“I can’t help it,” he said, his voice sounding nasal from behind the mask. “I don’t need this mask anymore.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Closing his eyes, he lifted his left arm and lowered it gently onto her hand. She did not take it away but reached up with her left hand to turn off the oxygen flow, its soft hiss fading, the sound of the waves from the calved berg still slapping the ship’s flanks. She was standing by him, her right hand still beneath his bandaged arm. He looked up at her and wordlessly she sat down by him, her hand still beneath his arm, her other hand gently stroking him and seeing the miracle of the pain not gone but momentarily defeated by her gift of touch. She raised her left hand higher, kissed her finger, and gently stroked him again. He groaned in ecstasy, his head beginning to move slowly, joyously, from side to side, and in that moment, out of all the pain and the evil of Jay La Roche, Lana emerged as gentle as a virgin, but knowing much more, lowering her head, her long, soft hair falling on him, then she kissed him there, the firm but pliant wetness of her lips encasing him, drawing him into her, her tongue sliding hard and fast and then slowly, lovingly, as he groaned, his whole body beginning to arch and rock, arching again, then arched as if frozen in time, shuddering before he collapsed against the bed, bathed in sweat, his eyes glistening with life, looking at her, then slowly filling with such calm that they said nothing until the pain, like a vindictive husband wanting to kill, attacked again.
Quickly, alarmed, she looked at the clock, rearranging her clothes and hair. It was still ten minutes to go before the next injection. Now the flush of love in his face left him, like a red curtain torn aside, his face stunned with ferocious pain, white, as pale as moonlight. She took the hypodermic, injected him, and knelt by him, ready with the mask should the coughing return. It never did, and as she told him she loved him, he went into a deep sleep, a tiny spot of blood seeping through on the stump of his right hand, as scarlet against the bandages, she thought, as a rose against hard snow.
She pressed the buzzer and the cardiac arrest team arrived. He revived on the second “jump,” but later that night the oscilloscope’s hiccuping green sine wave went flat, and in place of the lively “bips,” there was a long, steady tone.
“In all my career,” Matron fumed before the chief surgeon and the ship’s chief medical officer, “I have never seen such a flagrant violation of procedure.”
The MO, the young captain who had referred to Spence as Lana’s “boyfriend” a couple of days ago, could see the pain in Lana’s face, and for his part, the morphine shot she’d given the patient too early would hardly have made any difference. He told the chief surgeon so. And in his view it certainly didn’t warrant a court-martial, as Matron was pressing for.
The matron’s head shot up, looking over at the surgeon.
“It’s hardly the morphine I ‘m concerned about, Mr. Reilly.” Even now she insisted on the British convention of referring to chief surgeons as “Mister,” its usage conveying a higher status than “Doctor.”’ “Though giving the patient the injection earlier is, in my professional opinion, also thoroughly reprehensible.”
“Then what is this all about?” asked the surgeon, nonplussed.
“Ah — perhaps,” the MO interjected, “Ms. La Roche would care to step out for—”
“No,” said Lana.
“All right, then, Matron, I think you’d better go ahead,” said the MO.
“The sheet, sir… it’s… it’s filthy.”
“Filthy sheets?” said the surgeon, pushing the question back at her and looking at the MO for clarification.
“She …” began Matron archly, “did things to him.”
“Oh—” said the surgeon. “Oh—” He paused. They could hear the ship’s foghorn as it entered the area off Cape Race. “This is a very severe charge, Matron. I would advise you—”
“I don’t deny it,” said Lana.
Matron glanced quickly at the surgeon, making it quite plain she expected the maximum punishment for such unprofessional conduct and would not rest until she got it.
“Ms. La Roche,” the chief surgeon began, “you must realize how serious this is.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now there was a silence in which the captain noticed for the first time that he could hear the clock in the cabin ticking very distinctly. He shifted a few pens on his desk pad. “I’m afraid I’ll have to refer this to HQ. Are there any — mitigating circumstances you’d like to add—”
“The boy was dying,” said Lana.
There was silence again, Matron staring at her. Finally the surgeon, doodling uncomfortably on the blotter, said, “That doesn’t excuse it.”
“Exactly!” said the matron.
“All right,” said the surgeon. “That’s all.”
Out on the deck, where the chilly fog now came tumbling through in gusts, Matron paused before taking the steps down to her cabin deck. “If you think I’ve done it because I don’t like you, that’s not true.”
“Oh really?” said Lana.
“The point is, my girl, that we have to set an example for the others who come after us.”
“Yes,” said Lana. “Imagine if every nurse did it, and,” she added sarcastically, “right in the middle of a war.”
“Don’t be insolent! You don’t seem to have realized something, young lady.”
“And what’s that?”
The matron stood very close to her, and Lana could smell her bad breath as she began to speak. “You might have killed him. A shock to the heart like that.”
“He was dying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Didn’t you see the X rays, Matron?”
“I’ve seen more X rays and more deaths than you, young lady. He might well have recovered—If he had been left alone.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Lana, but Matron thought she saw a glimpse of fear in the young woman’s eyes and she pressed home her advantage.
“You’ll never know, will you?”
The temptation of guilt, of a hundred letters to Ann Landers about unprofessional conduct of nurses, flashed through Lana’s mind, doubt flickering in her eyes for a moment, and then it was all gone, rejected utterly, as if her whole being had irrevocably changed at that precise moment in her life. “I gave the boy love.”
“Is that what you call it?” sneered Matron.
“Yes,” said Lana, “and I’m sorry for you.”
“You! Sorry for me!”
“Yes,” Lana said softly, pulling her cape tightly about her, the fog from the Grand Banks colder by the moment, enveloping them both and hiding the bergs. “I’m sorry for anyone,” said Lana, “who hasn’t had love. It shrivels your heart to nothing.” Lana turned and walked slowly away along the deck, past the dim outlines of the lifeboats.
The young medical officer managed to get Matron to strike out some of the more hostile adjectives in her report about Lana La Roche, and while, informally, he convinced the surgeon not to recommend a court-martial, he could not prevent transfer, to the Matron’s delight, to a forward hospital — in what the nurses called “America’s Siberia”: the Aleutians.