hospitals. Each time, just when someone might begin to wonder if all the infant deaths pointed to something worse than just nature’s work, she changed jobs.”
Killing the congressman wouldn’t give Noah a new cup from which to drink, but the pleasure of that murder might be sweet enough to mask, for a while, the bitterness here at the bottom of his life.
“She admits to sixteen babies. She doesn’t think what she’s done is wrong. She calls those murders her ‘little mercies.’ “
He had been listening to Vasquez but hardly hearing what was said. At last a measure of the man’s meaning penetrated. “Mercies?”
“She chose infants with health problems. Or sometimes just those who looked weak. Or whose parents seemed dirt poor and ignorant. She says she was sparing them from lives of suffering.”
Noah’s instinct had been half right. The nurse was bent, but not by the Circle of Friends. Yet their roots grew from the same swamp of self-importance and excess self-esteem. He knew their kind too well.
“Between the third neonatal unit and here,” Vasquez said, “she worked at a nursing home. Euthanized five elderly patients without arousing suspicion. She’s… proud of those, too. Not only no remorse, but also no shame at all. She seems to expect us to admire her for… for her compassion, she would call it.”
The congressman’s evil was born of greed, envy, and a lust for power, which was a logical wickedness that Noah understood. That was the evil of his old man, of Uncle Crank.
The nurse’s irrational idealism, on the other hand, incited only cold contempt and disgust, not a raging desire for revenge. Without a banquet of vengeance to sustain him, Noah felt starved of purpose once more.
“Another member of the staff walked in on Nurse Quail when she was.. finishing with your sister. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known.”
At the far end of the long corridor, a guy wheeled the gurney into Laura’s room.
Rolling through Noah’s head came a sound like distant thunder or the faraway roar of a great cataract, soft though charged with power.
He passed through the door between the lobby and the residential hallway. Martin Vasquez called to him, reminding him that the police had restricted access to this area.
Approaching the nurses’ station, Noah was met by a uniformed officer who attempted to turn him back.
“I’m family.”
“I know that, sir. Won’t be much longer.”
“Yeah. It’ll be now.”
When Noah tried to move past him, the cop put a hand on his shoulder. Noah wrenched loose, didn’t take a swing, but kept going.
The young officer followed, grabbed him again, and they would have gotten physical then, because the cop had no choice, but mainly because Noah wanted to hit someone. Or maybe he wanted to be hit, hard and repeatedly, because physical pain might distract him from an anguish for which there was neither numbing medication nor any prospect of healing.
Before any punches were thrown, one of the detectives farther along the hall said, “Let him through.”
The roar of live Niagaras still echoed from a distance in Noah’s mind, and though this internal sound was no louder than before, the voices of the men around him were muffled by it.
“I can’t let you alone with her,” the detective said. “There’s an autopsy gotta be done, and you know I’ll have to show we’ve had continuous possession of the evidence.”
The corpse was evidence. Like a spent bullet or a bloody hammer. Laura had ceased to be a person. She was an object now, a thing.
The detective said, “Don’t want to give that crazy bitch’s attorney any chance to say someone tampered with the remains before we got toxicology back.”
Crazy bitch instead of defendant, instead of the accused. No need to be politically correct here, as later in court.
If the attorney could sell the crazy without the bitch, however, then the nurse might do light time in a progressive mental facility with a swimming pool, TVs in every room, classes in arts and crafts, and sessions with a therapist not to analyze her homicidal compulsion but to ensure that she maintained high self-esteem.
Juries were stupid. Maybe they hadn’t always been, but they were stupid these days. Kids killed their parents, resorted to the orphan defense, and a reliable percentage of jurors grew teary-eyed.
Noah couldn’t rekindle his fury either with the prospect of the nurse remanded to a country-club sanitarium or with the possibility that she would be entirely acquitted.
The distant roar in his head wasn’t the sound of building rage. He didn’t know what it was, but he couldn’t shut it off, and it scared him. Laura on the bed. In yellow pajamas. Either she had come out of her cataleptic trance sufficiently to dress for sleep or perhaps the nurse had changed her, brushed her hair, and arranged her artfully as a courtesy before the killing.
The detective said, “Quail figured, given the patient’s brain damage, death would be attributed to natural causes without a full autopsy. She didn’t bother using a substance that would be hard to trace. It was a massive injection of Haldol, a tranquilizer.”
By the time Laura turned eight, she understood that her family wasn’t like others. A conscience had never been nurtured in her, not in the Farrel house, but nature had given her a strong moral sense.
Shame came easily to her, and everything about her family mortified her more deeply year by year. She kept to herself, taking refuge in books and daydreams. She wanted only to grow up, to get out, and to make a life that would be “clean, quiet, not a harm to anyone.”
The detective tried to console Noah with a final revelation: “The overdose was so large, death was immediate. That crap just shut down the central nervous system like a switch.”
By the time she was eleven, Laura wanted to be a doctor, as if she no longer felt able to cut free of her roots merely by doing the world no harm. She needed to give to other people, perhaps through medicine, in order to ransom her soul from her family.
When she was twelve, she morphed in her daydreams from physician to veterinarian. Animals made better patients. Most people, she said, could never be cured of their worst sicknesses, only of their body’s ailments. No one should have to learn that much about the human condition by the tender age of twelve.
Twelve years of striving to shape the future with dreams and seventeen more years of dreaming without purpose ended here, in this bed, where no more dreams waited beneath the pillows.
The detectives and the medical examiner’s people had stepped back, leaving Noah alone at the bedside, although they continued to watch in their capacity as guardians of the mortal evidence.
Laura rested on her back, arms at her sides. The palm of her left hand lay flat against the sheets, but her right hand was turned up and closed in a three-quarter fist, as if in the final instant, she had tried to hold fast to life.
Both the porcelain-smooth half and the ruined half of her face were revealed, God’s work and Crank’s.
To Noah, now that he would never see her again, both sides of her face were beautiful. They touched his heart in different ways.
We bring beauty with us into this world, as we bring innocence, and the ugliness that we take with us when we leave is what we’ve made of ourselves instead of what we should have made. Laura had moved on from this life with no ugliness at all. Only the soul leaves here; and hers was without stain or scar, as innocent at departure as it had been upon arrival.
Noah had lived longer and more fully than his sister, but not as well. He knew that when his time came to go, unlike her, he wouldn’t be able to leave behind all his ugliness with his blood and bone.
He almost began to talk to her, as he had talked so often over the years, hour after hour, with the hope that she heard him and was comforted. But now that his sister had traveled beyond hearing, Noah discovered he had nothing to say anymore — not to her, not to anyone.
He had hoped that the distant thunder in his head would stop rolling when he saw Laura and confirmed beyond doubt that she was gone. Instead, the roar gradually grew louder.
He turned from the bed and walked away. The air thickened and resisted him at the threshold, but only for an instant.
Across the hallway, the door opposite Laura’s was closed. On his last few visits, that room — also a single — had stood open for airing because no patient currently occupied it.
