Chapter One
The alert came in while I was camped in the break room, running the clock down on the remainder of my shift. Half a dozen iPhones going berserk, warning of severe thunderstorms, possible flash flood- ing. Nurses sighing over Tupperware containers of leftover pasta salad, everyone anticipating the panicked calls from the ER, begging to send them floaters. Bad driving conditions meant an influx of bodies, peeled off the pavement, needing to be stitched back together.
I slipped out of the room before anyone could remember that I was off in half an hour. A coveted 7:00–11:00 p.m. shift before three nights off was a perfectly good reason for my coworkers to turn on me in normal conditions, but tonight was going to be a long one.
Rain slapped against the hospital windows as I retrieved my vitals cart from the hall. I thought of my car, parked in a garage six blocks from the hospital, and the long journey ahead of me tonight. Too late to be searching for an out now.
I stopped outside 102A, a woman in her late sixties I’d grown par- ticularly fond of in the days she’d spent in the ICU recovering from a bowel bleed. On this floor, it’s generally unwise to get attached to patients, but Mrs. Berne made even the most arrogant attending doc- tors shit their pants, and I admired her.
“Knock, knock,” I said, tugging my cart into the room.
Mrs. Berne muted her television. “What was all that terrible noise?”
“An overreaction to the weather.” I wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Mrs. Berne’s arm, careful not to disturb the network of IVs in her hands. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. You people and these machines—how am I supposed to sleep?”
While the blood pressure machine hissed and clicked, I slipped the pulse reader over Mrs. Berne’s finger. “Hate to be the one to break it to you, but the doctor ordered an abdominal scan.”
“Tonight? Why?”
You’re very sick, I stopped myself from saying. Most people who wind up in the ICU do not understand this simple fact, and reminding them only pisses them off. “Your white blood count is still pretty high. He wants to make sure the infection isn’t coming from a perforated bowel.”
Mrs. Berne’s eyelids closed. I took her hand in mine, her skin rice-paper thin and mottled with abused veins. “Hey. This is just a complication. It won’t be what does you in.”
Mrs. Berne eased a bit under my touch. “Oh yeah? What will, then?”
I hung up the blood pressure cuff. “My money is on that daughter of yours.”
“Which one?” Mrs. Berne shifted in her bed, wincing. “The blonde. Always yelling at us?”
“Oh, that one’s been a bitch from the second she was born.”
I smiled behind the glow of my monitor and finished logging her vitals. I wished Mrs. Berne luck with her abdominal scan and made my way to the door but paused in the doorway, drawing her attention from the television.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just letting you know I won’t see you again for a bit.” I palmed the doorframe, my opposite hand on my vitals cart. “I’m off at eleven, and then the next few nights.”
“Any fun plans?”
“Yeah.” I flipped the room light off for Mrs. Berne. A rare private room on this floor, thanks to the highly contagious intestinal parasite she’d been admitted with. “Sleeping.”
It couldn’t have been further from the truth, but the most effective lies usually are. I picked that one up from patients. Tell me you got that black eye when your husband elbowed you while reaching for the remote? Obviously I’ll think he punched you out. Now, if you say you got kicked in the face by a horse—that’s so wild I just might believe it.
Mrs. Berne’s response was a bark of a laugh. I carried it with me on the elevator ride down to the hospital entrance, out the doors, and toward the garage under an increasingly threatening sky.
My scrubs were damp by the time I reached my 2003 Accord. Having a car in Queens was pointless, but I’d had the thing since college and felt obligated to keep her around, like a needy old friend who wants to meet up twice a year for drinks.
I turned on the air in the Accord, my fingertips pulsing with the urge to pop my glove box and check that the Ziploc bag was still there. It obviously wasn’t difficult to get my hands on a syringe. A suffi- cient dose of morphine was a different story—one that would hopefully not end with a twelve- to fourteen-month prison sentence.
I expelled the sigh trapped in my cheeks and clipped my phone to the dash mount, more habit than anything. No need for GPS for this trip.
The clouds formed a giant bruise over the horizon by the time I reached the George Washington Bridge. Lightning lit the sky like a camera flash, preceded by a fresh assault of rain that blotted out my view of the road ahead.
The lanes quickly jammed up ahead of the merge for the bridge. I kept right, red and blue lights in my periphery drawing my attention.
My heart sank to my bowels. An NYPD cruiser swerved around me and pulled up to a car hugging the side of the bridge. A jumper, maybe, or an accident already.
My fingers went slick around the steering wheel. I’d been skittish around law enforcement since I was a preteen, when my uncle Scott nailed a sign to the edge of our property spray-painted with the words Come Back with a Warrant. I’d grown adept at avoiding the cops that occasionally came up to the ICU with questions. Sorry, vomit on my hands. Someone else at the nurses’ station will help you.
I kept my eyes trained on the taillights ahead of me until I passed the cruiser. No need to behave like a criminal. I hadn’t killed anyone. Not yet.
O
I left the storm in my wake somewhere on I-84. I’d forgotten how lonely this stretch of interstate could be. I’d only made the trip back to Carney, New York, a handful of times since I left for college twelve years ago. The most recent had been three months ago, after my mother’s foster brother Gil was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
Carney is in western Sullivan County, nestled between the casino at Monticello and the Pennsylvania border. The only marker one has entered the town of Carney is a billboard for Ealy Farms, a fami- ly-owned business that had kept the local economy on life support until the Great Recession and the ensuing rise in new hospital systems and health-care-adjacent jobs. Beside the billboard advertising “U-Pick” berries at Ealy’s was one that simply claimed Jesus Is the Answer.
To what, exactly, I was unsure. Rising opioid deaths, unemploy- ment, white rage. Take your pick.
Thanks to the mess getting out of the city, the two-hour drive took three and change. Gil lived right off County Route 42. Keep heading north and I’d eventually pass the fifteen-acre plot of land where my family’s farmhouse used to stand before the evening of September 8, 2001.
I killed my lights on the approach to Gil’s, even though his nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down 42, the house hidden by a cover of trees and night. The Accord bumped and ground to a stop on the uneven terrain of Gil’s driveway. Part of me longed to hit the gas and continue on the semicircle that fed back out onto 42, but a light flicked on in Gil’s living room. A face, round and ghastly, appeared in the win- dow, letting me know that I had been seen.
Gil waddled into the kitchen at the same time I stepped through the front door. Years ago, he had been the type of good-looking that had led to at least two bar brawls between women that I knew of. Now his face was twice its usual size, from the cocktail of Decadron and pain medication. Since he’d stopped treatment, white hair had started to sprout from his scalp like toothbrush bristles.
I looked from the joint between his lips to the oxygen tank he dragged behind him. “Could have let me know your plan was to blow yourself up.”
Gil’s face softened. He plodded over, collapsed into the chair oppo- site me. Stubbed out his joint in the ashtray on the table. “It wasn’t fair of me to ask you.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
After a beat, I reached for his hand, stroked the leathery skin sag- ging over his gnarled joints. Gil’s gaze dropped to the table. “You could talk me through it. So you don’t have to be the one.”
I felt myself thaw a bit. Gil didn’t need to explain why he couldn’t just buy a Ruger and do it himself. He hadn’t touched a gun since he’d left Afghanistan in 2002. Told me he couldn’t bear to, not because of things he’d seen over there but what had happened to my parents and Uncle Scott here in Carney.
A slick of sweat came to my palms. I wanted to think of Gil’s brains splattered against a wall about as much as I wanted to remember how the local paper had described the way my father’s remains had been found. A skeleton in the ashes, half his head blasted away. It was not until ten days later that they found his jaw near the creek at the edge of our property, animal teeth marks in the bone.
“Sam,” Gil began.
I tamped the grisly images down, squeezed Gil’s hand, warning him not to say more. Gil had been overly sentimental during my last few check-ins, and I didn’t want his last words to be a reminder of all the ways we’d failed each other over the past twenty years. Perfunctory phone calls on holidays, polite deferments of offers to visit each other— Gil did not like the city, and I could not get the time off work to come up here.
When I finally spoke, my voice clogged in my throat. “How about you lay down?”
I looped an arm through Gil’s and walked him into the living room. “In here,” he wheezed. “Bedroom’s a mess.”
I did not point out that the whole house was a mess, and soon to be my problem, as I guided Gil to the couch. The thing was older than I was, a pilling flannel bedsheet tucked over the cushions. He lay on his back, his knees bent to the side like bird wings.
“Put the TV on,” Gil said, while I draped an afghan over him.
At this time of night, it’s all the same. Jingles for cardboard-tasting pizza, ads for medications with so many side effects I think I’d rather just die.
As I replaced the remote, a framed photo on the end table drew my attention. Mom and Uncle Scott, seated at a picnic table. My mother wore a paisley dress that rode up her thighs while sitting, showing off an inch-long scab on her knee—I remembered it as a faded white scar.
“I thought you might like to take it home.”
Gil’s voice was small as I reached for the frame. Uncle Scott was seated next to my mother, his mouth fruit-punch stained around a smile, tongue poking through where his front teeth were coming in.
His strawberry-blond hair fell to his collarbone. I used to rib him about the old photos, the way he looked like a Hanson brother.
“I’ve never seen this one,” I said, swallowing to clear my throat. “That’s the day it happened,” Gil wheezed. “His eye.”
My uncle Scott was seven when he lost his right eye in a playground accident. A freak thing, a slip from the monkey bars and onto a stick protruding from the ground.
Gil’s fingers found the corner of the frame. I loosened my grip, let him have a final look.
“I was supposed to be watching him,” Gil said. “He wanted to go to the playground, but everyone else was still eating lunch, so I took him. And instead of watching him, I was talking to a cute girl.”
I was quiet, absorbing the impact of Gil’s confession. My uncle had worn a patch over his dead eye until middle school, when my grandfa- ther died. Grandma Lynn had used the money from his life insurance to pay for Scott’s new glass eye, but he had already fallen in with the only kids who would accept him, the Future Drug Dealers of Carney. Most people agreed that Scott’s life had been permanently derailed by the accident on the playground.
I watched Gil now, the wetness in his eyes, the way his thumb moved over Scott’s face in the photo. It made me sad to think of him carrying this secret all these years. Gil had come to my grandparents as a foster child at eight and never left; despite the lack of blood relation, I’d considered him as much my uncle as Scott.
“It wasn’t your fault he lost his eye,” I said, even though I had no idea, really.
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