Chapter 8 (Part 3 of 5)
(continued)
THE EASIEST WAY OUT of the hospital after hours was through the “tunnel system” in the basement, where she stepped over zippered black rubber body bags, eight or nine of them. Beneath each bag, big metal pans collected body fluids.
“This is not going to be us,” she said to herself.
Outside the hospital, which was surrounded by low-income housing, people worked on cars at the curb, small knots of men congregated on the sidewalks, and lone women in miniskirts and high boots lurked at street corners. Cherie marched purposely, clutching her one possession—Steve’s duffel bag.
With each passing block, the neighborhood degraded. A whiff of sewage mingled with greasy cooking smells. Out of the corner of her eye, Cherie caught sight of discarded condoms and hypodermic needles. Her heart pounded.
“Oh, my God,” she thought. “I can’t let anything happen to me. If I die, Steve dies, and my kids are orphans. I have to survive this. I have to make it through this.”
She knew an appearance of fear would increase her risk. Already she sensed eyes up and down the street following her. The athletic bag in her hand suddenly felt as conspicuous as a sack full of money.
Cherie ignored the panhandlers and transients. As she approached the building the nurse had described, an acrid reek of urine stabbed her nostrils. She climbed the steps, pretending not to see the murmuring pocket of men who appeared to be dealing drugs.
The lobby was small and dim. Half a dozen people bundled in rags slumped on a few folding chairs and a bench against a wall. Others conversed inaudibly in a corner. She felt hungry eyes stalking her.
“I’d like a room,” she said in a voice as cold and flat as she could manage.
A tall man with stringy black hair and needle tracks on his thin tattooed arms draped himself over the elevated counter, hovering above her like a vulture.
“Fifteen dollars a night or ninety a week, cash or Visa. It don’t matter to me,” he drawled. His eyes were dead.
Her back to the room, Cherie deftly produced the bills from under her blouse.
“I’ll take a week. If I stay longer I’ll use my credit card. This is all the money I have.”
“If you leave early, you don’t get your money back. Third floor. Elevator don’t work.” The vulture handed her a room key and pointed to the stairs.
A single naked light bulb oozed a jaundiced yellow pool at each stairway landing. Amid the sounds of babies crying and people arguing, Cherie was poised to fight or run, her heart revved by adrenaline.
When she reached the door to her new lodgings she shot a glance up and down the shadowy hallway before unlocking it. The room was literally no bigger than a jail cell. A forty-watt light bulb dangled from the ceiling. Across the walls and floor, cockroaches scurried for cover. The conveniences were a tiny sink, badly stained, and a single bed. No toilet. Paint peeled from the walls, leaves of plaster flaked from ceiling laths, a decrepit air conditioner hung from the lone window beneath rusty Venetian blinds. Framed at the window in a building across the street was a man wearing a dirty sleeveless T-shirt.
Cherie bent to look under the bed and was relieved to see it was nothing but a cot, a three-inch mattress on a wooden frame under which no one could hide.
She closed the door and locked it, took the remaining money—a gift from friends in Germany—from the athletic bag and stuffed it into one shoe, leaving her military I.D. in the other. She slipped Steve’s Ranger knife into her sock and shoved her chopped hair under Steve’s green fatigue baseball cap, trying to look like a man. Back out in the hall, she locked the door behind her, taped the key to her belly, and hurried to the hospital to meet her father for dinner.
This time the threatening neighborhood didn’t feel quite so alien.
She and her father found take-out barbecue about a mile away. The clerk was stationed behind bulletproof glass in a wire mesh cage. Earl slid the money through a teller’s trough, and the food was passed out to them through an aperture like a big night deposit slot. They started to eat on a nearby bench, but the characters milling about made Earl nervous, so they transferred to his rental car.
“Where are you staying?” Earl asked Cherie.
“Not far from the hospital,” she answered.
“Is it safe?” he asked dubiously.
Cherie laughed. “Yes, Dad. It’s just a place to spend the night. It’s not like I’m alone on the street.”
STEVE'S WATCH ALARM woke Cherie at five the next morning. Cockroaches crawled over her hairbrush. In the common lavatory shared by eight other rooms on her floor, several other women were getting ready for the day. No one spoke or made eye contact.
Cherie arrived at the hospital at six on the dot and cheerfully chatted up her comatose husband as though he understood everything and she had just strolled through the park. She informed him that they were going home as soon as possible.
“Now, I need you to work with me,” she said softly. “We’re going to do PT.”
In the hospital, PT stood for physical therapy. In the rigorous world of Airborne Rangers it was the abbreviation for physical training, the calisthenics that Major Rodgers loved.
Cherie began manipulating Steve’s limbs and joints (arms, legs, fingers, toes) five hundred times each. She was in the middle of this laborious regimen when the social worker dropped in and again asked Cherie to sign the papers that would commit Steve to a VA hospital.
“No,” Cherie said pleasantly. “Like I told you, I’m taking him home.”
The next morning, a male nurse Cherie had befriended—“Tex”—showed her how to suction the phlegm out of Steve’s throat. On day three, Tex instructed her on disconnecting and reconnecting the breathing tube.
That night, as she had the night before, Cherie varied her route on the way home. Still, she decided more precaution was necessary to neutralize the dangers of the street as much as possible. When have I felt the safest in my life? she asked herself. The answer came in a flash: it was when she was pregnant.
The next morning, she experimented with stuffing some folded clothing beneath her sweatshirt. Her reflection in the room’s foggy mirror was transformed, the simulated pregnancy so realistic she herself was startled.
Cherie tucked the extra clothing nonchalantly under her arm as she left the building in the pre-dawn darkness. Fifteen seconds later, her urban camouflage quickly slipped into place, she was pregnant and waddling, a model of frumpiness. She reversed the process twelve minutes later as she approached the hospital.
For Cherie, the mean streets of Washington, D.C. weren’t entirely different from Hot Springs, Montana. On countless occasions she smelled bears before she saw them. When rattlesnakes buzzed, the rule was you didn’t move until you saw where to tread. She knew how to pay attention.
At one o’clock one morning Cherie entered the shower stall in the lavatory down the hall from her squatter’s hovel. The place was deserted at that hour, but still she took no chances and disguised herself as a man, pushing her wavy hair under Steve’s fatigue cap. She disrobed inside the shower stall. She was naked and soapy when a man’s boots appeared beneath the shower curtain. With the noise of the water she hadn’t heard him come in.
She intentionally dropped her soap with a thud.
“Oh, goddammit!” she growled in a voice pitched as deep and guttural as she could make it.
In case her ploy didn’t work, her hand hovered over the knife that rested on the soap dish. Its blade was open. The boots were gone as silently as they had appeared.
Although she preferred to sleep on her stomach, that night, and every night thereafter, Cherie slept on her back, with the light on, the knife next to her right hand. From then on, she used the shower in Steve’s room. She never returned to her building’s lavatory.
A few days later, Walter Reed Army Medical Center was put under twenty-four-hour security lockdown. Crime was out of control. For the first time in the institution’s history, armed men in uniforms now guarded the entrances.
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