Free Sisterhood by Michael Palmer Page B

would have said more but for a persistent sliver of fear that he was about to come apart in front of the man.
    Huttner scrutinized his face, then said, “David, never forget that many times patients with serious illness express the wish to die when they’re in a stage of weakness and pain. I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve seen many patients as sick or sicker than Charlotte Thomas recover. This woman is going to make it. She is to get total, aggressive treatment and, if necessary, a full-scale Code Ninety-nine resuscitation. Understand?”
    “Yes, sir … I mean, yes, Wally,” David said mechanically, although he was searching his memory for the last time he had seen a sixty-year-old patient recover from the sort of severe, multisystem disease that beset Charlotte Thomas.
    “We’re in agreement, then,” Huttner said, beaming with pleasure at having successfully made his point. “Let’s go write a few orders on this woman, then we can call it a day.”
    As they approached the nurses’ station, David bet himself a guitar and six months of introductory lessons that the last critical moment of the hectic evening had passed.
    An instant later, a portly man dressed in a turtleneck sweater and tweed sportcoat emerged from the visitors’ lounge at the far end of the hall and headed toward them. He was still thirty feet away when David knew with certainty that another wager had been lost. The anger in the man’s jaw-forward stride was mirrored in his reddened face and tight, bloodless lips. His fists were suspended several inches away from his body on rigid arms.
    David glanced over at Huttner, who showed a flicker of recognition but no other emotion.
    “Professor Thomas?” David whispered.
    Huttner nodded his head a fraction, then moved forward. David slowed and watched as the two men closed on one another like combatants at a medieval joust. The grandstand for their confrontation was the nurses’ station, where several nurses, an aide, and the ward secretary fell silent, fascinated spectators.
    “Dr. Huttner, what the hell is going on here?” Thomas lashed out. “You told me there would be no more tubes and I get here to find a red rubber hose coming out of my wife’s nose attached to some goddamn machine.”
    “Now, Professor Thomas, just calm down for a minute,” Huttner said evenly. “I tried to call you last night to let you know what was going on, but there was no answer. Let’s go down to the visitors’ lounge, and I’ll be happy to go over the whole thing with you.”
    Thomas was not a bit mollified. “No, we’ll have this whole business out here and now with these people as witnesses.” He gestured at the gallery. “I came to you with Charlotte because our family doctor told us you were the best. To me the best meant not only that you would be the best in the operating room, but that you would be the best at treating my wife—as a human being, not just as some unfeeling piece of … of
carrion
.”
    The intensity and pain in Peter Thomas’s voice was startling. Behind the nurses’ station, Christine Beall cautiously turned her head toward Janet Poulos, the evening nursing supervisor. Poulos met her gaze impassively, then responded with an almost imperceptible nod. She was a slender woman, a decade older than Christine. Her coal-black hair was coiled in a tight bun, accentuating her narrow features and dark, feline eyes. A thin scar paralleling her nose gave even her warmest smile a slight sneer and undoubtedly contributed to her reputation among the nursing staff as being uncompromising and humorless.
    Christine saw her in a far different light, for it wasJanet who had supervised her initiation into The Sisterhood of Life. The secrecy of the movement was such that Janet remained the only Sisterhood member whom she knew by name and face. The nod acknowledged that Poulos, too, was assessing the drama unfolding before them.
    “All right, Professor,” Huttner said, a thin edge