The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [9]
Lot C was one of three satellite parking areas appropriated by Doctors Hospital to meet the needs of an ever-expanding staff. Christine started toward the minibus stop, then decided she needed the time and the three blocks’ walk as a bridge between her outside world and the hospital. Up ahead, two other evening shift nurses waved her to join them, but after a few quick steps, she stopped and motioned them to go on. Pausing by the window of a secondhand furniture store, she studied her image in the dusty glass.
You look tired, she thought. Tired and worried and scared.
She was not a tall woman, barely five foot four. Her sandy hair was tied back in a ponytail that she would pin up beneath her nurse’s cap before starting work. Scattered freckles, still darkened by the summer sun, dotted the tops of both cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
“What are you going to do, kid?” she asked her reflection softly. “Are you really ready to start this whole thing in motion? Peg-whoever-she-is may be ready. Charlotte Thomas may be ready. But are you?” She pressed her lips together and stared at the sidewalk. Finally, with an indecisive shrug, she turned and headed down the block.
Boston Doctors Hospital was a massive glass and brick hydra with three tentacles probing north and west into Roxbury and another three south and east toward the downtown area. Over the one hundred and five years of its existence several wings had grown, decayed, and died, only to be replaced by larger and higher ones. Ongoing construction was as much a part of its being as the white uniforms scurrying in and out of its maw.
Never able to snare a benefactor generous enough to endow an entire building, the hospital’s trustees had adopted the unimaginative policy of identifying the tentacles by the direction of their thrust. The sliding doors through which Christine entered the main lobby were located between Southeast and South.
She glanced at the large gold clock set in a marble slab above the information desk. Two thirty. It would be another twenty or twenty-five minutes before the day shift on Four South would sign out to her three-to-eleven group.
Christine leaned against a stone column and surveyed the activity around her. Patients and visitors filled every available seat, while dozens more crowded around the information desk or weaved their way across from one wing to another. Scattered wheelchairs punctuated rows of molded plastic chairs. The scene, one she had viewed hundreds of times over the past five years, still filled her with fascination and awe. There were days, certain special days, when she actually felt a physical merging of her body with the fiber of the hospital. Days when she felt its pulse as surely as if it were her own. Slowly, she crossed the lobby and joined the flow heading down the main artery of the South wing.
Christine’s floor, Four South, like most of the other floors in the seven-story wing, housed a mixture of medical and surgical patients, each with a private doctor. A few residents, widely scattered throughout the hospital, served as emergency backup. On Four South, as on all other private floors in all other hospitals, nurses were the sole medical presence for most of each day.
Stepping off the elevator, Christine scanned the cor ridor, checking for an emergency “crash” cart or other equipment that might suggest trouble in one of the rooms. The floor seemed normally busy, but an instinct, developed over five years, whispered that something was wrong.
She was nearing the nurses’ station when the cries began—pitiful, piercing wails from the far end of the hall. Christine raced toward the sound. As she passed Room 412, she glanced in at Charlotte Thomas, who was sleeping, though restlessly, through the commotion.
The cries were coming from