CHAPTER 20
Calling the nurses and playing the waiting game was no longer an option.
And the tantrums he had staged for the past two weeks were quickly depleting his energy, which he needed for his physical therapy sessions.
Having made it through the post-operative fog of narcotics and pain, he now had his eye on the end game: walking his ass out of this hellhole.
With that goal in mind, he stopped fighting with the nurses.
In fact, he stopped talking to them entirely.
He made it through most days with grunts and head nods and waited for Friday afternoons when the weekend crew showed up.
They were kinder and gentler than the Nazis that ran this place during the week.
Riki, his overnight nurse, was his savior.
The middle-of-the-night mission to the Promised Land, which took the better part of an hour to complete, combined with a double physical therapy session on Friday afternoon, had left him depleted.
He crashed as soon as they settled him in bed.
When he opened his eyes Friday evening, for a moment he believed it was again the middle of the night.
His bladder was screaming and he wasn’t sure he’d have the energy to get himself to the bathroom.
“Hey, there he is,” Riki said in her pleasant voice. “You’ve been sleeping ever since I clocked in. Howya feelin’? Jason told me you had a heck of a therapy session today.”
He nodded. “That kid’s the second coming of R. Lee Ermey.”
“Who?”
“Full Metal Jacket. You’ve never seen it?”
“No, what is it?”
“Never mind,” Gus said. “Listen, I’m very sorry to greet you like this, but I need to get to the bathroom right away or I’m going to make a damn mess of myself.”
“No problem. Do you need help with the urinal?” She held up the plastic bottle he loathed.
“That thing and I don’t get along. It steals my dignity, and I’ve barely got any left, as it is.”
Riki smiled. “Let’s get you out of bed, then.”
He closed his eyes. Thank God for Fridays.
“Crutches or walker? I can help you attach your prosthesis, but it’ll take a few minutes.”
“I don’t have a few minutes, and I haven’t put that thing on yet. Let’s go with the crutches.”
With Riki’s help, the round-trip from his bed to the bathroom and back again took nearly thirty minutes. But the layover, during which he stood and enjoyed the easily forgotten luxury of urinating while standing on his own, was worth the effort.
When he was settled back in bed, the nurse asked how his pain level was.
“Eight-ish.”
She scrolled through the computer at the side of his bed. “You haven’t had morphine today. Actually, you haven’t had it all week.”
“I’m trying to get away from it. It screws up my mind.”
“The pain will slow you down. I’m all for tapering off the pain meds, and there’s a plan in place for that. Cold turkey is too hard on your recovery. Let me give you a dose that will help you through the night.”
He shook his head. “I can’t think straight with that stuff.
My body’s for shit, excuse my French. All I’ve got left is my mind, and when they dope me up with that stuff, my mind goes to shit as well.
And between you and me, I think the weekday nurses are too liberal with the morphine and use it as a way to shut me up.
The regular crew and I don’t . . . see eye-to-eye. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Fair enough. How about we go with half your typical dose. It’ll take the edge off. It’ll make you loopy just after the dose is administered, but you’ll come around faster. Sleeping will be easy tonight, and by morning, you and I will be having coffee together.”
“You buying?”
“No, sir. Coffee is on you, but I’ll deliver it.”
“Deal,” Gus said, grimacing at the burn in his hip.
Riki disappeared and returned a few minutes later with the sterile-dressed cart. She clicked on the television. “Here, watch this. I know you don’t like needles.”
He looked up at the television. On it, a woman stood in front of a hospital in New York and spoke into the camera.
“Julian Crist had just two days to live,” the woman said. “St. Lucian police argued that during her entire stay at Sugar Beach, Grace was ruthlessly planning to kill her lover on the very night he was to propose to her.”
Riki adjusted the port in his arm and emptied the syringe of morphine into his bloodstream. The smoldering in his hip melted away like ice water poured over the orange coals of a campfire. Gus kept his eyes on the screen.
The woman took a few steps along the sidewalk with the glass facade of Bellevue Hospital behind her.
“Why?” she said. “Because Grace was actually in love with another man? Because her relationship with Julian was moving too fast? Because Grace discovered that Julian was involved with another woman? The prosecution made all these arguments during the trial, but the alleged motive was not what brought a conviction. Hard forensic evidence is what convinced the jury to hand down their sentence. We’ll dive into that next time, taking a closer look at the forensics that played such a crucial role in the trial.
” The woman stopped walking. “That’s next time on The Girl of Sugar Beach. ”
“Are you keeping up with this?” Gus heard the nurse ask. “It’s addictive.”
Gus strained his eyes against the dozing effect of the morphine and tried to bring the television into focus.
A promo flashed on the screen, and he watched a woman climb up a heavily wooded path that reminded him of a rain forest. She came to a bluff, which overlooked the ocean.
The voice-over faded and Gus wasn’t able to understand the words.
But he saw the ocean and the sun and dreamed about being on a beach, able to walk freely through the sand and dive into the surf.
He closed his eyes. The water was cool against his skin; the salt stung his eyes, but felt wonderful at the same time.
He turned in the ocean and floated on his back with no effort at all.
“I don’t think she did it,” he thought he heard the nurse say.
Gus grumbled something in reply, but stayed comfortably in his morphine-induced oasis, which had placed him in the warm Caribbean sun, floating weightlessly through the ocean and kicking through the current with both his legs and no pain.