Chapter Text
For a place full of people who hadn’t the foggiest what day it was, what month—in some cases, what decade—the seaside memory care facility was scheduled to run with the minute-to-minute precision of an atomic clock.
Sometimes it did, but most times it didn’t. Still, it always ran—day and night, weekend and holiday, behind time, ahead of time, with, without—it ran.
Though this morning, barely.
Two long fingers tapped on the pale-wood sunmica of the front desk, not in the rhythm of the biggest hand of the analog above, but of the slightest.
“Will you kindly stop that, Novak?”
The nurse ignored the sharp request, eyes trained on an imaginary spot out the bay windows—behind the trembling Golden Wattles; out past the long, curving driveway iced like a cake; beyond the tall bars of the gate, and across the frozen-over marina, to a lone boat or maybe a gliding pelican.
“Novak,” a small hand stopped the vexed rapping, and the nurse finally turned to the executive assistant so deft at manning the front desk that she sometimes tamed the circus that was Peaky Village Assisted Living and Memory Care . Vera Bennett drew her arm back, prepared for the onslaught of complaints she was accustomed to from staff.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting on Olga’s amoxicillin, Vera? She’s burning up,” Allie leaned over the front desk trying to make her point as the tired woman pretended to scroll on her desktop screen. “This is the fourth time this week.”
“I hardly control the weather,” Vera said breezily, offering a small smile to a visitor as she pushed the sign-in pad toward him.
He lit up when he saw Allie. Percy was a sweet balding bloke with the droopy eyes of a bulldog; the son of one of Peaky’s crankiest residents—Ruth Baker—who detested absolutely every single human and pet, including her poor son and his three children. She often made other residents cry with her mean words, and got in fights with residents that gave it right back to her. Liz, the Activities Director at Peaky would often pull out her one-year AA chip for dramatic effect and announce that Ruth would “drive her back to drink,” after the painting class she held for residents every Tuesday. No, Ruthie didn’t like anyone, not one bit.
Except Allie. Who she would never admit to liking, but everyone knew. If Allie ever took an unexpected sickie or availed herself of any of her meagre vacation time, Ruthie refused to take her pills, her baths, and sometimes even her favorite treat: tapioca pudding with prunes after dinner. She’d stare out her window with a longing beady gaze, waiting for Allie’s light-blue Ford to pull into her spot on the far side.
At moments, Allie wondered if Ruth saw something in her, something she recognized. Some sort of deep-seated forlorn molecule that sat, heavy like a musket ball in her chest. It had been placed there years ago, of course, decades ago, and would never leave at all.
But no matter what Allie thought, Ruthie wasn’t alone in her soft spot for Nurse Novak. No. Indeed, Allie got Mrs. Benjamin to get out of bed and take slow walks in the sun just days after her hip replacement; she got grouchy Oglevy who didn’t do much but hound the mailman, to tell her all about his late wife’s tomato garden in their old backyard. On the memory care unit, Allie would walk in and just for a moment, Georgia Bates, who was lost long ago to a nippy March in 1953, sparkled to life—ate her french toast sticks with glee.
Peaky hadn’t seen a better nurse than Ms. Novak. And good Care was harder to find than gold in an abandoned mine around here. That’s the only reason Vera suppressed her eye-roll when the woman commenced complaining about the pharmacy’s tardiness as soon as Percy walked off with sad flowers for his unloving mum.
“What’s the point of Ferguson’s earbashing about UTI-related falls and hospitalizations, if she forces a dodgy pharmacy from who knows where on us?”
The assistant took a deep breath, lowering her voice, “You can ask Ms. Ferguson that yourself when she makes her rounds next week,” to which Allie did not resist an indulgent eye-roll.
Joan Ferguson was the Vice President of the state division of Peaky Village. Few got along with her, and many feared her. She was a staunch dictator whom Allie had once thought had a decent philosophy about Care, but that illusion quickly dissolved when she cut their budget in half, bringing the number of nurses down to exactly one, and aides from 10 per shift down to four. She slashed education programs for young staff doing menial jobs—for cleaners and housekeepers from the countryside, many of whom were immigrants or struggling with substance abuse; tuition reimbursement programs were often their only opportunity out of the flawed hamster wheel they were stuck in. Meanwhile, resident rents skyrocketed and those without means were being steadily pushed into Dickensian nursing homes—left to rot away without anyone to advocate for them.
Indeed, Ms. Ferguson was just a cold-hearted cog in the private equity machine. Deaths had climbed since she came on, to the point where their lead paramedic Franky Doyle called her the Grim Reaper. And Boomer, one of Peaky’s cooks, swore that the mercury dropped even when every oven was blazing with chicken pot-pies if the woman so much as made her monthly rounds.
No, Ms. Ferguson wasn’t about to fix the pharmacy issue.
“If that’s all Novak, I’d like to get back to these timesheets,” Vera opened a large binder. “The new director is due and I can’t imagine she’d want to walk into this conversation first thing on a Monday morning.”
“Yeah, well maybe she should!” Allie barked; surprising herself and Vera at her acrimonious tone. She walked away before she could say anything else, running upstairs to her office to call the pharmacy for the umpteenth time.
The new director would be useless like the last one and the one before and the one before. Just a mouthpiece for Ferguson and the establishment—a perfect scapegoat who would ultimately be pushed out like every director before, Allie knew.
Unlike traditional hospitals, in memory care and assisted living, end-of-life was not the most dreaded outcome. For some in hospice, it was an immediate inevitability. So, death isn’t what Allie feared for Olga awaiting her antibiotics for a simple UTI. Pain, perhaps. But more than anything, the negligence of it all made her fingernails press into her palm as the phone to the pharmacy rang and rang, unanswered.
Her walkie crackled to life, “Allie?” a familiar voice said.
She picked up folders and stacks of papers scattered around her desk, looking for the little black box. A few expletives and flying papers later, she spotted it. She pressed the side button and brought the device to her mouth.
“Maxine.” Her favorite nurse’s assistant.
“I’m in 701. Resident’s unresponsive,” Allie felt her ears heat with urgency. Olga . “You’d better get down here.”
She grabbed her stethoscope and sprinted out of her office. “On my way,” she said into the walkie. But, “I fucking knew this would happen,” is what she wanted to say.
After so many years of working alongside each other, Allie had little trouble recognizing what the clenched jaw and indignance in Franky’s eyes meant. But right now, the focus had to be on Olga, they both knew.
With a deft hand, Maxine extracted Olga’s catheter while Allie hooked the bag onto a portable stand and attached a pulse oximeter to her finger. But the trouble came with the IV insert. Allie tapped once, tapped twice, tapped three times, and still kept missing her vein. Olga’s frail arm was being poked like a ham, bruises blooming under her paper-like skin.
“Nah, take your time. You can put it in after she crokes,” Franky said, doing little to ease the grim tension in the room. Maxine gave her a warning look and her partner, Will Jackson—gave her a curious one. Franky was friends with Allie.
A fourth tap, and she missed.
“She’s too bloody dehydrated, her veins are gone,” Allie said; futile in keeping her voice steady.
“Wonder what might have caused that,” Franky deadpanned.
Allie blinked rapidly to focus, and when she saw her own hands shake she knew she had to call it a day. She was too close. She tightened the tourniquet and handed the IV catheter to Maxine. It took her a few tries, but Maxine finally manipulated the traction, popped the tourniquet off, and got it. They all breathed a collective sigh of relief—and in one impressive move, Will and Franky lifted the unconscious woman off her bed and onto their stretcher.
“Go,” Maxine said. “I’ll call Bindi,” Olga’s daughter, “and start on the paperwork.”
Allie skipped the elevator and ran down three flights to the front desk. Paramedics moved so bloody fast. For a second she thought she might have missed them, but realized they were just behind her, exiting the lift.
“I called for amoxicillin many, many times,” Allie said, trying to keep up with Franky. “She was alright until an hour ago, so stop looking at me like that.”
“You should have called us when she started getting cyanotic, not some crap pharmacy,” Franky spat.
“She wasn’t cyanotic!” Allie said, louder; and as they entered the lobby, they caught the attention of some residents mulling about. Some of Olga’s friends gathered by the front desk to ask Vera what was happening.
By the front door, the stretcher got caught at the threshold strip. Allie stepped to the side. The paramedics hauled the clunky bed on wheels once, twice, and then with a loud grunt, yanked it through. The force jostled Olga’s file and cotton swabs off the stretcher railing. Allie collected the materials and chased after them as they loaded Olga into the ambulance.
Amid the chaos, nobody noticed the foreign figure—dressed in a well-tailored black coat—slip past and into the facility. The out-of-place redheaded woman only offered the scene a single sideway glance before making her way to the front desk to be greeted by a distracted Vera.
It was her first day and the icy roads had made her late enough. She would sort out what all that was about in due time.
Outside, Allie pulled on Franky’s arm as Will strapped Olga in and took care of some last-minute transfer formalities. When her friend turned to her, Allie finally spoke.
“Forgive me if I didn’t want her tied down in the ICU for no reason,” Allie said; her warm breath coming out in spindles. “She wasn’t cyanotic until 30 minutes ago. But she didn’t want tubes and needles, Franky. She didn’t want that again. I was trying to be cautious.”
She could almost see understanding ease the lines between the paramedic’s eyes, but then it evaporated, replaced with the grudge from minutes ago. Allie shook her head. You couldn’t talk to Franky when she was like this.
“You’d better get inside before you catch a cold,” with that, the brunette hopped in the front of the rig and the metal box disappeared into the ether.
Only then did Allie realize she hadn’t grabbed her jacket. Arms wrapped around herself, she made a limp walk back into the facility. It was only 10 a.m. Dammit .
Had she thought it was perhaps going to be one of those days that starts off wobbly, but then somewhere along the way the stars align and the rhythm hits and you just bob and weave with what life throws at you like a pro-boxer, going home at the end laughing with your mates about how your younger self from 8 hours ago thought everything sucked—Allie would have been sorely mistaken.
This Monday got progressively more and more shitty.
Everything that could go wrong went wrong. The water main burst in the middle of lunch spreading a panic through the dining room. Fletch, the maintenance director, had called in sick so the kitchen crew had to take on the cleanup—and they were not happy. Consequently, Liz, Maxine and Doreen—Allie’s other star nurse’s assistant—ended up serving chicken salad sandwiches to residents on bedrest.
This meant Allie was short two on her team. And just as she thought she was ready to go attend the meet-and-greet with the new director, of which Bridget—the resident counselor—had reminded her of one too many times, Ben Graham in room 204 slipped in the shower. Her pager went off again as she entered his room—Cherry had had a fainting spell owing to low blood sugar. Two other falls soon followed on a different floor each and then Mrs. Connelly in 604 came down with the most explosive diarrhea leading to debilitating dehydration.
Yes, the minutes fizzled into excruciating hours and the day into dusk.
That’s when Vera found Allie—a shell of herself walking down the third-floor corridor like a ghost.
“I’ve been calling you.”
Allie gave her a look, and ripped her latex gloves off.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t been in my office since noon. It’s been a crap day.” Vera fell into pace with the fatigued nurse.
“Before you leave, you’ve got to stop by the director’s office. The new director’s office.”
The blonde didn’t react, jabbing the elevator button over and over. “Yah, I'll do it in the morning.”
Vera hesitated as Allie walked into the elevator. But suddenly placed a hand on the door to stop it from closing.
“I’m afraid not,” she said, catching the nurse’s attention finally. “She’s gotten wind of the Delay of Care with Olga Petrov this morning.”
This time it was Allie’s turn to wrench the doors open when they tried to close. Vera took a small step back, looking down at her feet, and then chancing a glance back up at the baffled nurse.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Allie said. “There was no Delay of Care. It’s her first day how could she possibly get wind of that?”
The smaller woman opened her mouth and closed it again, but finally relented. Meg Jackson, the Deputy Chief of the paramedic company—who was eyeing a promotion—dug into the incident and filed a complaint with Derek Channing, her boss. He then rang up Ferguson, who chased down the new director to make sure she got to the bottom of the mess and filed a report before her visit next week.
“I’m sorry Novak. Just go up there and sort it out,” Vera offered. “It’s out of my hands.”
“I don’t even know this woman’s name—I, how—” Allie pushed the doors open again and this time they started that awful beep. “There was no Delay of Care,” she repeated meekly.
A fuzz of butter-blonde hair passed down the corridor and ran back when she spotted them. “Vera!” It was Liz. “Love, I’m still waiting on a xerox of those blasted coloring books! It started five minutes ago and they’re about to chew my head off!”
Vera was already turning around, taking short, fast steps toward an agitated Liz. “Bea Smith!” she yelled over her shoulder.
“What?” Allie opened the doors one last time with a weak grip.
“The director!” Vera called out from across the hallway. “Good luck!"