The Safety Zone (A Novella by Bob Racine) - Chapter 2

Yesterday I began the posting of the novella, ten chapters in length, one chapter a day until the presentation of the whole work is complete.  In case anyone missed Chapter 1, please consult that previous posting before reading any further.  However long anyone takes to do the reading (people take varied lengths of time to complete a work of fiction) I must urge all who do read through it to do so in sequence.  For the fullest benefit please do not skip chapters. 

Chapter 2              Plotting to Escape the Jinx

Brother Vernon visits Cara and is called upon by her to intercede on her behalf for relocation.  She wants to put distance between herself and the undesirable roommate.  The vast difference in personality between the siblings comes very much into play to her vexation and apparently to his amusement.  He tries to shrug her off but he gets enrolled, in spite of himself.

                  

Shortly after a nurse fetched Dagne and steered her to her surgery, Cara’s brother Vernon entered the room.  Vernon was three years younger than Cara and had escaped the grandmother’s influence.  Cara knew that her own serious and reclusive personality had not been to her brother’s liking, when they were growing up. 

He had been the kind of coarse, roughhewn kid who excelled in school at wood and metal shop and always, from as early as she could remember, had what Cara considered industrial hands, those of a steel worker or a coal miner, even though he had never in his life, as a child or an adult, been anywhere near a steel mill or a coal mine. 

As far back as she could remember his face had always looked to her like that of a craggy adult, with creases and pockmarks, and his voice tight and sandpapery.  He was a very earthbound creature, who found the grandmother’s mystical musings silly, a subject only for the most bemused conversation. 

Cara let Vernon know that Dagne annoyed her, especially with the bizarre story of two earlier roommates passing away, but she had refrained from sharing her distressing thoughts about death and dying.  Her fear was something she kept hidden, though she was aware that her brother might read her fear without being told. 

Cara was a private person – some would say antisocial – and had always done battle with her trepidations by herself.  But her extrication from her present emotional predicament depended upon Vernon this time, much to her sorrow.    

“You’ve just got a couple more days here,” he said.  “Surely you can handle it that long, can’t you?  She doesn’t have some incurable disease, does she?”

“She makes me edgy.”

“You look edgy.  I haven’t seen you like this since right after you found out that mother’s illness was incurable.”

“I want to get out of this room,” she moaned.

“Maybe she should get out,” he suggested.  “You were here long before she was.”

“Please help me get another room!” pleaded Cara.  Oh, how she hated to ask Vernon for help in this matter, but she had no one else to turn to.

“Get another room!  That’s going to take some explaining, isn’t it?” As if in response to Vernon’s speculative comment, the morning nurse, Cheryl Macy, arrived at Cara’s bedside at that very moment. 

This was not Cara’s first encounter with her.  Cara had been impressed with how cosmetically fresh in appearance this young woman was.  She looked to be in her late twenties and had dark eyes and fine combed black hair that sparkled, and her complexion looked clean and almost lustrous.  Cara wondered how she kept herself looking so fetching with all the strenuous labor required of a medic watching after floods of patients. 

She was accustomed to nurses being, if not emaciated, at least plain, well scrubbed, or physically undistinguished behind their white, neutral garb.  But Nurse Macy was no mere functionary in appearance.  She had a vivacious aura that Cara found rather intimidating.    

Not surprisingly Nurse Macy asked the usual.  “Good morning, Mrs. Hutchins.  How are you feeling?” 

Cara could not remember when those words had sounded more dreadful and uninviting to her.  She knew that the cliché response Okay, I guess or All right, I suppose would have been a flat lie, so she avoided any direct answer.  She heard herself ask, in reference to the blood thinner, “How long am I going to be chained up to this thing?”  It was an innocuous question, and it skirted for the panting moment the issue of her lost safety zone, even though she knew the answer before the nurse spoke it.     

“I’m not sure. As long as your doctor considers it necessary.”  Macy had not taken the tone of a reproving parent in saying this.  Somehow she made it sound companionable – a way to reassure her that she was in good hands. 

The nurse popped the thermometer into Cara’s mouth and took a firm grip of her wrist, displaying her well-manicured fingernails against the pallid surface of Cara’s skin.  For all of twenty seconds, while the reading was being taken, nobody said a word.  When the thermometer was extracted, Vernon spoke up, while Macy took Cara’s blood pressure. 

“Don’t you have something else you want to ask her?” 

Nurse Macy, who had not been looking in Vernon’s direction, thought he had spoken to her.  “What more do you think I should ask her?  I’ve already asked her how she’s doing.”  She seemed not the least annoyed by what she thought she had heard.  She seemed to take it as a kind of flirtation.

“Now you don’t think a nebbish like me is going to have the brass to tell a nurse how to do her job, do you?”  He said this with enough of a twinkle in his eye that Macy knew he was poking fun.  Then he added, “I was under the impression that she had something more to ask you.”

The nurse put Cara on the spot.  “Ask away.  Now’s your chance, while I’m here.”

Cara felt intense hatred of Vernon at that instant for forcing upon her the onus of broaching the unpleasant subject.  Her heart began to pound more heavily, and she took a few deep breaths, as she deflected her eyes from both of them, wishing she could crawl under the covers and hide or slink out the door.  She made a weak effort but could not get beyond two words.  “Could you-      ?”  With a sigh she gave up the effort. 

“Could I what?” the nurse asked.

Cara threw a pleading look in Vernon’s direction, hoping he would get the eye signal.  He did, but he did not interpret the signal with precise accuracy.

“My sister is concerned about Mrs. Denison – the lady in this other bed, the one who’s having her breast removed.”

“Is that what she told you?” inquired Macy.

“Yeah!” replied Vernon.  “According to Cara she’s a very talkative person.  Most people wouldn’t want to advertise that sort of thing, but she just rambles on about it.  How long would she live, if she didn’t go through with it?”

“It’s hard to say,” said the nurse. 

Cara felt like throwing something at Vernon.  “Vernon!  Would

you-   ?”

“Would I what?”

“About the room!”

“What about the room?”  Cara knew that he was either playing with her, pretending ignorance, or he was no more eager to broach the subject than she was and was using a delaying action.  Finally he called a halt to the act.  “Oh, the room!”  He then addressed the nurse.  “Yeah, she wants me to talk to you about the room.”

“The room?”

“She wants another room.  She wants to get away from this Denison woman.”

“Is she a bother?” the nurse inquired, looking toward Cara.

Vernon this time did not have to be implored to speak for his sister.  “She’s very talkative.  Cara’s afraid that she’ll make a lot of conversation and keep her from getting her sleep and rest.”

“Just ask her not to talk to you,” suggested the nurse, still directing her words at Cara and not at the brother who had raised the issue.  “Tell her you want to be left alone.”

Seeing success slipping away, Cara finally got together enough voice of her own to put her request to the nurse pointedly.  “Can’t you find me another room?” 

“Well, the placement of patients isn’t exactly my job,” Macy replied.

“I’ve got to get out of this room.”  Cara’s voice was now an angry whine.  But Macy remained calm.

Vernon finally put an end to the charade.  “Cara, why don’t you tell her about the jinx?  That’s your real reason for wanting to change, isn’t it?”

“Jinx?” puzzled the nurse.

“She’s afraid Mrs. Denison has cast some kind of voodoo spell on her.”

“Voodoo spell?”  It was apparent to Cara that the nurse was making a strenuous effort to keep from laughing.  What is she, Cara wondered, a party girl in a nurse’s disguise?  And she was shocked to find out that Vernon had indeed read her unspoken morbid thoughts, even though she had not used the word “jinx” herself.

At that moment the tease in Vernon took full charge.  “Mind you, I’m not the superstitious type, but my dear sister is.  She went through, I know, at least a dozen rabbit foots all during her childhood.  She nearly had hysterics once on the way home from school.  A black cat not only crossed her path, but then followed her all the way home. 

And for all the gold in China she would never tell anyone her scary dreams before breakfast.  You know!  Any dream you tell before breakfast will come true, right?  That’s the kind of thing her grandmother laid on her.”         

Macy then did emit a slight guffaw.  “Superstitious!  I’m not getting this.  What am I missing here?”

“Denison’s room mates die,” asserted Vernon with a touch of ersatz melodrama.

“Her roommates die?  Who told you that?” asked Macy, by now wide-eyed with curiosity.

“Mrs. Denison told her.  Seems she was in the hospital two times already in the past year, and both of those times the women she was rooming with-  well, they died right after she introduced herself to them.  Well, you get the picture, don’t you?  She tells her roommate her name, and they cash in their chips.  It’s like hello is really goodbye.”

Macy turned to Cara, attempting no longer to disguise her incredulity.  “Mrs. Hutchins, you actually think she’s a jinx and that your life is in danger?”

Cara felt so foolish that she lowered her head and almost prayed that the ceiling would fall on her and bury her.  Vernon then rose to the height of his flippancy. 

“It’s already too late isn’t it, sister dear?  The deed’s already done.  She’s already hexed you.  Moving elsewhere won’t do any good.  You’ll just take the hex with you.”

As dignified as she could manage to sound under the circumstances Cara rebounded, her head still bowed, “I want to get away from her.  I don’t feel safe.”  With these words she signaled that she was closing the book on why and wherefore. 

Vernon, addressing Macy, continued to poke fun.  “I guess there’s a difference between being safe and feeling safe.  I’m afraid that if she doesn’t feel safe, she won’t be safe.  She might be safe from some jinx that she only imagines, but if she doesn’t feel safe, that means that she’s scared and nervous and all psyched out.  So not feeling safe is not being safe from not feeling safe.  Does that make sense?  I think I got that right.”

Macy responded, sounding suddenly very professional.  “If she moves, she’ll have to move to another room on this ward, and I know for sure that all beds are taken at the moment.”

By this point Cara had risen to the peak of her nerve, finally lifting her eyes to meet the nurse’s.  “Couldn’t I switch with someone?” she earnestly inquired.

“Switch with someone!  No, we couldn’t ask anybody to do that.”  Cara could not tell if there was any rancor in the nurse’s reply.  At least ostensibly she was being courteous and kind. 

Vernon was still on a roll.

“Besides, sister dear, what would you tell them?  It would be unfair to the person you’re switching with.  You’d be subjecting them to the jinx.  Once they’re in here, old Denison would pop her name to them, and then they’d be marked for extinction. You’d be sending another innocent person to their doom.  How could you do that?”

Macy walked to the far side of Cara’s bed and pulled the separating curtain far enough around the oval track on the ceiling that it obscured Dagne’s half of the room.  “Perhaps this will give you more a feeling of privacy.  Okay?” 

Cara still felt distressed and she knew Macy was reading it in her face. 

“Well, if I hear of any vacancies, I’ll try to put in a good word for you.  I’m afraid that’s the most I can do.  I have to go now.  I’ll check on you again later.”  She then left the room.

Even with the nurse departed, Vernon kept at the witticisms.  “You only have one other option.  You’ll have to come up with some potion or some incantation to counteract the spell she’s put on you.  You’ll have to fight voodoo with voodoo.  Or, if nothing else, you could pray.  Maybe prayer will do it.”

“Oh, shut up!” Cara shrieked, waving her hand at him in an air of surly dismissal, wishing she could wrap the cord from the thinner around his neck and choke him.

“I’m trying to save her from drowning, and she tells me to drop dead.  Maybe I ought to leave, before the curse falls on me.”  He did not leave, but he did remain silent, at her request.  Cara in the meantime closed her eyes and stayed mute.  She half hoped that when she opened them again, he would be gone.

He was the brother she found it difficult to like, one she could not live with but the one she could not do without.  She felt demoralized by the manner in which he had lampooned her before the nurse.  He had often in their lives made fun of her when no one else was around, no one except perhaps a few family members, but never before a stranger and at a time and place wherein she felt so vulnerable. 

After a few minutes of the welcome silence lapsed, she learned that he too was thinking about the past.

“You know, this isn’t the first time you’ve had trouble with roommates.  I couldn’t begin to count the number of boarders you’ve had in your house in the past nine years since Mom died, and it hasn’t taken a single one of them but a few weeks or months to find out how difficult you are to live with. 

“You’re so fanatical about your space and where things are put, how the silverware is arranged in the drawer.  You object to them having visitors when you happen to be in the mood for peace and quiet.  How can anybody know how your mood is going to change from moment to moment?  Why even bother with boarders?  Why not just live alone?”

“I need the money,” said Cara quite peevishly.

“You need the money!  Yeah, I suppose you do.  But the people who live with you are kind of cash short too, or they wouldn’t be there putting up with all your fuss.  You were even that way to some extent with Mom, when she was alive.  So why should anyone be surprised that a hospital roommate would get on your nerves?  You want to live alone, but you don’t want to live alone.”

Cara saw the perfect comeback.  “Sometimes you have to do things you’re not happy about.  Just like you, when Ruth kicked you out, but you went.” 

“I had no choice but to go.” declared Vernon. 

“That’s right,” replied Cara, “You made her very unhappy.” 

“Ruth was always unhappy; she manufactured unhappiness.”

“But I took good care of Mom.  I got along better with her than you did with your wife.”

“Mom never complained, you mean, and why should she?  She depended too much on you.  That what you call getting along?  I grant you you took good care of her.  I grant you that.”

Cara wondered how Vernon would respond, if she were to ask him how much he enjoyed living alone.  How lonely was he?  She knew his separation and divorce had caused him money troubles.  Supporting three children, one in college and two not yet out of high school, had been a severe drain on him.  She supposed he was just barely making it on his construction worker’s salary and must have sizeable credit card debt.  But he was too proud to let her hear him complain. 

She supposed that that was one personality trait the two of them did have in common – concealing troubles.  They concealed from each other, by a kind of tacit code of agreement.  So she saw no reason to violate the code and said nothing more to him.  She only asked him to pull back the curtain that Macy had drawn, so that she could have some sunlight. 

She felt that since human contact was proving less than comforting, she would let the natural light provide a little much-needed warmth, until Dagne was brought back.  He acceded to her wish.

Those words I need the money, Cara thought, seemed to have become a theme song on her lips for the past quarter of a century.  There was never much money, yet there was always somehow enough money.  She had held down a job as a seller of lingerie at a high profile department store for all of that time, a fact in which she took some pride, with a salary that she supplemented with money her second husband left her. 

She had held onto her small slightly substandard house, little more than a cottage, built during the 1920s, which had never heated very well, and she had been forced to rent out the one extra bedroom to close the gap between too little and just enough.  She dreaded to find out how much or how little of her hospital expenses were going to be covered by her employer’s group health plan. 

She had struggled alone, and because of that she clung to the right to suffer alone whatever circumstances called upon her to suffer.  She wanted a private room in which to do that suffering, but it was out of the question, she was told.  And now her solitude had been disrupted by an overbearing woman in the next bed and by a brother who she knew was attending to her only out of duty, not to mention the shade of the grandmother who seemed to be standing ominously invisible at her bedside. 

- - - - -

Somewhere around 3:00 pm Cara was about to sink into sleep, when Dagne was wheeled in by a nurse and deposited in her bed.  Vernon had departed a few hours before.  At least for a while, Cara thought, she will not have to worry about Dagne talking her to death, being as anesthetized as she was. 

A few minutes after the dazed and silent Dagne had been settled, Chuck entered the room and walked over to Dagne’s bedside once again.  But this time there was no conversation between them, and by the end of half a minute he had turned and started on his way out.  Cara stopped him in his tracks with her request.

“Would you pull my curtain around me?”  The less she saw of this Dagne, the better she liked it, even if it meant sacrificing the sunlight once more.

“Certainly” was his reply. 

“How she doin’?” she asked, as he closed her off.  She longed to be told that everything went fine with the operation and that Dagne would be discharged the very next day, as unlikely as that was.

Chuck paused at the foot of Cara’s bed and stared for a moment in Dagne’s direction, before he spoke.  “No complications that I know of!  The surgery took about two hours.  How she’ll be feeling when she wakes up-  well, her state of mind will determine that.” 

Cara thought she caught sight of something unspoken in Chuck’s face.  He looked at Dagne as if he was looking past the matter of breast removal or physical recovery, as if he was seeing something more in the patient, something that gave him personal pause – and concern.  As he walked out, he threw Cara a look that seemed apologetic, that suggested a wish to say more but a regret that some hidden restraint stood between him and doing as he wished. 

Cara attached no importance to this gesture.  Whatever it was, she knew it in no way concerned her, nor did she want it to concern her.  She yearned more than ever to have this crazy woman out of her sight and hearing.

The Safety Zone (A Novella by Bob Racine) - Chapter 1

For the next ten days starting today I will be publishing on this blog a novella I have written.  It has ten chapters, and I will be posting one chapter a day for each of the ten days. The writing concerns a crisis experience undergone by Cara Hutchins, a middle-aged woman, during her stay in the hospital facing a risky operation.  But as it turns out, her surgery is not the challenge by which she is ultimately tested, rather a confrontation involving another patient for which there is no forewarning and one that calls upon internal resources from which she has never before had to draw – physical, psychological or spiritual.  She survives a frightening trial by fire to discover a new dimension of herself.  I trust that the story will capture your interest enough to stay with it all the way to its dramatic and cathartic outcome.  The entire work is related from her point of view; it is an internal drama. 

All of you who complete the reading of it, however long it takes you, are requested to respond, just so that I can keep track of how many people I have reached.  This is something of an experiment, and I will be eager to find out how well the experiment works. Thank you for your participation!

Chapter Titles:

Chapter 1             The Somewhat Deadly Greeting

Chapter 2             Plotting to Escape the Jinx

Chapter 3             An Unlikely Rescuer

Chapter 4             Testing the Firmness of the Ice Beneath Her Feet

Chapter 5             Refusing Unsolicited Counsel

Chapter 6             A Rude Awakening and a Cruel Demon

Chapter 7             Groping for the Hand of Deliverance

Chapter 8             A Frantic Search for Answers

Chapter 9             A Strange Leap of Faith

Chapter 10          “Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?”

Chapter 1              The Somewhat Deadly Greeting

Cara, two days after admission and awaiting the completion of blood thinning in preparation for neck surgery, finds herself saddled with a new roommate, a woman whose lively and outgoing and rather bizarre personality has a strangely unsettling and depressing effect upon her.

It was shortly before 8:00 am.  Cara had had a clear sight line to the window in her hospital room, ever since she had awakened an hour before.  Her eyes had bathed in the brightness of the translucent sunlight.  But her new roommate had just arrived and was about to occupy the bed on the far side nearest that window.  Cara’s view was now partially obstructed, the woman becoming an unwanted and unavoidable distraction. 

Looking around was the only option Cara considered open to her.  Her eyes were tired from reading ominous news in the daily papers and the few glossy magazines her brother had brought her.  The television set she had just turned off, when her channel hopping had not been productive of anything she considered worth her time.  And she felt no urge to engage in conversation and tell yet another individual why she was in a hospital bed hooked up to a blood thinner, when she was undergoing no pain and taking no medication. 

She felt ridiculous complaining about the boredom that had been thrust upon her.  So with no inclination to sleep, all she could do was watch the woman’s methodical transformation from casually dressed stranger to bona fide surgical patient.  Cara only hoped that the stranger was not telepathic, or else she would be reading Cara’s anxious mind.  

It had been a little over two weeks since she had gone to her primary care physician for what she thought was to be a routine medical check-over and he thought it wise to send her for an MRI, since she had never in her life had one and because the pulsations in her neck seemed to him at best “ambiguous.”  Ten days later, when the MRI was performed, she learned that her left carotid artery was over 90% clogged. 

Her physician had explained to her over the phone, upon the receipt of the MRI findings, that it had to be treated without delay.  If that waste material floated up to the brain, she most surely would have a stroke, or at best it could partially blind her.  Perhaps both!  He suggested that she waste no time and go to the Emergency Room at once.  He would call the ER staff and let them know she was coming at his request.

During her time there, she had felt like an impostor.  She was in no pain, her appetite at lunch had been robust, and her energy level was high enough that she knew she could put in a substantial day’s work.  But there she was, alongside people with cuts and bruises and severed limbs, people in wheelchairs fighting for the next breath – broken bodies and broken spirits.  After more than an hour’s wait, a neurological expert determined from examining her motor coordination that no stroke was in the offing. 

That had been a relief after three or four hours of intense worry.    He explained that she was what is known as an asymptomatic case.  Without the x-rays no one could tell anything was amiss with her body.  But he told her she would have to be checked into the hospital for further observation and probable surgery.  The artery would have to be cut open and cleaned out. 

Before being admitted to a bed, she had then been subjected to something called a Doppler Test.  A flat surfaced device, one that in her perspective resembled an electric shaver, had been rubbed over both sides of her neck for the space of approximately a half hour, while an attached machine made bizarre sounds that put her in mind of some prehistoric animal repeatedly opening and closing its big, cavernous mouth.  She was told that the device was taking more detailed pictures of her neck.  A noisy and gross way to do it! 

Over the two subsequent days she had been visited by the surgeon who was to perform the operation, and he had disclosed to her the high risk factor involved.  The surgery, it seems, could cause the very stroke she had thus far averted.  But before they would operate, her blood had to be thinned to reduce the risk of further clogging. 

Every one of her instincts told her to forget the surgery for now and go home, but she knew she would take a humongous chance with her fifty-four-year-old body by letting it drag on.  The pending decision on her part weighed on her, adding a droplet of dread to her almost insufferable boredom.

The image of poking and cutting and slicing so close to her face and throat kept popping into her mind.  She not only feared death and/or helplessness but walking into it alone and unarmed.   How much harder it was to face such a thing without a family of any size to stand by her.  All she had standing by her bedside at the moment was the blood thinner, to which veins in her arm were connected. 

Because it could not be moved while in operation, she had been subjected to the indignity of having to make use of a bedpan.  The toilet facility, only feet and inches away, was for the moment off limits to her.  But she was thankful that nowhere during her ordeal had she succumbed to the migraine headache that was periodically visited upon her.  She had had a headache or two, but never the headache.  She well knew the difference. 

She had been alone most of her life.  There were two marriages, and both her husbands had died on her, the first one killed in Vietnam within the space of a year and a half after the wedding.  The second one, almost twenty years her senior and sickly when she married him, gave up the ghost within five months after the nuptials.  Neither left her any children. 

Her father’s desertion of the family when she had just reached the age of six necessitated her mother going to work as a waitress, and over the long years the mother worked herself into poor health.  A brother named Vernon, three years younger than Cara, was the only surviving relative she had. 

Her head was full of ghosts.  Beside the husbands were her overworked mother, who breathed her last breath cradled in Cara’s arms, and an overprotective and spooky grandmother, who was still spooking her after all the many years.  She was free of responsibility to anyone but herself but not free from care or the torment of solitude and alienation and bad dreams. 

And now she faced the possibility of facial and vocal paralysis.  She imagined herself mutilated and broken.  How would she manage any kind of cordiality with anyone who witnessed her broken-ness? 

She had been hoping that she would have the hospital room all to herself for the balance of her time, free of pesky visitors and free of wounded and weary sufferers, but now her privacy had been invaded once more.   The stranger began to take off her street clothes with meticulous care, preparing to slide into the hospital garments, and it became immediately apparent to Cara that she was in no hurry to do so. 

Her attention seemed to be more on her body than on her change of dress.  The woman looked to be well past sixty, her hair a dull gray.  Cara watched her as she rubbed her arms gently, after which she placed her fingers tenderly against her face and stroked her cheeks. 

Obviously she was going through the same mental and emotional process that Cara had gone through off and on the past two days – wondering if she was doing the right thing by entrusting her flesh and blood and bones to a physician who had no personal investment in her.  Would that flesh ever be the same again?  Is this undressing marking a day and an hour that will serve as a milestone in her slow disintegration into dust?  

Then the woman did something that caused Cara a surge of embarrassment.  She let the strap on her slip fall down her arm, did the same with the strap on her brassiere, and bared her left breast.  To Cara’s slight horror, she took her naked breast in her hands and regarded it with what seemed to Cara as an almost religious devotion.  Cara quickly looked away before the woman had time to notice if she had been watching. 

The thought of being enrolled as a witness to this unseemly act was most unsettling to Cara.  It was tantamount for her to undressing in public.  But Cara’s discreet evasion of eye contact did not stop her roommate from breaking the silence.

“When this thing is gone, I just wonder, will one side of my chest be heavier than the other?” 

What an astounding and unheard of way to begin a conversation with someone you have never met, thought Cara!   No hello!  No self- introduction!  No word of greeting whatsoever!  A question about female anatomy!  What kind of shady lady do we have here, she wondered.  Something maybe worse than a psychic!     

         

“I’m sorry!  What did you say?” Cara drawled out in reply, hoping she was giving the impression of someone too fogged out to have seen or heard anything.  For once in her life she regretted being so sober.  She wished she were anesthetized. 

“Will I feel lopsided after they remove this thing?”  The truth hit Cara like a claw hammer.  This indecent, shameless lady was a cancer victim and was about to undergo the removal of her left breast. 

“It doesn’t weigh that much,” remarked Cara in an air of dismissal that she hoped the woman would notice.  But the newly arrived surgical patient was not about to be dismissed.

“Doesn’t weigh that much!  How much do you suppose one of these things weighs?  And how would anyone ever weigh it, until it comes off? You can’t put one of them on a scale, if it’s attached to the rest of the body.  Can’t you just see the doctor holding an amputated breast in his hand right after an operation?  Does he ever walk over right then, put it on a scale and weigh it?” 

The woman then became in Cara’s eyes even more brazen, as she got up from sitting on her bed and walked over to Cara, still holding her breast and now flourishing the thing in Cara’s direction for Cara to observe up close.  Mere annoyance now transposed itself into utter distaste.  She wanted to shoo this roommate away, tell her to keep to her side of the room, but she hated and feared confrontation. 

What was this weird woman thinking?  Did she wish for Cara to examine it, to take a clinical interest in its shape and size – or weight? 

The roommate allowed the breast to drop but kept her eyes directed to it, letting it protrude and hang above Cara’s head.  Cara did not know when she had ever experienced such embarrassment.  She figured the woman wanted her to look and comment or some such thing, but Cara stubbornly kept her eyes averted.  She had no interest in that spongy mound of flesh.  She had enough of her own worry to occupy her. 

The woman’s patter resumed. 

“My educated husband-  and now my dead husband, may he rest in peace-  he used to wonder how a woman could stand so straight and poised with these big protr-  trusions pulling her forward.  That’s what he always called them – pro-trusions.  I can barely pronounce the word!  I don’t think I ever heard him once use the word breast or boob.  Of course, when he was with his men friends he probably called them knockers.  Where men get that word for them I’m sure I don’t know.  I’ve never known one to knock anything down.”

Cara loathed being anyone’s captive audience; she began to contemplate how to extricate herself from this unwelcome assault upon her sensibilities.  The air in the room began to feel stifling to her, even though the air conditioner was pumping full blast.  Apparently unaware of Cara’s unease, the woman continued her reminiscence.  

“He had a beer belly.  A big beer belly!  Now that was a pro-tusion!  That was an obstacle to standing up.  Much more so than any bulging boob!  He could really knock something down with that, if he set his mind to it.  Whether he’d still be standing after he did the knocking down, I’m not so sure.  Why can’t we call a beer belly a knocker?” 

Realizing that she had been hopelessly pulled into a conversation she did not want, Cara decided that at the very least she could redirect it.  So she asked, with the exposed breast waggling above her face, “When is the surgery?”

“Today – in just a little while!  I had a false alarm last time.”  The woman finally turned back toward her own side of the room and resumed the process of changing into the hospital garments and in a few seconds had covered the breast, talking all the way through the process.

 “This is the third time I’ve been in the hospital in the past eight months.  They checked me in for the surgery twice before, but both times they had to cancel it.  Complications!  By the way, my name’s Dagne Denison.  And you are-  ?”

“Cara Hutchins.” 

 “Well, Cara, I hope I’m not the last person on this earth to introduce myself to you.”

“What?” responded Cara.  The last on this earth!  Was she speaking of someone’s death – her own maybe, from the mastectomy?  If so, why was she sounding so nonchalant about it?  “What’d you say?”   

“I said I hope I’m not the last person on this earth that you ever meet.

You see, I introduced myself to the two roommates I had on those first two visits to the hospital, and they died on me.”

If someone had pricked Cara’s skin with a knife, she could not have felt more suddenly lacerated or under siege.  “Died?  Did you say died?”                                                                                                       

“Yep!” 

Cara got it: She was being warned that she, Cara, might die.  Her shock was swift, and it cut deep.  Dagne then enlarged upon what she had said, now sounding to Cara almost jovial, or at the very least bleakly humorous. 

“They both kicked the bucket before I was checked out.  I was the last person on this earth to make each of their acquaintances.  Makes you feel like a jinx.  Good thing I’m not superstitious.  But that is amazing.  I can see it happening once in my lifetime, but twice?  And so close together?”

Cara wanted to be told that this was a joke.  “Two roommates-   ?” 

“On two different visits to the hospital!  Couldn’t stand being away from me, pined themselves to death.”   Then Dagne smiled a teasing smile that offered some succor to Cara but nowhere near enough.  “Just kidding, of course, about being a jinx.  I never found out why they croaked.”

Cara started to hyperventilate, but she was determined not to let this Dagne know it.  The woman was actually raising the specter of her death, Cara’s, her possible death at least.  And she was doing it by the use of ‘croak’.  The hated word suggested to Cara not a peaceful departure from the earth but a very loud and clamorous one, a very ugly scene.  After all, it rhymes with ‘choke.’  Her spirit felt bruised, and she heard herself gasp.  She hoped Dagne had not heard the gasp. 

A young fellow in hospital uniform entered the room and walked directly over to Dagne, who was now sitting on her bed.  He was a clean-cut fellow, with a slight goatee, broad-shouldered but about medium height.  He possessed the kind of eyes that looked as if they took in everything they viewed and then some.  The neat goatee made him seem a little priestly.  A look of excited recognition spilled over Dagne’s face and a welcoming smile was stretched across his.

“Well, hi there, Chuck!  Pleasure meeting up with you again!”    

“I’m not hard to find,” he replied.  “I won’t say I’m glad to see you back.”

“Just say you’re glad to see me – period,” suggested Dagne with a snicker and a handshake.

Cara welcomed this distraction; she believed it would stop the flow of the harrowing conversation she and Dagne had been having.  She would be able to take a breath now, get herself calmed down and sort through her thoughts about Dagne’s terrifying disclosure.  She would have been pleased to be left out of the banter that was about to occur, but Dagne had other ideas.

“Chuck, have you met Cara Hutchins?”

“Can’t say I have.”  He greeted Cara without moving any closer to her.  “How do you do!”

Cara nodded him a greeting and said nothing.  The last thing she wanted was someone else invading her space, especially someone among Dagne’s garrulous friends.  But Dagne seemed determined to pull Cara into the conversation. 

“Chuck and I got real acquainted the last time I was here.  He knows politics, has this elaborate plan all worked out for the government to follow, guaranteed to wipe out all our country’s problems.  I told him he ought to run for office.  After he’s elected, he’d put everything in order.  Wouldn’t you, Chuck?  After all, they don’t call you an orderly for nothing.”

“Except I’m not an orderly; I’m a nurse,” he corrected.

“Men nurses!  What’s this world coming to?  Why aren’t you a doctor?”

“First you want me to be President of the United States, now you want me to be a doctor,” he remarked with a sly grin.  “One is a far cry from the other.”

“You look like someone in authority might look, so I guess President would suit you better.”     

“I’d make you my press secretary,” he commented.  “With your way with words, those news people couldn’t keep up with you.  You’d talk ’em down.”

So this verbosity on Dagne’s part was nothing unusual for her, Cara discerned.

“I’d talk ’em down, all right!  They’d get writers’ cramp trying to take notes.  Why not make me Secretary of the Treasury instead?”

“The way you handle your money?”

“Did I tell you that much about myself?”

“You were about to declare bankruptcy, weren’t you, the last time you were here?”

“The story of my life!  I’m always giving away my secrets.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“Lots of people go bankrupt these days.  It’s fashionable.”

One of the hospital kitchen crew, a Hispanic woman looking to be in her thirties, arrived at that moment with Cara’s breakfast.  She wheeled the serving stand into position over the bed and placed the tray on it.  She then left without uttering a word.  Dagne saw the food that had been placed in front of Cara and made a colorful comment about it.

“Ah, it’s so wonderful being waited on like that.  Having breakfast in bed is comfy enough, but all three meals?!  This is the closest to royalty I’ll ever get.  I wonder if queens ever have mastectomies.”  Dagne then walked over and surveyed the food tray in front of Cara.  “It looks harmless enough.  To be sure they wouldn’t admit me to the hospital to poison me.  If they wanted me dead, they’d just wait for that little malignancy to do its job.” 

Cara was by now so annoyed and rattled that she could not commence eating.  She just let the tray sit in front of her, waiting for her roommate to back off and return to her own bed, which after a few lingering seconds she finally did, incited by Chuck’s next question. 

“They’re going to do it this time, huh?” 

“Yep, I’m a condemned woman,” declared Dagne.  “I’ll be minus an appendage.  It’s an amputation, any way you slice it.  Oops, that was an unintended pun!  Sorry for the slip!” 

Dagne snickered, then in a mere few seconds her self-consciousness seemed to vanish.  “On second thought, why be sorry?  If you have to look the devil in the eye, why not smirk a little!” She looked down at her breast but evidenced no sign of grief or sorrow.  “Yeah, old lefty here and me just spent our last night together on this earth.  Today we say goodbye forever.” 

“You’ll just weigh a little less, that’s all,” Chuck ribbed.  “It won’t stop you from running your mouth.  You’ll even have another secret to give away.  That should make you happy.”

A woman without discretion too, noted Cara, and on all occasions!

“How could a missing breast be a secret?” Dagne asked in jest.  “It’s practically in your face.”

“I don’t think I’d care to have it in mine.  My wife wouldn’t be too happy about that either.”

Dagne laughed uproariously before she offered her clarification.  “I guess I meant that it’ll be in my face.”

“If you’re anything like the women I know, you’ll want to keep it secret, or at least drop it as a subject of conversation.”

“But where will I ever find anyone to take an interest in my secret life the way you do?” 

“Well, I have to get back to work,” said Chuck.  “Just wanted to stop by and welcome you once more.”

“Do you have to go so soon?” pleaded Dagne.  “You’re good for me; you keep me on my toes.”

“Then I had better go,” chided Chuck.  “On your toes is the last place for you to be right now.”

“But you’re so entertaining,” Dagne declared.

“No, I’m just interesting and friendly,” maintained Chuck.  “You’re the entertainer.”

“Then stay and watch the show.”

“I’ve got to return to my duties.”

“If you’re a nurse, why can’t you come and nurse us?”

“Because I’m assigned to another floor.  But I’ll stop by again while you’re here.  Stay cool.”

Chuck proceeded out the door.  Cara watched him go with a bit of dread.  As long as he was in the room, he served as a kind of buffer between her and Dagne.  With him gone she felt once again vulnerable. 

This Dagne, to whom she had just been introduced, was a person she knew next to nothing about, a total stranger, and within a matter of minutes she had involved Cara in a shadow game involving jinxes and curses and the nimbus of daunting death.  Though she spoke in an amiable and fun-loving manner, she had brought storm clouds into Cara’s mind, not the sunshine of pleasant companionship. 

She was obviously a social animal, who made friends easily and without effort, seeing as how Chuck had gone out of his way to visit Dagne, if only for a few moments.  Sociable!  Friendly!  So why was this sociable and friendly woman such a threat to her, Cara?

Cara finally began to eat, though she tasted nothing.  But the food did give her something to focus on, a means of staving off the encroaching anxiety and fear that Dagne had unleashed inside her already disquieted mind.  If this new roommate tried now to invade her privacy, she could use the function of eating as an excuse to put her off. 

Her hands were shaking, as she sought to tear open the pack of sugar on her tray.  The tearing resulted in a little spillage.  Instinctively she squeezed a few granules of what was spilled between the tips of her right thumb and index finger and flicked them over her shoulder before dumping the rest onto her cereal.  She was startled to learn that Dagne had been watching her from the other side of the room. 

“What did you do that for?”  

“Do what?” she responded. 

“You just threw something over your shoulder.”

Cara saw no point in running a dumb act.  “Just an old habit of mine!  Sugar grains,” she answered, hoping once again to be dismissive of an unwelcome issue and hoping Dagne would take the hint.  But again the aggressive Dagne probed on.

“Old habit!  How did you pick up that habit?”

“My grandmother did it.”

“Your grandmother did it?  Every time she ate?”

“Just when she spilled some.” 

“To what point?”

“It’s supposed to keep the devils away.”

“Keep the devils away?  Why would a devil care if you spilled sugar?”

Cara decided not to answer.  How could she make a crass wit like Dagne understand the life she, Cara, had had to live.  She knew that she was being rude to cut Dagne off, but she knew she risked much more to open up the subject any further.  She did not even look in Dagne’s direction, just kept her eyes buried in her plate. 

Cara did not want to see the possible hurt or the possible bemusement or disparagement in Dagne’s face – or, even worse, a cold indifference that would make Cara shudder.  It was that sudden and irrevocable disconnection that she feared she might have to relive, one that she had brought upon herself repeatedly throughout her life.

Cara regretted bringing her grandmother into the conversation with Dagne.  She was somewhat grieved to see that that old woman by whom she was practically reared (while her mother slaved in the restaurant) was still casting a spell.  She thought she had shed all that superstitious stuff a long time ago, but she now saw that at the least power of suggestion she could still be disquieted by even the most casual allusion to hexes and evil spirits. 

She had heard from her grandmother about demons using human beings even when they were completely unaware of it.  She had often tried as a child to imagine some invisible spook alighting upon an individual’s shoulder, using that shoulder as a sniper point to propel pain and calamity out into the surrounding world.  She feared that if she looked too long or too hard at Dagne, she might hallucinate and actually see a spook on the woman’s shoulder, whether there was really one there or not. 

She told herself again that such a fear was groundless and foolish; nothing like that had ever been seen by her before.  But the sudden aura of untimely death, hers in particular, had been released into the room, and her breathing had grown more labored.  She feared that maybe this is the way Dagne had inadvertently killed those first two roommates – not by having some demon rake or bite their flesh or drink their blood, not by any physical assault, but by subverting their minds and imaginations, unnerving them and disarming them from within. 

That, she understood by this point, was how her maternal grandmother had subverted her.  The old woman had thought of herself as devout but in Cara’s hindsight now appeared more superstitious.  Hers was a God of judgment, whose universe was bestrewn with all kinds of booby-traps. 

She would never allow a cat in the house as a pet, because cats were sinister creatures who brought misfortune.  Cara was taught never to touch a cadaver or else evil spirits would enter into her.  That is why undertakers were such weird people.  They were full of evil spirits.  And the grandmother was a strong believer in curses.  She was always obsessed over the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree and regarded the slow death of any tree or shrub or flower to be the fruit of somebody’s infamy. 

Cara had often wondered what superstitious meaning the woman would have attached to migraines, a recurring malady that Cara had not acquired until adulthood, long after the grandmother was gone.  She would probably have considered it a symptom of some kind of demon possession.  Cara knew that they sometimes felt like demon possessions.

Cara had become skeptical about much of the grandmother’s world view by the time she reached adolescence, but what really hooked her was the old woman’s warning that whenever she used a four-letter word or thought an evil thought or did a sneaky thing, God would subtract time from her life – a day, perhaps a month.  Cara’s tender child’s mind had reasoned that twelve such infractions could shorten her life by a whole year. 

When she had found herself in the hospital those two days before and facing surgery, her grandmother’s warning had come home to her.  She was only in her early fifties, so maybe for all her perpetrations God was finally foreclosing on her.  Her better judgment rejected such a notion, but the little child in her still trembled at the thought.

It was clear to Cara that Dagne had invoked the shade of her grandmother, and Cara felt too inhibited to shoo the shade away.  But she felt some relief, when Dagne’s daughter, a rather attractive and sleekly dressed woman Cara perceived to be about forty, arrived to stay with her until the surgery.  When Dagne introduced her to Cara, Cara feared that once again she might get pulled into a three-way conversation, but this time Dagne let her be and engaged with the daughter by herself, much to Cara’s relief.