House Arrest (4 page)

Francie found her hanging with some kids behind a restaurant. At first Pippa ignored her, but there was a shining in Francie’s face, radiant and homey at the same time. Four nights in a row, Francie stopped by on her way to work, even though Pippa told her to get lost. Francie talked about Isis, how she was the mother of everyone, wise and forgiving. She described Tian as Isis’ great great many-greats grandson and the head of the family. Tian helped people find the comfort of believing in ancient ideas like the solstice and the sun’s return, following traditions as old as civilization. Tian was especially on the lookout for lost girls, raw and ready to belong to something good, because no one had helped his sister when she needed it. Pippa came to see Francie as an angel, dressed all in white. Later she found out that wearing white clothes for ceremonies was part of being pure for Isis. Francie was the only one who wore white all the time, even to work, even though no one could see her on the hospital switchboard.

Pippa got up to clear the dishes. No matter what else anyone might say about Francie—about her being bossy, or trying to get Tian back, or anything—she was one persuasive lady. After four nights of urging, Pippa agreed. She was so weary trying to take care of herself. Francie’s family sounded way better than being a hooker or a runaway. She followed Francie into the family’s feeble old van that smelled of dried thyme and spearmint. A few months later, Pippa dressed in white too and danced at her first solstice celebration in a remote section of Forest Park. That night, four years ago next month, Pippa joined the Family of Isis.

Francie’s face was paler than usual when she returned to the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” Marshall asked.

“That was Liz on the phone. There’s a problem at the Tea Room.” Francie turned to Pippa. “Wait for me to get dressed. I’m going down there with you.”

3 ~ Emily

I had to swing by the office after leaving Pippa. Anticipating our first meeting had flustered me so badly that I forgot to restock my supply bag. Marge despised poor planning but luckily her office was dark. I opened my backpack on the table in the empty supply closet, glad that no one could see the jumbled mess I made in Pippa’s living room.

When I started working at the agency, the nurses all carried blue canvas bags. After we switched from paper charts to laptops, my shoulders ached every night. So I bought a wheeled backpack. At first the other nurses made jokes and rolled their eyes. Andy drew a cartoon on the message board of a geeky nurse with a giraffe neck pulling a humongous rolling bag. Everyone could tell it was me, but he was Marge’s snitch, so no one liked him much. Besides, the comfort tradeoff was worth the occasional snide comment. Since then, other nurses had started using rolling packs. My friend Gina was the first.

“Nurses on a roll.” Gina’s musical Jamaican accent perked up even an offhand comment. When Andy snickered, Gina turned her back on him.

I emptied the clutter from my bag, and repacked the standard items: waterless hand wash, stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, alcohol wipes, sterile gauze pads, disposable dressing sets, sterile saline, syringes. The red bag with blood-drawing equipment and the needle disposal box fit neatly into the bottom corner between the portable scale and the laptop. If you took the time, everything would fit just so, even the roll of paper towels. That made me think about Marge’s rules and Pippa’s comment. My cheeks burned.

Marge had never liked me. It had gotten much worse the week before when I found Mrs. Newman in the hallway of her apartment building, naked except for a wide-brimmed straw sunhat, searching for her key in non-existent pockets. I reported to Marge that the old woman wasn’t safe living on her own anymore, even with maximum hours of nursing and homemaker support. Marge snapped at me, said those were administrative decisions. Her job, not mine. But yesterday I saw Mrs. Newman again and Marge hadn’t done anything. So I gave Gina a statement; she was our union steward. When Marge heard about that, she would really be pissed off at me.

I collected the supplies for my regular Wednesday patients. Suture removal kit and sterile gloves for Mrs. Grover’s post-op incision. Absorbent dressing made from seaweed for Mr. Stanisewski’s foot ulcer. Sterile swabs and hydrogen peroxide for Josué’s pin site care. Thinking about the little guy made me smile. I slipped the tiny yellow school bus from my pocket, and scratched off the price tag with my fingernail. The toy tucked perfectly into the front zipper pocket of the pack. Once a week I tried to bring Josué some small gift, even though Marge had a strict policy about not getting personally involved with our patients. I knew I wasn’t the only one who brought a toy, a piece of sugar-free candy, a bunch of grocery-store flowers to brighten a kitchen table.

Before leaving the office, I checked my phone for messages and found a Post-it note in Gina’s looping scrawl stuck to the receiver. “Late lunch? Two-ish?” I checked my watch; if I hurried I could see my three patients, meet Gina for a late lunch, and still get home to meet Zoe’s bus.

The moment I handed Josué the toy bus, I cringed. How could I have forgotten that it was a school bus that clobbered him? On the second day of kindergarten, right in the crosswalk while the guard in her orange apron stretched her hand out for the driver to stop. But Josué grinned and stuck the tip of his tongue through the double gap in his front teeth. He didn’t remember anything before waking up with stainless-steel pins sticking through his leg, pins attached to circular metal rods that held the bones while they healed. I first met Josué at the children’s hospital, two days after his accident. He taught me how to pronounce his name.

“Hoe-sway,” he enunciated carefully. “Remember that.”

I remembered, and Josué had gotten used to me cleaning the pin sites with sterile swabs, but it still hurt. We sang his favorite songs while he banged the tambourine against the mattress with one hand and made the toy school bus dance with the other. While I fit the spongy dressings between his skin and the metal rods, he steered the bus over his pillow and blanket between lines of small plastic soldiers. Soon the pins and rings would be ready to come off, Carmen told me, and Josué could return to school.

“But you’ll still visit.” Josué drove the school bus up my right arm, parallel parking in the crook of my elbow. “Right?”

“Yup, even when I’m no longer your nurse.” Sometimes I thought about introducing him to Zoe. Would they be friends?

Across town, Mr. Stanisewksi hobbled to meet me at the apartment door, refusing his crutches. When we first met, he didn’t bother teaching me to pronounce his name. “Call me Mr. S,” he had said.

He smiled as widely as Josué at his favorite treat, a sugar-free lime lollipop. “I know it’s funny for a grown man to suck on a pop.” His mouth puckered at the first taste of tart. “Don’t you tell me that old age is a second childhood, young lady. I’m not a violent man, but that idea makes me want to smack someone.”

“It’s not for the young and inexperienced,” I agreed, then gloved up and removed the old seaweed dressing from the diabetic ulcer on his big toe. “Looks much better today.”

While I cleaned and repacked the shrinking ulcer, he described the science fair experiment his eleven-year-old granddaughter in Amherst was conducting. My mind flashed to the project on Pippa’s dining room table. I wondered who was making that relief map, and if there were adults like Mr. S. to keep track of the progress.

“She plays two hours a day of Beethoven to the first group of seedlings.” I could hear the pride in his voice. “Folk songs to the second group, rock and roll to the third, and nothing at all to the control group. At the end of the month she’ll measure them all and see which plants grew the tallest.”

“I’d choose the folk songs,” I said. “What about you?”

“There’s no polka music, so they’ll all be pipsqueaks.” He laughed at his own joke.

I wondered what kind of music Pippa liked. Did she sing lullabies to Abby, and to the new baby in her womb? What exactly had happened to Abby? What kind of man was Tian? And who else lived in that big house? The health interview hadn’t answered any of those questions. Usually I was good at drawing out my patients, eliciting their secret worries while building a therapeutic relationship. But most of my patients weren’t Pippa.

“See you on Friday?” Mr. S. asked.

I pulled my thoughts back from Pioneer Street. “Same time, same place.”

I’d been at this job for almost four years, but I was still touched by my patients. I pretty much fell into nursing in the first place. The morning after my high school graduation I took the ferry off the island, then the bus down to Portland. I knew what I was leaving, but not what I was looking for, except that I wanted to fade into the background. The city had changed in the eight years I’d been away. Perhaps I could have found some childhood friends if I’d looked, but I wanted to start over.

The nursing home job was advertised on the bulletin board at the Food Coop. It turned out that I loved the physicality of taking care of people. People who didn’t know about my past. Who only cared that my hands were gentle when I washed their feet and I listened to their stories while I rubbed their backs. That I didn’t make a face when I helped them off the bedpan, or when they didn’t make it on in time. They didn’t pity me and I didn’t pity them. Sometimes, we were so short-staffed that patients were left in their wheelchairs for hours, before anyone could change their diapers. Incontinence briefs, we were supposed to say. For dignity, as if there was dignity in sitting around in your mess, no matter what you called it. But the nursing home wasn’t all grim. I loved the moments when a child would come running into the sunroom and call “Grandma!” and thirty gray heads would turn smiling toward the voice. Even if they had no grandchildren, or couldn’t remember them, or their grandchildren lived in California and never visited.

Mrs. Grover lived just a few blocks away. While I cleaned the railroad track incision across her vast brown abdomen, she brought me up to date on her son’s custody battle for his three children. My mind wandered back to Pippa. Who would get custody of her baby if she and Tian both went to prison?

“Terrell needs me,” Mrs. Grover grabbed my hand. “I have to get well so I can help when he gets the kids back.”

I moved her hand away from the sterile dressing and patted it. “The incision is still a bit red and puffy,” I said, removing the final skin sutures. “But it looks less angry, and your fever is down.”

While the antibiotic infusion dripped through the tube tunneled into her chest, I half-listened to Mrs. Grover describe her daughter-in-law’s demands, and half-worried about Pippa’s appointment Friday morning at the obstetrician’s office. If she didn’t believe in our medicine, would she refuse the pelvic exam? What did Isis teach about childbirth?

Outside Mrs. Grover’s apartment building, I checked my watch, stashed the pack in the trunk and transferred my lunch bag to the front seat. I was late to meet Gina. The Forest Park road twisted down the hill to the duck pond. Any day now it would be too cold to sit outside, for even fifteen minutes.

Gina waved from our favorite bench, facing the gray water choked with shriveled lily pads and the dark forest beyond. Her red lipstick and fur-trimmed emerald green jacket were the only splashes of color visible. Everything else was a wan shade of beige or gray or muted brown. The woods, the ground, the sky, even me. Marveling for the thousandth time that such opposite people could be so compatible, I grabbed my lunch bag, and hurried towards her. I was eager to talk about the situation with Mrs. Newman. And about Pippa Glenning. Next to Anna, Gina was my closest friend. She knew about my work in Portland, even a little bit about Chad. But I had never told her about my father. Or about the island where my mother and I were sent when he went to prison.

I hadn’t told Gina about the phone call either. Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, had called last weekend to tell me that my grandfather had a stroke, a serious one. If he died, I might have to return to the island for his funeral. I hadn’t been back since the morning after graduation. Fourteen years. My parents were dead and there was nothing left for me there except bad memories. Gina knew nothing about those either.

Sometimes, like now, I was tempted to tell her. But Gina had strong feelings about what was right and what was wrong. And, much as we liked each other, I wasn’t at all sure how she would feel about being friends with a jailbird’s daughter.

4 ~ Gina

Gina watched Emily pick her way towards their bench, skirting shallow brown puddles glazed with ice. That girl could use some color. Rouge, maybe? A purple scarf?

Emily sat down and opened her lunch bag. “Okay morning?”

“Max is failing. Even sedated, he’s such a professor. Today he lectured me on the political significance of his Bar Mitzvah Torah passage. He claims he remembers every Hebrew word, seventy years later.” Gina peeled her orange, trying to keep the skin intact in one long strip. That made her think about Granny Teisha, and Granny brought the sadness full circle back to Max. She hoped Emily wasn’t tired of hearing so much about the old guy. “You’re Jewish, right? Did you have a Bar Mitzvah, or the one that girls do?

“A Bat Mitzvah? No.”

Gina waited for more, arranging the snake of orange peel back into the whole round shape. Granny used to do that, then she would fool the kids, offering them an empty piece of fruit, throwing back her head and laughing as it fell apart. When Emily didn’t elaborate, Gina asked, “What about your morning?”

“New patient,” Emily said. “The pregnant woman from the Frozen Babies case.”

“No kidding? How did it go?”

“I’m not sure. You know anything about her?”

“Just what I read in the paper,” Gina said. “A religious cult, wasn’t it? They worship the solstice, all-night bonfires, like that. Some kids died and I think her husband’s in jail.” Gina popped an orange segment into her mouth. “What’s she like?”

“She’s okay. It’s a bizarre situation. I’d like to help her, and her baby. But I don’t know how to act. I have to meet with her probation officer. I’m a nurse, not a cop.” Emily frowned. “You should have gotten this assignment. You’re better at the complicated stuff.”

“No, thanks.” But Emily might be right, Gina thought. Emily was a good nurse, smart and compassionate. But sometimes she seemed frozen herself. Gina had once asked if there had been someone special in her life. Emily had mumbled about someone named Chad, her supervisor at the nursing home in Portland. He had urged her to apply to nursing school and helped her get a scholarship. When Gina asked what happened, Emily said it didn’t work out, then started describing how Chad quizzed her for exams by making up funny ways to memorize the bones of the wrist or the Krebs cycle. Well, she would probably never know what happened with Chad, because that girl certainly liked her privacy.

Gina offered Emily the perfect husk of orange on the palm of her hand.

Emily laughed. “Your hand skills are wasted in this job. You ever think about going back to the OR?”

“Nah. I love these hours, spending time with my boys. And guess what? I like my patients awake.” Gina drank from her thermos. “What about you? Do you ever want to go back to labor and delivery?”

Emily seemed to search the dark pond surface for an answer. “I miss the births. Sometimes I think about becoming a midwife. But I’m not sure about going back to school.” She turned to face Gina. “So what do you think about Mrs. Newman. When I saw her again yesterday, nothing had changed. She refuses to bathe, doesn’t eat unless she’s fed.” Emily shook her head. “She needs residential care, but Marge won’t do anything about it.”

“It’s tricky. She’s the supervisor.”

“All she cares about is losing the business. I’m thinking of calling Mrs. Newman’s doc on my own.”

“Have you documented everything?”

Emily nodded. “You bet. Every detail of Mrs. Newman’s behavior and every word of my conversation with Marge. You’re the union rep. Can’t you do something?”

“Not really. The union can bargain for benefits and safety issues, file a grievance if you’re treated unjustly. But this is a professional issue.”

Emily rubbed her nose hard, like Gina had seen her do before when she was worried, but then she grinned. “So, you mean if I call Mrs. Newman’s internist and tell him the situation and Marge fires me, then the union can help?”

“Sure.” Gina laughed, then got serious. “Is that your plan?”

“Do I have a choice? Marge already said to drop it, and you know how strict she is about getting her permission before notifying a patient’s attending.”

“Well, there’s rules and there’s rules,” Gina said.

Emily looked at her. “What do you mean?”

Honestly, sometimes that girl was so naïve. “You know. If the rule is bad, and you’ve got to break it for the patient’s sake, sometimes you go ahead.”

Like Granny Teisha’s illness last year. The tiny hospital in Ocho Rios sent her home with vials of narcotics and no hope of recovery. Granny Teisha threw the pills away and spent her last weeks surrounded by four generations of family, comfortable in a cloud of ganja. It was illegal, but it was right. The only hard part for Gina had been trying to explain that distinction to her sons.

Emily sighed. “Between Mrs. Newman and Pippa Glenning, I’m not sure about anything. I just like to take care of my patients, not deal with all this administrative stuff.”

Gina didn’t much like workplace politics either, but that was life. “The two cases seem totally different to me,” she said. “Mrs. Newman needs your advocacy. So you do what’s right, and the union will back you up. This other thing, this cult and dead babies and house arrest, I don’t know about that. You probably don’t want to get too involved with that girl.”

“But Pippa’s my patient too.”

“True,” Gina said. “But like I said, there’s rules and there’s rules. You be careful.”