Orphan #8 (36 page)

I should have gone ahead and given her a full dose. I had no reason to allow Mildred Solomon to rise again to consciousness. I knew now she’d never give me what I wanted. There would be no apology, no remorse. I should have emptied the syringe and left her sleeping while I walked out of this room and into the bright hallway, shutting the past behind me.

Except it was impossible for me to leave the past behind. It was multiplying inside me, the tumor generating new cells by the minute. After my operation, if I woke up to find my breasts lopped off, black thread knotted across my chest, it would be as if Dr. Solomon herself had wielded the knife.

I kept my back to her, looked out the window at streetlamps, lit windows, occasional headlights. Above, the city’s glow turned the black sky gray. The lights made me realize it was indifference, not darkness, that made the night dangerous. Deeds committed in the city’s small hours were not so much hidden from view as ignored, as if the few of us awake in the dead of night had all agreed to turn away our eyes. It was like the people in those villages downwind
of the death camps. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t smell the smoke; they just pretended not to know what was happening. It occurred to me there was nothing I couldn’t get away with between midnight and dawn.

If I couldn’t get the contrition I yearned for, why not exact justice instead, like my brother had done? Mildred Solomon would be dead soon enough, no matter what I did or didn’t do. Why not transform the inevitable into something intentional? Why should I leave her to die, alone and ignored, a few days or weeks from now, when her death tonight, witnessed, could mean so much more? For once, I could stand up for myself, an adult now instead of a child, my weapon a needle of morphine instead of a pistol. I could do it now, before the old woman awoke. In the middle of this indifferent night, no one would notice if I took a woman’s life.

Suddenly dizzy, I clutched at the windowsill to keep myself from falling backward into the room. The idea pulsed through my arteries, throbbing in my neck. I saw now that withholding Mildred Solomon’s morphine could be elevated from a selfish act to a noble endeavor. What a perfect opera it would make! The curtain rises on a child strapped down and chloroformed like an animal, then falls on an old woman put down like a dog past petting.

Somewhere in my sleep-deprived brain were all the reasons why killing Mildred Solomon would never bring me peace, but I was too exhausted to know them. I took the vial of morphine from my pocket and weighed it in my hand. It would be so simple to fill the syringe and press the plunger. There was nothing to stop me. Down the hall, Lucia was surely asleep over her lap of yarn. In the morning, the day nurse who found a terminal patient passed away during the night would think nothing of pulling up the sheet
to cover the body. There would be no questions, no inquiry, no autopsy. No one would know.

Not even Mildred Solomon.

I backed away from the window. It wouldn’t be worth doing if Dr. Solomon didn’t know. I wanted to see the realization in her eyes, wanted the doctor to know what her good little girl, her bravest patient, was about to do. I had been her material to do with as she pleased. Now I was the one in control. If she couldn’t feel remorse for what she’d done to me, then at least she’d know, before she died, how it felt to have your life in someone else’s hands.

Groping along the wall, I found the switch and turned on the light. I blinked against the sudden brightness. Rinsing a cloth in the sink, I touched it to the old woman’s face.

“Time to wake up, Dr. Solomon.”

Chapter Nineteen

R
ACHEL WENT IN TO THE
R
ELIEF
S
OCIETY DRIPPING WET
from a thunderstorm that slowed the streetcars and made her late. She was excited to tell Mary what she had learned from Mrs. Hong, to talk over her thoughts about Sparrow and Jade. Because of the rain, the patients were all inside instead of out on the porches. Their ragged breathing and harsh coughs echoed through the hallways.

Rachel went into Mary’s room. The bed was empty, the mattress rolled up, twisted wires exposed. At first she thought Mary must have been moved. Then the truth became apparent. She sat on the iron rail of the bed, too stunned to cry. The head nurse saw her there. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I didn’t mean for you to find out like this. Mary’s fever spiked yesterday. Her heart just couldn’t take it. I know you cared about her, but we have another patient waiting to come in from the tents. Would you disinfect the bed for me?” Silently, Rachel nodded. The nurse placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “It comes with the job. We never get used to it, but we do learn to bear it.”

Rachel washed down the bed with bleach, puzzling out the mystery of how a person could be alive one minute and gone the
next. She’d seen it happen, when her mother died. That was a moment she could still recall, the shift in her mother’s eyes from seeing to not-seeing. She would have hated to witness that change in Mary, but still she wished she’d been with her at the end. It broke Rachel’s heart that Mary had died alone, so far from her family and friends. The Hospital for Consumptive Hebrews would notify Mary’s parents, she supposed. There was a graveyard nearby, burial expenses covered by the charity, but it was up to the families to send money for a headstone. From what Mary had told her, Rachel doubted the grave would ever bear her name. With the help of another nurse, she put a fresh mattress on the frame. Before Rachel’s shift was over, a woman who spoke no English was tucked up in Mary’s bed. Agitated and breathless, she called out in Yiddish, the guttural sounds spattering her lips with sputum.

In the darkness of evening, Rachel let the streetcar carry her down Colfax Avenue. She was so lost in her thoughts she missed the Abramses’ house and had to walk back from the next stop. Opening the door, she found the dining room lit with candles and full of voices—she’d forgotten it was Shabbat. “Come, sit with us, Rachel,” they beckoned, but she shook her head and slunk upstairs to the Ivy Room. When Mrs. Abrams came to check on her, she found Rachel staring out the rain-streaked window.

“I heard about Mary. I’m so sorry, dear. Did you know she wanted you to have all of her lovely things? Usually they would have been donated back to the hospital, but Dr. Abrams had the interns bring her steamer trunk home for you. I’ll ask them to carry it up before they leave.” She paused. “You know, I invite the interns as much for you as for them. I thought you might take a liking to one of them. Such fine young men. It’s how Althea met
David, after all. And they’re not old like your uncle! Has there been anyone you liked?”

Rachel shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to her to notice them.

Mrs. Abrams recommended a hot bath. Rachel took the suggestion, sinking under the water to muffle the sounds of conversation drifting upstairs. Afterward Rachel returned to her room to find the trunk standing on end in the middle of the floor. Nearly her height, it looked larger here than it had in the hospital. She undid the clasps and pulled the handles. It opened like a book on its spine. On one side was a neat stack of shut drawers, each with a tiny glass knob; on the other, a curtain behind which the dresses hung. Rachel parted the curtain, as she had done before at Mary’s instruction, and slid her hands through the familiar inventory. She felt fine wool and stiff linen, satin and silk. Beneath the dresses were the shoes, four pairs all in their places. Rachel leaned in and inhaled a smell from before the tuberculosis and the hospital: scented powder and polished leather.

Rachel pulled off her orphanage nightgown, intending to try on the dresses and shoes, one after another, as she knew Mary would have wanted her to. Then she realized such dresses weren’t meant to be dropped over a naked torso, that the shoes would scratch her bare feet. She sat down on the floor and began pulling open drawers, looking for a camisole and stockings. The smallest drawer on top held hairpins and combs, a few rings, a string of false pearls. Next were gloves and handkerchiefs, then underwear. She found camisoles with the slips and silk scarves. The stockings were below that. Rachel wondered what was left for the bottom drawer. Pinching the glass knob, she pulled it open.

Letters, photographs, ribbon. A diary closed with a locked
hasp. A china doll with a broken arm. An unfinished embroidery still on its hoop, threaded needle poked into the stretched fabric. A seashell.

Rachel handled Mary’s things like found treasure, respecting the locked diary, listening to the shell, cradling the broken doll. She shuffled through the photographs, recognizing Mary as a child astride a spotted pony; as a girl posed with her mother in a circle of flowers; as a debutante, escorted by her father, his tuxedo a dark contrast to her shimmering gown. There was a photograph of Mary and another girl, arm in arm on a path beneath trees. There they were again at the shore, their tangled legs dissolved in the surf. And again, hand in hand on a porch swing, feet lifted, heads tossed back with laughter.

This must have been the friend Mary mentioned. Her particular friend. The girl was pretty enough, though not nearly as lovely as Mary. Rachel held the photograph closer. Whereas the camera brought out the shape of Mary’s features, the other girl seemed indistinct, her jawline and hairline and nose blurring together. But her eyes, they were what kept her from being plain. Expressive and wide, the eyes were always fixed on Mary’s face. The way she looked at Mary was something Rachel recognized. It was the way Naomi had looked at her, that last night at the Home.

Rachel rarely allowed herself to think of that night, the way Naomi had touched her, how they had kissed. Remembering made her heart twitchy, her stomach queasy with guilt. To distract herself, Rachel replaced the photographs in the drawer, took out the bundle of letters, untied the ribbon.

They were all written to Mary, the varying addresses charting her movements: at home from boarding school for holidays, care
of the White Star Line during a trip abroad, and finally to the sanitarium in the Catskills. The return addresses changed, too, but the name was always the same. Sheila Wharton. There were none of Mary’s letters to Sheila—the letters Sheila’s mother found and burned before forbidding her to see Mary again.

Rachel shivered. She pulled the eiderdown quilt from the bed and wrapped it around her naked body. Kneeling in front of the gaping trunk, she drew a letter from its envelope. Mary had said Sheila’s mother thought their friendship was
unnatural
. It was the same word the monitor had used to warn her about Naomi, but Rachel couldn’t quite believe that Mary and her friend had done the things she and Naomi had done. If they had, Rachel was sure they would never have written about it. She didn’t even know what words they might have used.

Rachel unfolded the first letter. The paper smelled like flowers. She glanced over the page of perfect script, searching for a phrase a mother might object to.
When I lick my lips, I can still taste you
. The words swam before Rachel’s eyes. She had to blink, hard, to bring the swooping lines back into focus. She pinned the paper to the floor and began again from the beginning.

It was midnight before Rachel carefully folded away all the letters, tied them back up, shut them in the drawer. She closed the trunk and did the clasps then shoved it into a corner of the room, scratching the floor. Crawling into bed, she switched off the light. Sheila had written to Mary about love and kisses, about the kinds of things Rachel and Naomi had done and more, things Rachel had never even thought of. These thoughts now monopolized her mind’s eye, like a movie projected on the inside of her eyelids.

Of the hundreds of girls at the Home, some of them had friendships
so passionate they might have been unnatural, but Naomi was the only one Rachel had known. Now she knew for sure of another girl—no, two girls—who were the same way. But for Mary and Sheila, it was more than kissing in secret. They had plans to travel to Europe together: to sketch in Venice, hike the Alps, visit Paris, explore London. Sheila mentioned other girls in her letters, too, though Rachel suspected some of them were characters in stories and not real girls she knew. But still. There was a new sort of life revealed in those letters, a life Rachel had never known enough to imagine, a life where two best friends could have, between them, all that mattered in the world.

Rachel allowed herself now to remember how strange it was, that night with Naomi, that it hadn’t felt strange at all. Naomi’s hands and mouth on her skin had seemed the most natural thing in the world. Beyond the confines of a narrow orphanage bed, what kind of life might she and Naomi have dreamed of? Not Europe, of course, but being together, sharing an apartment, going to movies. The picture of Mary and Sheila at the ocean reminded Rachel of the day Naomi took her to Coney Island. That must have been the day they found the seashell; Rachel imagined Sheila presenting it to Mary, Mary promising to keep it always. But what had Rachel done to Naomi? Stolen the tuition money her uncle and aunt had given her and run away in the middle of the night. It was unforgivable.

Naomi must hate her. Sam had abandoned her. And now Mary was dead. Under her quilt, the enormity of her losses swooped down on Rachel like crows to carrion.

Rachel was loath to get out of bed the next morning. Mrs. Abrams brought her a cup of tea and some toast, telling her that
Dr. Abrams would let the head nurse know she wasn’t feeling well. “It’s hit you hard, Mary’s death, hasn’t it? Dr. Abrams tries not to get attached, but I see it affects him, too, the loss of a patient. Would you like me to help you sort through her things?”

Rachel panicked at the idea of Mrs. Abrams seeing Mary’s letters, imagined her recoiling in disgust. “No, thank you, Mrs. Abrams. I already looked through the trunk. It’s just her clothes, nothing else. I’ll get ready for work.”

“All right, dear. You’ll come down when you’re ready.” She gave Rachel a kiss on the forehead, which left her wondering if Mrs. Abrams would have treated her so kindly if she had known the truth—that Rachel was a thief and a liar; that she, too, was unnatural.