Ozark Nurse (11 page)

Shuddering, he thought of what had occurred today—a bullet fired by a madman. She might have been killed. If she had been, in a very real sense he would have been responsible. Wanting only to give her life, love, and happiness, he would have given her death.

Thinking of all these things, Paul reached his decision. Tomorrow morning, first thing, he would hand in his resignation at the hospital. Then he would talk with Nora and repeat what he had told her today—only this time he would make it final.

He would tell her: "I love you. But I'm a very mixed up and confused guy; maybe I'm a sick guy. I'm not sure of anything these days, except that love is all I have to offer. That isn't enough, not for you. You rate a man who can give you love, plus all the good things of life you deserve. You go find a guy like that, honey, while I try to find myself."

When he was ready for bed that night, Paul stood for a moment frowning at the phone. Then he lifted it and dialed.

"I want you to give a message to your father," he said when he heard Rita's soft, throaty "Hello."

"Tell him he can tear up that contract."

"Are you out of your mind?"

Sounding furious, she told him not to dare to hang up until he told her what this was all about. "If you're sore because I dared to criticize your girl friend—"

"I'm not sore at anybody," he said curtly, "unless it's myself. I've simply decided I'm not cut out to be a column writer or a ham actor on TV. Also, I prefer to call my soul my own."

"But what will you
do
?" She was determined to argue about it. "You said yourself you were washed up at the hospital."

Sounding even more curt, Paul said that his plans at the moment were vague, really of interest to no one but himself. Perhaps he would spend the next few months relaxing—with some sort of a job to keep him going, of course. He might apply for a job as lifeguard out at the lake for the summer.

"Lifeguard! You? The brilliant Doctor Anderson sitting up on a stool watching screaming brats trying to drown themselves?"

Then she said, all sweetness again: "It might be an idea, at that. I'll come out in my bikini. You can have fun saving me."

Sitting at the corridor desk outside of Surgery, Nora yawned, doodled on a sheet of scratch paper, and wondered how long it would be before these blissful moments of quiet would be interrupted. It was close to midnight. Nora had been on duty since eight o'clock that Sunday morning. Why, she mused, did everything bad always happen on Sunday?

Today, for instance, three desperately needed nurses had come down with virus colds. That included the supposedly indestructible Maggie, whose voice had been reduced to a whisper by a bronchial infection. And then what happened? There were three emergency cases in Surgery, victims of a traffic smash-up. One of the victims was a lovely seventeen-year-old girl with a broken back. Maybe the girl would walk again; maybe she wouldn't. One thing was certain. Without surgery, skillful surgery, she wouldn't have a chance.

If only Paul could do the operation! He could have done it once, had done spinal operations which were successful, with all the odds against him. But now—

She eased one foot out of her slipper. Her feet were sore and weary, like everything else about her. She thought about her bone-tiredness. She thought about those poor kids in surgery. One was a sixteen-year-old boy who had been lucky. He had gotten off with a broken leg, several cracked ribs, a fractured jaw and several missing teeth.

She tried to think about anything or anybody except Paul, who for all practical purposes had passed out of her life like a dream she had once dreamed. It was nearly two months now since he had left the hospital—on leave of absence, since the staff refused to accept his resignation—and had taken that lifeguard job at the lake.

I'll survive, Nora told herself. There were worse things than losing a man who apparently had lost all interest in love and romance. And she had survived, with less pain than she had expected. She was once more in touch with reality. Romantic dreaming was out the window. Her work absorbed her more than it ever had before. My work has been my salvation, she told herself many times.

And of course there was Andy Fine, who had moved in to live with them. That dear kind man had been something of a salvation, too. If only I could fall in love with him, she thought life would be so simple.

Andy wanted her to marry him. He had finally told her so. And she—what did she want? Love? The kind of dreaming, hurting love she had felt for Paul? What had that gotten her? "You'll be better off without me, Nora. Just forget me—forget everything. Some day you'll thank me for making the decision for both of us." Famous last words.

So much for beautiful, beautiful love. It was a pain in the head, the neck and the heart. And yet—give up all hope and thought of it forever? Never know any more the trembling happiness and glorious excitement which really did change life into a many-splendored thing? That was really quite depressing to think about.

Andy offered her ease, a trip around the world, and a life that he would devote to making her happy. All that sounded pretty nice, in a dull kind of way. And of course he would do a lot for her family. He had made that very clear.

He had already done a lot for her family. Too much, Nora kept telling him. In fact, the boat he had bought for Jerry had sent her into a flurry of anger. "You let that brother of mine talk you into that, Andy, after I warned you about Jerry." But he insisted she was all wrong.

Andy repeated over and over that the boat had been his idea. He had, he claimed, always wanted a boat to play around with. Boats were quite the thing these days, and not terribly expensive. But until now, there hadn't seemed much sense in owning one. Until now he had had no time to laze around himself, and no family to do things for.

"Now I do have a family." That was the way he chose to regard Nora's folks. "I haven't anybody else to do things for, Nora. If it makes me happy to do a few little things for your folks, can't you let me be happy?"

"Oh, Andy." There was no use arguing with him. He had the answer to everything.

Down the corridor, an elevator door opened and Mamie, the student nurse, stepped out, bringing the chocolate malted Nora had asked her to get from the cafeteria. Having skipped dinner, Nora was faint from lack of food, although not hungry.

"You're an angel," Nora said, as the tiny girl with the toothy smile set the glass down in front of her. "You're going to make a wonderful nurse one of these days."

"I'm not going to make a nurse, period," Mamie said flatly, then groaned as a red light flashed and Nora sent her rushing off to the elderly ulcer patient in 407.

Returning in about ten minutes, Mamie said with no hint of compassion: "Why do they always shriek for bed pans at midnight?" She shook her head sadly. "That's one of the things that bugs me: bed pans." And Mamie started to nibble the chocolate bar she had gotten for herself.

"You'll get used to it, honey."

"Not me. You know something? I've decided I'm not the type to be a nurse. I mean, you read about how a real nurse just adores all the messy, nauseating jobs she has to do. She trips around doing things for groaning, half-dead people, stands by when the docs cut into people, babies cantankerous old women who keep punching the bell just to make a nurse come running because they have a little gas pain."

Mamie gestured with the candy bar. "This afternoon I decided I'd had it. There I was, having fun out at the lake with this cute guy I met about a week ago. So what happens? All of a sudden it's three o'clock, and I've got to run."

"But that's part of the job, Mamie. The late shift—"

"And the worst of it was," the little trainee continued, "just when I had to leave, there was this cute guy in the cutest motorboat who invited me to take a ride down the lake with him." Not that she wanted to dump her own boy friend; it was just that she was dying to go out in the fancy motorboat. BOBBY-O was the name of the boat, which was blue, and had the name in silver on the side.

Nora looked at her, frowning. "Are you sure about that name, Mamie?"

Andy had become very fond of Bobby, and it had been his idea to name the boat after the little boy.

"Of course I'm sure." Mamie seemed slightly annoyed at the question. "I may not be much of a nurse, but I can read. And like I said, it was the boat I was interested in; not the guy who owned it. Oh, he was something to look at; a real charmer, with lots of rippling muscles and all. But he was married and had this little kid." If there was one thing Mamie could say for herself, she wanted no part of a married guy. They were a complete waste of time.

"How did you know this man was married, Mamie?"

The girl finished her candy bar and dusted off her hands.

Simple enough. The wife was right
there
, a big fat girl with a shrill voice. The little blond kid really was a doll; only the child was screaming his head off because his father—"this handsome hunk of man who owned the boat"—was trying to teach the kid to swim. And the child didn't want to learn, because he was scared to death of the water. And the wife kept saying: "Let him alone, Jerry. Do you want him to have a spasm or something? Let my child alone!"

Nora didn't need to be told any more. She could see the scene as clearly as if a movie camera were unwinding before her eyes. Bobby
was
terrified of the water. It was just another expression of the fear and anxiety which obsessed the youngster. And Jerry, who disciplined his son in no other way, was determined that Bobby must learn to swim.

Mamie was giggling. "It really was a family brawl. Everybody along the beach was watching them. This wife was the jealous type, see? She was so fat. And there were a lot of good-looking girls around giving her husband the eye. So she made a few cracks about that, loud enough for everybody to hear. Then she started in about the kid not wanting to get in the water. And finally she got up and pranced off, dragging the poor screaming boy with her. And it was after that that the guy asked me if I wanted to try his boat out."

She groaned. "But
me
, I had to hustle back here to hustle bed pans."

Another red light flashed on. There was another lugubrious sigh from Mamie as she rushed off.

Nora sat for a few moments, hands covering her face. Poor Bobby, poor Ethel, and for that matter, poor Jerry.

Who could blame him for wanting to escape from a nagging wife whose jealousy had become an obsession?

Just then the phone on her desk jangled.

As soon as she heard Caroline's distracted voice, she knew that something terrible had happened.

"It's Ethel," Caroline said, her voice so shaky with terror that at first Nora wondered if Ethel were dead, if she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills as she had threatened to do. No, it wasn't that. "She fell down the stairs, and she's lost her unborn baby. And oh, Nora, she's in terrible shape."

It was no time to ask questions. Later Nora would learn that Ethel had come back from the lake in one of her irrational frenzies. When dinner time came, there was no sign of Jerry. By nine o'clock, when there was still no Jerry and no phone call from him, Ethel's tormented mind had leaped to the usual baseless conclusion. He had gone off somewhere, and this time he wouldn't be back. Hadn't she said right along that would happen sooner or later?

Then, fairly beside herself with anguished fear, she had taken several stiff drinks. Caroline had tried to stop her, had begged her not to do it. Ethel wasn't used to drinking. "You've got to think of Bobby, even if you don't care about yourself. Do you want that sweet child to see his mother drunk?"

But Ethel was past knowing what she was doing, past caring about anything except that Jerry was gone. "He's gone, he's gone," she had screamed wildly. She had started up the stairs, sobbing, stumbled and fallen.

Automatically, Nora's trained mind took over. A spontaneous miscarriage, plus a plunge down a dozen stairs, could be very serious. When Caroline cried anxiously: "I'm afraid she'll bleed to death, I'm afraid to move her, I don't know what to do," Nora asked in a crisp, calm voice: "Has Jerry come home yet?"

No. Jerry had not appeared.

"What about Andy Fine? Is he awake? Does he know what's happened?"

Oh, yes. Mr. Fine was right there, and anxious to help. But he had never been up against anything like this before and was afraid to do anything for fear of doing the wrong thing.

Breathing a silent prayer of gratitude that Andy was on hand, and restored to excellent health, Nora said they should put Ethel into Andy's car and have him drive her to the hospital. She should have immediate attention, and their one ambulance was out on another call.

The next two hours were hectic. Her own weariness forgotten, Nora roused the resident doctor out of bed, turned over her desk to the nurse who came on at midnight, and was waiting with the orderly and a wheel chair when Andy's car drew up in front of the hospital entrance.

It could have been worse. There was that to be thankful for. There might have been broken bones, or an incomplete miscarriage which would have called for surgery. There were neither, which was all to the good.

But Ethel's general condition was not good. When she was wheeled into the hospital, into the elevator, then into a private room on the third floor, she seemed in a state of shock. "Who are you?" she muttered, showing no sign of recognition when Nora spoke to her. Her eyes looked blank.

This phase passed almost as soon as they got her into bed, another nurse assisting the doctor. He pronounced her blood pressure alarmingly high, her pulse beat fast and irregular, her temperature almost a hundred and four degrees.

"Go away," she cried suddenly, to the doctor and the assisting nurse. "Get out. Stop doing things to me. I've lost my poor baby. I've killed it, that's what I've done! And you can't bring it back, no matter how much fooling around you do. So please just get out. I've got something I want to say to Nora before I die. So won't you give me a chance to say it before it's too late?" Tears streaked down her feverish cheeks; her lips trembled. "Please."