Mortality Bridge by Steven R. Boyett Read Free Book Online Page B

will. She’ll be comfortable and not in any. I wish I had better news but.
    The nurse arrived with morphine and a kind of starched condolence. She recommended certain paperwork be completed before she started pushing opiates. Jemma started sobbing when he approached her with the DNR. Long dry rasping sobs. The paper’s naked meaning undisguisable. She’d been strong till this. Holding out some hope. He held her and talked to her and cried with her and in numb wonder handed her a pen and watched her sign her name to complete the circle he had started with the signing of his own so many years ago. What a perfect son of a bitch you are.
    And then the clear morphine push into the IV line. Her pain abated and she slept.
    He told the nurse he wanted to be alone with Jem from here on out and asked her to show him how to administer the morphine. She walked him through it next time a dose was due, drawing the solution from the ampoules with a syringe and injecting it into her IV line. He asked her why she didn’t administer it directly and the nurse said, “IV drip lets her have a constant dose. With injection she’d have peaks and valleys. And this solution is too strong for direct injection anyway; it’s concentrated for IV drips.” She pushed the plunger. “One of these every four hours. Too little or too late and she’ll still be in pain. Too much or too soon and she could go into respiratory distress.”
    “That would kill her?”
    “It would probably just be unnecessarily painful. It’d take about sixty milligrams for a lethal dose.”
    “I see.”
    She drew up doses for the next two days and left them in the bathroom by the sink. “I noted the nonadministered morphine as wasted,” she said.
    Niko nodded. She knew who Niko was of course and thought she knew what he was really asking but she was wrong.
    Before she left she told him she was sorry and she wished him well. “You’re very strong,” she said. “But this is never easy.”
    After she left Niko went into the bathroom. On the sink a small white sack containing twenty capped syringes drawn with measured doses. He held one to the light. The clear liquid promising passage. He set it back among the others in the sack and left them on the bathroom sink. Then he sat beside Jem’s bed to hold her hand and talk to her and be a presence for her as all else became an absence.
     
    HE DID HIS best to stay beside her every moment but it wasn’t possible. He had to get her meds, go to the bathroom, go downstairs to make quick meals. He hurried through all of these, tripped on the stairs once, burned himself eating. Ignored his phone and turned hers off. Talked to her and told her everything. His brother’s death, the Deal, the shameful farce of his career. Confessed his soul and pled with her and with whatever powers lay outside them both. Apologized and begged forgiveness and offered bargains. Sometimes Jem seemed conscious but he didn’t think that she could hear him. Anyway it was all too little too late, wasn’t it? Easy for you to come clean now, isn’t it, Niko?
    He gave her meds and swabbed her IV site and changed the bag and bathed her with a soft washcloth. Fingers tracing hard bone close beneath her thin and bruising skin as if needing to verify what he saw. Once she seemed to be trying to speak but he wasn’t sure. On the evening of the second day after he’d dismissed the nurse he came back upstairs with some barely noticed microwaved dinner on a plate. The moment he walked in he felt the difference in the room. He set the plate down on the floor and hurried to the bed. Her quick strained gasps. He held her hand and said her name. As if calling her back home. Jem, Jem. Jem? Her hand jerked in his and then relaxed. She breathed out calmly like a sigh and released something unseen to the reclaiming world. Niko waited but there was nothing more. The moment come and gone so mildly.
    Still holding her relinquished hand he let out a horrible long bay