The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [47]
The nurses’ station was quiet—deserted except for David and a ward secretary who was painfully trying not to notice him. Eyes closed, he sat, rubbing his temples, struggling to sort out the unpleasant emotions swirling within him. Confusion? Sure, that was understandable. Depression? A little, perhaps. He had just lost a patient. Loneliness? Dammit, he wished Lauren were home.
But there was something else. It was hazy and diffuse. Difficult to focus on. But there was something, some other feeling. Several minutes passed before David began to understand. Underlying all his reactions, all his emotions, was a vague nebula of fear. Trembling for reasons that were not at all clear to him, he dialed Lauren’s number, hanging up only after the tenth ring. Even though he had unfinished business in the hospital, he felt the urgent need to get out. He would call Hadawi from home, he decided.
* * *
Christine leaned against a doorway and watched David leave. She had no qualms about the rightness of what she had done, but his discouragement was painful for her.
Later, she excused herself from shift report and walked down the deserted corridor to the pay phone. The number she dialed was different from the one she had used the previous day. God, had it only been a day? No voice answered this time only a click and a tone.
“This is Christine Beall of Boston Doctors Hospital,” she said in a measured monotone. “In the name of compassionate medical care and on instructions of The Sisterhood of Life, I have, on October second, helped to end the hopeless pain and suffering of Mrs. Charlotte Thomas with an intravenous injection of morphine sulfate. The prolongation of unnecessary human suffering is to be despised and to be terminated wherever possible. The dignity of human life and human death are to be preserved at all costs. End of report.”
She hung up, then on an irrepressible impulse picked up the receiver and dialed Jerry Crosswaite’s number. With the sound of his voice, the impulse vanished.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello … Hello?”
Christine gently set the receiver back.
In the shadows at the far end of the hall, Janet Poulos observed Christine as she left report and made the call that Janet felt certain was her case report on Charlotte Thomas.
“Sound her out about The Garden,” Dahlia had urged. “Be careful what you say, but sound her out.”
Janet countered with her belief that Beall was far too new in The Sisterhood to be ready for The Garden, but Dahlia insisted.
“Just remember,” she said, “what would have happened to you three years ago had I decided you weren’t ready. As I recall, you were thinking about taking your own life before I phoned.”
In fact, Janet had passed beyond the thinking stage. At the moment of Dahlia’s call she had more than a hundred sleeping pills laid out on her bedspread. Self-loathing and a profound sense of impotence had pushed her to the brink of suicide.
For years she had lived on hatred—hatred toward physicians in general and one in particular. She had joined The Sisterhood to use the organization in order to put certain M.D.’s in their place. Where necessary, she had even manufactured data on patients to get the Regional Screening Committee’s approval and recommendations.
However, after six years and nearly two dozen cases, what little sustenance she had gained from such activities had disappeared.
Then, with a single phone call, everything had changed. Somehow, Dahlia knew about the falsified laboratory and X-ray reports, about Janet’s hatred for physicians and their power, about many intimate details of her life. She knew, but she didn’t care.
In the course of the year after she joined The Garden Janet was brought along slowly. Every few weeks Dahlia would transmit the name of a patient in the northeast who had been approved by The Sisterhood for euthanasia. Janet would arrange a meeting with the distraught family of the patient and offer a merciful death for their loved one in exchange for a substantial payment. The contract, once made,