Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 53, No. 12, December 2008

The Proper Application of Pressure to a Wound by Sherry Decker

I was tempted to squat right there in front of God and everybody and piss on Jesse Frenault’s grave — except I doubt God cares about things like that, and what the hell, all the other mourners were already gone. Unbuttoning my wool coat, lifting my long, black skirt, and peeling down my pantyhose would have been a struggle wasted on the squirrels.

The branches of a giant maple sheltered the new grave. The November winds had stripped most of the leaves already, but a steady trickle of amber leaves whirled and rustled down around me. It wouldn’t be long before the grave was covered and the only thing to suggest the thoughtless old buzzard was buried there was his modest gravestone. I leaned forward, planning to spit on the arched marble, but couldn’t work up enough saliva to even swallow, much less spit.

“You poor old fart,” I said. Another leaf brushed my shoulder and spiraled down to decorate more of the fresh, russet dirt.

After taking care of him for three straight years most days and nights, he didn’t leave me a red cent. He left it all to his lazy ass son who had come home to visit him once during his last year on earth. His son’s name was Vincent Reginald Frenault, and he spent more time following me around, accidentally stroking my rear, than spending time with his dying father. I felt like saying, “Here, dammit, Vincent, you hold your old man’s sticky pecker while he takes a leak since you’re so keen to help out.” Vincent would have fired me on the spot, though, and I needed the job. After being put on probation from the hospital for mouthing off to a doctor I was lucky to have a nursing job at all. I’ve made some sad decisions in my life.

I had been in a sound sleep when Jesse’s bell started clanging. I went tearing next door, zipping up the front of my robe as I ran, hopping from one foot to the other and pulling my slippers on over my heels. I found Jesse upright in bed, the first time he had sat up by himself in six months. It must have been sheer terror that gave him enough strength in those stick-thin arms and in his gnarled, age-spotted hands twisted by arthritis. He grabbed my arm as soon as I reached the side of his bed. His blind eyes were like mottled green grapes ready to burst from too much juice. I thought he was having a seizure by the way he jerked from side to side. Beneath his thin blue gown, open down the front, his rib cage heaved like a bellows.

I felt his bald head and clammy brow. “No fever. You in pain?”

“I can’t...” he said. Almost a quart of blood shot from his toothless mouth like water from a fire hose, all over my arm and hand and the bedcovers. He toppled forward, his face landing in the gelatinous puddle on the bedspread. I lifted his head and saw thick yellow mucous bubble from both nostrils. Blood and mucous make me queasy — a bizarre flaw for a nurse. I often wonder, what’s in those lumps and smears? I half expected to see something moving in that puddle.

I pulled him back on his pillows and dialed 911 even though I knew he was dead. Vincent slept through it all.

Jesse was more pathetic than hateful, so I’m glad I didn’t squat on his grave. It’s just that I was counting on him to leave me something in his will, considering all the care I gave him. He said I was the best nurse he’d ever had and that I was “quite outspoken.” Or, did he say I was “awfully free with my opinion”? Anyway, he liked me to read to him at bedtime. I didn’t mind. It felt good to look up every page or so and see him resting on his pile of pillows with his clean face and hair and his clean bedding. I bathed him every evening after dinner and slid him between fresh laundered sheets. It was the only time he didn’t smell like a shitty diaper or like a moldy old refrigerator hauled off and left at the garbage dump. Old refrigerators have their own unique smell, as if forty years of curdled milk, rancid meat, moldy fruit, and cheese had permeated their walls. A person can scrub until she is exhausted and the refrigerator walls are raw from her scouring, but that stink hangs on. Jesse smelled like that, like an old, moldy refrigerator, propped up and abandoned at the garbage dump.

“You’re welcome to stay on,” Vincent told me the morning the coroner picked up his father’s body.

“For what?”

“I might need some tender loving care once in a while.” Vincent sounded quite serious, but the expression on his face made me want to jam my palm up against the end of his nose real hard, driving the nasal bone into his frontal lobes. A lobotomy, compliments of the private nurse.

Instead, I picked up my medical bag and my suitcase and headed for the door.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” he called after me.

One year earlier I would have shouted something appropriate over my shoulder, but I’ve learned from my unhappy experience at the hospital that saying nothing demonstrates restraint and it leaves them wondering what you would have said if they were worth the spit and air it takes to say it.

Hospital Special Services added my name to their list again and promised to call as soon as they found something “fitting.”

“If possible, no terminal cases this time please,” I said.

The counselor nodded and then shook her head. Everybody wants the same thing, a patient who isn’t dying. We all want someone who will get well or at least stabilize.

“I’ll call as soon as we do a needs-comparison,” she said. That meant she would scrape the bottom of the barrel before she found something for me.

Three of my patients died during my last month at the hospital. One of them was a middle-aged woman in the final stages of cancer, so her death wasn’t unexpected. She just slipped away while I held her hand. One minute there was the light of life in her eyes, a look of awareness, resignation, peace, and a moment later she was gone. She didn’t blink or look away. She faded out, like a flashlight with a weak battery.

There was an eight-year-old boy who had found his father’s loaded target pistol and shot himself right through the ears. He looked fine, like we could wipe off the blood and plug the holes with cotton swabs where his inner ears had been and send him home. I squeezed his mother’s hand as he took his last breath. Her knees gave way and I caught her before she hit the floor.

I’ve always heard that doctors and nurses make the worst patients. It’s true. Dr. Everson was in his mid forties and as healthy looking as any athlete.

Rumor had it, one day he discovered a lump on his knee. He didn’t wait for the test results. Instead, he entered and locked the door of an examination room and injected himself with a syringe full of air while I banged on the door and peered through a gap in the blinds. The emergency team broke the glass and unlocked the door, but they failed to revive him. He died alone in the stark room beneath a faulty overhead light flickering off and on. Not the kind of place I would choose to end it all.

My checkbook was screaming to be fed it when my final paycheck from the Frenault estate arrived, barely enough to pay my bills and buy groceries. I didn’t buy much at the Thrift-Mart, though. After someone dies in my care I tend to lose my appetite for a while. But since I was there, I bought a pound of whole coffee beans, a quart of milk, and a bag of raisin bagels and stashed them in my empty refrigerator. I had taken so many meals at the Frenault estate my refrigerator had developed that abandoned smell, and it reminded me of Jesse, so I scrubbed it with baking soda and hot water while shuddering and holding back memories of blood and mucous.

It had been months since I had enjoyed a walk and I headed for town, hoping to elevate my mood. I couldn’t afford to buy anything. I forgot my scarf and gloves so I shoved my numb hands into my coat pockets. It was just above freezing, cloudy and blustery. Hardly uplifting.

Leisure time affords the opportunity to see and hear things one doesn’t want to remember later: an old married couple arguing over whom is too blind to drive, a young couple fighting about money, an impatient mother scolding her toddler. Someday she’ll pray he’s forgotten what she said.

“You’re a brat. I should spank you right here where everyone can see! Stop crying! I don’t want an ugly, bawling kid with me.”

I’d never say things like that to my child. I was married once. Pregnant.

In the middle of town was a corner pharmacy. It had a window display of blood-pressure cuffs. I stood there, comparing price and features, reminded of Jesse Frenault. Behind me, brakes screeched, followed by an awful, double-thump. A man shouted. People raced by me into the intersection.

From inside the open door of the drugstore, someone shouted, “Call 911. Pedestrian hit by a car!” The pharmacist rounded the end of the counter and ran out the door and into the street.

I pushed my way into the crowd behind him. “Let me through. I’m a nurse.”

The pharmacist was already there, kneeling beside a little girl on the cold, damp street. She looked to be about six years old and bled from a deep gash on her thigh. A jagged bone protruded through the torn flesh. A blue lump swelled on her brow.

“My baby,” a man moaned. “Someone, help!”

Ten feet away the gleaming bumper of a silver Mercedes hummed. No dents, no blood, no sign of colliding with the child. I wondered how the car had managed to miss a big, hefty guy like the father and mow down a tiny girl.

I knelt alongside the pharmacist, “I’m a registered nurse,” I said. He nodded, his face as gray as the pavement. I placed my hand over the girl’s wound and pressed, staunching the flow of blood. A siren wailed from the fire station six blocks away.

“Shouldn’t that doctor be helping that kid, instead of just some... pedestrian?” The voice came from behind us. “Aren’t you a doctor?” A man tapped the pharmacist on the shoulder. The pharmacist shook his head, looking pale to the point of green.

With my free hand I stroked the child’s light brown, wavy hair. Her blue eyes were half open. I smiled, hoping she would blink or return the smile, but she didn’t.

“It’s her birthday. I promised we’d go out for milkshakes. Vanilla is her favorite.” Her father crumpled to his knees, gasping.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

The father shook his head as if my question made no sense.

“Her name?”

“Angela.”

Chills raced down my neck and arms. Why, I asked. But God has never answered that question, and I have asked it a million times in the past six years.

Angela was the name I had chosen for my baby. Had she been born she would be the same age as the child in the street, this child whose warm blood coated my hand.

Angela blinked.

“Help is on the way,” I told her. “You’ll be okay.”

Like her, my husband had light brown, wavy hair and blue eyes, and like her he had a spray of freckles across his nose.

Derek.

This Angela wore a navy blue coat and black Mary Jane shoes with white ruffled anklets. The hem of a red-checked dress escaped where a missing button allowed the coat to fall open. The dress hem was small, about a half-inch wide and hand stitched. Maybe her mother had sewn the dress for her with barely enough material, or it was secondhand. I’d never know, but it made me angry. An innocent child from a poor family, her birthday party was a milkshake and her party dress was a hand-me-down. And now this, hit by a car, her blood on the street. Strangers staring. Her father crying. Life was cruel.

The crowd parted and the ambulance rolled to a stop. Two men scrambled out carrying a stretcher, a third carried an emergency aid kit.

“Got her,” one of them said. I moved aside. My hand was sticky with a sheer red glove of blood.

They loaded Angela into the ambulance and sped away with lights flashing and the siren screaming. The crowd shuffled away, dragging me with it. The ambulance was swallowed by traffic while my old familiar numbness returned to my neck, back, and legs.

The pharmacy assistant patted me on my shoulder. “Good thing you were here.” She nodded toward the front door of the drugstore. Inside, the pharmacist leaned against the counter, swallowing again and again as if trying to hold back vomit. “He hit a jaywalker with his car a couple years ago. Killed him.” She patted me on the shoulder again. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

I hadn’t been okay in six years, alternating between anger and numbness. Sometimes the anger startles me and makes it difficult to respond to anyone with a calm, tolerant voice. The numbness makes me appear uncaring.

I had often made conversation with co-workers, patients and neighbors, gave injections and baths, took blood pressures, administered prescription drugs, detected fevers and even diagnosed illnesses in time to save lives, but I had done it all with a detachment no nurse should have. I was either angry and shooting my mouth off, or numb and going through the motions, looking like I didn’t care. No wonder the hospital put me on probation.

My attention was drawn to something in the gutter at my feet, a dark blue button. I squatted and picked it up. Angela’s missing coat button gleamed in my palm like a beveled jewel. I squeezed it tight and suppressed a sob.

As I stumbled back toward my apartment I whispered the things I’d sacrifice for Angela’s survival. A soft voice inside my head asked, even Derek?

He’s already gone anyway.

Your profession?

I’m not such a great nurse.

Your own health?

Who cares?

Happiness?

What happiness?

The Bible says one cannot bargain with God, but that has never stopped me from trying.

When I reached the steps to my apartment building, I paused, looked up, and studied my darkened fourth floor windows. The thought of unlocking my door, opening my refrigerator, and smelling Jesse Frenault again made my throat hurt. I didn’t want to think about Jesse or Angela or Derek. Numbness or the anger would be better; I was accustomed to both.

I kept walking.

An hour later I found myself at another intersection with another corner pharmacy, this one newer and larger. I studied their window display of bath mats, shower curtains, towels, washcloths, security railings, hot water bottles, thermometers, and bed trays.

Inside was a fifties-style lunch counter with six red vinyl-covered stools, one occupied by a man sipping coffee from a bisque-colored mug. Half a sandwich remained on a matching plate. The sight made me yearn for shelter from the cold wind, and to wrap my hands around a cup of hot coffee.

I claimed the stool at the opposite end of the counter near some swinging double doors. The waitress raised the coffee carafe and her eyebrows. I nodded and she brought another bisque-colored mug and a matching pitcher of half-and-half.

She halted, open-mouthed, carafe in mid-tilt. “Oh, are you hurt?”

My bloody hand rested palm up on the counter. I flexed my stiff fingers.

“No, a pedestrian-car accident. I just applied pressure to the wound.”

“A little girl?”

I nodded.

The waitress filled my mug. “They’re looking for you,” she said.

“Who is?”

“Not sure. The police. The hospital. It was on the radio but I didn’t hear it all. Are you sure you’re okay?” Pop music played in the background.

I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath a long time. The waitress and the other customer were both staring at me. I nodded again.

“Here.” The waitress wrung out a soapy wet towel and handed it to me. It was hot and it felt good on my cold hands. The white terrycloth turned reddish brown as my skin turned beige again.

The bell above the front door clanged and a gray-haired African American couple entered. They went straight to the prescription counter.

The pretty pharmacy assistant eyed their prescription and nodded. “It’ll be about ten minutes,” she said.

The old couple sat down on a green vinyl sofa beside the self-serve blood pressure machine.

A Pakistani woman entered dressed in an aqua blue sari with silvery trim that didn’t look warm enough for the blustery weather. She laid a prescription on the counter and left again. Before the door closed behind her, two grade school-aged boys entered. They dropped their backpacks on the floor and knelt beside the magazine rack.

Another minute passed as I studied my reflection in the stainless steel backsplash behind the sinks. My reflection appeared elongated and blue gray, but my short brown hair looked neat, considering the wind outside.

Other than the accident, I couldn’t remember any details from my walk. I didn’t recall passing anyone, although I must have, and couldn’t remember crossing any streets, but I had to have crossed numerous intersections.

A familiar sounding voice caught my attention. “Thanks for stocking these. This brand is hard to find.” It was Dr. March, the pediatrician on staff at the hospital — the one responsible for my probation. His voice made me angry. His words replayed in my mind: “It’s hard to believe you’re an educated woman with that mouth of yours.”

We made brief eye contact in the polished metal. I looked away but I knew he recognized me and that he was going to say something.

Screw you, I was ready to shout, but when I looked again the front door opened and closed and he was gone. At first I felt relieved, and then insulted. Leave them wondering what you would have said.

The bell above the door rang again. A man wearing jeans and a buff-colored jacket entered. His dark windblown hair covered his forehead and ears. He paused, studying his own feet, as if trying to recall what he had come in for.

The waitress refilled my mug. “Want a menu?”

I shook my head. “No, but maybe I should call the hospital,” I said, and she nodded.

Bang. Her forehead disappeared. Strands of blond hair and pink matter dotted the stainless backsplash. A piece of scalp and hair fell with a plop into the murky dishwater and she collapsed like a marionette with severed strings. The coffee carafe popped like a big light bulb when it hit the floor.

“Huh?” The other customer at the counter slammed his mug down.

Bang.

He jerked as if he’d been kicked from behind. He slumped forward, tipping his mug over and spilling black coffee across the counter. I turned on my stool. The man in the buff-colored jacket pointed a gun at the elderly couple on the vinyl sofa, pulled the trigger twice, and the man and woman slumped together like Siamese twins joined at the cheekbone. Their mouths fell open. The man’s false teeth dropped into his lap, followed by a glistening trail of spittle.

A man wearing a greasy apron shoved the swinging doors open, tripping over the waitress on the floor. He straightened, straddling her body.

“What the...” He wielded a meat cleaver in one hand, and then there was a loud pop and blood spurted from a hole in his throat. His eyes bulged as he dropped straight down beside the waitress. He gurgled for a few seconds and then fell silent.

The gunman aimed the gun at the pretty young pharmacy assistant. I stood up. My stool made a loud wobble-wobble sound as it spun in crooked circles. He jerked his head in my direction as the assistant ran past him and out the door. He turned all the way around, as if considering a shot at her through the window, but the pharmacist came through a doorway behind the prescription counter and bang, he took the bullet instead.

The gunman walked toward me but halted five feet away when the dead man with his face in his coffee spiraled off his stool and toppled to the floor. His head bounced once on the glossy linoleum, his ears full of blood.

The eerie calm was broken only by the sound of Bobby McFerrin singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” over the radio. A strong diesel smell emanated from the gunman as he drew closer. He was in his mid thirties and hadn’t shaved in at least a week. Above the stubble his gray eyes looked blank. He cradled the gun in black-stained hands, aiming it at my face.

“What has happened to you?” My voice sounded calm even to me.

He shook his head as if it were an impossible question. Then he raised the gun to his own temple and pulled the trigger, splattering brown hair, white skull, and pink brain confetti over the two boys crouched at the base of the magazine rack. They scrambled to their feet and ran out the door, leaving their backpacks behind. Sirens wailed in the distance.

I lowered myself to the stool on shaking knees.

Emergency Services and the local newspaper labeled me a hero.

“I simply applied pressure to the wound,” I explained.

The police said I had saved three lives at the pharmacy. The survivors’ names were listed below the victims in the newspaper article. The pharmacy assistant said I distracted the gunman so she and the two boys could escape. The boys were interviewed for the evening news with their parents sitting beside them. They didn’t say much. Mostly, they just nodded or said, “uh-huh.’”

I refused to be interviewed, but people kept thanking me in the days that followed even though I tried to explain. “I simply stood up. My stool wobbled.”

Heroes risk their lives to save people. They run into burning buildings, or confront terrorists. All I did was press on an artery and stand up from a lunch counter.

The hospital called. I have a full-time job again in the emergency room, graveyard shift. It’s a foot in the door. A second chance.

A few days later the newspaper ran another article, with Angela’s photo. I still have her coat button in my jewelry box. I forgot to take it with me when I visited her and brought her new crayons and a coloring book.

The town fathers awarded me a thousand dollars, along with a framed document signed by the mayors of the adjoining towns. It’s on top of my refrigerator. I haven’t hung it up. I might not. It reminds me of that day, like old refrigerators will always remind me of Jesse and like girls with light brown, wavy hair and freckles will always remind me of my dead baby and of Derek.

Last week I rounded a corner with a cart full of surgical tools hot from the autoclave and almost collided with Dr. March. I had never noticed before how much he looks like Derek. They could be brothers.

“Welcome back,” he said.

I wanted to reply, but my throat muscles cramped and I couldn’t say anything. Instead, I nodded and pulled the cart out of his way.

Maybe I yelled at him that day three years ago because he reminded me of Derek, and thinking about Derek makes my throat cramp. Thinking about Derek makes me remember Angela. I don’t know, maybe that’s not so terrible.

Derek didn’t want children. He suggested the abortion, but ultimately it was my decision. Three months later he left me anyway.

I’ve started keeping a journal. I wrote, How many people witness an accident, save a life, and then wander into a pharmacy where someone with a gun starts shooting people? What are a person’s chances of experiencing a day like that?

Writing things down helps me cope. I’m sleeping and eating better. I’m hardly ever angry and haven’t felt numb in a long time.

I also wrote, It was a bad decision, but I believe my Angela has forgiven me.

Something surprising happened, another strange coincidence, really. Vincent Reginald Frenault checked into the hospital for a CAT scan. Turns out he had a large benign tumor on one kidney. I’m a surgical coward myself, and I wondered if Vincent was terrified or in pain. I wasn’t certain what he’d say if I visited him, but the day after his surgery I went up to the third floor, just for poor old Jesse’s sake.

Vincent lay on one side, hugging a pillow in a private room with a view of the foothills and mountains. An ostentatious bouquet of red roses in a Waterford crystal vase monopolized the corner table. I’m certain Vincent ordered the flowers himself so that he wouldn’t appear neglected. He looked surprised to see me.

“You’ll be okay,” I told him. “Lots of people live long lives with one kidney. You’ll just need to watch what you eat and drink, avoid alcohol, and don’t take any drugs unless it’s something your doctor prescribes.”

He stared, saying nothing. He wore a serious expression and I felt sympathy creeping into my heart, so I stepped to the side of his bed and patted his hand. He took my hand in his and returned gentle pressure to my fingers.

“Ready to come back to work for me?” He winked and licked his lips. Then he lifted the covers and patted the mattress.

“Jeez, Vincent! You’ll never change, will you?” I walked out without looking back, but I heard him chuckling and then moaning as if chuckling hurt.

As the polished brass doors of the elevator closed behind me I glanced down at my hand, still sensing the brief pressure of his fingers on mine, as if he had taken my blood pressure, or applied pressure to a wound. And for the first time in seven years, I laughed.

Copyright ©2008 Sherry Decker