Whispers and Lies by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page A

life.
    It must be so depressing, people are always saying to me, to be constantly surrounded by the sick and the dying. And sometimes, I admit, it is. It’s never easy to watch people suffer, to comfort a young woman stricken by MS in the prime of her life, to tend to a comatose child who will never wake up, to try calming an old man with Alzheimer’s as he shouts obscenities at the son he no longer remembers.
    And yet, some moments make it all worthwhile. Moments when the most banal act of kindness is rewarded by a smile so blinding it brings tears to your eyes, or by a whispered thank-you so sincere it makes you go weak at the knees. This is why I became a nurse, I understand in moments like these, and if that makes me a hopeless romantic or a silly sentimentalist, so be it.
    Probably it is this quality that makes me such an easy target. I suffer from Anne Frank’s delusion that people are basically good at heart.
    I parked my car in the staff parking lot at the front of the hospital and made my way through the lobby, past the gift shop and pharmacy that wouldn’t be open for another few hours, to the coffee shop that was already busy. I waited in line for a cup of tasteless black coffee and a fat-free, cranberry-studded muffin. I thought of Alison, how much she loved cranberries. I had a recipe at the back of one of my drawers for banana-cranberry muffins. I decided to make a batch when I got home.
    The administration offices were closed till nine, and I made a mental note to stop by later to inquire about Alison’s friend, Rita Bishop. Even though Alison had told me not to bother, I thought it might be worth a try. Rita might have left a forwarding address. One of the secretaries might know where she’d gone.
    I’d already finished my coffee and was halfway through my muffin when the doors of the excruciatingly slow-moving elevator finally opened onto the fourth floor. The nurses’ station was already buzzing. “What’s up?” I asked Margot King, a heavyset woman with copper-orange hair and blue contact lenses. Margot had been a nurse at MissionCare for more than ten years, and during that decade the color of her eyes had changed almost as often as the color of her hair. The only constant was the color of her uniform, which was a crisp Alpine white, and the color of her skin, which was a wondrous ebony black.
    “Rape victim,” Margot said, her voice a whisper.
    “A rape victim? Why’d they bring her here?”
    “The rape was three months ago. Guy beat her with a baseball bat, left her for dead. She’s been in a coma ever since. Doesn’t look like she’s going home anytime soon. Her family decided to bring her here when Delray Medical Center needed the bed.”
    “How old?” I asked, bracing myself.
    “Nineteen.”
    I sighed, my shoulders collapsing, as if someone had jumped on them from a great height. “Any more pleasant surprises?”
    “Same old, same old. Mrs. Wylie’s been asking for you.”
    “Already?”
    “Since five o’clock. ‘Where’s my Terry? Where’s my Terry?’ ” Margot repeated in Myra Wylie’s frail voice.
    “I’ll look in on her.” I started down the hall, stopped. “Is Caroline here yet?”
    “Not till eleven.”
    “She gets migraines, doesn’t she?”
    “Oh, yeah. She suffers real bad from those damn things.”
    “When she gets in, will you tell her I need to see her?”
    “Problems?”
    “A friend,” I said, continuing down the peach-colored hall toward Myra Wylie’s room.
    I slowly pushed open the door and peeked my head through, in case the frail, eighty-seven-year-old woman fighting both chronic leukemia and congenital heart disease might have drifted back to sleep.
    “Terry!” Myra Wylie’s voice wafted up from the center of her hospital bed, quivering into the air like smoke from a cigarette. “There’s my Terry.”
    I approached the bed, patted the bony hand beneath the sterile white sheets, smiled at the graying face with the watery blue eyes.