Life Sentence

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  Life Sentence

  Andrew Neiderman

  For my brother-in-law Richard who will always remain a star in our sky

  Prologue

  The Intensive Care floor of what the employees called the Oakland Clinic, for lack of any other nomenclature, was dimly lit. It had the look and feel of the wee hours even though it was just a little past eight in the evening: longer shadows thinning into spider webs over the milk-white plaster walls, no one walking the halls or visiting patients.

  Currently, there were four patients who had been admitted on the floor, two nurses and a nurse’s aide. The two nurses were watching a rerun of I Love Lucy on a television set just to the right of the heart monitors, one of which had just flat-lined. Neither nurse noticed.

  They both laughed aloud, their voices reverberating and seemingly absorbed in the nearby walls that also digested the blinking glow of the television screen.

  At the far end of the hall, Mrs Littleton, the nurse’s aide, stepped out of a patient’s room and walked casually down to the nurses’ station. She watched the last few moments of the segment of I Love Lucy and when the commercial came on she, like a school teacher getting her students’ attention, tapped the counter with her digital thermometer.

  Freda Rosen looked up first, visibly annoyed at being addressed in such a manner.

  ‘What?’

  Keeping her stern, school teacher’s expression, Mrs Littleton nodded at the monitor to the right, the one with the flat line.

  ‘When did that happen, I wonder?’ Shirley Cole asked.

  Mrs Littleton shrugged. ‘I’m not a nurse, but I anticipated it. I thought he was looking a darker shade of blue for the last few hours.’

  ‘Darker?’ Shirley looked at Freda Rosen who rose and unfolded her body as if she were eighty, pressing down on her lower back and groaning. ‘I swear that chiropractor is worthless,’ she declared, rubbing her lower back vigorously. It looked like she was pumping blood into it.

  ‘You get what you pay for,’ Mrs Littleton said, the corners of her thick wormy lips disappearing into her bloated cheeks and round chin. Her mouth looked like one formed in a ball of clay by a child inserting four tightly pressed together fingers. At least that was what Shirley envisioned.

  ‘I don’t pay for it,’ Freda eagerly bragged. ‘He’s my daughter’s brother-in-law.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mrs Littleton said with a shrug. ‘You pay nothing. You get nothing.’

  Shirley Cole laughed. Her laugh was a singular guttural sound that rose like a bronchial cough and died just outside her mouth. She rose, too and the three of them started down the corridor.

  ‘You forgot the pads,’ Mrs Littleton said and nodded back toward the desk.

  ‘We didn’t forget them,’ Shirley said. ‘What’s the point of resuscitating this one?’

  The three entered the room of patient Ronald Sutter. Freda confirmed he had passed away and Shirley turned off the heart monitor.

  They stared at the elderly man who looked like he was shrinking right before their eyes, melting in the bed and threatening to become one putrid glob of ooze.

  ‘I swear he was at least ten to fifteen pounds heavier two days ago,’ Mrs Littleton said. ‘I’d like to know more about all this.’

  ‘What for?’ Freda asked, still smarting from Mrs Littleton’s clever comment about her son-in-law’s value. ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s right. He was at least that much heavier,’ Shirley Cole said.

  ‘Actually, from the sight of him that first day and the condition he was in, it took him a lot longer to expire than I had expected,’ Freda admitted.

  ‘You’re both sure this isn’t something we can catch, something infectious?’ Mrs Littleton asked.

  ‘Of course we’re sure,’ Shirley said. ‘How ridiculous.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Mrs Littleton pursued. ‘By your own admittance, you know very little, and why is it that they’re all so elderly? I mean, they’re not just in their sixties or in their seventies. They’re all like eighty or even ninety! Where do they come from? How come there are no members of anyone’s family visiting or inquiring?’

  The two nurses glared at her, both with similar disapproval in their eyes.

  ‘You’re asking too many questions. You signed under the same conditions we did and you’ve accepted the money,’ Freda reminded her.

  ‘I know. I just …’ She looked at the dead man. ‘I never saw anything like it. I overheard Mr Sutter ask Dr Hoffman how this had happened to him? What did he mean? How what had happened? Old age? He asked that only the day before yesterday. Mr Sutter was here only four days, I think,’ Mrs Littleton said.

  ‘Three and a half, but who’s counting?’ Shirley said.

  Freda raised her eyebrows. ‘Do I have to tell you who’s counting, who wants to know about each and every heartbeat?’

  ‘No,’ Shirley said and brought the sheet up and over Ronald Sutter and then turned sharply to Mrs Littleton as something she said registered. ‘What do you mean, you overheard? You were eavesdropping, snooping on a conversation between the doctor and his patient?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I was just getting some fresh linen and …’

  ‘If you two don’t mind, let’s stop chattering over a corpse,’ Freda said.

  The three started out.

  ‘Don’t either of you have nightmares about any of this?’ Mrs Littleton asked. When Freda said, ‘chattering over a corpse’ it made her envision the dead man listening with his eyes turning a rancid yellow.

  ‘It’s better not to think or talk about it,’ Shirley muttered. ‘If you really can’t do that, you should ask to be relieved of the duty. And Freda’s right, you know you shouldn’t be talking about any of it and you shouldn’t be repeating things you’ve overheard, accidentally or not.’

  ‘I didn’t say I couldn’t stop thinking or talking about it, and I wouldn’t talk about any of this with anyone else but you two.’

  ‘If you did, that wouldn’t be wise,’ Freda said, narrowing her eyes when she looked at her. ‘Not wise at all.’

  ‘I don’t like threats. I won’t stand for that,’ Mrs Littleton snapped back.

  Freda stopped walking and so did the other two. ‘Are you going to stand there and tell us that you had no sense of a threat when the conditions were explained to you?’ Freda asked Mrs Littleton.

  Mrs Littleton looked at Shirley. ‘Well, not exactly a threat, no.’

  Shirley shook her head. ‘This isn’t good,’ she said. ‘If they hear about any complaining …’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ Mrs Littleton said emphatically.

  ‘Sounds like a complaint to me,’ Freda muttered.

  Mrs Littleton looked at her, the fear forming visibly in her trembling lips. ‘It’s not a complaint. I’m just …’

  ‘Talking too much,’ Freda said. She started walking again and the other two joined her.

  ‘I’ll admit this much,’ Freda continued. ‘I’m not so sure we were smart choosing this shift. In my experience terminal patients die more during the late evening hours for some stupid reason and then we have all that paperwork. The other two have an easier ride.’

  ‘Are you making the call or am I this time?’ Shirley asked instead of con
tinuing the topic.

  ‘I think it’s my turn,’ Freda said.

  She went to the phone.

  Shirley took her seat again and turned back to the television set.

  The commercial had ended and the show resumed.

  ‘I swear,’ Shirley told Mrs Littleton. ‘I’ve seen this one ten times if I’ve seen it once, and I don’t laugh any less.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth? Some things just last and last,’ Freda said.

  ‘Unlike our patients.’

  They both laughed. Mrs Littleton looked away so they couldn’t see the disapproval in her face.

  Freda picked up the receiver, poked the numbers with the pen in her hand, waited a moment and then announced Sutter’s death. She listened and then she hung up. She looked a little ashen.

  ‘What?’ Shirley Cole asked her.

  ‘He was very angry. I mean … very. He said this can’t continue, making it sound like it’s our fault somehow.’

  ‘What can’t continue?’ Mrs Littleton asked. ‘Very old men dying? How could that possibly be our fault?’

  Neither nurse answered her.

  ‘It might mean no more patients, no more clinic, no more high paying jobs,’ Freda said.

  ‘Damn. I was looking forward to having the down payment soon on that townhouse in Monroe. Bobby would have such a shorter commute to his office in Manhattan,’ Shirley added.

  ‘Maybe things will turn out better for the other three,’ Freda said.

  ‘Better? Looking at them and what’s being done for them, what could be better for them than their dying in their sleep?’ Mrs Littleton asked.

  ‘No matter what happens, we should ask for some sort of bonus, don’t you think?’ Shirley asked Freda.

  ‘We oughta get a lot more than we get,’ Freda agreed.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mrs Littleton said, still steaming from the way the two of them had clamped down on her and ignored her, ‘you two work so hard it’s criminal.’

  ‘It’s not how hard we work; it’s what we do,’ Freda said sternly.

  ‘I wouldn’t talk like that, if I were you,’ Shirley said softly. ‘Neither of you,’ she added, looking pointedly at Mrs Littleton.

  Freda looked at her, glanced at Mrs Littleton and then looked away.

  Shirley laughed at Lucy’s antics on television. Freda and Mrs Littleton both turned back to the television set and then all three laughed harder than they had before. It was as if they needed to soak themselves in humor after just the subtle hint of something threatening.

  Freda insisted Lucy never got old.

  ‘Unlike our patients,’ Shirley muttered and they all laughed again. It was clear that for the moment at least no one could say anything that wouldn’t be funny.

  The sound of their laughter resonated in the hallway and echoed down the long corridors of darkness through which the remaining patients were slipping quickly into their own eternal night.

  All but one that was.

  ‘I’ll start on Mr Sutter’s report,’ Shirley said. ‘And we’ll get him down to the morgue.’

  Freda decided to take a walk. Unlike her last nursing job, this one required so little physically, she actually gained weight.

  ‘Good. I’m getting some exercise,’ she announced and started down the corridor. She glanced in two of the rooms, vaguely interested in the remaining patients, and continued on as if she were window shopping for a patient on whom to practice a procedure.

  When she reached the end of the corridor, she turned and started back, glancing into room four. The empty bed stopped her in her tracks.

  ‘Huh?’ she said as if someone had spoken.

  Cautiously, skeptically, she entered the room and gazed about. It was empty.

  ‘How?’

  She turned and hurried back up the corridor, her heels snapping like tiny firecrackers on the cream-colored tile, the muscles in her calves bobbing like a yo-yo.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ she announced. ‘Mr Morris is not in his room.’

  ‘Not in his bed?’ Mrs Littleton said.

  ‘No, not in his room. He detached the monitor. Why didn’t we see that?’

  They all looked at it.

  ‘I was concentrating on the report,’ Shirley explained. She gave Mrs Littleton a look of chastisement.

  ‘Well, it couldn’t have been too long ago. Maybe while we were attending Mr Sutter,’ Mrs Littleton offered. ‘At least I saw he had flat-lined.’

  ‘Neither of you is listening to me. Didn’t you two hear what I said? I said Mr Morris is not in his bed and not in his room,’ Freda repeated with more urgency and concern.

  ‘Did you check the bathroom?’ Shirley asked her.

  ‘Of course. Besides, how could he get up and go to the bathroom?’

  Mrs Littleton smiled as if Freda had been saying the most ridiculous things and turned to Shirley who smiled.

  ‘I’m not kidding, you two. Go look for yourselves.’

  They stopped smiling.

  ‘The man was nearly comatose,’ Shirley said. ‘The last pulse I took was somewhere in the forties. His blood pressure was barely recordable. I actually anticipated him going before Sutter.’

  ‘I know what he was and what he wasn’t,’ Freda said. ‘I know every patient on this floor down to his or her last few drops of blood, don’t I?’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Shirley said and nodded at Mrs Littleton. They both rose and the three of them hurried down the corridor and paused at the doorway of room four. They gazed around.

  ‘How the hell?’ Mrs Littleton said.

  Shirley shook her head.

  ‘He couldn’t have walked past us, could he?’

  They turned to the doorway at the end of the corridor and then hurried through it.

  Down the stairway on the first set of steps, they saw the hospital gown.

  ‘What did he do, run out of here naked?’ Shirley asked.

  Freda thought about the janitor’s closet off the stairway before the other two did and went to it.

  ‘Buzzy leaves a set of overalls in here and boots for when he washes down the driveway and the ambulance. Look. They’re gone.’

  ‘How could he just get up and walk away in his condition?’ Shirley wondered. ‘Now, I’m beginning to have those nightmares you mentioned,’ she told Mrs Littleton.

  ‘Do you think someone came in and snatched him?’ Mrs Littleton asked.

  The two nurses thought and both shook their heads.

  ‘They would have made too much noise and how would they get in the building?’ Freda asked.

  ‘If any of them were terminal, he was,’ Shirley repeated.

  ‘Exactly. But how could he rebound and that quickly, too?’ Freda asked.

  ‘This has to be someone else’s mistake,’ Shirley said.

  ‘Someone else’s mistake? You’re both forgetting, he escaped on our watch, and you two are the ones so worried that every little detail is perfect,’ Mrs Littleton told them.

  No one spoke all the way back to the station. Freda grabbed the phone and called security. She told them what was happening and listened. Then she hung up.

  ‘No one has seen hide nor hair of him down there.’

  ‘They were probably playing cards or watching television, I’m sure. It’s like guarding a cemetery.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘You know what we do,’ Shirley said.

  ‘Your turn to make a call to him,’ Freda said.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Shirley replied. ‘How am I going to explain this? And on top of what you just told him about Sutter?’

  ‘Just tell it like it happened,’ Mrs Littleton said. ‘While we were checking on Mr Sutter, Mr Morris …’

  ‘Got up, detached himself from the monitors, which we didn’t notice, changed into the janitor’s clothes and walked out?’ Shirley asked.

  ‘It’s what happened, isn’t it?’ Mrs Littleton said. ‘Just stress how long we were with Sutter. Maybe tell him we did try the pads.’

/>   Shirley nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s good. We were in there working on him. That will be our story.’

  ‘Lots of good it will do,’ Freda said.

  They all stared at the phone as if it were a time bomb.

  ‘There goes my down payment for sure,’ Shirley Cole said and then shrugged and made the call.

  One

  Ceil Morris stepped out of the Starbucks on the corner of her West Side block and casually strolled up the walk toward her apartment building. Other pedestrians flew by her as if she were standing still. She wasn’t walking softly and slowly because she was relaxed or uncertain of her direction and destination. She simply couldn’t move much faster. She had felt the dull ache in her hip on the right side awaken, grow stronger and pulsate down the back of her leg the moment she had stood up in Starbucks. Her reaction to the pain was more in line with rage than fear. She gritted her teeth and cursed under her breath, panning the lower West Side neighborhood as if she expected to spot some patient assassin who was relentlessly following her and killing her bit by bit, taking his time, slowly poisoning her muscles, her joints, her very blood.

  First, it was trouble with two of her upper teeth, both root canal episodes that nearly depleted her relatively small money market account, not to mention the pain and the fatigue that followed as a result of it. Then it was the worst bout of irritable bowel syndrome she had endured her entire fifty-four years, and now it was this hip problem that was tumbling head over heels toward a hip replacement, something she could not afford. Like the other forty-five or so million Americans she had no health insurance. She had no real savings to speak of, just her small money market balance and close to two thousand dollars in cash hidden in her apartment. That was it. She owned no real estate, had no valuable jewelry and absolutely no stocks or bonds.

  Endure until you die, she thought. The poor don’t fear death as much as the rich. For the poor it’s a solution.

  She paused to take another deep breath. She could choke to death on her agitation, every moment of reality another bitter pill to swallow. Her sales lady position at Folio, a discount clothing and shoe store, took far more out of her than she received from it. The store was always busy and the lower income customers were just as demanding, and in many cases as downright nasty and arrogant, as the wealthier ones who shopped at Saks or Bergdorf Goodman, not that she had ever worked in either. She had window-shopped there and observed. She was lucky to get the job she had, even though it was only a little above minimum wage and carried no benefits other than a thirty percent discount on anything she wanted to buy at the store.