DeBeers 05 Hidden Leaves Read Online Free PDF

chains, and patients who were so introverted, so closed up, they practically had to be hand-fed. Your mother was never that bad, but it was easy to see she wanted to keep to herself.
    She tried to sit alone at a table that first night. but Nurse Gordon would not permit it. To be fair to her, it was our policy to try to get the patients not to withdraw, and she was doing only what we considered goad therapy. Occasionally, one or more of my associates had dinner with the patients. and I had on occasion as well, so it wasn't so unusual for me to do the same. Even so. Nurse Gordon looked very surprised when I appeared in the dining room. There were no other physicians there this particular evening. Dr. Ralston Price and I were the head physicians and he was off to speak at a convention.
    We had nearly twenty patients in the clinic at the time, their ages ranging from fourteen to sixtyeight. One was a young woman about your mother's age. I'll call her Sandy because she had flaxen bland hair that she kept long and stringy and pulled an with such force sometimes, it made her forehead crimson. Sometimes she actually pulled out some strands and held them in her small, tight fist like threads of real gold. At night Nurse Gordan would practically have to pry her fingers open with a crowbar, and Sandy would scream and threaten to bite her. That was a
confrontation to behold. Nadine Gordon was no one easily intimidated, however. She usually got her way.
    Sandy was an obsessive-compulsive, and she could, if she targeted someone, talk incessantly at him or her, regardless of whether or not the recipient of her conversation actually paid her any attention. She was at your mother that first night and on about her favorite new topic: the dark figures she saw lurking about the clinic, looking, she believed, for an opportunity to crawl into people.
    She sat beside your mother and began to polish her silverware clean. If someone didn't remind her to eat, she would sit there all night polishing her fork and her spoon.
    "I saw them bring you here," she told Grace. "They knew you were coming. They were whispering about you in the corridor all day, you know. They're just waiting outside your room now. You don't look at them. You don't let them look into your eyes. That's very important. When you see them, you turn away," she warned, "You give them your back and don't ever, ever walk into a dark room. They have you where they want you if you do that. You can't see them in the dark. That makes sense, doesn't it?
    They followed me here, you know. They followed me. But don't blame me for them. They followed other people. too. They followed you, I bet. Didn't they?"
    Your mother looked a bit terrified.
"Sandy," I said, sitting dawn across from her, "I want you to start eating. You want time to do other things tonight, and besides, we can't keep the kitchen staff waiting for you all night, can we?"
She looked at me, looked at Grace, and then she started to polish her fork.
"Sandy, start eating," I said a little more firmly.
All the while your mother was watching, fascinated, but still obviously frightened. too.
Nurse Gordon came up behind Sandy and threatened to take her fork and have her eat with her hands. She wouldn't eat if we did that anyway, of course. She would go out to wash them and spend an hour in the bathroom doing so.
"C'mon, Sandy," I coached. "See. Grace is eating. She wants to finish and do other things."
She looked at Grace and then she took a small fork full of mashed potatoes, inspecting it closely before putting it into her mouth.
"I'm tired," she said almost immediately after one fork full.
"So eat and then go to sleep." Nurse Gordon told her. She oversaw the patients at the tables with an eagle eve and with catlike movements.
"If there's something in particular you like to eat, just let the nurse know." I told Grace. "We have an excellent chef."
I saw Nurse Gordon's eyebrows rise. It wasn't something I told every patient, of course. I