than once she had awakened from a dead sleep, panicked because she had forgotten to pass on a small but perhaps important piece of information about one of her patients. It played hell with her sex life, when she had one. All she seemed to want to do once she got home was to sleep. Alone.

                  She had not slept well the previous night. She kept going over in her mind the events of the previous day, her subconscious chewing on them, unwilling to let her rest. She had had dreams, unformed and nebulous, but not less frightening therefore, of some unnameable catastrophe occurring because she had allowed herself to be distracted. Narcotics, to her, were medicines. Street drugs occupied some other corner of the universe. She knew the chemicals were dangerous if misused, that some people would rob and kill to get them, but her knowledge was sterile, only factual. She had no emotional understanding, and their need, to her, was like her dreams, chaotic and frightening. Did they—that ubiquitous “they” which meant Horst Appleby and his henchwoman, Delilah Bancroft—did they think that she was a junkie? The thought made a hole gape in Jeannie’s limited universe, beckoning her into a hell of self-doubt, filled with images of iron bars and decaying flesh.

                  “I think she’s probably clean by now.” The voice startled her out of her dark reverie. She whirled to face the door. Across the now immaculate but startlingly naked form of La Curandera stood Dr. Caine.

                  “How long were you—?” Jeannie asked. “I’m sorry, I—”

                  “Only a moment,” Caine said. “You were off somewhere. Rough night?”

                  “Rough day yesterday.”  She pulled the sheet over the old woman.

                  “I heard.” He eyed the face of La Curandera. “It seems a little weaker now. The tic.”

                  “Yes.” Jeannie was embarrassed, still, that he had seen her in her funk. “I thought so, too.” She went on to report Maria Sanchez’ morning vital signs. It was a neutral subject.

                  “Sounds as if we’re doing the right thing, then,” Caine said, his voice rising as if it were a question.

                  “I don’t know.” Jeannie did not want to play his game; he was the damn doctor—let him figure it out. It was what he got paid for.

                  “Y’know,” Caine said, “I went to the medical library last night, read up on things a little. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but they’re pretty weird.” Again his voice was almost, not quite, questioning.

                  In spite of herself, Jeannie was interested. Whatever was wrong with the old witch was something out of the ordinary. If Caine had a theory, she wanted to hear it. She hated mysteries in her patients. Puzzles were all right; puzzles had solutions. Mysteries were dark and without form, and she avoided them—if she could.

                  While she was thinking, Caine had moved away from his patient toward the door. “Call me if anything changes.” He started to go out, stopped. “I’m sorry you had a rough time of it yesterday, about this drug thing. I think they’re overreacting.” Again, he made as if to leave; again, he stopped and turned back to her.

                  “I’m going to check out—” he flipped through his note pad “—Wood, in Six. You know him pretty well, don’t you?”

                  “I’ve taken care of him a lot. He’s a nice guy.”

                  “If you have the time, come on in with me. You’ve got some idea of a baseline with him.”

                  “All right,” Jeannie said, pleased at the fact that Caine seemed to recognize what nurses were put on the earth to do. “Give me a minute to get things shipshape in here. I’ll only be a minute.”

                  “Okay, that’ll give me time to write a few orders. There won’t be any changes on this one, though.” He started out the door again. “I appreciate your help.”

                  Jeannie lowered her eyes until he was gone. She hurried to dress La Curandera in a fresh gown, neatened the covers, and started next door to do what she could to help Joe Wood, pretending to herself that she was not flattered.

                  After the solitude and quiet of working with La Curandera, Jeannie felt crowded in Joe’s room. She stayed by the entrance, suddenly shy among the people she knew. He was, after all, Prissy-Jo’s patient today. She was only there as an observer. Caine and Walters were discussing something with the other nurse, but Joe waved her into the room with a grin and a joke.

                  “Jeannie with the dark brown hair!” he said. “Am I glad to see you! Do you know the difference between a surgeon and a puppy?”

                  “Uh-uh.”

                  “A puppy eventually quits whining.”

                  Jeannie laughed, in spite of the presence of the docs. “You must be feeling pretty good, today.”

                  “Never never ever better!” he said. “Goin’ home soon, you wait’n’see.”

                  Caine glanced across the bed, trying to catch Jeannie’s eye. His face carried the question. Jeannie wanted to shrug, as if to say that she did not know what Joe was doing, feeling, being. But the patient’s eyes were on her, and he caught her anyway.

                  “Tradin’ secrets, huh?” Joe demanded. “’S okay. I know I’m bein’ kinda manic, but ’s okay. ‘Every day in every way ’M gettin’ better’n’better.’ You’ll see. You don’ know everything there is to know y’know.”

                  Joe’s face was red with excitement. “This is the big test, huh? Okay—shoot. I’m ready. Do your worst.” He was covered with a thin sheen of sweat.

                  Caine stepped to the bedside.

                  “All right,” he said, “I will. Can you tell me your name?”

                  “Sure can.”

                  “Would you?”

                  “Yep.”

                  Caine suppressed a sigh of irritation. “What is your name?”

                  “Joseph C. Wood.”

                  “What does the ‘C’ stand for, Mr. Wood?”

                  Joe looked over at Jeannie. “Do I hafta?”

                  Jeannie nodded. “It’ll help.”

                  “Hate the name,” Joe said. Caine waited. “All right. It’s Clarence.”

                  “I can see why,” Jeff Walters interjected.

                  “Where are you, Mr. Wood?”

                  “Hospital.”

                  “Which one?”

                  “Saint-something-or-other,” Joe answered, knitting his brow. “Only place I’ve ever been in named for a hooker. That’s it—Magdalene! Saint Mary Magdalene.”

                  “Good,” Caine said. “Another question: what is the date?”

                  “Shoot, I don’t know. July, maybe.”

                  Caine asked the year; Joe told him, then said, “I’m oriented as to time and place. Want to know who’s president? Governor?”

                  Jeannie saw Caine’s irritation starting to grow. She often wondered why so many doctors performed poorly when their patients were responding to them. The word around the hospital was that Caine like his patients best either comatose or anesthetized.

                  Caine was holding his extended index finger a few inches in front of Joe’s face. “Follow my finger with your eyes. Don’t move your head,” he ordered. He moved the finger left–right, up–down, watching Joe’s eyes track it.

                  Caine continued to put Joe through his neurological paces. The tests were by and large mundane, familiar to Jeannie and the others. They could have performed most of them, but not with the mastery of Caine. He was a symphony conductor; his hands danced in front of Joe. From one pocket he pulled a gadget that he applied to Joe’s skin, questioning him on the sensations it caused or failed to cause. From another came a wisp of cotton that he trailed, seemingly, across Joe’s naked nerve endings, eliciting responses that surprised Jeannie but that he, Caine, seemed satisfied with. Using an opthalmoscope, he peered directly into Joe’s nervous system. He had Joe stick out his tongue and move it in impossible directions, made him grimace and grin like an oversized marionette. He made noises and asked Joe to describe them. He hammered on Joe’s nerves to elicit reflexes.

                  Caine was in part investigating Joe’s neurological status, in part performing before Jeff Walters and the two nurses. I shall show you, he seemed to be saying, the artistry I command as a master neurologist. I can jerk this man’s strings and show you how a human being is wired. I don’t even need his conscious cooperation for some of the things I do. The correct stimulus, correctly applied, will produce the appropriate response. I am the puppet master, and, were any of you in this unfortunate man’s position, you would grin and grimace and jerk under my hands, just as he does.

                  “Thank you, Mr. Wood,” Caine said. “That’ll be all for now.” He cocked his head at an odd angle; it was his signal that he wanted a conference outside the patient’s hearing. Dutifully, the two nurses and Jeff Walters followed Caine out of the room. Jeannie stopped to squeeze Joe’s hand.

                  “Did I pass, teach?” Joe asked.

                  “We don’t give grades, Joe,” she said. “See you in a couple of minutes.”

                  She was the last out; she shut the door behind her.

                  They clumped together in the hall, a little clot of disease-fighters. Jeannie wondered whether the white blood cells in her body held conferences like this one, and she suppressed a smile at the image. She saw herself and Prissy-Jo as helper T-cells, clustering with two leukocytes.

                  “Well,” began the neuro-leukocyte, “I really don’t see any worsening in the state of his nervous system. He’s a little looney, but, hell, that could be just anxiety. He knows he’s sicker than hell. What do you think, Christopher? You’ve been working pretty closely with him.”

                  Caine had become a big, yellow-white blob. Jeannie was not hallucinating. She could clearly see Abraham Caine and Jeff Walters standing in front of her. But her imagination had taken over. She stifled a giggle; it was awfully hard to talk seriously to two white blood cells, each with a stethoscope dangling from his neck.

                  Dr. Abraham Caine made a tall and skinny leukocyte, constantly blurred around the edges, as if at any moment he might transmute himself into another kind of cell. Jeannie’s fancy made him half white cell, half neuron, as befitted his specialty. His arms dangled and gestured as if he were stretching to connect himself with another like himself. But his hands never quite reached across the gulf separating one axon from a dendrite. There was always a gap to be bridged by the ions of probability and potential; there was never the certainty of touch, of contact sure and unequivocal.

                  What had Caine just said? “What do you think?” She mentally shook herself to rid her mind of the images that had gathered there. She was only partially successful.

                  “He looked pretty good to me,” she said, “if kind of manic. I still think he has TIA’s, but I don’t think that they’re what’s making him have these experiences he’s reporting.”

                  “What experiences?” Prissy-Jo wanted to know. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

                  Jeannie explained about Joe’s belief that he had left his body and talked to Evans, while the latter was dying.

                  “I don’t like that stuff,” Prissy-Jo said. She shivered. Jeannie felt a sympathetic trembling in herself, but decided it was only the overly efficient air-conditioning.

                  Jeff Walters had been silent so far. “What do you make of it?” Jeannie asked him.

                  “Nothing,” he said. “People do all sorts of weird things when they’re sick—and he’s sick enough that he can believe whatever he wants. It’s not a medical problem.” He glanced at his watch and moved down the hall to Marie Jefferson’s room. “Gotta finish my rounds.”

                  “Me, too,” said Caine. “Just keep an eye on him, Mrs. Sanchez, and let me know if he does anything too bizarre—I mean, if you notice any further neuro symptoms.”

                  “That’s Mendolsson-Sanchez,” Prissy-Jo said. “Mrs. Sanchez is in Five. I’d appreciate it if you would keep it straight.” Prissy-Jo re-entered Joe’s room, leaving Caine and Jeannie alone in the hall.

                  “Is there anything else, doctor?” Jeannie said. Caine, with rounds still to complete, was not moving.

                  He stuttered for a moment, then glanced cautiously around the unit before answering.

                  “Uh, do you eat?” he asked, his eyes still moving, checking the doors to the rooms, the office, the med room, and the outside hall. He scanned the whole area in a heartbeat and kept scanning while she answered.

                  “It’s one of my favorite hobbies.”

                  “Good.” Caine’s eyes were still moving.

                  “Are you waiting for something,” Jeannie asked, “or someone?”

                  “Me?” Caine said. His eyes fixed on her, somehow calculating in their assumed innocence. “Waiting?”

                  “You’re looking everywhere.”

                  His eyes moved off her again even as he answered. “I’m looking at you.”

                  “You couldn’t prove it by me.” Idiot, she said to herself. You’re only encouraging him.

                  Caine wrenched his gaze from the rest of the unit and met her eyes. “You’re pretty easy to look at.” Jeannie backed up a pace as he stepped closer.

                  “When do you eat?”

                  “Around eleven.”

                  “Call me,” he said. “Five-two-three-one.” His face was blushing pink as he retreated. He was nearly into Eight, where Marie Jefferson lay, by the time he finished saying his extension number.

                  “Is that an invitation?” Jeannie asked.

                  “Whatever,” Caine mumbled.

                  “Hell, make it one!” Wanda Sue stood up behind her CRT. “Live it up, boy. Go for the gold.” Caine spluttered incomprehensibly in embarrassment, turned to enter Eight, and walked squarely into the door frame. Glasses askew, he joined Jeff Walters in the Turnip’s room.

                  “I’d watch out for that one, honey,” Wanda Sue said. “When they act that shy, you gotta wonder why.” Wanda Sue grinned.

                  “Why?”

                  “Let’s just say that Dr. Caine is able-bodied,” Wanda Sue said. “He tries to keep it a deep dark secret, but he’s been through this hospital like fire through a hay barn. Except for a couple of nuns, you’re nearly his last challenge.”

                  “You’re kidding.”

                  Wanda Sue batted her lashes. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

                  Caine and Walters exited Eight as Wanda Sue sat back down behind her computer screen. Jeannie wanted to ask how Marie Jefferson was doing, but Caine’s invitation blocked her approach. She did not want to appear anxious to talk with the young neurologist.

                  My God, she thought, I am ambivalent today.

                  Jeannie went back to Five and looked in on La Curandera, who seemed to be resting quietly. She had a couple of minutes. She went into Eight.

                  Maureen Shicklegrosser was cleaning Marie’s black hair. There was a tenderness in her movements that belied the reputation she nurtured in the hospital, a tenderness that, even so, was a product not of nature, but of discipline.

                  Maureen was an LVN, a licensed vocational nurse. With less training than an RN, Maureen more than made up for her lack of formal education with twenty-eight years of practical experience.

                  Marie Jefferson required immense care. Comatose for over a month, she was fed through a tube, but the “total parenteral nutrition” was not enough. She was slowly wasting. The skin on her face was stretched taut over her cheekbones, nose, chin and forehead, but flaccid over her cheeks and eyes.

                  Jeannie hated to work with the long-term neurological cases. The wasting of the body was the worst of it. She was glad that Maureen, whatever else she thought of her, seemed willing to take on the worst cases. Jeannie and the others would laugh at her attitudes, relics of the nineteenth century. For Maureen, the doctors were authority, and she held them up on tall distant pedestals of respect.

                  Hoss called her Shicklegruber to her face, Hitler behind her back. Once, Maureen overheard him. “Hitler was not all bad, you know,” she had said. Hoss had stood open-mouthed, unable to reply. There was a twinkle in Maureen’s eye as she stared Hoss down, daring him to defend his ethnicity against hers.

                  Maureen’s virtue as a nurse was her uncomplaining acceptance of the care of the gruesomely ill, the patients who sometimes knotted the stomachs of the younger nurses. She did not flinch at the worst cancers, the ones that filled the patient room with odors of decay. The older nurse’s technical skills were not always up to date; she had to be prodded to accept a new practice, was unwilling to attempt a procedure that violated what she had learned as a student. But no one questioned her dedication to her patients.

                  Washing Marie’s hair was a chore. The probe into her brain had to be disconnected from the cerebral function monitor, and the field around the probe had to stay dry to minimize the risk of contaminating the wound. Every time an artificial object was introduced into the body, the risk of infection rose. The longer the invading probe stayed in place, the greater the risk. Marie Jefferson was already neurologically compromised. The CFM probe was like a ship’s line to the dock of her body, the invading germs like rats creeping up the line.

                  Although the hair was shaved around the probe, it grew back quickly. Maureen was trimming back the growth carefully.

                  “How is she doing?” Jeannie asked.

                  Maureen kept her attention on the delicate task. “She’s quiet now. I think she enjoys having her hair cleaned. She always behaves well. A few minutes ago she was misbehaving, but I just tightened her restraints and she settled down.”

                  “What was she doing?” Jeannie asked. “More seizures?”

                  “No,” Maureen said, “not seizures, exactly. She moaned and rolled around a little, and bit her lip. It started when I played that ‘music’ that Dr. Jeff makes me play for her. I stopped it, and she became quiet.”

                  Of course, Jeannie thought. The music was missing! That was what had given her the feeling that something was wrong in Marie’s room. Every time she came in, the music had been playing, just loudly enough to be heard. Now there was only the sound of her ventilator.

                  Dr. Jeff had insisted on placing a small music player near Marie’s head, had fiddled with it until he was satisfied that the volume and tone controls were properly adjusted to reach into the emptiness inside the woman, and he had hoped, fill it with the sounds that she had loved. The player was an inconvenience, but Walters had insisted, even over the claims of Dr. Caine that the woman’s body was empty of personality, that all that remained of her once brilliantly talented nervous system were cerebellar and spinal reflexes. Caine’s arguments left Jeff Walters unimpressed; he started coming in at odd times to check that the music was playing. Anyone who turned it off could expect a chewing out.

                  “Was there any activity on the CFM?” Jeannie asked. The non-convulsive physical activity had her hopeful. Most of the illnesses they dealt with on the unit were so dreadful that there were few chances to bring someone good news.

                  “I didn’t see any,” Maureen said. Her voice said more than her words; she wanted to be left alone, without interference.

                  “When you’re ready for lunch, I’ll cover for you,” Jeannie said. Most meals in ICU were taken on the run, between crises, phone calls, doctors’ requests, the needs of the patients, administrative demands, and the questions and fears of the patients’ families.

                  Maureen, she was afraid, would recognize what Jeannie was doing, looking for the chance to examine Marie without Maureen’s presence. But the thought of thirty minutes out of the unit for an uninterrupted meal was too tempting.

                  “Thank you, J.C.,” she said. “Perhaps around eleven?”

                  “Just let me know,” Jeannie said. “I’ll be around.” She let herself out of the room and continued on her rounds.

                 

Chapter 12

           

                  As Jeannie shut the door behind her on Maureen and the one-time Turnip, she nearly bumped into the daughter of La Curandera, who was making her way quietly through the unit to her mother’s room.

                  “Hi,” said Jeannie, blocking her way.

                  “I want to see my mother.”

                  “Mrs. Sanchez.”

                  “You found out her name.”

                  “We found out your name.”

                  “Someone recognized her?”

                  “Someone recognized you.”

                  “Ah.” Maria Sanchez digested the information. “I would like to see her.”

                  “Come with me.”

                  “I would like to be alone with my mother.”

                  “Maybe later,” Jeannie insisted. “Do you want to see her now?”

                  Maria Sanchez nodded in at least temporary surrender.

                  “Let’s go, then,” Jeannie said. She accompanied the attorney to Five. It was time to look in on the patient anyway. The rest of her morning round could wait while she sorted out how to respond to the daughter. Yesterday and again just now, she believed, she sensed a deep love in Maria Sanchez for her mother. But there seemed to be something else going on as well, something that Jeannie could not wrap her mind around. It had to do with the stench, even more with the aura of evil that had seemed to surround La Curandera on admission. And then there were the rumors that the woman—the patient, not the daughter—was some sort of healer. Jeannie wondered whether the designation might just as well be a euphemism for witchcraft. It seemed to fit some of what had already happened, but it was so superstitious an idea that she did not want to consider it. There had to be some physiological basis for La Curandera’s problem. If they could diagnose it, then they would be halfway toward treating her. What they were doing right now was only palliative.

                  The daughter, Maria Sanchez, was dressed as if for court and even carried a briefcase. Jeannie pushed open the door of Five and stood aside to let the other woman go ahead of her. Maria went to her mother’s bedside and stood looking down at her.

                  “She seems a little better.”

                  “The tic is still present, though,” Jeannie warned. She had seen many relatives believe that the patient looked “a little better” when in truth they were getting ready to die. That was not the case here, but Jeannie’s reflexive response was meant to deny false optimism, which, in the long run, proved more painful than an acceptance of the fact of illness. “But you’re right, it’s not as pronounced.”

                  “Then maybe it was right to bring her in here.” Maria was still looking down, talking almost to herself. “She is more distant from the influence.”

                  “Influence of what?”

                  “Oh—I’m sorry,” Maria said. “I was just talking to myself. It’s a bad habit.”

                  “You said influence,” Jeannie pursued.

                  “I am not an expert in these matters.” Maria waved a hand vaguely at the equipment in the crash room.

                  The daughter was clearly unready to explain. Jeannie changed the subject, but she still wanted a history of her patient.

                  “Has your mother ever been sick before?”

                  “Nothing like this,” Maria answered. “Just minor things that she treated herself—little headaches, female problems. She is a very wise woman about these things, but I think now that she is out of her depth.” Maria sat down, holding the brief case tightly on her knees, her eyes on her mother’s face. Her left hand slid back and forth across the dark leather, in an unconscious but tender caress.

                  Maria stretched the silence out until she broke it. “You have cleaned her.”

                  “Yes,” Jeannie said. “She needed it.”

                  “I knew you would.”

                  The sickbed watch enveloped the two young women again. Maria could not be much older than Jeannie. But there was about her a dark intensity that she herself had never experienced, something that made her feel alone and stupid, as if she were the one person in Maria Sanchez’ acquaintance who knew nothing, had never known anything, about how the powers of the world worked. Jeannie tried to push the feeling away, rationalizing that it was the distance between the Hispanic culture and her own Anglo upbringing that caused the pervading sense of mystery she felt in La Curandera’s presence.

                  Mystery worked both ways. Maria had admitted her ignorance of the technology that now sustained her mother. To Jeannie, that technology was the workaday world. But that was true only because she was one of the practitioners, one of those in control. To her patients, she knew, the things she did seemed magical; she tried to give them enough understanding of what was happening to them so that they could cooperate in their treatment. But others wanted magic, wanted the doctor-god to heal them—Jonquil Marie Hennessy, for one.

                  While musing, Jeannie maintained her awareness of Maria Sanchez. The daughter seemed to have relaxed. She had opened her brief case and was reading and making notes on a yellow pad.

                  The lawyer felt Jeannie’s attention and looked up, meeting her gaze.

                  “If you have other duties, I will watch my mother.”

                  The uncertainty Jeannie felt must have shown.

                  “I know that she must be here,” Maria said. “It is better for her.”

                  “What made you change your mind?” Jeannie liked the new attitude, but she was not quite ready to trust the woman.

                  “I spent the night awake,” the daughter said. “Awake, I had dreams, dreams in which my mother slowly strangled while I stood by helpless, ably only to witness her pain. There were no fingers around her neck, but I could see the imprint of invisible fingers, the indentations they made in her skin. I tried to pry them away from her but I could not grasp them. Only she could feel the killing hands, and they did their work slowly. If she is to die, then perhaps you and the rest can save her much agony. If not, then she is as well here as anywhere, as long as I can stay with her. Who can tell?”

                  Jeannie had her own streak of fatalism. Sometimes it was time for death, no matter how heroic the measures taken. But Maria’s change of attitude frightened her, at least a little. She was trying to figure out whether or not there would be a repetition of yesterday’s events. And, as yet, she had gotten nowhere closer to gaining a medical history of her patient.

                  “How long was your mother ill before you brought her in?”

                  “I was not with her,” Sanchez said. “I was at work. The others brought her to you.”

                  “Well, has she ever had anything like this before?”

                  Maria Sanchez did not answer. She turned her face away, looking at the figure on the bed, watching the faint but still active tic work its way across the old woman’s face, over and over again.

                  Jeannie waited, hoping for an answer, but none came. She felt certain that there was something hidden, waiting to emerge. She searched what she could see of Maria Sanchez, wishing for the power to pry into the young woman’s secrets. Maria wore a severe black dress, relieved only by a thin golden chain around her neck and a matching one around her waist. Her long hair was coarse and straight, gleaming nearly blue-black in the fluorescent light of the hospital room.

                  Her mouth was wide. Beneath bronzed skin, the muscles of her jaw were tensed. Her cheekbones hinted at an Aztec ancestor’s genes. She wore a minimum of makeup, the slightest hint of green eye shadow setting off the gold chains and matching her green eyes, the evidence, perhaps, of some admixture of European heritage. A fine dark down softened her upper lip. She was, Jeannie decided, unlikely to go unnoticed at any gathering. She was not a beautiful woman, nor was she pretty in any conventional sense. She was very much herself, even when, as now, a frown knotted her brow and downcast her strong mouth.

                  She turned to Jeannie.

                  “She has always been too strong.”

                  “Too strong?” Jeannie echoed.

                  “Until now. Until yesterday.”

                  “What happened?”

                  “I do not know.”

                  Maria Sanchez, Jeannie felt, was telling the truth; she kept silent, hoping for more, because so far she did not understand.

                  “I was in court. I had not seen her for three days. This is not unusual. When she is busy with her work, she remains alone a great deal. When she has finished, then she will call me and we will drink chocolate together and talk. She wants me to follow after her when she dies, and tries to talk me into it. I go to her and listen because she is my mother and gave me life. Sometimes it is as much as two weeks that I do not hear from her, so you will understand that I was not worried.

                  “When the message came to me that she was being taken here, it came from one of those who did not believe that this was a proper place for her, that here she would die because of the ignorance of the Anglo doctors. But she stayed unconscious, and those who believed that this was a place of last resort triumphed over the others and carried her here. In this place, they concluded, the needs of her body could be met while she fought the battle that she was forced to fight.”

                  Maria’s intensity, the density of her belief in the truth of the events she described, kept Jeannie silent, if not believing. She listened without judgment, forcing herself neither to accept nor reject the story.

                  “I did not at first agree with those who felt this way.”

                  “Yeah, I noticed,” Jeannie said.

                  “I will not ask your forgiveness,” the daughter said. “I felt it strongly. I would do it again, if I felt that it was necessary.”

                  “Look,” Jeannie said, “let me know if you change your mind. You won’t need a knife. You could just leave.”

                  “Your priest is a brave man.” Maria Sanchez locked eyes with Jeannie. “You have more heart than most Anglo women, yourself. I have thought about it all night long. If this priest and this nurse will risk themselves to keep my mother in this place, then perhaps there is a power here that I did not perceive. These two believe in it, or they would not take such risks for an old woman they do not know. And they must be knowledgeable; they are here always.

                  “I do not believe that you can save her,” Maria went on, “but you can keep her alive while she tries to save herself. That I can not do alone. Look.” She pointed at the old woman. “Her jaws are still clenched tight. How could I put food and drink into her? But you can, and your priest can pray for her.

                  “The only thing I ask is to be allowed to stay with her, as much as I can. Is that possible?”

                  Jeannie did not answer right away. Dr. Caine would want this woman kept as far as possible from his patient, considering what had happened yesterday. He had enough ego to insist on having no interference with his treatment, such as it was. But having a relative present if La Curandera ever woke up would give her a point of reference and some protection against the killing loneliness and fear of waking up tethered to machines.

                  “Do you give me your word that you will do nothing to interfere with her treatment?”

                  “What treatment?”

                  “I know it’s only palliative,” Jeannie said, “but you just admitted that we can keep her alive.”

                  “I have no quarrel with intravenous feeding.”

                  “And no more knives,” Jeannie said. “No weapons of any kind.” The germ of an idea was growing in Jeannie’s mind. She prayed that it would develop, would not be lost while she worked out the details of the arrangement between herself and Maria Sanchez. She had to have something concrete to present to Caine if Maria was to be allowed to stay with her mother.

                  “Agreed.”

                  “And you won’t disrupt the routine of the unit,” Jeannie insisted. “There are people here sicker than your mother, people who don’t need any extra excitement in their lives. It could kill them. Agreed?”

                  “Agreed,” said the daughter of La Curandera. “There is more; I see it in your face.”

                  “You must give me or the doctor a medical history of your mother. You must answer some questions concerning her health and the kinds of things that she does.”

                  “I tell you,” Sanchez said, “that you will not cure her with your drugs and your knives.”

                  “Why not?”

                  “Her illness is of the spirit.”

                  It was not much, but it was something. Jeannie wanted desperately to leave the room and discuss her suspicions with Abraham Caine, but she had gotten more out of the daughter than all day yesterday, and to leave would be to cut off the trickling flow of information. She had to stay to try to widen the channel.

                  “How do you mean?”

                  “My mother did not just ‘get sick,’” Sanchez answered. “She was attacked.”

                  “How?”

                  “Her spirit was challenged by another, a competitor.”

                  “What do you mean?” Jeannie felt as if her question was like diving headfirst into a pool without first looking to see if there was water, but she plunged ahead.

                  “I mean what I said,” the daughter replied. “She is not the only one of her kind in this city. There is bad blood between her and another.”

                  “What did this other do?”

                  “That can not be told.”

                  Jeannie’s patience snapped. The process of drawing information from Maria Sanchez was like emptying a gallon bucket with a teaspoon.

                  “Damn it, Maria!” she exploded. “How the hell am I supposed to do my job is you keep me ignorant?”

                  Sanchez turned away. “Your job is to feed her and keep her from harm. If she is to get well, it will happen. She is old. Perhaps this is where she will die. It is not in our hands.”

                 

* * *

                 

                  The scream caromed off the walls of the unit and echoed out through the double doors into the halls outside. It was heard on the floor below.

                  The scream came from Jonquil’s room. Jeannie was still trying to understand what Maria Sanchez was trying to tell her—or perhaps to avoid telling her—but when she heard the cry she moved immediately to its source, Room Eleven.

                  Running was bad form in the hospital. The floors were slick, the patients easily frightened by untoward activity, and there was a real possibility of running into someone. But the scream did not stop. Jeannie ran.

                  She was the first to reach Jonquil, but it was not the patient who was in trouble. It was Hoss Jackman, the nurse assigned to her.

                  Everything happened in slow motion, as it does in an auto accident. Jeannie barely hesitated long enough to take in the action before going into combat.

                  Jonquil’s teeth had a death grip on Hoss’s thumb. He was waving his free hand wildly. He wanted to hit Jonquil to make her let go of his thumb, but he couldn’t strike a patient. Even in agony, the threat of a lawsuit stayed in his mind.

                  But the thumb was spurting blood all over the sheets, over Hoss, especially over Jonquil. Gore coated her face, dripped from her nose, shot from Hoss’s thumb and her mouth and puddled in the breakfast that had just arrived. Her oatmeal—why, Jeannie wondered in a moment of bizarre detachment, had they given her oatmeal again after yesterday’s debacle?—her oatmeal was now a blood pudding.

                  Hoss’ blood was everywhere. Jonquil’s teeth must have cut an artery.

                  Hoss was still screaming, but the inarticulate shock had resolved now into words, and the words were aimed at Jonquil, who was shaking her head like a bitch determined on killing a kitten.

                  “Let go of my goddamn thumb!” was one of Hoss’s milder phrases. “You’re gonna tear it off!”

                  Jeannie heard others approach. But Hoss was in trouble now; his thumb might be gone by the time they arrived and settled on a course of action.

                  Jeannie moved to the opposite side of the bed from Hoss. She locked one arm around Jonquil’s head, and covered her nose and mouth with her hands. Jonquil kept shaking her head, trying to tear off Hoss’s thumb, but Jeannie hung on, knowing that Jonquil’s lungs were compromised by years of smoking and her heart disease.

                  Sure enough, Jonquil had to gasp for air. Hoss yanked his thumb out of her mouth and clamped his free hand around it to apply pressure and stop the bleeding. Jeannie uncovered Jonquil’s mouth and nose, but kept her in the headlock.

                  She was afraid to let go. But now, the others had reached the room.

                  “Knock her out,” Jeannie said, still being flailed, feet off the floor, by Jonquil’s struggles. Now the woman’s hands came into play, scratching at Jeannie’s features. She buried her face in the pillow; Jonquil’s magnificent claws raked the back of her head and neck. She heard the fabric of her lab jacket tear under the assault, felt the manicured nails dig into her shoulders. Jeannie was trapped, unable to fight back or to let go.

                  Suddenly the hands were removed. Jonquil still struggled, but Jeannie could stay away from the snarling mouth, as long as whoever it was held the scratching claws away from her.

                  “What’s going on?” Jeannie demanded, her voice muffled by the pillow.

                  “I have her hands,” Father Diego said. “Vivian’s getting something to knock her out.”

                  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Father,” Jeannie said. “People will talk about us.”

                  “Get your fucking hands off me, you goddamned Papist!” Jonquil shouted, still struggling as hard as ever.

                  “Vivian, hurry up!” Jeannie called.

                  “I’m here, already,” the head nurse answered, snaking the point of a hypodermic into Jonquil’s IV line, which, somehow, had stayed intact through the combat. “This oughta quiet her down.”

                  “Took you long enough,” Jeannie said. “What are you giving her?”

                  “IV Valium,” Vivian answered.

                  “I’ll settle for anything right now.”

                  The injection seemed to take forever. Even in the situation, Vivian followed procedures. IV Valium had to be inject slowly into Jonquil’s veins. The introduction of ten milligrams took a full minute.

                  Diazepam acts on the limbic system, that part of the deep structure of the brain—the thalamus and hypothalamus—that mediates the basic survival responses of fear and fury. The limbic system is the arouser, perhaps even the seat of all the unconscious terrors and angers, the source of berserker rages and psychotic horrors. Flight or fight find their beginnings in the limbic system. It is built-in, hard-wired.

                  It took so long to inject the drug because Valium corrodes blood vessels if the concentration is high. Slow administration gives time for the blood to dilute the drug.

                  Slow administration also meant that Diego and Jeannie were sitting on Jonquil through the worst of her rage. Bloody but unbeaten by their restraint, Jonquil continued to flail her head around, as if Jeannie’s weight were negligible. Diego clamped her hands against the bed.

                  The longest minutes of Jeannie’s life passed while they waited for the drug to take effect. It was not until the second half of the dose hit that Jonquil started to give up the fight. Panic flooded her eyes as she understood what had been done to her, tears, of frustration, fear, that made her fight the effect of the drug for minutes longer, but its action was too powerful. The drug stole Jonquil’s fury from her, and she wept for its loss, quietly now, while Diego and Jeannie breathed heavily, wondering whether to release their holds on her.

                  “That ought to do it,” Vivian said. “You can let go, now.”

                  “Thanks, boss,” Jeannie said, panting. “Nick of time. You too, padre. Glad for your help. That’s two I owe you in as many days.”

                  Diego grinned back at her, panting himself, too winded to do more than nod.

                  Vivian gathered up Hoss, Diego, and Jeannie and led them out of the room. She examined Hoss’s wound critically. “That’ll need stitches at least,” she said, “maybe a little surgery. I’ll tell ER you’re on your way down. Think you can make it?”

                  Hoss, the excitement ended, suddenly turned blue-gray and began to sway on his feet. “I don’t think so.”

                  Vivian sat him down and ordered Wanda Sue to grab a wheelchair. While the ward clerk went searching for one of ICU’s chairs—they were always being borrowed by one of the other units—she picked up the phone and paged the chief of surgery. While she was waiting for him to get on the line, she saw Maureen watching the little group.

                  “You busy?”

                  “I’m caught up.”

                  “Good. Get in there and keep an eye on Jonquil. Hoss is down for the count and Jeannie needs to rest. Keep an eye on both their patients. Get Prissy-Jo to help you.”

                  “I can do my work,” Jeannie protested. Her eyes hurt with unshed tears.

                  “Not until you settle down a little,” Vivian said. She turned her attention to the phone and spoke briefly to the head of surgery, and hung up.

                  “What happened, Hoss?”

                  “She bit me,” he said, still smarting from the unprovoked attack. “I was going to take her temperature and she bit me. Just leaned over and grabbed my thumb in her teeth. I don’t know what happened to the fucking thermometer.”

                  “Don’t worry about it,” Vivian said. “How are you feeling?”

                  “Weak. Think the bleeding’s stopped, though.” Hoss had wrapped a gauze pad around the injured thumb. He lifted a corner of it to examine his hurt. “The bitch nearly tore it off!”

                  “Let’s see,” Jeannie said. She leaned across the intervening space to examine his hand. The damage was deep. Jonquil’s teeth had lacerated Hoss’s thumb, down at the base. The flesh was torn open to the bone.

                  “Where was it?” Vivian asked as Wanda Sue returned with a wheelchair.

                  “OB,” Wanda Sue said. “God, I hate goin’ in there. All those women give me the creeps. Here, cowboy, I’ll roll you down to ER. Hop in.”

                  Hoss moved shakily into the wheelchair, still gripping his injured hand. Wanda Sue started him toward the exit. “We’ll be back, sometime.”

                  “Maybe you can do something,” Vivian said, tilting her head towards Jonquil’s room, “when she wakes up.”

                  “I’ll give it a try,” Diego ventured, “but I won’t get too close to her.”

                  “How are you feeling?” Jeannie asked. She had noticed that he seemed to be out of breath a lot recently.

                  “I’m OK,” Diego answered.

                  “Are you sure?”

                  “You’re the one to be concerned about, after that tussle. Did you get hurt?”

                  “Just my dignity,” Jeannie said, “and I didn’t have much left, anyway. I’m fine.”

                  But she was lying and knew it. The attack was unprovoked, except by Jonquil’s panic, and although it had not been aimed at her, this time, she knew she was waiting, just waiting for Jonquil to try something really dangerous. She wanted to take precautions against Jonquil’s rages, but there was nothing she could do. If they kept her drugged, they would compromise her breathing; if they restrained her, they took a real risk of causing an emotional outburst that would bring on the heart attack they were trying to prevent. There was no way to win.

                  Jonquil was just one example among hundreds of situations Jeannie had seen in her short career. On most days, she found herself in situations with no good outcome possible. Granted, there were compensations—the patient who pulls through in spite of all the odds, the death where fear is eased and suffering minimized—but the frustrations, the disasters like Jonquil, seemed to last longer and come more often. And with the bureaucratic mess over the drug thing, Jeannie was beginning to entertain thoughts of chucking the whole business and going back to waiting tables. It would not be any less frustrating, but at least the stakes would be lower.

                  But she was addicted to the adrenaline, to the rush of energy that surged through her when her skills were all that stood between life and death.

                  Once in a while, her hands carried life.

                 

* * *

           

                  Diego returned to Jonquil’s room.

                  Maureen had finished cleaning up the bloody mess. The room had the silence of a battlefield after a cleansing rain. Jonquil lay quiet in her bed, her face drained of color, a slow faint snore escaping from her nose. Her hair was disarranged, her carefully-applied makeup smeared and skewed.

                  “Father,” Maureen asked, “are you going to be in here for a couple of minutes?”

                  “Well, since she’s sleeping—”

                  “Because if you are, would you watch her for me? I needed to go to the bathroom when all this started, and I have my primary patient to look in on. I won’t be five minutes, I promise.”

                  “Well—”

                  “Thank you, Father.” Maureen was out the door before she finished speaking.

                  Diego chuckled at her urgency. The quiet laugh, quite unexpectedly, caused an ache in his chest, which he rubbed without noticing what he was doing, watching Jonquil all the while, thinking about how, or even if, he could find some approach to the woman that would let her deal openly with her fears. From all he knew of her, those fears were well justified.  She could, he believed, have a fatal heart attack at any time.

                  Without his quite realizing that she was waking, he found her eyes meeting his. Hers were alert through the drug; diazepam was fast-acting when given intravenously, but did not last long.

                  “You too, huh?” Jonquil said.

                  “Good morning.”

                  “Answer me, damnit.”

                  “Me too what?”

                  “Heart.”

                  Diego realized he was rubbing his chest and almost guiltily dropped his hand to his side. “No, just a little out of breath. You gave us quite a workout.”

                  Jonquil was adamant. “Heart,” she affirmed. “I know you, Zorro.”

                  She laughed after the last word, softly, despairingly. “You think no one here knows. Everyone knows. It’s part of the admission orientation for Chrissake.” She sniffed, whether in grief or in disdain, Diego could not tell. “No secrets here, are there?”

                  “Not many, I guess,” Diego admitted. “Why did you hurt that boy?”

                  “He’ll live.”

                  “So will you.”

                  “Not for long,” Jonquil said. “Not now.”

                  “He was trying to help you.”

                  “Bullshit. He was only doing what he was told to do. He had papers to fill out. I was the next item.” She turned her face away. “Why can’t they just let me go?”

                  “I’ve seen your chart,” Diego said. “You’re sick, but not as sick as you think.”

                  “What do they know? If I was healthy, they’d tie me down for what I did, but they’re afraid to. Afraid it’ll kill me. Jesus, why am I talking to you, anyway? I’m not Catholic.”

                  Diego grinned. “They let me talk to anybody.”

                  “Then why don’t you go and do it? I don’t need your help. I can die just fine on my own.”

                  “What makes you so sure you’re going to die?

                  “Everyone,” Jonquil said, “dies.”

                  “It makes you angry,” Diego said. He wanted to get through to the frightened and hateful woman, but he had to be gentle or risk setting her off again.

                  “No shit.”

                  “A lot of people react that way.”

                  “So? I’m not ‘a lot of people.’”

                  “You’re not making this conversation any easier,” Diego said.

                  “That’s not my job. I’m—how do the Brits say it?—I’m redundant. Finished.”

                  Jonquil pronounced her end with such finality that for a moment Diego acquiesced in her judgment. Her calm was unnatural. Her words came out with bitterness and sarcasm, but there was no energy, not even the heat of anger, pushing them. Jonquil Marie Hennessy was perhaps more affected by the drug than Diego thought. Sitting there by the woman who had dully announced her end, he breathed a prayer that she would somehow find hope, whether for a continued earthly life or for life after death; which one didn’t matter.

                  Diego searched his heart at the prompting of his conscience. Jonquil’s attitude and behavior irritated him. He felt his conscience pricking, reminding him that it was her fear, he was sure, that made her act as she did—and perhaps something deeper. He suddenly latched onto a thought.

                  “You feel very lonely sometimes, don’t you?” he said.

                  “Everyone does.”

                  “A lot of people,” Diego said, “but you just reminded me that you’re not ‘a lot of people.’”

                  “Shit,” Jonquil said, grinning. “You were listening. I’ll have to be more careful.”

                  “Your husband visits every day, doesn’t he?”

                  “Big deal.” She sighed, closing her eyes. Diego thought he might be closing in on something. He refused to let her hide.

                  “You don’t think so.”

                  “He hates me. I hate him. It’s all for form’s sake.” Now Jonquil was showing some feeling. Her lip curled as she spoke, her voice was louder, her words quicker, more energetic. She sat up, lifting her head, facing him. “You ought to see him when he’s in here. He can’t wait to get out. He thinks I can’t see him looking at his watch every thirty seconds, just waiting for his chance to get away from me.”

                  Diego restrained a sudden, powerful impulse to know the time.

                  “When we were first married, I thought I could manage,” Jonquil said. “I was wrong. Somehow, I lost him, right at the beginning. Two weeks into the marriage, the day after we got back from the honeymoon, it was over.”

                  “But you’ve been together for over thirty years,” Diego protested. “You have children.”

                  “No.” Jonquil’s face was set, her voice stony. “Not together. In the same house. In the same bed. But not together.” She glanced at him. “Why am I telling you all this?”

                  “Sounds as if you might need to tell someone.”

                  “It’s all BS anyway. You’re a Catholic; you couldn’t understand; you’ve never played the game, so I might as well go on. It makes about as much sense as anything else.”

                  But she became silent.

                  “What happened, do you think?” Diego prompted.

                  “Nothing, that’s what happened. Not a thing. Henry was in the Air Force, an officer. I couldn’t handle being the little wife of a little second  lieutenant. I hated being looked at like that. I came from a good family; people respected us. When we went to live in that cracker shack, I cried. I mean, you wouldn’t have used that place for a doghouse, but the Air Force expected us to live in it. And the wives of the captains and majors and colonels and generals and the godforsaken wives of the godforsaken first lieutenants acted like I was dirt. Well, I did not marry Henry to be treated that way, and I let him know about it.”

                  Every day, Diego almost said. How, he wondered, had the grudge lasted so long? It was fresh in her mind, as if the humiliations had been yesterday, instead of thirty years before.

                  “I mean, I didn’t join the godforsaken Air force,” Jonquil said. “That was just Henry’s job. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t play their stupid games. For twenty years, I had to put up with that.” She drew her legs up and hugged her arms around them. “That’s why Henry only made major. They hated me and they took it out on him. I used to laugh in their faces, the stupid wives. And they talked to their stupid husbands, and they held stupid Henry back, and he knew it, knew it was my fault. But I didn’t care,” she insisted.  “They were stupid, and someone had to tell them. Henry knew it, he knew they were stupid, but he wouldn’t get out. He was always apologizing for me. He never said so, but I know he was. If he was smart, he would have seen what was going on. He would have dumped me, and he would have been right. Thirty years.”

                  The gust of words left Diego a little stunned. “He must have loved you very much.”

                  Jonquil laughed, a harsh clatter of breaking glass, brittle, jagged.

                  “Yeah, sure. He was just stupid.”

                  “What about your children?”

                  “Seen any of them here.”

                  “Well, no, but—”

                  “And you won’t. They’re so relieved to be out of the house, away from me, they all moved out of town as soon as they could.” Jonquil’s hands were white where they clutched her knees, but her face was eerily calm.

                  Diego did not understand the woman’s spleen, her self-hate, or the woman herself, but he could believe her. It helped to explain her reaction to the hospital and its people. He tried to think of something to say, but failed. He looked again at Jonquil, saw the lines in her face, the result of a lifetime of fear and doubt, of her failing but constant effort to hold a self together against internal attack. Henry and the marriage had never had a chance to succeed. She carried a bright and sardonic exterior, but the inside was riddled with old wounds unhealed, wounds that she poked around in daily, kept fresh, kept painful, like a child picking off a scab.

                  The thought struck him like a bullet: Jonquil did not want to heal, had never wanted to heal. Pain was a familiar companion, and when the pain left, she might have nothing else.

                  He stayed a while longer, until Maureen came back. She parried his further probing with a skill born of long experience, and he left her after saying a troubled prayer—silently, so as not to anger her.

J.C. and the Boys by Alan David Justice is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If you'd like to have a dead tree edition of J.C. and the Boys, you'll find it here.

There's another story, The Communion of the Saint, here. 

And also here. 

And as a free audiobook here.

A Hanging Offense begins here. It's the story of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, set in the town of Saint Albans.