She looked at her wristwatch and sighed the sigh of overburdened managers everywhere. The one that said, “They don’t pay me enough for this.” She waved me to the empty chair by her desk and closed the door behind me.
She didn’t sit. “It’s your nickel.”
“I just received a call from Merritt’s father. He’s down in ICU. Merritt’s sister, Chaney, is deteriorating, may be dying. He made an impassioned plea for Merritt to visit her. He would like her to come down right now.”
Georgia sat. She dropped her coat and let the canvas bag fall to the floor. “God. God. God. Don’t you hate doing this some days? Listen to me, really, I’m bitching to you about having to run like hell to get to Boston Market before my kids’ teacher’s conferences and look at the alternatives life has to offer. Look out there, in the dayroom. Look at those poor kids. Or God forbid, look down in the ICU or over in oncology. I’m so ungrateful.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I’m babbling again. What do you need from me to make this happen?”
“I need the policies regarding patients being restricted to the unit during suicide precautions to evaporate, at least temporarily.”
“You can’t just d/c the precautions, can you?”
“No. With what’s going on right now, no. She’s still mute. Her sister’s in crisis. And I take it you heard about the arrest?”
She shook her head.
“The Boulder DA went public that they have an adolescent female suspect. Merritt knows about it. And now Chaney may be dying. I can’t d/c precautions or increase privileges with those stressors on the table.”
“Is she about to be arrested?”
“No way to tell. It could happen anytime, I imagine, based on what I saw on the news.”
Georgia’s tongue was between her upper and lower teeth. Her lips were parted. She said, “Don’t worry about the administrative side. That crap won’t jell before tomorrow. Write the order for the ICU visit. I’ll get staff and security lined up to go with. We’ll take her on the road and worry about policy and procedure in the morning if this thing goes south, and hopefully it won’t. There’s no time to discuss it with anyone, right?”
“Right.”
“I’ll leave a message for Joel, he should know what we’re doing. And I’ll have my players together up here in, like, five minutes. You get her ready, okay? Let her know what’s expected of her and let her know that she’ll be surrounded by sumo wrestlers.”
I wanted to kiss the head of the head nurse. I said, “Thanks, Georgia, a lot.”
“The karma price is too damn high for some omissions in life. Refusing this visit, I’m afraid, would be way off the negative karma scale. No thanks are necessary.”
To ensure against omissions of my own, I phoned down to the ICU, identified myself, and asked to speak to Chaney’s nurse. The ward clerk said she wasn’t available.
I asked, “How is Chaney doing?”
Quick exhale. “Bad. Real bad.”
“Thanks, I’ll call back.”
I felt guilty for checking on John Trent. But at least I knew that he hadn’t been lying.
Nineteen
My feelings were jumbled, which is not a good posture for a clinical psychologist during a crisis. The strongest feeling I had was that I wanted to protect Merritt from the world. From death, and tragedy, and neglect, and hostility, and loss. Right then, I didn’t much consider the atrocity she was accused of committing. I only wanted to shield her from the horrors that hovered nearby. I knew my feelings were paternal, and not therapeutic. But they were as big as life and I couldn’t ignore them.
Paradoxically, my actual job was to protect Merritt from herself. Despite all the objective evidence-and given a near-fatal suicide attempt, I didn’t require much more objective evidence-I was having trouble convincing myself that she was actually in grave danger of self-destruction. If there was any ambivalence on my part about permitting Merritt to visit with Chaney in the ICU, it wasn’t about fear that she would attempt suicide while free of the safety of the adolescent psychiatry unit. Rather, it had to do with an ill-conceived sense that nothing awaited her downstairs but further pain and suffering.
I didn’t want her to have to experience that anymore.
If Chaney survived this night, it was likely that a night where she didn’t survive was lurking on a near horizon. The cards determining this baby’s eternal life were being dealt by fate, or by some callous God I didn’t want to contemplate, or by some bureaucrat at MedExcel. I felt an absolute helplessness that I could do nothing to prevent Merritt from feeling the pain of watching her sister die. All I could do was help her prepare for it.
In the meantime, though, I was charged with keeping Merritt alive during the visit to the intensive care unit.
With that I had some help. Three counselors who had volunteered to stay after shift change and two uniformed hospital security guards accompanied Merritt and me on the journey from the fourth floor to the second. One of the guards used a key to make sure we had an elevator to ourselves on our way down to the ICU.
As we made our way down, I had an eerie sense of having come full circle with Merritt. I had met her days before in an intensive care unit and now she and I were on our way back to one. The circle, I hoped, wasn’t really complete. Being surrounded by benevolent guards and having a little sister near death was no way to complete it.
Merritt’s poise was remarkable. She hadn’t panicked when I told her that her sister was in a new medical crisis. Merritt had stood from her bed as soon as she heard my words, expecting to be taken immediately to her sister’s bedside. Assuming it was her right to be there.
Which it was, of course. I wasted a minute or two telling her about suicide precautions and warning her that staff would be with her at all times.
She listened impatiently, picking at the sleeve of her T-shirt. This one was black and read CHURCH GIRL in a soft script across the front. I realized that I didn’t know youth culture well enough to know whether the church girls were a rock ’n’ roll band, and that I didn’t know my patient well enough to know whether or not she was making some religious statement with her choice of T-shirts.
When I was done with my speech, she raised her eyebrows tenderly and mouthed the word, “Please.”
I asked myself whether I trusted her. I knew I did. We left her room.
As we reached the entrance to the intensive care unit I asked the security guards to wait in the hall, one by each of the two doors to the unit. I asked the mental health counselors to wait in the nursing station and to keep their eyes open should Merritt require their help.
Merritt and I entered the ICU through a tiny vestibule where we took turns washing our hands with foul-smelling antibacterial soap. We pulled on gowns. Merritt’s preparations were deliberate and measured. She washed her hands with care, lathering liberally, rinsing well. She was patient. That’s what John Trent had told me about his stepdaughter. She’s patient.
The intensive care unit at The Children’s Hospital is a long rectangular space with a glassed-in nursing station on the center of one of the long walls. Beds and cribs are spaced regularly along the other walls. Sometimes curtains are pulled between them, sometimes not. Behind each bed were enough electronics to land a 777 in a whiteout.
Chaney’s bed was in the far corner. Nurses, doctors, and assorted health techs surrounded the bed, their activity a magnet for everyone’s attention. John Trent stood back from the crowd that had assembled around his young daughter’s bed. A pale yellow hospital gown was tied behind his neck, but not at his waist. His arms were crossed loosely in front of him.
Merritt left my side without asking permission. I didn’t know what she planned to do, but sensed it would be the right thing. Her slippered feet made hardly a sound as she crossed the unit and approached her stepfather and embraced him from behind. He turned to face her and the tears he had been damming spilled loose in a silent torrent as the two of them hugged.