Pssst!”
Someone out in the hall was trying to catch his attention. Corky ignored the insistent summons. The effects of the sleeping pill from the night before hung on, making him feel lazy and a little cranky.
“Pssssssssst!”
He turned his head and glared. Perched in a wheelchair, was the same old woman he’d seen peeing the night before. In the light of day, he noticed that she looked a lot like the old lady in Harold and Maude.
The little kid pushing the chair stared at him noncommittally.
“Hi ya, handsome.” The old woman grinned and lifted her eyebrows a few times. “Catching up on your beauty sleep?”
Clucking her tongue, she winked and motioned for her driver to push on. The pair rolled out of sight before he thought to respond.
Corky stuck his fingers in his ears, made a wide, silent scream, then jumped up and commenced shadowboxing in the middle of the room just to be performing some action other than lying in bed thinking about himself. He toyed with the idea of trying to see Lucy Cross, or at least asking one of the nurses what had happened to her.
If he could see her again, he’d ask if they could just sit and talk. All the girls in his class said he was a great listener, and if Lucy wanted to talk, he’d listen for as long as she wanted. No matter what she told him, he was sure he could help. Maybe, once they were both discharged from the hospital, they could even hang out together.
The idea jolted his thoughts from druggy fuzz into the realm of vitalizing, gonad-charged possibilities. From there, he took a quantum leap to the problem of where to take an older, worldly woman on a date. She was classy, and probably had a million guys after her who owned hot cars and had shitloads of money.
He could take her to Bill’s Place on Clement for burgers and fries. He shook his head. She was probably a vegetarian so it would have to be the Japan Center for vegetable tempura.
Afterwards they’d go dancing at the I-Beam or Rockin’ Robins. No, wait. She’s recuperating. We should go easy, maybe take in the laser show at the planetarium or walk around the de Young or go up to the Palace of the Legion of Honor and hang out with the sculptures. She looked like an artsy type.
“It’s time for vital signs, Champ. Can I see you between rounds?”
He blinked himself back to reality. The nurse with the feet and the nice tits, the one he was positive had a thing for him, appeared out of nowhere.
He nodded a greeting and in a flurry of alarm, remembered he was wearing loose pajama bottoms. Sneaking a peek, he found with no small relief that the split front fly was closed. To play it safe, he pulled the drawstring as tight as it would go without hurting and retied it with a double knot.
After she’d checked his lungs, blood pressure, and temperature, he told her his throat still hurt, secretly hoping there was nothing she could do about it since the rawness of his voice made him sound older. While it lasted, he figured he could probably get away with saying he was twenty-three.
“You can plan on it being sore for another couple of days, kiddo. If it’ll ring your chimes, we can start you on some warm salt water gargles four times a day.”
He groaned.
“You expected perfect health after having a hard plastic tube shoved down your throat for three days? Give it time. Hasn’t your mother told you patience is a virtue?”
“Oh man,” he whined, returning to his dance-dodge-and-punch boxing routine.
Cat casually opened the boy’s closet and at once drew back from the rank smell. Through watering eyes, she peered into the dark recesses. “What the hell do you have in there? A favorite dead pet?”
Nonchalantly, the teenager pulled out a pair of checkered hightops with the toes shredded out and threw them in the corner. “They’re my favorite shoes. My mother brought them in.”
She watched him box for a minute or two. “Did Dr. Barza talk to you yet?”
He punched the air more forcefully. “Yep.” He took a few more punches and circled around to face her. “The guy is a total dweeb. He says to me—” Corky mimicked the monotone Conehead voice from Saturday Night Live: “‘No one can help you, Calvin, unless you are willing to communicate. Communication is the first step toward mental health.’
“I didn’t say anything to that, so Barza starts ragging about how suicide is a desperate move, and if I’d succeeded, it would have devastated my parents and my friends. He said suicide is a totally irresolvable death for the survivors. He was really piling on the shrink shit, practically reciting from the shrink textbook of nerdsims.”
He resumed boxing for a moment, then ambled from bed to sink, from sink to doorway, from doorway to closet. He stopped near the bedside cabinet and picked several flakes of peeling paint from the wall. “Then out of nowhere, the dude starts talking about his mega-thousands of dollars Porsche and how cool it is to go a hundred miles an hour on the highway. It was so lame. As if I care about his stupid penis-envy car.”
She could easily imagine the aging psychiatrist driving a hundred miles an hour down Highway 101, his skimpy, graying ponytail flapping in the wind, like some worn out freak flag.
“I hope my parents aren’t paying for this guy to drain my brain, because it’s not going to work. I’m not going to say anything.”
“Did you tell Dr. Barza that he couldn’t do anything for you?”
“Sure!” Corky lowered his eyes. “I didn’t come right out and say exactly that, but I didn’t give him what he wanted either. I just sort of acted like I agreed with everything he was saying. He’s such a dweeb he didn’t notice that I wasn’t really saying a fucking—” he lightly slapped his mouth. “Oops, sorry.”
She waved it away. “It’s okay. I have neither virgin mouth nor ears.”
His head bobbed. “That’s cool.”
“So, what happened last night?” The question came unexpectedly to them both.
He made a face and picked harder at the paint. He’d peeled through a layer of institutional green and was working his way through the songbird yellow. “When? You mean last night?”
She rolled her eyes.
“You mean in that girl’s room?” He assumed an expression of innocence. “What about it?”
“You freaked out. Why?”
“Who said I freaked?” The teenager bit his lip. “I didn’t freak.”
She watched him carefully, noting his reactions. “You were screaming when they took you out of Lucy Cross’s room. Then you cried all night. You call that not freaking?”
“Somebody lied,” he said, pretending to be indignant. “I didn’t do any of that shit.”
She debated whether to go hard-line, observed how he evaded her eyes, and decided it was the way to go. “I don’t think anybody lied, Corky. I think seeing Cross touched off something close to home.”
His paint picking grew frantic. The top of his thumb was bleeding. “You’re wrong. What sort of something are you talking about? Do you think—”
“I think something inside you snapped when you saw Ms. Cross. I think—”
“Nothing happened to me! Why should some girl I don’t even know freak me out? You’re out of your mind.
“The only thing going on with me is that I got depressed because my girlfriend broke up with me and I couldn’t sleep and I took too many sleeping pills by mistake.”
He winced at the lie. It was such a wimpy cop-out, but better than the truth. Straightening to his full height, he stared at her defiantly.
She stared back until he looked away. “Was that really it? Some girl splitting up with you?”
“Yeah, that’s really it. And the only reason I sorta freaked out last night is because Lucy Cross looks a lot like my girlfriend. I was totally bummed.”
“Bullshit,” Cat sighed. “I think that seeing how Ms. Cross was hurt reminded you of whatever is going on with you.
“I’ve been a nurse for a long time. I’ve heard it all—everything from white lies to confessions of murder. Whatever it is, you can tell me and I promise to do everything in my power to help.”
The muscles in his jaw jumped. “I’m telling you, it was this girl named Molly who dumped me.”
The overhead page system belched out pages for Dr. Wilber and Dr. Cramer. The operator sounded like a mother calling her kids in for supper.
Corky started pacing again. “So, what happened to that Lucy person anyway?”
Weighing patient confidentiality against the therapeutic value of giving out the information, Cat decided it was a day to break rules. “She was assaulted by a crazy man.”
Corky controlled the sudden urge to curse. “She seems nice, like she’d be a good person to know.”
“Unfortunately things like that sometimes happen to nice people.”
“Is she gonna be okay?”
“I think so, but what about you? You gonna be okay?”
“I’m good.”
“Really? Then why did Trish have to sedate you this morning?”
Corky walked to the sink and spit. “Is that dude across the hall a mo?”
She made note of how quickly he changed the subject. “A mo? What’s a mo?”
“You know, a homo. A homosexual. A fag. Does he have AIDS?”
Cat ignored his question. “You were given a chloral hydrate at three forty-five this morning, because you lost it after seeing Miss Cross.”
“I want my room changed so I don’t have to look at the mo. He stares over here all the time. It gives me the creeps.” The color was rising up his neck to his face.
“Professor Dean is a very nice man. He teaches at—”
“I don’t care what kind of guy he is. You think I like being stared at by some homo doing his fantasy-sex number on me? I hate that shit!”
She nudged him away from the sink to wash her hands. “You’re overreacting, Corky.”
“Overreacting?” His voice rose. “What do you mean, overreacting? You think I want him—” Corky jerked his thumb in the direction of Professor Dean’s room—“thinking about what he’d like to do to me?”
She touched his shoulder. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
The boy threw himself on his bed. When he spoke again, it was in a reasonable voice. “When am I getting out of here?”
“I think Dr. Leffler’s plan is to keep you on this unit for the next day or two instead of sending you down to the psych unit. Dr. Barza will probably see you a couple more times and have you attend a daily therapy group where people your age talk about what’s bothering them. After that, your docs will probably let you go home.”
Corky froze. “They’re gonna send me home?” He stared at her in disbelief. “You mean, home with my parents?”
The boy’s fear was palpable. “What’s the problem with going home?”
He pitched a pillow to the ceiling and caught it with his feet. “Nothing. I just thought they’d send me somewhere else until…it doesn’t matter.”
He slid to the edge of the bed and commenced beating out the rhythm to a Sting tune on the corner of his bedside table with his thumb.
Unconsciously she tapped her foot to his beat wondering what the hell was going on inside his mind.
“Home?” he repeated. “Sure. No problem.” Corky thought about Lucy, then about home, and then about the danger that lay in wait for him there.
And Cat could only guess.
* * *
Stella was on the commode when Cat dropped the four colored tablets onto her palm. “Last pills for today, Stel.”
As she watched, Stella proceeded with the Old People’s Eight-Step Pill-Swallowing System: Line them up—small ones first, place smallest one at the very back of the tongue, drink half a glass of water, shrug, cough it back up, chew, shudder, and swallow.
Cat exchanged the water glass for a roll of toilet paper. “I see you’ve found a friend,”
Stella nodded and wiped. “Zoe Walker. She’s a sweet little girl. I understand her father’s not well.”
“Not well is a gross understatement.” Cat helped Stella stand and pivot into the wheelchair.
“How long does the poor soul have left?”
“A few days.”
“Is he suffering?”
Cat thought for a moment. “His physical pain is mostly under control. His suffering comes more from not being ready to let go.”
“The younger ones usually have a harder time with that.” Stella let her hands go limp so the redhead could wash under the coarse and yellowed fingernails. “They’re never quite ready to give up playing and go to sleep like us older children. It’s that vexatious feeling that there’s something more.”
The two women fell silent, watching their hands and fingers interact.
“Do you remember what I told you about Bresford Place?”
“I understand it’s nice.”
“It’s more than nice, Stel. It’s got a lot of great programs for senior citizens, like folk dancing and—”
Stella pointed to her arthritic knees. “That’s me— swing your partner, do-si-do. Do they have wheelchair ballets, too?”
Cat ignored the sarcastic remark. “They also have classes on art, writing, photography, and almost anything you can think of. There are also community service programs—everyone has to participate in at least one of those.”
“Whoop-de-do. Since you’re so enthusiastic, why don’t you go there? Send a postcard. Let me know how it goes with the fuddy-duddies.”
“Come on, Stel, don’t you care what happens to you?”
“I’m just an old lady with nothing better to do than sit around holding up my clothes.”
“Not true. You’re a viable, worthwhile person with a sharp mind. You have so much to offer.”
“You’re a dear girl to say that, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much good to anyone.”
Cat played an invisible violin. “I may have to put on my hip boots for all the bullshit floating around here today.”
Stella cackled as Cat measured and discarded the unremarkable urine. She washed her hands for the fiftieth time since her shift began. She inspected what she called her nurse’s winter nails, momentarily depressed by the ragged, chipped ovals that never looked nice no matter what she did to protect them.
“Zoe and I went exploring this afternoon,” Stella said. “She took me to her father’s room, but he was delirious and started talking to himself. It upset it the little tyke so much, I thought it best to leave. On our way back here, we ran into a tall man in a lab coat who was muttering to himself about cats and coal, or was it catty holes?”
“Catechols,” Cat said. “It’s something that causes a chemical reaction. Dr. Cramer has an obsession with them.”
“I see,” Stella said, then fell silent until Cat put a brush to the thinning mess of silvery-white fluff that reminded her of the insides of milkweed pods.
“One thing I know for certain is that I’ll never end up hooked to one of those damned breathing machines,” Stella said, wagging a bony linger. “The first time I ever knew there was such a thing, I got hold of one of those living wills and told my doctor: ‘Young man, if anything ever happens to me and you don’t respect my wishes, I’ll come back from the grave to haunt you. I’m not going to hang around while you and the hospital make money off my corpse. No way, Jose.’”
Cat chuckled at the old woman’s use of the youthful idiom, and put Stella’s hair into a sparse bun.
“We then saw the room with all the balloons, and then met a woman who nearly talked our ears off about her female troubles and all fourteen operations she’s had on her tee-tee in the last year.
“If Zoe hadn’t been there,” Stella raised an eyebrow, “I would’ve told her that what she really needed was good long roll in the hay with somebody.
“I reckon some women get to imagining they’ve got female troubles just to get someone to pay attention to them down there. I never have understood women like that. It’s as if they don’t have anything else to put their attention on. It’s not healthy.”
As Stella continued talking, Cat couldn’t help but think that except for the need of a total body reconditioning, Stella really wasn’t much different from any of the younger women she knew.
In her first year of nursing school, she’d rejected the American perspective that the minute the outer packaging showed signs of wear and tear, anyone over retirement age automatically became a mental ward suspect, categorized as feeble-minded and incompetent.
She believed that the elderly led secret lives, even the ones who seemed lost to senility. In her fantasies, they waited for their doting younger relatives to disappear, then sprinted to the gym to rehearse advanced aerobics or Olympic pole vaulting.
“…then, after the man with the ice tongs stuck in his head, we stopped to say hello to that handsome boy next door. He looks like such a nice, polite young man.” Stella took a sip of water and blotted her lips with a wad of toilet paper. “Something about that young man reminds me strongly of my grandson, or, at least from what I can remember of the lad.”
“Grandson?” Cat was immediately alerted to the red tape involved if previously unclaimed family suddenly popped up while she was trying to have the old woman accepted into a county-funded residence. “I didn’t know you had family, Stel.”
“I’m not sure I do. I lost my husband and son back in forty-three so the only ones that would be left now would be my daughter-in-law and my grandson, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since the tyke was a toddler.
“Little Oats would be all grown up by now. Probably has a family of his own. I’m sure his poor mama made up some cockamamie story about his daddy’s side of the family, so he wouldn’t even remember his old Nanmar Tella.”
“Nanmar Tella?”
“The tyke couldn’t say Grandma Stella, so I became Nanmar Tella instead.”
“Wait—I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t your daughter-in-law tell her son about his grandparents?”
“She was a simple girl, a country bumpkin you might say. Otis junior met her on one of his daddy’s business trips. She was a waitress in some backwoods roadside cafe and he fell in love on the spot—asked her to marry him by the time she served the pie and coffee.”
“You have to admit it’s romantic.”
“I suppose it was one way to get out of leaving a tip. We weren’t surprised when he brought her home from Arkansas. She didn’t weigh more than a sack of feathers. That was Otis junior’s way since he was a child—always dragging home the runts from every litter on the block.” Stella paused, smoothing out the wrinkles in her lap blanket.
“That poor girl was scared out of her wits by us. In her whole life I don’t think she’d ever been more than two miles from home, and here we were living in the lap of rich folks’ luxury in a big mansion in the Oakland hills. Otis junior had to teach her how to use the modern conveniences.
“She never said more than six words to me and Otis senior. We tried treating her like one of our own, but she never did warm up to us.”
“Both your husband and your son died in the same year?”
Stella looked away. “Uhn huh. Died together.” The old image came up, stung, and then faded.
The flicker of pain did not escape Cat’s notice. She’d never believed in letting sleeping dogs lie. Her curiosity made sure the hounds were always up and barking. “How did they die?”
Even though she expected the redhead would ask, Stella still flinched at the question she’d avoided like the plague. Automatically she gave the answer she always gave. “Car accident. Both killed instantly.”
“I’m so sorry, Stel. That must have been horrible for you.”
“It’s alright. We move on and learn from what we’re given.”
Cat slipped a fresh gown over the old woman’s thin arms. Her withered breasts hung like two albino prunes. “What about your grandson? Did you ever try to find him?”
“Oh yes. Looked all over Arkansas for his mama’s family, but never found anybody willing to admit they knew where she and the boy were. Those backwoods people stick together like tar and feathers.”
“What if he could be found? Would you want to see him now?”
Stella smiled. “Oh, honey, I don’t expect he would even know who I was. For all I know he could be—”
“But what if he was found? Would you want to see him?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Cat noticed Alan standing in the doorway of Professor Dean’s room. Above the door, the nurse call light flashed in an eighty beat-per-minute rhythm, indicating that it had been on for longer than ten minutes.
Alan shook his head and walked toward the nursing station. Professor Dean, his eyes closed and headphones in place, continued speaking to the empty doorway.
Stella shifted on the wheelchair. “I haven’t thought about it for years. I wouldn’t know what to say to the boy. I wouldn’t think there’d be any point to it now. Maybe before, when I could’ve helped with his schooling, but it’s too late for that.”
Professor Dean realized he was talking to himself and stopped.
Cat guessed from the way he struggled to pull himself all the way to the edge of the bed, that he needed to be cleaned and turned.
“I wouldn’t be so sure it’s too late,” she said. “Maybe he has kids who need a great-grandma.”
“I don’t know, dear. I guess I’d have to spend some time thinking about it.”
Stella scolded herself for lying. She’d dreamed of being surrounded by her own kin, but only when she felt strong enough to deal with the sadness that followed.
Across the hall, Professor Dean again searched for his call light.
“I gotta go, Stel. Push your call light if you need something, okay?”
“Okey doke,” Stella said, watching the redhead run from the room. Always in a hurry, she thought. The whole damned world was in a hurry. She figured it would be like that until the end of time, except just what in the hell was it they were hurrying for?
* * *
Cat pulled Professor Dean to the side of the bed farthest from the puddle of liquid stool and washed the infected and sloughing skin of his buttocks.
He clicked off the cassette player and removed one earphone. “I’m sorry. I told the nurse. He must not…have understood what…was needed.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She exchanged a soiled washcloth for a clean one. “It wasn’t your fault. It was the fault of the nurse who ignored your request for the bedpan. I’ll speak with him and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“No. Please. Don’t want…anyone put out.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d been put into a situation involving an errant nurse and a patient who wanted to keep peace, even at the expense of his own comfort and well being.
But because it was Alan, and because it had happened so many times before, she would not let it slide.
“Let me ask you this, professor: if another professor was screwing up, and you knew it was harming his students, and that it was something he did consistently, what would you do?”
“But this was…such a…small thing.”
“Perhaps, but it isn’t the first small thing.”
He nodded. “Oh. I see.”
She continued to scrub him, her anger building until she was clenching her teeth.
It wasn’t until she’d finished bathing him that she finally noticed that most of the balloons had dropped another few inches from the ceiling.
* * *
Alan was simultaneously charting and biting his nails when Cat approached the nursing station. “What's the matter, Alan, afraid of balloons or of straining yourself turning a ninety-pound man? Or maybe it's getting your rubber gloves soiled that bothers you.”
Alan gave her an icy stare. “I beg your pardon?”
“Professor Dean asked you for the bedpan and you just walked away from him. I'd like to know why.”
The nurse closed the chart and rose to leave, his indifference reflected in his tone. “I don't know what you're talking about. Do you?”
She blocked his way before he could pass. He was eye level with her breasts. She consciously fought a long-held desire to pick him up by the shirtfront and hang him on any available hook. “Unfortunately, my little cockalorum, I do know what I'm talking about.”
He sneered and tried to dart around her but she blocked him again.
“You had better let me pass or I'll…”
“You’ll what? Scream?” For a split second she was ashamed of herself for bullying him, but then remembered the heartless way he'd treated Professor Dean, and rallied. “Explain why you ignored Professor Dean's request for a bedpan.”
“I didn't have time. I was going to get someone else to do it, but forgot. Get out of my way.”
“I think you intentionally left the man in distress. You aren’t—?” She left the question in the air, with the sudden realization that Alan consistently refused AIDS patients. “Are you—? Shit, don’t tell me you’re afraid of caring for AIDS patients?”
“You're harassing me,” Alan whined. “Let me go.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “What the hell? From a teenage boy, I expect this. From an uneducated person off the street, I expect this. From a nurse who is fully trained on how to protect himself from any communicable disease, this attitude isn’t acceptable. I’m appalled and embarrassed for you.”
“I have the right to refuse any patient I don't want to care for,” he sneered. “I don't like taking care of those people. If you want to risk it for the sake of showing what an altruistic humanist you are, great, go ahead! Personally, I'd rather be thought of as an uncaring asshole and live until I'm ninety than be dead in five years because I got splashed or stuck while I was being the perfect nurse.”
She sighed. Alan’s narrow point of view would not be changed by anything she had to say. She'd already learned that people in that bigoted, self-righteous frame of mind were unreachable.
“As flawed as it may be, I appreciate your honesty,” she said evenly, “but the next time a similar situation comes up, don't make someone suffer because you've made a moral judgment. If you do, and I find out about it, you’ll answer for it.”
Behind her, someone cleared her throat.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw Jo Atwood, the assistant director of nursing administration, standing stiffly at attention. She flinched and nodded in acknowledgment. When she turned back, Alan was nowhere to be seen.
“I need to talk with you, Catalina,” the administrator said with an air of gravity. “Think you can take a minute from hassling the other staff?”
With her healthy, country-girl looks, Jo Atwood was an attractive woman, though it seemed to Cat that she had taken pains to hide the fact under carelessly applied makeup and a shapeless military-inspired dress. An unnecessary headband made crush marks in her short cropped hair.
Cat slumped. What had the administration found to ride her about now? Was it one of the people in the elevator? Had some SPCA activist complained about a tall redhead babbling about hurting ducks?
Walking toward the conference room, she recalled that after her last disastrous love affair, she’d asked Jo for a leave of absence in order to pull herself together.
“How could such a magnificent woman let herself be taken in by such a jerk?” Jo had asked, as if it were a personal affront.
When she began to cry, Jo slipped a reassuring arm about her shoulders. “Most men's egos can't handle strong women like yourself, Cat. It’s his loss. He must be blind not to see how lovely you are.”
She’d taken comfort from the woman's light stroking of her head until she felt the woman’s hands caressing her neck and shoulders. She pulled away, but before she could bolt, Jo was kissing her.
Cat had never questioned her own sexuality, and, although she believed women were generally more advanced than men on an emotional and spiritual level, it had always been men who held her sexual fascination. Straight or gay, she considered all women her sisters. And, she wasn’t embarrassed to admit that she appreciated looking at a pretty woman as much as the next guy—but bedding one wasn’t in her nature.
Knowing that the conference room would be empty, Cat did an about-face. “Maybe we should talk in the kitchen instead. I could use a cup of tea.”
Jo caught her by the arm and ushered her inside the conference room. “I don't want to be interrupted. You can drink tea on your break.”
Cat sought out an isolated corner chair while Jo circled the conference table, arms folded across her chest. She wasted no time getting to the point. “You've been written up for insubordination again, Catalina.”
Cat sighed. A week didn't go by without her being written up for sticking her neck out for one reason or another. Other than a few matters of temper, the offenses were almost exclusively political. “For what minor infraction am I to have my hands slapped this week?”
“Miss Hurley was right behind you in the parking lot yesterday morning when she witnessed you making an offensive gesture at one of our esteemed physicians. You should be more careful about flipping someone off, especially when you’re right outside the director of nurses’ window.”
“How ridiculous.” Cat stood to leave. “It’s a minor offense—add it to the pile.”
“This time, I'm afraid it is a big deal. This is your sixth probation inside a twelve-month period, and that's cause for immediate dismissal without recommendation.”
“Don't make me laugh. I'm senior staff. Administration wouldn't dare fire one of their best nurses, let alone in the middle of a nursing shortage. Plus, they know me well enough to know I’d bring them to court in two seconds.”
“You’d lose on all counts. You may be a senior staff nurse, but you’re a troublemaker. Nursing shortage or no nursing shortage, the hospital is letting nurses go left and right and replacing them with lower cost help. Have you noticed how many new grads and imported nurses are on staff these days? You're premium salary around here, and they'd love to unload you.
“Last but not least, the administration has enough paperwork on you to convince any judge to not only fire you, but prevent you from practicing nursing for the rest of your life.”
Jo rested a hand on her arm. “They're serious this time, Catalina. You keep bucking the system, and they don't like that. They don’t want you spoiling the rest of the apples in the barrel.”
“You mean the rest of the sheep in the flock, don't you?” Cat drew her arm away from Jo's hand. “This is absolute bullshit and you know it, Jo.
Jo spoke in just above a whisper. “I do know, which is why I’ve come up with a plan. I’m thinking I could misplace a few of the more recent reports. Not a lot, but enough to keep you out of administration's way for a while.”
“Why would you do that? I mean, I know that you're mostly in the nurses’ corner, but the fact remains that you’re part of the management machine.”
“Between us,” Jo said, her face suddenly flushed with color, “I admit my reasons are personal.
“I was a nurse on the wards for eight years before I took this job, so I know what it's like out there. I also know that a lot of the nurses count on you to speak up for them. You’re a fighter and I admire you more than you know.
“I care for you, Catalina. You turned me away once, but I’m hoping you might reconsider and give me a chance.”
Her eyes steady on the carpet, Cat felt her stomach churn at the prospect of facing the hopeful look in Jo's eyes. She’d never been very good at rejecting or disappointing people—it was all part of the nurse’s curse.
“Listen, Jo, I like you. You’re a great nurse and I appreciate the fact that you’ve always played fair with me, but as I’ve told you before, I don’t—”
Jo took her hand and kissed it. “Please, Catalina, give me a chance. We’d be great together. I’d treat you like a queen. I know you’d be happy.”
Cat moved toward the door knowing she should make herself perfectly clear and just say ‘No!’, but she didn’t. Cowardly and world-class wimp that she was, she couldn’t bring herself to disappoint the woman. Her best strategy at the moment would be to discuss the situation frankly, like an adult. If that failed, she supposed she could just run out the door.
Cat breathed a sigh of relief as her heel touched the door.
Jo put a restraining hand on her arm. “Cat, let me show you how much I—”
Nora slammed into the room at the same time an announcement came over the paging system.
Attention all personnel, code blue Ward Two.
Nora took one look at the two women and instantly sized up the situation. Grabbing Cat by the hand, she pulled her out the door, shouting as they went, “Sorry, Jo. Gotta run.”
Side by side, the two friends sprinted a couple of yards behind the code cart. “You get the mouth, I get the chest,” Cat said, laughing.
Nora flashed her a disgusted side glance. “You know, for someone who purports to have a simple, sedate existence, I have a feeling a documentary of your life would give the first thirteen minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark a run for its money at the box office.”