Good Medicine Read Free

there. She hadn’t expected him home. She’d hoped he wouldn’t be.
    She knew he wasn’t at work, he hadn’t been all week. It was Thursday, and his secretary had left increasingly desperate messages for him every day. Up until this week, he’d managed to keep up a relatively professional facade at his law office. The partners had been lenient with him, blaming his erratic behavior on the accident. They’d covered for him the same way Jordan had, she mused as she walked through the rooms she’d painted and decorated with such care.
    It felt as if she were seeing her home clearly for the first time in weeks. A great many things had disappeared lately, and she’d tried to believe it had nothing to do with Garry, but now she forced herself to face the truth.
    In the living room, an empty CD holder stood beside the equally empty space where the expensive audio system had been. They’d bought it on their first anniversary. Several weeks ago, the apartment had been broken into while they were both supposedly at work. Her few good pieces of jewelry had been taken as well as all the electronic equipment—even the damned microwave.
    Garry had taken them. She’d known it even then, buthadn’t been able to face the fact that her husband was an addict who’d steal and lie and cheat to get drugs.
    Slowly and painfully as though she were old and brittle-boned, Jordan lowered herself to the dove-gray sofa and forced herself to look at what her life had become.
    It had started with that damned car accident. Garry had been driving home late, undoubtedly going too fast. The expensive little sports car he’d insisted on owning had been struck by a pickup truck at an intersection. Garry had come away with a compound fracture of the left arm and a concussion. He’d also complained of excruciating pain from torn muscles in his back, pain that nothing seemed to alleviate.
    Garry’s physician, Albert Mayborn, had finally prescribed morphine.
    Jordan blamed herself for not recognizing that Garry was becoming addicted. She ought to have known, the signs were all there. Garry complained of pain long past the time when any muscle strain should have healed. She’d finally seen the physical signs of drug abuse in her husband’s bloodshot eyes, his jumpiness, his inability to sleep, his hair-trigger temper.
    At last she’d confronted him about it, and of course he’d denied it. Until tonight, she’d managed to deny the extent of the problem herself.
    The awful scene in the E.R. kept replaying in her head, and Jordan’s humiliation and shame grew. She drew her knees up to her chest, trying by sheer force of will to impose control over her shaking arms and legs.
    She couldn’t get a deep breath. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She began to cry, deep, tearing sobs that scared her. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop them. Soon her stomach and chest hurt, her lungs felt as if they were on fire, and still the wrenching sobs went on and on. She was completely alone.
    Hours passed. The phone rang, and she couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t move. She was thirty-two today, and she didn’t want to live. She began to think of the many ways there were to die.
    And then the physician in her recognized that she needed help.
    She forced herself up off the sofa, dialed the telephone and ordered a cab.
    Sweating and shaking, still gulping back sobs, she found her handbag and made her way outside.
    The Native driver gave her a concerned and wary look. “You okay, lady? Where you want to go?”
    â€œSt. Joseph’s Medical Center,” she gasped.
    St. Joseph’s was an old building, and she knew every inch of it, having interned there. She dragged herself up a set of stairs at the back of the building to the third floor. It was the only place she could think of to get help.
    The psych ward.

CHAPTER TWO
    T HE INTAKE NURSE WAS both intuitive and