Despite their obvious age difference, father and daughter struck Constance Hodges as an unhappily married husband and wife reluctantly showing up for their weekly couple’s session. Thomas claimed the long couch facing the fireplace. Julia staked out the smaller couch at a right angle to him. Hodges assumed a neutral position on the chair opposite Julia. “Shall I have some coffee or tea brought—”
“Not for me.” Merchant cut her off. “I have to get downtown after this. Where do we stand, Constance?”
“Dr. Fisher certified the death this morning. I have some papers for you to sign. Frank E. Campbell came at one. They’ll hold Mrs. Merchant until the death certificates are issued. We’ve alerted the media, per your request, and we’re logging condolence messages as they stream in.” Constance felt pleased by her succinct and thorough delivery.
“That’s a big help, Constance. I’ll have Roberta connect with you as soon as I get to my office. She’ll take over arrangements from here.”
Julia turned to him. “Don’t you even want to know the cause of death?”
Ms. Hodges observed that Merchant seemed surprised by the question. “Coronary arrest.” She supplied the answer quietly. “Her heart simply stopped while she was sleeping.”
“Coronary arrest is not a cause of death,” Julia snapped. “Coronary arrest is the result of something. Everyone knows that.”
“True enough.” Hodges strained not to sound patronizing or defensive as she pointed out that people with advanced dementia couldn’t communicate their symptoms and often had undetected conditions.
“My mother was only fifty-six years old, Constance. And she looked fine at dinner last night.” Julia turned to her father. “Not that you would know or care. When was the last time you came to see her?”
“I was here two days ago, Julia,” he said evenly. “I brought your mother a few new things to wear.”
“That Roberta picked out?”
If this had truly been a couple’s session, Hodges thought now, she would interrupt Julia and ask her to reflect on the hostility in her last exchange, but she was not their therapist, she reminded herself. She was merely a facilitator, and all she could do right now was sit back and discreetly pretend not to hear their crossfire.
“That’s out of line, Julia,” Thomas Merchant told his daughter. He turned to Constance. “I’m sorry you have to sit through this.”
“Whatever,” Julia continued. “All I know is, my mother did not have a bad heart.”
“We don’t really know that,” said Thomas.
“There’s a lot we don’t know.” Julia turned back to Hodges. “Like why my mother’s night caregiver—what’s his name? Brandon Johnson?—ran out of here this morning and what he poured down my mother’s throat in a medicine cup last night.”
The words hit Hodges like a jolt of electric current, and she found herself too rattled to speak. She had felt this level of panic only one other time in her life, sitting in her Central Park West office, after an enraged patient had slammed her stained glass desk lamp on the floor and shattered the silence into thousands of tiny colored shards. He had brought his face so close to hers that she could feel his tensile fury. She had frozen then, and she froze now.
“I had a camera in her room, a motion-sensitive camera in her alarm clock.”
“Jesus Christ, Julia.” Merchant looked appalled.
Julia kept her eyes on Hodges. “When he moved my mother into Park Manor, I had the idea I’d protect her from caregiver abuse. The camera’s been there all this time, and today I took it home and played it. I wanted to see my mother alive one last time. I didn’t expect to see that caregiver forcing her to swallow something while the nurse stood by watching. I guess my instincts were right when I bought that camera. I’d really like to know what was in that medicine cup.”
Hodges fought back her panic with deep, even breaths. At Park Manor, only the nurse on duty was authorized to administer medications. She wore an orange coat while she prepared and dispensed them. The coat signaled to the rest of the staff that she should not be approached, spoken to, or distracted. Hodges did not even want to think about the damage it would cause to Park Manor’s reputation if news surfaced that a nurse and a caregiver had violated the sacrosanct protocol. Constance would not let that happen. She was Park Manor’s lion at the gate. If the institution were tarnished, she would be the biggest loser. Park Manor, after all, was her passport into a world few regular New Yorkers like herself ever penetrated. She had attended cocktail parties in the private homes of the city’s largest benefactors. She was invited to receptions and fundraisers in all the best venues of the city. She could pick up her phone and call heads of corporations, private school headmasters, Broadway producers, and city officials, and they would all take her calls. But her access would end without Park Manor.
“I can assure you, Julia,” she said with as much conviction as she could summon, “that caregivers never administer medication to patients. Mrs. Merchant tended to get dehydrated. Dr. Fisher had instructed her caregivers to make every effort to get her to drink. This included giving her water at bedtime. Brandon was Mrs. Merchant’s primary night caregiver. This was his responsibility.”
“Was it also his responsibility to kneel at her bedside and kiss her cold forehead this morning at five thirty-three AM?”
Hodges stared at her clear mug of cold, cloudy coffee. She had never felt so blindsided in her life. The effort to appear outwardly calm was straining every muscle in her body. She had always judged Julia Merchant as just one more unremarkable adult child of insanely accomplished parents, but now she wasn’t so sure.
“And don’t tell me you didn’t think something was amiss,” Julia continued. “Why else were those caregivers in your office this morning?”
At least Hodges could respond to this. “It’s standard procedure to debrief the staff on duty when a death occurs.”
“Do you check their pockets, too? Because I’d like to know where my mother’s little gold charm is, the dancer charm she used to wear around her neck. It wasn’t in her bedside drawer this morning when I went into her room. That charm had sentimental value to me and I want it back. I want to debrief that Brandon myself.”
Hodges already knew what the unpleasant consequences of that would be. Julia Merchant would find out that Brandon had resigned. Hodges would have to acknowledge that he had violated Lucy’s nutritional plan. Then Julia might leap to the conclusion that other, more serious violations had occurred. The grieving reacted to their losses in unpredictable ways, and Julia was evidently looking to cast blame. Hodges had no choice. “Brandon is off duty tonight and tomorrow,” she lied. “But I’m sure he would never take anything from Mrs. Merchant’s room.”
“Oh? And how can you be so sure?”
Lies always begat more lies, Constance thought. But what choice did she have? “Because I have every confidence in Brandon. He is a wonderful caregiver. He was devoted to Mrs. Merchant.”