The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [11]
The woman had anticipated Christine’s concern. “Please, Christine, just hear me out,” she said. “As is always the rule in our movement, you are under no obligation to do anything other than that which you believe in your heart to be right. I have known the woman about whom I am calling for many years. I feel certain that she would not want to survive the situation in which she now exists. She is in great pain and her condition, from what I have been able to learn, is without hope.”
At that moment Christine knew, without being told, whom she was being asked to evaluate. “It’s Charlotte, isn’t it?” she said. “Charlotte Thomas.”
“Yes, Christine, it is.”
“I … I’ve thought about her a great deal lately, especially with the agony she’s been going through these past few days.”
“Were you planning to report her case yourself?” the caller asked.
“Last night. I almost called her in last night. Something stopped me from doing it. I don’t know what it was. She is such a remarkable woman, I …” Christine’s voice trailed away.
“The path we have chosen to follow will never be an easy one,” the woman said. “Should it ever become easy, you will know that somehow you have lost your way.”
“I understand,” Christine said grimly. “My shift begins at three this afternoon. If it feels right to me then, I’ll call in her case report and let the Screening Committee decide.”
“That is as much as I could possibly ask or expect, Christine. Perhaps sometime in the future circumstances will allow us to meet. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” she said, but the woman had already hung up.
Before falling asleep the previous night, Christine had drawn up an ambitious list of projects for the day. Suddenly, with a single phone call, none of them mattered. She carried a pot of tea to the living room and sank into an easy chair, totally absorbed in thoughts of The Sisterhood of Life. Over the ten months following her initiation into the movement a new meaning and purpose had entered her life. Now she was being asked to test that purpose. With Charlotte’s life at stake, the test would not be easy.
Engrossed in thoughts of Charlotte Thomas and John Chapman, Christine wandered into the lounge to hang up her coat. Two of the day nurses had put aside the shift notes they were writing and were, instead, arguing about which of John Chapman’s medications had most likely caused his fatal reaction. Christine had no inclination to join in. She greeted them with a nod, then said, “I’m going to see Charlotte for a few minutes. Send someone to get me in four-twelve if I’m not back by the time report is ready to start. Okay?” The women waved her off and resumed their conversation.
It had been nearly two weeks since Charlotte Thomas’s surgery, two weeks during which Christine had walked into Room 412 dozens of times. In spite of the frequent visits, as she approached the door a strange image appeared in her mind. It was an image that came to her almost every time she was about to enter 412. Well, not exactly an image, Christine realized—more an expectation. It was quite vivid despite what she knew in the practical, professional part of her. Charlotte would be sitting in the vinyl chair next to her bed writing a letter. Her light brown hair would be piled carelessly on the back of her head, held in place by a floppy bow of pink yarn. The thin lines at the corners of her eyes and along the edge of her lips would crinkle upward in pleasure at the appearance of her “super-nurse.” She would look as healthy and radiant and alive at age sixty as she had probably looked at sixteen. A woman totally at peace with herself.
That was the way she had looked each day during her stay in August for diagnostic tests. The moment before she entered the room Christine imagined her voice, as clear and free as a forest brook, saying, “Ah, sweet Christine. My one-woman pep squad, come to bring some cheer to the sick ol’ lady …”
At the foot of the bed Christine stopped and closed her eyes, shaking her head