NIGHT SHIFT PROVED TO BE AS EASY AS FLO promised—I could see why she preferred it. Just one other night nurse came on Fifth. Lucia and I knew each other from shift changes, and we chatted easily about the patients until she settled herself behind the nurses’ station with an elaborate piece of crocheting, a christening dress for her granddaughter, she said. Gloria signed off on all the night’s doses and locked up the medication room before clocking out. The doctors were good about prescribing sedatives for those patients whose opiates didn’t already guarantee us a quiet night. Aside from dispensing meds and checking beds, we didn’t expect to have much to do until dawn.
Just as I finished organizing my cart for eight o’clock rounds, the storm Flo predicted finally broke. The sky flickered like a neon sign advertising thunderclaps. Wind burst through open windows, sweeping rain over sills and slamming doors. Thunder boomed above our heads. Light fixtures rattled. Bulbs dimmed and recovered. Someone screamed.
Lucia and I rushed to close windows in the patients’ rooms. We ran into each other in the hallway, trailed by our wet footprints. “Mr. Bogan fell getting out of bed,” Lucia panted. “Will you help me with him?”
“Let me just call down for a janitor first.” I did, then together we got Mr. Bogan up. Tangled in his sheets, he’d drifted over the side of the bed, sinking gradually to the floor.
“Thank God you didn’t break a hip, Mr. Bogan,” Lucia said as we settled him back on the mattress.
“I’m sorry, I had to use the toilet. I duh-duh-didn’t mean to cah-cah-cah-cah-cah-cause any trouble.”
Lucia saw that he had soiled himself. “You’re no trouble, dear. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I can manage here if you want to check on the others.”
I dashed into the next room. Already the floor was puddled with rain. Working my way down the hall, I closed windows, calmed agitated patients, straightened sheets, promised to return with medications. A Negro janitor arrived, steering his wheeled bucket with the long mop handle. He followed me down the hall, drying the floor in each room as I left it.
In Mildred Solomon’s room, the old woman’s moans mixed with booms of thunder like the soundtrack of a horror movie. At four o’clock rounds, I’d only administered half the prescribed dose and by now it was wearing off. I noticed the bedsheets had gotten wet from the rain driven through the window. I’d have to change them, and probably the nightgown and diaper, too. The thought made me shudder. But now that all the windows were closed, I’d have to get the meds out first. Coming through the doorway, I nearly collided with the janitor.
“I’ll start back down the other end of the hall after this room,” he said.
“Thank you so much.” He was a young, gentle-seeming man. I wished I knew his name, but I so rarely worked nights, we’d never met.
I think he read my expression because he said, “My name’s Horace.”
“Thank you, Horace.”
“You’re welcome, Nurse . . . ?”
“Rabinowitz.”
“You’re welcome, Nurse Rabinowitz.” Horace placed the mop in the bucket and began rolling it through the doorway as I stepped past him. He stopped, his eyes following me.
“Is there something else, Horace?”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Nurse Rabinowitz, and I don’t mean anything by it, but I can’t help remarking on your hair. I’m in art school, you see, days, and I don’t know as I’ve ever seen that particular shade of red.”
Mildred Solomon’s moans were seeping into the hallway. “I’m sorry, I have to go get the medications.” I turned away from Horace as he entered the room.
The chaos of the storm had unnerved me; I knocked the cart against the nurses’ station, jumbling the cups of pills and rolling the syringes. My hands shook as I reorganized the medications. Brushing hair out of my eyes, I surveyed the cart to make sure nothing was missing. I looked up and saw Horace coming down the hall. Having finished mopping out the last of the rooms on Fifth, he was steering his bucket toward the freight elevator. Impulsively, I pulled open a drawer and took out a pair of scissors.
I left the cart and walked quickly, unpinning my hair as I went. A thick lock unrolled down my neck like a lizard’s tongue. I lifted the hair away from the nape of my neck, pulling it taut. With the scissor held just above my ear, I placed the hair between its blades and cut. The shearing sound reminded me of the first time I cut this hair, how the scissors chewed through the braid in greedy bites.
I coiled the hair in my palm. “Horace, wait.”
He stopped, the rolling bucket stilled so suddenly water sloshed out.
“Here.” I held out my hand. He took what I offered. The red strands crackled and curled around his brown fingers.
“I don’t quite know what to say, Nurse Rabinowitz.”
“It’s for your art studies. Don’t worry,” I said, stepping back, “it’s not really mine.”
Horace tucked my strange gift into the chest pocket of his coveralls. I retrieved the cart and pushed it into a patient’s room. The thunder grew distant as the summer storm rolled out to sea.
THE STORM HAD disturbed the routines of night shift. It was after nine before all of the patients were dry and settled and medicated—all except one.
“I’ll take this in for Dr. Solomon,” I said to Lucia. “I expect to stay for a while. She’s near the end, I think.”
“That’s kind of you. You know, no one else calls her Doctor. But you knew her, didn’t you? Gloria told me she treated you when you were little. Were you sick?”
I suppressed an urge to blurt out the truth. Instead, I simply nodded. “It was a long time ago.”
Lucia suggested I go ahead and spend the night sitting beside the dying woman. “Take her midnight dose with you, too. I’ll do the rest of that round myself. It’s mostly bed checks at that hour, anyway. If you want to be with her, I mean.”
“I do, thanks.” I picked up another syringe and marked the chart, writing down a time that hadn’t happened yet. Lucia settled back with her crocheting as I walked to Dr. Solomon’s room. My hand curled around the vial of unused morphine in my pocket. I hoped it wasn’t too full for what I’d be holding back, though I supposed I could just rinse the extra down the sink. I wondered why I hadn’t done that from the beginning. What did I think I was saving it for?
In Dr. Solomon’s room, I closed the door and sat by the bed. I’d neglected her since the storm. Covered with only the wet sheet, she was curled on her side, whimpering. I examined the old woman, trying to gauge the extent of her pain from how her jaw moved as she ground her teeth, the way her eyeballs rolled under the closed lids. She needed a dose badly, but first I had to clean her up and change the linens.
I rolled the sheets toward Dr. Solomon’s spine. Leaning over, I slipped my forearms under her neck and knees and hugged the body toward me, exposing the other side of the bed. I removed the damp sheets, tucked in dry ones, then pulled off her nightgown and removed the soiled diaper. Naked, Dr. Solomon looked like a shriveled chick fallen from a nest. Violent thoughts crowded my mind as I cleaned and dressed her, but my hands moved with practiced gentleness.
“That’s better,” she muttered, making herself comfortable in the clean sheets. “What took you so long?”
It startled me, hearing her speak when she’d just been so limp in my arms. She must have been pretending, waiting until I was done caring for her body to reveal her mind was alert. “The storm kept us busy, but I’m here now. You remember who I am?”
“Why do you keep asking me these silly things? I told you, I’m not senile. It’s just that damn morphine. He prescribes too much.” She licked her lips. “You have some for me, don’t you?”
“I have your dose, but we have to talk first.” I was determined to get through to her this time. I would wrench from her the words I deserved to hear: I was wrong, I’m so sorry, please forgive me.
“About the X-rays again? That was so long ago. Why don’t you ask me about something else?” She squared her shoulders, extended her neck. “I ran my department, did you know that? I was the first woman in the city to be head of radiology. Not at a teaching hospital, no, I didn’t publish enough for that. So many surgeons wanted me to read their X-rays I never had enough time to conduct another study. The years, they slip away. One day I looked up and three decades had gone by. I wasn’t planning on retirement—can you see me wasting my time around a mahjong table? The cancer is what drove me out. I’m only sixty years old. My career should have lasted ten more years at least. Get me some water.”
She was infuriating, complaining about cancer at sixty when here I was, twenty years younger, about to be butchered because of her. I held the glass of water to her lips while she sipped, my fingers so tense I could have broken the glass. I welcomed the anger, counted on it to fuel me through the night, justify whatever I had to do to get my apology. Once I told Mildred Solomon about Dr. Feldman’s plans for me, she’d have to think about someone other than herself for once. She’d have to give me what I was owed.
“Did you bring my pudding?”
“What?”
“My chocolate pudding. I told that other nurse to tell you I wanted chocolate pudding. Did she?”
I’d forgotten, and anyway, I wasn’t in the business of doing her bidding. “Never mind about the pudding. I want to talk to you.”
“Then I’ll get my dose, right? Well, I can bargain, too, you know. You can torture me all you want, but I won’t talk unless I get my pudding. Even a convict gets a last meal.” She crossed her arms, though I could see their weight against her ribs was painful. She set her mouth in a hard line and looked away, all the determination and tenacity she’d used to make her way in a man’s world brought to bear on this ridiculous request.
“It’s too late now, the kitchens are closed.” She turned her head, her chin quivering from the effort. “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll go see what I can do.”
In the cafeteria, I caught the last kitchen worker as she was setting out a platter of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper for the night staff. She led me back into the kitchens. In one of the refrigerators, there was a shelf of leftover pudding bowls covered in Saran Wrap. I took the fullest one, intent on depriving Dr. Solomon of any more excuses. She might be dead before I came back to work after three days off, one last shift before my surgery. This needed to happen tonight.
“I’ve been dreaming of this.” She spooned the pudding into her mouth in maddeningly tiny portions, smacking her lips after each taste. My arm grew tired of holding the bowl beneath her chin. Between spoonfuls, I rested the bowl on her lap, my hand cupped beneath it. Through the back of my hand I felt a spasm as pain radiated from her bones.
She hadn’t quite finished when the spoon dropped to the blanket. “That’s enough,” she said, without even a thank-you, as if I were a waitress in a diner. She dropped her head against the pillow and let her eyes drift closed as her tongue circled her lips. “That taste takes me back. My mother used to make me chocolate pudding for breakfast. When I had chicken pox, all I could stand to eat was cold pudding. Even after I got better, I refused anything else in the morning. I remember her standing at the stove after supper, stirring a pot of pudding to leave in the icebox overnight. Is there any smell more wonderful than milk just before it burns?”
“I remember my mother lighting the stove in the morning,” I said, then stopped myself. Reminiscing with Mildred Solomon was not on my agenda. “Listen to me now. I had an appointment with an oncologist this morning.” She didn’t respond. “About my tumor, remember you felt it?”
“I remember. I’m not senile. Did he think it was malignant?”
“He’s performing surgery next week. He’ll examine the cells while I’m on the table. I won’t know until I wake up how much will be left of me.” I thought of my child-self strapped to her table, Dr. Solomon dripping chloroform onto the mask. I took her chin in my hand and made her look at me. “It’s from the X-rays you gave me. From your experiment. You did this to me. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Her gaze never wavered, though her eyelids twitched and fluttered. “You think everything is my fault. Women have breast cancer all the time. So maybe you have cancer, that’s terrible, sure. But what about me? It was probably giving all those X-rays that put this cancer in my bones. I’m not sorry about that, how could I be? It’s a waste of time, regretting the past. Besides, you don’t know for sure.”
“Even if it’s not cancer, I’ve gone through my whole life damaged.” I touched my wig. “Damaged because of you.”
“You think being bald ruined your life? So what if you wear a wig. So do the Orthodox, so do a lot of women. Look at you. You’re a pretty girl. You have a good job, a profession. Are you married?” She paused, considering. “Were you able to get pregnant, after the X-rays?”
As often as I regretted not having children, I’d always thought it was my own nature that denied me mothering. Now I wondered if Mildred Solomon hadn’t robbed me of that, too. “I don’t know, I never tried.” I hesitated, wavering between the truth that felt like a lie and the lie that felt like the truth. “What if I am married, what’s it to you?”
I instantly regretted it. She seized on my words. “Then you have something I never did. I could never get married and keep my career. We can’t all be Madame Curie, can we? I know what those other doctors used to say about me behind my back, some of them to my face even. You have no idea what I went through.”
I didn’t want to see anything from her point of view. It muddied my anger, confused my sense of justification. Still, my mind conjured an image of Dr. Solomon as a young woman with that little tie around her neck, pushing her way through a crowd of white-coated men. I knew all too well what words they would have called her.
I clutched my breast. “But what about me? What will be left of me after this? Don’t you feel sorry about that?”
“At least you have someone who’ll be with you when you die. Who do I have?”
“You have me.” I tried to sound sinister, wanting Dr. Solomon to realize how helpless she was, how completely in my power. Instead, the three words were a simple statement of fact. Of all the people in the world to have at her deathbed, she was down to me.
Mildred Solomon’s mouth hung open; she was panting from the pain. “I’m ready for another dose.” She spoke like a doctor giving orders. “We can talk more later, Number Eight, but only if you give me some now.”
“My name is Rachel, I’ve told you that. But you don’t care, do you? Even now, I’m just a number to you. All the children at the Infant Home were nothing more than numbers to you.” I thought of the tattoo on Mr. Mendelsohn’s frail arm. “Just numbers, like in the concentration camps.”
She gripped the sheets. “How can you say such a thing? You were in an orphanage, not some concentration camp. They took care of you, fed you, clothed you. Jewish charities support the best orphanages, the best hospitals. Even this Home is as good as it gets for old people like me. You have no right to even mention the camps.”
Of course the orphanage wasn’t a death camp, I knew that, but I wasn’t backing down. “You came into a place where we were powerless, you gave us numbers, subjected us to experiments in the name of science. How is that different from what Mengele did?”
Dr. Solomon sat up, the movement agonizing her hipbones. She pointed a wavering finger at me. “Don’t you dare call me a Mengele! He was a sadist, not a scientist. And how did you come to be in the Infant Home anyway? Were you rounded up by Nazis and stuffed into a boxcar? Of course not. The agency was just taking care of you, so you didn’t end up on the streets. You might as well blame everything on whatever it was that killed your parents. My research was your chance to give something back to society, for all that was given to you.” She lay back, her hands cupped around her hips. “I saw those newsreels, just like everyone else. What we did was nothing like the Holocaust. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But I did know. “My brother, he was in a unit that liberated one of the camps.” I lowered my head, my voice a whisper. “He said all those women with their heads shaved, they reminded him of me.”
If Mildred Solomon had chosen that moment to offer me the smallest kindness, a tender touch, I would have dissolved into tears in her withered arms, lavished her with painkillers, served her chocolate pudding for every meal. All I’d ever wanted from this woman, I realized, was the faintest echo of a mother’s love. Couldn’t she sense it?
“Nonsense. Now you listen to me, Number Eight. Either smother me or give me some morphine, because if you don’t I’m going to scream bloody murder.”
Defeated, I squeezed just enough morphine into the IV to shut her up. Her eyes sank back into her head, her mouth relaxed into a slack oval. What remained of her dose filled my vial. I sat on the edge of her bed, watched as the pain eased its grip on her tensed muscles. It wouldn’t last long. What else could I do, what other words could I deploy, to wrench from this woman even a hint of contrition? How could she deny me this, after everything I’d given her, all she’d taken from me? If it hadn’t been for me and the other orphans she used as material, she couldn’t have conducted the study that earned her a coveted position. If she didn’t regret how she’d used us, she should at least be grateful. After all, her career was built on our bodies.
No one else looking at the frail creature in that bed would have seen her for what she was: obstinate, selfish, cruel. Curled up, she took up such a small corner of the mattress. What time was it anyway? The watch face on my wrist looked blurry. I hadn’t realized how very tired I was. I felt myself keeling sideways. My shoulder reached the mattress, then my head. I pulled up my knees, nudging Mildred Solomon over to make room for my legs. I folded my arm under my head and fell asleep at her feet.