Orphan #8 (31 page)

Rachel inhaled, as if stricken.

“Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry.” He stooped to retrieve it. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

She took the hat from him, held it on her lap. She sensed the glare of electric light on her smooth scalp. She lifted her chin and tried to hold Sam’s gaze, but he turned his attention to the floor. She recalled the way Sam’s eyes had slid away from her face, that first day in Reception, when she mistook Vic for her brother. All these years, she’d thought it was guilt that turned his head. Now she saw the truth—that he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

“You go ahead, Sam. I’ll stay here. Maybe I’ll go find Papa myself. Or maybe I’ll end up marrying Uncle Max after all.” To hurt him back, she said, “It couldn’t be worse than Marc Grossman.”

Blood rose into Sam’s cheeks, mottling his skin. “It won’t come to that, Rachel. I promise.”

The word was such a lie, Rachel switched off the light so she wouldn’t have to see her brother’s face.

If Rachel ever slept, she didn’t know it. She listened to Sam in the night, pilfering supplies from the shelves in the store. Knowing the inventory by heart, she could guess from the location and
quality of the sound what he was taking: duffle, blanket, canteen, knife. He’d be gone by morning, of that she was sure. She turned over on her cot, covering her ears with the blanket. She heard a muffled jingle sometime before dawn.

In the morning, Rachel felt strangely numb as she adjusted the inventory ledger to cover her brother’s theft. She wandered silently through the building, picking up a piece of ribbon that had fallen from Sadie’s dress, peeking into Max’s dusty bedroom. For a while, Rachel couldn’t account for the novelty of it. Then she realized—she had never before in her life had a place entirely to herself. Sitting at the kitchen table, she read again her father’s letter, then spread out what was left of Naomi’s stolen money. It might be enough for a coach ticket to Sacramento, but she’d be arriving with nothing in her pockets to find a man she hadn’t seen in a dozen years. A man who was sick and needed money himself. A man who had left his children behind.

Rachel looked through to the store. She liked working there, talking with customers and organizing the goods. She even liked Max, just not for a husband. Maybe she would stay on awhile longer. Then she thought of Max’s tongue sliding across her teeth, his hands on her waist every time she climbed a ladder. He might say he’d wait until she was sixteen, but alone in the store, she wasn’t sure his word could be trusted.

In the quiet kitchen, Rachel realized she was homesick. Not for her brother and the father she could hardly remember, but for the dorms and dining hall and play yard of the Castle. She missed Nurse Dreyer. She missed Naomi. The money on the table, the braid in her case: they were a wall between her and the place that had been her home. She dropped her head onto her arms. Even
if she wanted to, she couldn’t go back. She would have to choose between her brother’s promises, her uncle’s proposal, or the uncertain prospect of her father.

She heard the whine of an engine. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she looked out the window and recognized Mr. Lesser’s truck. Of course, it was Sunday. Max hadn’t left an order, though. Mr. Lesser knocked on the kitchen door. Rachel tucked the money and her father’s letter in her pocket, then went to let him in. She could at least offer him lunch until Max returned. He’d come so far.

All the way from Denver.

Chapter Sixteen

N
IGHT SHIFT PROVED TO BE AS EASY AS
F
LO
promised—I could see why she preferred it. Just one other night nurse came on Fifth. Lucia and I knew each other from shift changes, and we chatted easily about the patients until she settled herself behind the nurses’ station with an elaborate piece of crocheting, a christening dress for her granddaughter, she said. Gloria signed off on all the night’s doses and locked up the medication room before clocking out. The doctors were good about prescribing sedatives for those patients whose opiates didn’t already guarantee us a quiet night. Aside from dispensing meds and checking beds, we didn’t expect to have much to do until dawn.

Just as I finished organizing my cart for eight o’clock rounds, the storm Flo predicted finally broke. The sky flickered like a neon sign advertising thunderclaps. Wind burst through open windows, sweeping rain over sills and slamming doors. Thunder boomed above our heads. Light fixtures rattled. Bulbs dimmed and recovered. Someone screamed.

Lucia and I rushed to close windows in the patients’ rooms. We ran into each other in the hallway, trailed by our wet footprints.
“Mr. Bogan fell getting out of bed,” Lucia panted. “Will you help me with him?”

“Let me just call down for a janitor first.” I did, then together we got Mr. Bogan up. Tangled in his sheets, he’d drifted over the side of the bed, sinking gradually to the floor.

“Thank God you didn’t break a hip, Mr. Bogan,” Lucia said as we settled him back on the mattress.

“I’m sorry, I had to use the toilet. I duh-duh-didn’t mean to cah-cah-cah-cah-cah-cause any trouble.”

Lucia saw that he had soiled himself. “You’re no trouble, dear. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I can manage here if you want to check on the others.”

I dashed into the next room. Already the floor was puddled with rain. Working my way down the hall, I closed windows, calmed agitated patients, straightened sheets, promised to return with medications. A Negro janitor arrived, steering his wheeled bucket with the long mop handle. He followed me down the hall, drying the floor in each room as I left it.

In Mildred Solomon’s room, the old woman’s moans mixed with booms of thunder like the soundtrack of a horror movie. At four o’clock rounds, I’d only administered half the prescribed dose and by now it was wearing off. I noticed the bedsheets had gotten wet from the rain driven through the window. I’d have to change them, and probably the nightgown and diaper, too. The thought made me shudder. But now that all the windows were closed, I’d have to get the meds out first. Coming through the doorway, I nearly collided with the janitor.

“I’ll start back down the other end of the hall after this room,” he said.

“Thank you so much.” He was a young, gentle-seeming man. I wished I knew his name, but I so rarely worked nights, we’d never met.

I think he read my expression because he said, “My name’s Horace.”

“Thank you, Horace.”

“You’re welcome, Nurse . . . ?”

“Rabinowitz.”

“You’re welcome, Nurse Rabinowitz.” Horace placed the mop in the bucket and began rolling it through the doorway as I stepped past him. He stopped, his eyes following me.

“Is there something else, Horace?”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Nurse Rabinowitz, and I don’t mean anything by it, but I can’t help remarking on your hair. I’m in art school, you see, days, and I don’t know as I’ve ever seen that particular shade of red.”

Mildred Solomon’s moans were seeping into the hallway. “I’m sorry, I have to go get the medications.” I turned away from Horace as he entered the room.

The chaos of the storm had unnerved me; I knocked the cart against the nurses’ station, jumbling the cups of pills and rolling the syringes. My hands shook as I reorganized the medications. Brushing hair out of my eyes, I surveyed the cart to make sure nothing was missing. I looked up and saw Horace coming down the hall. Having finished mopping out the last of the rooms on Fifth, he was steering his bucket toward the freight elevator. Impulsively, I pulled open a drawer and took out a pair of scissors.

I left the cart and walked quickly, unpinning my hair as I went. A thick lock unrolled down my neck like a lizard’s tongue. I lifted
the hair away from the nape of my neck, pulling it taut. With the scissor held just above my ear, I placed the hair between its blades and cut. The shearing sound reminded me of the first time I cut this hair, how the scissors chewed through the braid in greedy bites.

I coiled the hair in my palm. “Horace, wait.”

He stopped, the rolling bucket stilled so suddenly water sloshed out.

“Here.” I held out my hand. He took what I offered. The red strands crackled and curled around his brown fingers.

“I don’t quite know what to say, Nurse Rabinowitz.”

“It’s for your art studies. Don’t worry,” I said, stepping back, “it’s not really mine.”

Horace tucked my strange gift into the chest pocket of his coveralls. I retrieved the cart and pushed it into a patient’s room. The thunder grew distant as the summer storm rolled out to sea.

T
HE STORM HAD
disturbed the routines of night shift. It was after nine before all of the patients were dry and settled and medicated—all except one.

“I’ll take this in for Dr. Solomon,” I said to Lucia. “I expect to stay for a while. She’s near the end, I think.”

“That’s kind of you. You know, no one else calls her Doctor. But you knew her, didn’t you? Gloria told me she treated you when you were little. Were you sick?”

I suppressed an urge to blurt out the truth. Instead, I simply nodded. “It was a long time ago.”

Lucia suggested I go ahead and spend the night sitting beside the dying woman. “Take her midnight dose with you, too. I’ll do
the rest of that round myself. It’s mostly bed checks at that hour, anyway. If you want to be with her, I mean.”

“I do, thanks.” I picked up another syringe and marked the chart, writing down a time that hadn’t happened yet. Lucia settled back with her crocheting as I walked to Dr. Solomon’s room. My hand curled around the vial of unused morphine in my pocket. I hoped it wasn’t too full for what I’d be holding back, though I supposed I could just rinse the extra down the sink. I wondered why I hadn’t done that from the beginning. What did I think I was saving it for?

In Dr. Solomon’s room, I closed the door and sat by the bed. I’d neglected her since the storm. Covered with only the wet sheet, she was curled on her side, whimpering. I examined the old woman, trying to gauge the extent of her pain from how her jaw moved as she ground her teeth, the way her eyeballs rolled under the closed lids. She needed a dose badly, but first I had to clean her up and change the linens.

I rolled the sheets toward Dr. Solomon’s spine. Leaning over, I slipped my forearms under her neck and knees and hugged the body toward me, exposing the other side of the bed. I removed the damp sheets, tucked in dry ones, then pulled off her nightgown and removed the soiled diaper. Naked, Dr. Solomon looked like a shriveled chick fallen from a nest. Violent thoughts crowded my mind as I cleaned and dressed her, but my hands moved with practiced gentleness.

“That’s better,” she muttered, making herself comfortable in the clean sheets. “What took you so long?”

It startled me, hearing her speak when she’d just been so limp in my arms. She must have been pretending, waiting until I was
done caring for her body to reveal her mind was alert. “The storm kept us busy, but I’m here now. You remember who I am?”

“Why do you keep asking me these silly things? I told you, I’m not senile. It’s just that damn morphine. He prescribes too much.” She licked her lips. “You have some for me, don’t you?”

“I have your dose, but we have to talk first.” I was determined to get through to her this time. I would wrench from her the words I deserved to hear:
I was wrong, I’m so sorry, please forgive me
.

“About the X-rays again? That was so long ago. Why don’t you ask me about something else?” She squared her shoulders, extended her neck. “I ran my department, did you know that? I was the first woman in the city to be head of radiology. Not at a teaching hospital, no, I didn’t publish enough for that. So many surgeons wanted me to read their X-rays I never had enough time to conduct another study. The years, they slip away. One day I looked up and three decades had gone by. I wasn’t planning on retirement—can you see me wasting my time around a mahjong table? The cancer is what drove me out. I’m only sixty years old. My career should have lasted ten more years at least. Get me some water.”

She was infuriating, complaining about cancer at sixty when here I was, twenty years younger, about to be butchered because of her. I held the glass of water to her lips while she sipped, my fingers so tense I could have broken the glass. I welcomed the anger, counted on it to fuel me through the night, justify whatever I had to do to get my apology. Once I told Mildred Solomon about Dr. Feldman’s plans for me, she’d have to think about someone other than herself for once. She’d have to give me what I was owed.

“Did you bring my pudding?”

“What?”

“My chocolate pudding. I told that other nurse to tell you I wanted chocolate pudding. Did she?”

I’d forgotten, and anyway, I wasn’t in the business of doing her bidding. “Never mind about the pudding. I want to talk to you.”

“Then I’ll get my dose, right? Well, I can bargain, too, you know. You can torture me all you want, but I won’t talk unless I get my pudding. Even a convict gets a last meal.” She crossed her arms, though I could see their weight against her ribs was painful. She set her mouth in a hard line and looked away, all the determination and tenacity she’d used to make her way in a man’s world brought to bear on this ridiculous request.

“It’s too late now, the kitchens are closed.” She turned her head, her chin quivering from the effort. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll go see what I can do.”

In the cafeteria, I caught the last kitchen worker as she was setting out a platter of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper for the night staff. She led me back into the kitchens. In one of the refrigerators, there was a shelf of leftover pudding bowls covered in Saran Wrap. I took the fullest one, intent on depriving Dr. Solomon of any more excuses. She might be dead before I came back to work after three days off, one last shift before my surgery. This needed to happen tonight.

“I’ve been dreaming of this.” She spooned the pudding into her mouth in maddeningly tiny portions, smacking her lips after each taste. My arm grew tired of holding the bowl beneath her chin. Between spoonfuls, I rested the bowl on her lap, my hand cupped beneath it. Through the back of my hand I felt a spasm as pain radiated from her bones.