The Inquisitor (7 page)

Jane shook her head and took a swig of beer. She also felt an overwhelming urge to unload her secret to a sympathetic ear. She'd once carried her feelings for Thomas effortlessly, but they'd become all too heavy lately, the price of bearing them in private. It left her isolated and lonely, and she didn't like that. Maybe the time to talk was here. "How'd you know?"

"Just by watching. There's something different between the two of you when you dance. I didn't see it before last Christmas, but since…" She grinned with a shrug.

"See what?"

"You're more relaxed."

"And him?"

Susanne shrugged again. "Hard to tell. He's already so loosey-goosey with that hillbilly facade he puts on."

Jane laughed, then felt depressed again. She peered through the gaps between nearby buildings and glimpsed the blue sparkle of Lake Erie. A line of dark clouds floated across the horizon, their tops swollen into great round caps like a patch of mushrooms. The sight reminded her of the prairie skyline and carefree days back home in North Dakota.

"He seems like a good guy, though," Susanne added. "I can see why you like him."

The confirmation of her own instincts picked Jane up a little. She trusted Susanne's judgment and especially liked her ability to share insights without appearing to give advice. That bond had been established early, within days of her arrival in ER.

Despite her decision not to date anyone, Jane had started to let her guard down with the guys in the department, hoping to fit in. Nothing serious, just played along with their lighthearted chatter and teasing in the way she would have with her buds back at Grand Forks. But then came the comments laced with sexual innuendos.

At first she'd taken offense. That kind of talk angered her. As early as high school she'd had to endure the "nice T and A" comments the boys whispered behind her back but loud enough for her to hear. It drove her to start dressing tough, all the while feeling far from it inside. Even now, being what her mother called "amply endowed," whenever she wore a swimsuit the old self-consciousness about her body remained. So when the males in ER cracked that J.S. had better not go near old men with pacemakers, she might have grinned good-naturedly, but the joke set her cheeks on fire.

"They're assholes," Susanne had told her in the nurses' lounge after the first incident. "Not one of them would know what to do with a gorgeous woman like you, and that's your weapon. Zing their kind right back, and they fold."

The next time some wit resorted to that same refrain, Jane had run her fingernail down the front of his lab coat, unhooking the buttons as she went, and looked him scornfully in the crotch. "No danger letting you near the female patients, with or without pacemakers."

He'd turned tomato red.

The others had oohed and laughed.

But she'd felt elevated a notch in how the males treated her after that.

And Susanne had become a combination older sister and aunt who watched over her without ever seeming to interfere.

"He says he doesn't want to do anything more about us right now," Jane found herself admitting to her. "That he couldn't stand the busybodies picking our lives apart."

"They won't if you don't let them," Susanne said.

"And how do I manage that?"

Susanne smiled and shook her head. "I suppose the same way you already have, silly- by continuing to keep your mouth shut. It's worked."

"But you knew."

"I'm different. What I picked up on had to do with seeing a kindred spirit, you might say. No one else is likely to find out."

Jane again wondered if Father Jimmy might not suspect the truth. "Yeah, right."

"Ask yourself why you know so much about who the people in this department are sleeping with," Susanne said.

Jane shrugged. "I don't know. Word gets around."

"Because most people, when they become lonely or down enough, brag about whom they love as a way to raise their confidence. I guess it somehow makes their being loved back feel more real. So far, honey, you've resisted that urge. As a result, you fall off everyone else's radar as soon as you walk out of here."

Susanne ought to know, Jane thought. Hardly anyone in the department ever gossiped about her private life. Oh, a few might have guessed at the possibilities of whom she might be with, but they didn't get far, there being no rumors to feed the mill. She wore no wedding ring, never discussed anything personal, and when sAewent out the door of ER, it might as well be into a black hole.

"So it beats me why he'd still be worried about gossip this stage of the game," Susanne continued. "You've both proven you can put up a good enough front to keep your business private. What's to stop the two of you from making plans for after next year?"

Hearing someone else articulate what she'd been telling herself, Jane felt something release deep inside her. Susanne, as usual, hadn't advised her what to do, but rather nudged her to see for herself what ought to be done. Not that she didn't already know. Anyone with half a brain could see that the time had come to press Thomas for the real reason he'd been stalling about their future. What held her back had to do with her fear of the truth and the practical prairie philosophy she'd learned from her mother: never ask questions when the answers might make you more miserable.

"You what?"

"I had to, Jimmy. Wyatt would have tried to kick you out of the hospital."

The priest jumped up from the visitor's chair in Earl's cramped ER office and started to pace. "But to have him lead a hospital audit on pain? That's as stupid as… as… as if you put bin Laden in charge of human rights at the UN."

"Or you telling the prickly fart how to practice medicine. Why'd you pull a boneheaded play like that?"

Jimmy froze and gave Earl a withering look. "Because I won't sit at any more bedsides and try to give spiritual comfort to poor wretches who die screaming."

"You're exaggerating-"

"Goddamn it, Earl, wake up. You see something that atrocious in ER, and you'd move in with morphine, ketamine, fentanyl- whatever it takes. I can't do that. For me it's beg the nurses, who ask the residents, who don't prescribe enough, then beg them to get their staff supervisor. Even then a third of them won't budge from the guidelines, but I beg them as well anyway, and all the time the screeching goes on. I tell you, there ought to be a court for medical atrocities, just like there is for atrocities of war, and this kind of torture by omission should be made a crime…" He seemed to run out of breath and simply stood there, panting as heavily as if he'd just completed one of his runs.

Earl sat stunned. He knew that crap happened, as hideously as described, and he condemned it whenever he could, but he'd never before seen it from so stark a point of view. At first he didn't know what to say. Finally he asked, "It's really getting to you?"

Jimmy nodded. "Sometimes." His eyes focused on something Earl couldn't see.

Judging from the pain reflected in the priest's gaze, Earl didn't want to see it. "You still could have come to me, Jimmy," he said softly. "Brought me patients' names and chart numbers. That's the kind of documentation that would have nailed Wyatt and others like him."

"Yeah, right. Case by case, committee by committee- it takes forever that way."

Earl exhaled long and hard. "But keep at it enough, and even the thickest-skulled dinosaurs change their ways in the end."

"Then why didn't you do it?"

"Me?"

"Yeah. You're a physician. Nothing stopped you from stepping up with charts and patient names these last twenty-five years."

Earl bristled. "Nobody dies like that in my department. Certainly not since I've been chief."

Jimmy's eyes narrowed into a hard, unjoking glare. "And that's the trouble with you, Earl. You hide in ER."

"Hide?"

"Yes, hide. It's a domain as black and white as any in the hospital. The sicker the patients, the easier your job. Stabilize 'em, medicate 'em, and ship 'em upstairs. Don't get me wrong, you're great at it- decisive, skilled, and courageous. But one of the reasons the job suits you isn't so noble. The patients don't hang around, and you like it that way. The ones who don't make it, you can honestly tell yourself they died while you were trying everything possible. The ones who do, their pain, fear, and despair are muted by shock or postponed by drugs. The long and short of it all is that you get to keep your losses more cut-and-dried. No having to deal with the long, messy aftermath that survival involves."

"Whoa. Now wait a minute, Jimmy. I find out how people did after they left ER. Their doctors tell me-"

"I'm not talking about the clinical results or satisfying your medical curiosity."

"Jesus, Jimmy, what the hell's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter is, you can't be VP, medical and bury yourself in a mentality that has a fix for everything."

Earl leapt to his feet. "That's not fair!"

"What's fair got to do with it? You want to face a patient's lingering, share in his or her long-term agony, witness their slow settling for a fraction of a former life, then watch your successes as they piece together what they lost from the heart attack or stroke or car accident that derailed them."

"Damn it, Jimmy, how dare you-"

"Why, in all the years I've been here, I never once saw you up on the floors visiting with any of the people you saved."

Earl felt he'd been gut-punched.

He stood behind his desk as a tiny prickle of sweat dampened the back of his shirt despite the chill of cold air pouring over his head from a ventilation duct in the ceiling.

The black of Jimmy's eyes increased its hold on him. "If you'd had any inkling at all for that part of the game, Earl, now and then I would have found you on the wards where it plays itself out. And maybe, just maybe, when you came across wretched souls with barely days left to live, bellowing like wounded beasts, you might have acquired the same compassion for them that you found for the likes of Artie Baxter when you made sure he didn't suffer in ER."

With that, the priest released him from the tractor-beam grip of his stare, quietly opened the door, and disappeared into the darkened corridor.

The head nurse slid her glasses to the tip of her nose, peered at him, then let them drop on their silver chain. "Dr. Garnet! We don't usually see you up here."

"Here" referred to the Palliative Care Unit, or "terminus," as some of the more callous residents called it.

"Then it's about time," he answered, straining to read the woman's name tag. "Mrs. Yablonsky, would you be so kind as to grab the chart cart and accompany me as I see the patients?"

Crinkles at the corners of her eyes lessened. "See the patients?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"Yep."

"Now?"

He nodded.

"But why?"

"I want to check their pain medication."

The visible portion of her face corrugated itself into a frown. "You mean without their doctors knowing?"

Jesus, he'd be here all night answering her questions. "We're going to be doing an audit on pain management throughout the whole hospital. Dr. Wyatt himself will be chairing it. I thought I'd get a head start."

The far smoother foreheads of two younger nurses who had approached from behind her scrunched up in amazement.

"Dr. Wyatt knows about this?" the supervisor asked.

Earl smiled in response.

"Well, it's most peculiar…" She pushed herself out of a swivel seat, surprising him with her height. With eyes nearly at the same level as his, she also possessed the big shoulders and sculpted build of someone who swam laps across Lake Erie.

While he waited for her to prepare the charts his gaze drifted along the polished, barren corridor, and he shuddered at the thought of being stuck here to die. Just park him under a tree with a nice view and a bottle of whisky when his time came.

He'd never admitted it to anyone, but deep down he hated hospitals, felt claustrophobic in them. As a patient, he'd loathe every part of surrendering to any regime that a place like St. Paul's would impose on him, especially with his butt hanging out the back of a tie-up gown.

Through windows at the far end of the unit he watched the sun as it slipped behind a column of thunderheads that had been piling up over the lake. Immediately the passageway darkened, and everything became cast in a thin yellow light. Low rumbles sounded outside, and a crackle of static interrupted the quiet music from a radio on the work counter.

"Storm's coming," said one of the younger nurses, reaching up and snapping the off button.

Only then did he hear the weak moans and wailing. Mere wisps of sound that floated out from the semidarkness of the hallway, they were the kind of noises that, once gotten used to, could easily be ignored- with the help of a radio. "Are they always crying like that?"

"Oh, this is nothing," Yablonsky said. "Sometimes they get to screaming so loud you can't hear yourself think." Oblivious to her own callousness, she never paused in pulling out charts and placing them on a pushcart.

A twist of anger turned his stomach.

In the first room they stopped in, he found an old man curled in bed, as withered and emaciated as a mummy. His skin had yellowed with jaundice, and, either comatose or sleeping soundly, he didn't respond when Yablonsky called his name or slipped the mask that had fallen off his face back into place. Earl let him be.

Next door to him lay an elderly lady in similar shape.

In the third room, a gaunt, gray-faced woman with the wisps of her remaining hair combed neatly into place sat in a chair and stared out at the approaching rain clouds. Her upper face brightened as soon as she saw him. "How nice, a new doctor."

A glance at her chart before coming in revealed her name to be Sadie Locke and that she had metastatic cancer of the breast that neither chemotherapy nor radiation could halt. As he stepped up to shake her hand and introduce himself, the sleeve of her housecoat slipped up her arm to reveal a swarm of florid red blotches where the tumor had seeded itself to her skin, and a sniff of decay floated down the back of his nose.