Sisterhood (11 page)

“Amen,” his wife echoed as she turned off the light and rolled over next to him.

Christine drove slowly, steering by rote, unaware of the traffic around her. On the gaslit sidewalks the night world of the inner city was in full cry. The hookers and the hustlers, the junkies and the winos, and the clusters of young men milling outside tavern doorways. It was a world that usually fascinated her, but this night the people and the action went unnoticed. Her mind had begun playing out a far different scene.

It was a tennis match. Two women on a grassy emerald court. Or perhaps it was only one, for she never saw them both at the same time. Just a bouncing figure in a white dress, swinging out with energetic, perfect strokes.

Totally immersed in the vision, she cruised through a red light, then onto a wide boulevard leading out of the city.

All at once, Christine realized why it seemed like a match. With each swing, each stroke, the woman’s face changed. First it was Charlotte Thomas, radiant, laughing excitedly at every hit; then it was the drawn, sallow face of her own mother, a stern Dutch woman whose devotion to her five children had eventually worn her to a premature death.

The strokes came faster and faster, and with each of them a flashing change in the competitor’s face until it was little more than a blur.

Suddenly Christine glanced at the speedometer. She was going nearly eighty. Seconds later, a route sign
shot past. She was traveling in a direction nearly opposite to her house.

Shaking almost uncontrollably, she screeched to a stop on the shoulder and sat, gasping as if she had just finished a marathon. Several minutes passed before she was able to turn around and resume the drive home.

It was after midnight when she reached the quiet, treelined street where she and her roommates had lived for two years. The decision to search for an apartment in Brookline had been unanimous. “An old town with a young heart,” Carole D’Elia had called it, referring to the thousands of students and young working people who inhabited the quaint duplexes and apartment buildings. After a three-week search, they found—and immediately fell in love with—the first-floor apartment of a brown and white two family. Their landlady, a blue-haired widow named Ida Fine, lived upstairs. The day after they moved in, a large pot of soup outside their door heralded Ida’s intention to adopt the three of them. Christine had resented her intrusion in their lives at first, but Ida was irrepressible—and usually wise enough to sense when she had overstayed her welcome.

Christine, Carole, and Lisa Heller were quite different from one another, but tailor made for living together. Carole, an up-and-coming criminal lawyer, handled the bills, while Christine took care of the shopping and other day-to-day essentials of cooperative living. Lisa, a buyer for Filene’s, was the social chairman.

With a groan of relief and fatigue, Christine eased her Mustang up the driveway and into its customary spot next to Lisa’s battered VW. The two-car garage was so full of the “treasures” Ida was constantly promising to throw out that there had never been room inside for more than their bicycles. As she walked around to the front, Christine noticed for the first time that lights were blaring from every room. A party. The last thing
in the world she wanted to deal with. “Lisa strikes again,” she muttered, shaking her head.

The unmistakable odor of marijuana hit her as soon as she opened the door. From the living room the music of an old Eagles album mixed with the clinking of glasses and a half-dozen simultaneous conversations. She was searching her thoughts for somewhere else to sneak off to for the night when Lisa Heller popped out from the living room.

Three years younger than Christine, and six inches taller, Lisa was dressed in what had become the unofficial uniform of the house—well-worn jeans and a baggy man’s shirt pirated from some past lover. Her face had a perpetually intellectual, almost pious look to it that seemed invariably to attract men who were “into” Mahler and organic food, both of which Lisa abhorred.

“Aha! The prodigal daughter returneth to the fold.” She giggled.

There was something disarming about Lisa that had always made even Christine’s blackest moments seem more manageable. “Lisa,” she said, smiling around clenched teeth, “how many people are in there?”

“Oh, eight or ten or twelve or so. It’s hard to count because some of them aren’t really people, you know.”

“Do me a favor, please,” Christine pleaded, “Go get some rope and your raccoon coat and see if you can sneak me past the door as your pet Irish wolfhound or something. I just want to go to bed.”

“Ah, bed,” Lisa said wistfully, steadying herself against the wall. “Soon all that Gallo Chablis and fine Colombian dope in there will have us all in bed. The only question remaining is who will be bedded down with whom. Speaking of which …”

“Lisa, is
he
in there?”

“Big as life. It’s his dope, doncha know.”

Christine grimaced. Jerry Crosswaite was hanging on like a bad cold. She shook her head. “It’s my fault,” she
added with theatrical woe. “My cardinal rule, and I broke it.”

“What rule is that?” Lisa punctuated the question with a hiccup.

“Never date a man more than once who has vanity plates on his car with
his
name on them.” The two friends laughed and embraced.

Although seeing Jerry still had its pleasant moments, they were becoming fewer and farther between. Ever since his unilateral decision that they were “made for each other,” Jerry had mounted an all-out campaign to make Christine “The Wife of the Youngest Senior Loan Officer in Boston Bank and Trust History.” For weeks he had barraged her with roses, gifts, and phone calls. To Christine’s mounting chagrin, Lisa and Carole had become so swept up in the romantic adventure that they had undermined her efforts to discourage his ardor.

“Chrissy, will you stop complaining.” Lisa said now. “I mean you’re past thirty, and he’s a nice man with an Alfa. What more could a girl want?”

Christine wasn’t totally certain she was being teased. “Lisa, he has fewer sides than a sheet of paper …”

“Well, babe, I wouldn’t kick ’im out of bed,” Lisa said.

“Stick around, Heller, you may get the chance to find out if you mean that.” Christine brushed past her and into the living room.

Jerry Crosswaite set down his wine and began a piecemeal effort to rise from the couch and greet her. Christine forced a grin and waved for him to stay where he was. There were twelve others in the room, many of them looking even more gelatinous than Jerry.

“Brutal,” Christine muttered, at the same time smiling irrepressibly at Carole D’Elia, who was engrossed in a game of her own creation called ‘Scrabble For Dopers.’ In this version, to be played only with the aid of marijuana, any word, real or invented, would be
counted as long as it could be satisfactorily defined for the other players.

Carole called her over. “Hey, Chrissy, you’re the only one with any sense around here. Come and arbitrate this. Is or is not Z-O-T-L the noun for a decorative arrangement of dead salamanders?”

“Absolutely,” Christine said, giving her a hug from behind. None of the women sharing the house smoked marijuana regularly, but from time to time parties simply materialized, and as often as not, pot was a part of them. Despite the relative inactivity around the room, there was a sense of vitality that Christine felt every time she was around her roommates. She decided that their company might be just the tonic for her trying day. Even if it meant dealing with Jerry Crosswaite.

“By the way,” Carole said. “You had a call a little while ago. Some woman. Said she’d call back. No other message.”

“Old woman? Young?” Christine asked anxiously.

“Yes.” Carole nodded definitively, polished off the rest of her wine, and wrote down her thirteen points.

Crosswaite had negotiated his way across the room and come up behind Christine, putting his hands on her shoulders. She whirled around as if struck with meat hooks.

“Hey, easy does it, Christine, it’s only me,” he said. He had discarded the jacket of his Brooks Brothers suit and had unbuttoned his vest—a move that for him was tantamount to total relaxation. Only the fine, red road maps in his eyes detracted from the Playboy image he liked to project.

“Hi, Jerry,” she said. “Sorry I missed the party.”

His gesture swept the room. “Missed it, hell. It’s been waiting for you. Lisa said you like the necklace. I’m glad.”

Christine glanced around for Lisa so that she could
glare at her. “Jerry, I really wish you would stop sending me things. I … I just don’t feel right accepting them.”

“But Lisa told me …”

She cut him off, trying at the same time to keep her voice calm. “Jerry, I know what Lisa told you, and Carole, too. But neither of them is me. Look, you’re a really nice man. They think a lot of you, so do I, but I’m getting very uncomfortable with some of the gifts you’ve been sending and with a lot of the assumptions you’ve been making.”

“Such as what?” Crosswaite said, an edge of hostility appearing in his voice.

She bit at her lower lip and decided that she was simply not up to a confrontation. “Look, just forget it,” she said. “We can work the whole thing through another time when we have a little more privacy and a little less wine.”

“No, Chris, I want to discuss it now.” Crosswaite’s control disappeared completely. “I don’t know what your game is, but you’ve led me along to the point where this relationship is really important to me. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve gone frigid.” His tone was loud enough to break through to even the most somnolent in the room. Embarrassed looks began to flash from one to another as Carole and Lisa rose to intervene. The banker continued. “I mean you were never any tiger in bed to begin with, but at least you were there. Now, all of a sudden, you’re a fucking glacier around me. I want an explanation!” The room froze.

Christine took a step backward and brought her hands, fists clenched, tightly in against her sides.

The ring of the telephone shattered the silence.

Carole rushed to the kitchen. “Chrissy, it’s for you,” she called out after a few seconds. “It’s the woman who called before.”

Christine loosened her fists and lowered her arms before breaking her gaze away from Crosswaite.

There were three people in the kitchen. With a single look Christine sent them scurrying to the living room. Then she picked up the receiver.

“This is Christine Beall,” she said, sharpness still in her voice.

“Christine, this is Evelyn, from the Regional Screening Committee. Are you in a position where you can talk uninterrupted?”

“I am.” Christine settled onto a high rock maple stool she had found at a Gloucester flea market and later refinished.

“The Sisterhood of Life praises your deep concern and your professionalism,” the woman said solemnly. “Your proposal regarding Mrs. Charlotte Thomas has been approved.”

In the quiet kitchen, Christine began, ever so slightly, to tremble, as each word fell like a drop of water on hard, dry ground.

The woman continued. “The method selected will be intravenous morphine sulfate, administered at an appropriate time during your shift tomorrow evening. An ampule of morphine and the necessary syringe will be beneath the front seat of your car tomorrow morning. Please be certain the passenger side door is left open tonight. We shall lock it after the package has been delivered.

“We request that you administer the medication as a single rapid injection. There will be no need to wait in the room afterward. Please dispose of the vial and the syringe in a safe, secure manner. As is our policy, after your shift at the hospital is completed, you will please call the telephone recording machine and tape your case report. We all share the hope and the belief that the day will arrive when our work can become public knowledge. At that time reports such as yours—already
nearly forty years’ worth from nurses throughout the country—can be properly honored and receive their due praise. In transmitting your report there will be no need to repeat the patient’s clinical history. Have you any questions?”

“No,” Christine said softly, her fingers blanched around the receiver. “No questions.”

“Very well, then,” the woman said. “Miss Beall, you can feel most proud of the dedication you show to your principles and your profession. Good night.”

“Thank you. Good night,” Christine replied. She was speaking to a dial tone.

With a glance at the closed door to the living room Christine pulled on a green cardigan of Lisa’s that had been draped over a chair. Quietly she slipped out of the back door of the apartment.

The night sky was endless. Christine shivered against the autumn chill and pulled the sweater tightly about her. On the next street a car roared around a corner. As the engine noise faded, a silence as deep as the night settled in around her. She looked at the stars—countless suns, each one a mother of worlds. She was a speck, less than a moment, yet the decision she had made seemed so enormous. Pressure through her chest and throat made it difficult to swallow. Panic, uncertainty, and a profound sense of isolation tightened the vise as she moved slowly to her car and unlocked the passenger side door.

Christine walked around the deserted block once, and then again. Hidden, she sat on a low rock wall across the street from her apartment and watched until the last of the partygoers finally left and the lights in the windows winked off. With a prolonged, parting gaze at the jeweled sky, she sighed and headed home. All that remained in the living room were a few half-filled
glasses and a single, dim light, left for her by her roommates.

Christine flipped off the lamp. She was undressed even before reaching her room. Standing by the bureau, she unpinned her long, sandy hair, shook it free, and began slow passes with her brush, softly counting each one.

“Whenever you must really know …” Charlotte’s words dominated her thoughts as she stepped across to her bed.

It was not until she turned the covers that she saw the envelope resting on her pillow.

She read the note inside, stiffened, then crumpled it into a tiny ball and threw it on the floor.