AFTER SHE LEFT, I steeled myself, and because I was so shaky, I used the walker from the rehab center that my kids had insisted I keep, to push over to my desk. There, in the bottom of the lowest drawer, buried as much as I could bury it, was the manila folder. I had to swallow hard before I opened it.
The clippings about the accident, and the scandal, were beginning to become brittle and yellow. I lifted them carefully. There was the picture of the car smashed into the tree. There was a photo of Bethany from her middle school yearbook, and another of her from a curtain call for that musical she was in.
Then came stories about the trial of Stinson, the man who did it. A picture of him in his wheelchair, in front of the court. And there was the name, in black and white: Judge Nathaniel Kearney. In the picture his hair was dark, and he didn’t wear glasses. Grecian formula and contacts. No wonder I hadn’t recognized him. It figured he was vain as well as pompous and greedy.
I remembered how he’d made such a show, performing his sympathy for Iris and Jimmy.
I sat staring out the window as the light faded. Images and sounds and words gelled into coherence as the horror unfolded in my memory, as it had so often before. A narrative constructed out of shards: what happened first, and what happened after that, and after that. All the way till the end. I always made myself remember it all the way to the end. They say stories lose their potency if they’re rehashed too often, but that would not happen to this tale. Every time it washed over me, it was a stream deepening the channel.
“Ma?” I heard Charlie’s fearful rasp when I answered the phone. “We’re at St. Mary’s. You need to come. Right away.”
There was shuffling and then Jimmy was on the line. “Mom? It’s Bethany and Iris. A car, it jumped the curb.” Sobs in the background. “Please, you need to get down here.”
I raced to my Buick, stabbing the key into the ignition. Jimmy’s shaky voice reverberated, urging me to go faster. A horn blared. I careened into the parking lot.
Habit almost carried me to the staff entrance but I caught myself and ran to the ER. I barged in on a conversation between a nurse and the person staffing the desk. “They’re upstairs, in surgery,” the attendant said. I half ran, my body falling into the shortcuts I’d nearly forgotten, except I had to backtrack when I got to a door that required a hospital ID. I pushed through the sensation of being weighed down, like I couldn’t move fast enough. Like swimming through syrup.
The elevator doors parted like a stage curtain, revealing a swarm of scrubs and lab coats. I almost collapsed in relief when I saw Iris. She seemed even taller than normal, her long brown hair piled in a bun that flopped as she nodded. Her eyes were enormous, dark mirrors fixed on the doctor who was speaking. She had a welt on her cheek, and her arm was in a sling, but otherwise she seemed okay. Jimmy, looking heartbreakingly young, had his arm around her. Charlie and Pam huddled behind them.
But where was Bethany? My heart thudded in dread.
I moved closer. I stood unnoticed, but I heard everything. Head injury. Brain bumping inside the skull. Surgery to release pressure. Oh my God, Bethany. Risk of blood clots. Rib and shoulder fracture, blunt force trauma to the chest. Won’t know anything for a while yet. Iris swooned and collapsed against Charlie and Jimmy.
I stepped forward and cleared my throat.
“Mom!” Iris lunged toward me. She bent over to rest her head on my shoulder. She wept, just like when she was a child and she’d waited until she saw me to begin crying after some accident or hurt. Jimmy awkwardly encircled us with his arms. Charlie and Pam made another layer of hugs and bodies and tears. But it was Iris who formed the core, the gravitational center of fear and disbelief.
A young resident was talking about CAT scans, and I saw Iris wasn’t taking it in. I could tell she wasn’t making sense of what he was saying.
I leaned forward. “Maybe you should explain it to me.”
He turned, speaking slowly. “I am so sorry. I know this is a lot. Perhaps you can take your daughter to the waiting room, and I’ll talk to her husband.”
Except Jimmy was in worse shape than Iris. He was crumpled on a chair fifteen feet away, his face in his hands. Charlie hovered next to him. Jimmy sobbed loudly. Iris rushed to her husband and held him, stroking his hair. They awkwardly rocked each other, perched together on the edge of the bench.
I stood up straighter. “I think you’d better give me the details.”
At that moment the elevator opened. It was Sameer Gupta, the head of Neurology. “Frannie? I just heard.” He hugged me. I sent a chastening glance over his shoulder at the resident. Sameer said, “I’ll see what’s going on and fill you in.” He disappeared through the doors that separated the operating rooms from the surgical lobby.
I stood, mute, amid the squawk of call buttons and the telemetry machines receiving info from patient’s rooms. Activity thrummed around me. Someone in a surgical mask came forward. I refocused. It was Sameer again. Over his shoulder I saw my daughter rush toward me. For a split second, I saw her as I would have seen the loved one of any former patient, and then—a shock like ice water—I realized the woman with the terrified eyes was my Iris, and this tragedy was my tragedy, and everyone I cared about were “the loved ones.” I reeled, suddenly overwhelmed. Sameer reached out to steady me.
“Frannie, take a breath.” He spoke in a low voice with such caring, I knew he understood it had hit me. He whispered. “Your family needs you.” He was right. I pulled up straight again.
Iris pushed me aside and stood in front of Sameer. “What is it? What’s happening?”
Sameer swallowed. He said, “She’s in surgery now. She is young and strong, and they’re doing everything they can.”
His words made my stomach drop. Iris’s voice climbed into a sob. Jimmy folded her into his chest, where she shuddered, wiping her face on his pale blue windbreaker, already smeared with mascara.
The next thing Charlie was patting my arm and saying, “Mom? Mom, wake up.” I struggled to rise from the deep cushions of the chair where I had fallen asleep.
Charlie said, “She’s out of surgery.”
The clock near the elevator put it at almost two thirty in the morning. I arched and pressed my hands into the small of my back. “I’ll go talk to the doctor.”
“He went right into another surgery. Some guy with a spinal cord injury. Besides, he already talked to Iris and Jimmy. They’re in the recovery room with her.”
“I want to go in.”
“No. Only parents.”
“But …”
He put his arm around me. “Let’s go home. There’s nothing we can do now, and Iris and Jimmy and Bethany are going to need us to hold things together the next few days.”
I noticed the bruise-colored shadows under his eyes. I put my hand against his cheek. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, Ma.” He swallowed. “I can’t believe it.” He bent to gather my purse and balled-up tissues from the couch, before his jaw tightened. “I’d like to get my hands on that bastard.”
We left my car in the lot, and Charlie dropped me at my place. But I couldn’t go to bed. That felt too normal, somehow. I curled on the divan by the picture window and stared outside till the sky got light and the world began to wake up and go about its business. Cars driven by those who had early shifts rolled out of driveways. A woman with a briefcase hurried by, eyes glued to her phone. People with jackets over their pajamas slumped in the park across the street, drinking coffee as their dogs did their business. Ordinary life.
I realized that within an hour or two, almost everyone I knew, and certainly everyone Bethany and Iris and Jimmy knew, would hear the news. The principal and teachers at the middle school would confer in low tones about how to handle this. The girls in Bethany’s classes would hug one another in the bathroom. Their parents, hearing what had happened and imagining the unimaginable, would call one another to ask for news and blink back tears as they drove their kids to soccer or picked up the dry cleaning. They’d drop off cake and brownies and casseroles and heartbreaking notes for Iris and Jimmy and Bethany. I hoped they would remember Bethany’s allergy to peanuts.
We went back to the hospital. Iris was curled in a chair, her head propped against the wall. Her eyes were closed, and her left arm was still captured in a sling. The cut on her cheek had purpled, but otherwise her face was as pale as Bethany’s.
Bethany’s head was somehow flatter than it had been yesterday. Except if I stood in just the right spot in the corner near the window. From that one place she looked like the same dear Bethie. With lots of tubes coming out of her.
I stroked the curls off her forehead. Her long lashes cast shadows on her cheeks. The last time we’d spoken she’d complained about a pimple that had appeared, and how it was going to ruin her school photo. And there it bloomed, troubling the smooth skin of early adolescence, a minor blemish on her lovely perfect chin. I squeezed her hands, leaning over the bed, trying to stifle my sobs.
There was a sound behind me. I quickly wiped my eyes, taking a second to find my calm nurse’s expression before I turned to Iris.
She stretched awake, rubbing her face with her free arm. Her eyes were shadowed and empty.
I stood to hug her. She stiffened at my touch.
I understood. In my years of nursing I had seen this too. I would be the vessel for the anger. Someone close had to absorb the fury, the unfairness, to be the sink into which the horror was drained. To embody the unjust universe. To be angry with.
I touched my daughter’s hair. “Hi, honey.”
She exhaled, slumping as her exhaustion took over. “Hey, Mom.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
“No. Maybe. I guess I dozed.” She looked at me, suddenly tender, and took my hand. We watched Bethany’s chest rise and fall to the wheezing rhythm of the machine. Iris whispered, “It should have been me. I was right there. It’s my fault, I didn’t make sure she had her seat belt on. What am I going to do?” She sobbed again and bit her lip. I knew this pattern too: cycling between guilt, exhausted blankness, bargaining with the Almighty, and desperate panic. Thank God, Cal had died in a different hospital. I didn’t think I could have taken all of my worlds colliding in one space.
I held her tight. She pulled back after a few moments.
I kissed the top of her head. “Where’s Jimmy?”
“He’s getting us some coffee.” Pause. “He’s shattered, Mom. He isn’t strong enough.”
No one is. No one is strong enough. It was meaningless to assure Iris she would survive this, because mere survival—of any of us—is not what we wanted. To have our regular lives back was what we wanted, our lives from before. Bethany, the same as always. Iris, never knowing this dark tunnel. Everything back to normal.
But normal was an illusion. I had prayed all night, but you have to be very careful with words when you pray. I looked at the machine breathing for our Bethie, the tubing carrying away drainage, and prayed for her to recover. Mere survival was not enough.
Jimmy arrived with coffee and kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get one for you.” He held out his Styrofoam cup. “Do you want mine?”
“No thanks—I’m sure you need it.”
He wedged in next to Iris. Somehow the way they squeezed onto the single easy chair, each leaning on the other, was too intimate to bear. I said, “But the coffee does smell good. I think I’ll go get a cup. Do you want anything else?”
In the elevator, I wondered whether I’d have to settle for the terrible cafeteria brew or if the Starbucks near the gift shop was open yet.
“Frannie? Is that you?”
It took me a minute to place the freckled woman with thick glasses. Then it clicked. “Miranda?” I’d known her since she was a student nurse.
We hugged and she smiled, “Just can’t stay away from us, huh?”
I didn’t want to tell her. I couldn’t face any more sympathy. So I waved my hand in an “it’s nothing” gesture. “I’m visiting someone. When the elevator stopped at this floor I got off on an impulse to see if I knew anybody.” I hurried to change the topic. “Do you always work this unit?”
“Not usually, but we got slammed last night. A car accident, and that crane collapse … you probably heard about it on the news.”
I swallowed. “The car accident was on the news?”
“No, no. The crane collapse.” She pushed up her glasses. “The accident was sad, though. Guy jumped a curb. Hit another car, with a girl and her mom. I hear the girl is in pretty bad shape. And the guy was soused. I got to Emergency just as they were bringing him in, and I could smell the booze.” She exhaled in judgment.
“He’s … the guy is here?”
She lifted her chin, motioning down another hall to the west wing. “Yeah, he needed surgery. Spinal injury—they operated, but his legs are paralyzed. He won’t get movement back.” She sniffed. “Not that I have much sympathy.” Her pager buzzed and she looked down. “Oops—gotta go. Nice to see you,” she called over her shoulder as she padded off in her quiet white shoes.
I slid onto the bench near the elevator, reeling. Of course. Of course the EMTs would bring them both here. It’s the closest trauma center.
The elevator doors opened and closed three times while I sat there. I waited till the hall was empty, and ambled in the direction Miranda had indicated, checking out the little sign by each door and noting the equipment.
In one there was a man on a respirator. It had to be him. The monster who’d hit my Bethie. The name on the door said “Sid Latourno.”
I looked up and down the hall before I slipped inside. I approached the bed. Sid was an old gray man. I leaned over, trying to find the evil in that face. Then he snorted and shifted his position, bending his knees and kicking.
Not him. I back out slowly.
Roger Stinson was two doors after that. A face that might have been handsome before dissipation. Thick hair. Legs deflated looking and inert under the blanket. I stood staring down at the man who had done such damage to my family. A bile-tasting fury rose, acrid in my mouth. My chest filled with cold fog. But through it all, the beeping of the ventilator echoed in my head, like a ruthlessly beating, remorseless heart.
According to the research, survival among patients after ventilator withdrawal is less than an hour. In my experience, it was usually much less. And Stinson was on a morphine drip, which depressed breathing even further. I stared at the machine. He might last ten minutes, if I’d had to guess. But then again, he was relatively young, always an advantage when fighting for life.
I exhaled sharply. It didn’t matter anyway. Any interruption and the alarm would sound at the nurse’s station. I inspected the infusion pump controlling the IV. It was one of the newer models. Once the IV tubing is threaded through the pump, a nurse can set it to deliver as little as 0.01 milliliter of medication an hour or as much as a liter.
But it was easy to make a mistake inputting the settings: simply leaving out a decimal point or adding a zero when setting the rate can result in overdose. Such events were depressingly common. The nursing journals were full of case studies in which some small action, like forgetting to add a decimal after being distracted while hanging a new bag, resulted in outsized, catastrophic outcomes. Post-op patients were particularly susceptible because they were on such strong medication. I had lived in fear of making such an error.
I fingered the IV tubes coming out of the pump, staring at the settings. It would be so simple. And it was nearly shift change, when fewer staff were on the floor. He’d go unattended for the few extra minutes it would take. But who would get in trouble? Would one of my former colleagues have to go home thinking he or she had made an error that resulted in a man’s death? There’d be an internal inquiry, and some poor former student, maybe even Miranda, could lose her reputation and career. Everything would be looked at.
Oh my God: I had forgotten about the cameras! Were there cameras in the hall? There had been talk of installing them a couple years before, as a “quality-control” feature. More like a staff control feature, but still. I hadn’t checked. If there were, I’d have been recorded, entering Stinson’s room. The thought hit me like I’d been dropped into a pool. What was I thinking?
The infusion pump beeped, indicating he needed more morphine. They’d come soon to hang a new bag. I thought maybe I should just give the busy staff a break and slow the drip to almost nothing. Delay the new medicine. It wouldn’t kill him. Just give him a taste of real pain, of what my family was going through …
I turned and practically ran down the hall to the elevator, aghast. I found my way to the Starbucks in a daze. My hands were still shaking when I put the cream in my dark roast.
That’s where I was when I heard them call the code and Bethany’s room number.
I raced back to the floor. A nurse was herding them out of the room, first Charlie and Pam, whose arms were linked around Iris, who was collapsing but trying to claw her way back in. Jimmy was blocking her view, holding her while looking back over his shoulder.
She sobbed when she saw me, her arms extended toward the door. “Oh God! Please, Mom, please don’t let them …”
I shoved my way in, into the controlled chaos of extreme emergency. Chairs were willy-nilly to make room for the urgent choreography: arms spooled cords and tubes around other arms and heads and shoulders, doctors called out meds, nurses ripped open steri-packs and hung new bags. Machine beeps punctuated air filled with the smell of plastic and alcohol. In the center I caught a glimpse of Bethany, pale as the sheets, her lips purple, her small figure inert as arms and bodies reached over and around her. A young doctor loomed above her, his face grim with determination as he pulsed with all his weight into her chest, pushing with such force he practically lifted himself off his feet with each compression. Behind him another doctor gripped the set of paddles. “Clear,” someone barked, and I heard the shoomp of electricity being pumped into flesh, and Bethany’s body lifted and pancaked down. “Again. Everybody, clear.” I was being moved, and a resident—the same one as before—tried to keep me from seeing. I squirmed to duck under his arm, but he held me, saying, “No. No, please. Please don’t …”
Shoomp. The irregular squealing continued, her heart wavering in fibrillation. The resident backed me out into the hall and nearly over Iris, who was sunk partway to the floor, with Jimmy half holding her up, half crumpled himself. The machine squeal continued, so loud it drowned out everything else.
Then all was silent. Though I could see the chaos around me, the carts and equipment wheeling, and techs and nurses and docs calling directions as visitors with pale fearful faces skirted around us and eased down the other hall, eyes averted, and Iris’s hands covered her open mouth—all was quiet. And finally in this silence I heard someone say, “Call it.”
I looked down at the folder in my lap. The final clippings layered there were tangled together, much less orderly. “Judge and Lawyers Investigated for Corruption.” “Lawyer Convicted of Bribery.” “Corruption Probe Continues, Judge Claims ‘Witch-Hunt.’” According to the paper, it had been going on for years, prosecutors and defense lawyers bribing clerks to get certain judges, then paying those judges to make sure there was leniency.
Two lawyers eventually went to prison. And although Judge Nathaniel Kearney and a prosecutor were charged with accepting bribes to let Stinson, along with other drunk drivers, off easy, the charges were dropped because the evidence was deemed insufficient.
Inadequate.
The way the word came off his lips echoed through my mind, and the curdled taste of the soup again flooded my mouth. It’s amazing what the body remembers. It was no wonder I’d dreamed about Bethany’s death the day I met him. My subconscious knew. His face had awakened the ghosts.
Still, it wasn’t surprising that I hadn’t recognized him. During the trial we were so out of it, so numb. And the black robes and big desk and official setting mask the human being behind the apparatus. Maybe that’s the reason the men here at Ridgewood seem so emptied out. They’re used to their trappings: their business identities, their office plaques, their secretaries. The props of old women are more portable: jewelry and face lifts and the tasteful expensive clothes that some of them still put on, even here, just to come down to our dining room to be served boring food by workers wearing name tags.
I thought of Katherine’s expensive ring. It was like armor, or a talisman protecting her from reality. Spoils of war, a bribe for companionship. From a man to whom I now had to listen play the grand piano.