Orphan #8 (39 page)

“I did. That’s over now. Look at me, Dr. Solomon. Do you remember what I showed you?” I lifted her hand to my breast, pressed the fingers against its swell.

“Your tumor, yes. I remember. I’m not senile. You think it’s my fault, for those X-rays, but you’re wrong. My cancer, that’s from the X-rays I gave. Are you sorry for me? No, you’re not. You might have gotten cancer anyway. You could be hit by a bus on your way home. Would that be my fault, too?” She shivered, clutched at the blanket. “When I was little, I had chicken pox. The only thing I’d eat was chocolate pudding. My mother made it for me every night, put it in the icebox for my breakfast.”

Her eyes drifted, aimless. For a moment, time folded in on itself and she was a girl, small as I had been at the Infant Home, a little girl sick in bed. I imagined myself, for a second, a mother, taking care of my own child. Of its own accord, my hand reached out and stroked her hair. She turned her plaintive gaze on me.

“Can I have my pudding now?”

Just like that, the spell was broken. She was no monster, merely a pathetic, dying woman, shrunk down to the simple desires of a child. I was equally pathetic, also dying, reduced by self-pity to the petulant impulses of a toddler. Smacking down what few days she had remaining would gain me nothing but shame.

A great, gulping sob erupted from my throat. I staggered to the window as every emotion of the last few days converged in sadness. I had never been more lonely than in that moment. If only I could have sent my spirit floating above the stars to Miami, I would have gladly left my body an empty sack on the floor.

Instead I was alone with Mildred Solomon. I felt her eyes on my heaving back. I hadn’t wanted her to witness the pain she’d caused me, had wanted only to visit that pain on her. A week ago, I would have argued that the world was divided between those capable of inflicting pain and those whose fate it was to be hurt, that Mildred Solomon and I were on opposite rims of that canyon. I knew now any one of us could cross over. It wasn’t innate—only the choices we made determined which side we lived on. From whichever point one started, stepping out on that rickety bridge was a risk, planks threaded together with twine, the sway in the middle fearsome. Exhilarating as it had been to be suspended above that chasm, rules of time and space and right and wrong all falling away, one look down had been enough to sober me. I had scurried back to my starting place, unable to finish the crossing.

As I calmed down, I heard Mildred panting. I looked behind me, saw tears distorting her eyes. For a second, still, I imagined she cried for me, but no. From Dr. Solomon would come no soft words tossed across the room.

“The pain, it’s too much. I need the morphine now.”

I came away from the window and picked up Mildred Solomon’s midnight dose, long past due. I stared at the syringe in my hand. It was the full amount the doctor prescribed—more than enough to push back her pain. More than she wanted. I picked up the glass vial, intending to slightly adjust her dose, forgetting it was full.

It was the first time Dr. Solomon had seen it. Her eyes widened. “Why do you have so much?”

“It’s meant for you.” My voice was flat. “Every time I held some back—making you talk, making you suffer—I saved the extra, until I had enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to kill you,” I whispered. The words sounded like a line delivered by an actress who’d lost her motivation. I doubted she even heard me. Not that I was worried she’d tell anyone. Kept to her prescribed dose, she was unlikely to ever speak coherently again.

I took a breath. I was done meddling. I would follow the doctor’s orders. After this injection, I would leave Mildred Solomon to her painless sleep. I’d go sit by the nurses’ station until my shift ended, then change out of my uniform and walk out of the Old Hebrews Home. I had no desire to see any further into the future than this.

“How much?” Her voice quivered with excitement.

“What?” I didn’t understand her question.

“How much morphine?”

I glanced down, though I already knew the answer. “The vial is for blood draws, it holds two hundred milligrams.”

“And there’s more in the syringe?”

I showed it to her, liquid up to the line marked fifty. She smiled, her dry lips stretched so wide they cracked.

“What did you say your name was again, Number Eight?”

“Rachel Rabinowitz. You don’t think you’re going to report me, do you?”

“Report you? No, Rachel, no, I don’t want to report you. I want you to give it to me. All of it. I want this to be over. I want it more than anything. Now, while I can still talk to you and tell you what I want. Now, while you can be with me, so I won’t be alone.”

I frowned, tilting my head. Could I be hearing this right?

“Don’t say no, Number Eight. Please. You know I don’t have much longer. I want to decide it for myself. That doctor will never let me decide anything. But you, you’re a good girl, you’ll help me, won’t you?” Mildred Solomon’s words tumbled over each other. “Please, it’s going to happen so soon, you can’t imagine the pain.”

“Why should I care about your pain? Did you care about mine?” I said the words, but they were just hollow sounds.

“We’ve been over that. Never mind. Consider it your revenge if it makes you happy. Just please, give it to me, give it all to me now.”

“Not for revenge, no. I won’t do that. I wanted to, do you know that? I could have. But I didn’t.”

Frustrated tears wet her cheeks. “Then do it to prove you’re a better person than I am. So what if I met Marie Curie, if she shook my hand? I was wrong, is that what you want to hear? I’m sorry. There, I said it. I’ll say anything you want me to, Number Eight, but please, just do this for me.” Her words were coming too fast for me to process their shifting meaning. “If you won’t, then let me. I’ll do it to myself.”

Dr. Solomon grabbed at the vial and the syringe. My hands went slack. I didn’t even have to be involved. I could let it happen without being responsible. But she was fumbling with the syringe, her hands too shaky to maneuver the needle. Even if she managed to draw up more morphine, she wouldn’t be able to reach the valve on the IV. I wondered what she would do in her desperation. Plunge the needle through her thin skin? I imagined the puncture deflating her.

I took back the syringe and the vial. She didn’t have the strength to resist. Hands empty again, the old woman wept like a baby.

“No one listens to me. No one does what I say.”

“Are you certain this is what you want?”

She quieted herself. “Yes, yes it is.”

I knew in my bones she was speaking the truth. This was her choice now, not mine. What a mockery was being made of my intentions. Without another word, I pushed the needle through the rubber stopper of the vial, filling the syringe completely, and squeezed the morphine into her IV.

“All of it, Number Eight. All of it.”

I refilled the syringe, pushed the plunger. I watched my hands inject the fatal dose as if someone else controlled their actions, then I sat on the edge of the bed. Mildred Solomon grabbed my hand.

“You’ll stay with me, won’t you?”

“I will.”

“Good girl,” she said, patting my knuckles. “Good girl.” Her words seemed to come from far away.

I observed her breathing become shallow and ragged. Soon the
diaphragm would be too numb to pull in breath, the heart too starved for oxygen to keep up its rhythm. The end would be quiet. I didn’t have to stay to know what would happen.

But I did stay. Until the carotid artery stopped pulsing. Until the face became slack, eyes sinking into the skull. Until dawn lifted the darkness.

Only then did I leave Mildred Solomon’s body, closing the door behind me. I told Lucia that the patient had gotten her medication and was resting quietly. As I heard myself say the words, I was surprised at how true they sounded. I marked the chart and put the syringes in the autoclave. Later, when I went into the nurses’ lounge to change, I placed the empty vial, wrapped in my handkerchief, on the floor. Like the groom at a wedding, with a stomp of my foot I shattered the glass.

T
HE BRIGHT MORNING
outside the Old Hebrews Home blinded me. I waited on the building’s steps for the sunspots to fade from my vision. Walking to the subway, my legs felt liquid. I thought I would look different to the people I passed, branded by what I’d done. But no one fixed me with an accusing stare. The streets carried the same traffic, the sidewalks the same pedestrians as they had yesterday and would tomorrow. I looked around at the crowd waiting on the platform, wondering if anyone else among us had taken a life. Apparently, it didn’t show.

Underground I didn’t have long to wait for a train. I tried resting my eyes as it rocked along, but I was afraid of giving in too soon to sleep. At the Times Square transfer, I was glad to be distracted by a family that sat across from me. The husband was struggling with a clumsy assortment of wicker baskets and beach bags. The
mother’s straw hat was knocked off by the squirming toddler she lifted onto her lap. The hat rolled toward me as the train lurched forward. I picked it up and handed it to the son, a little boy with a ball cap on. It looked like his mother had stitched the Yankees insignia on it for him.

“What do you say to the nice lady?” his father said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the boy said in a pretty voice. Tufts of kinky hair escaped the confines of his cap. He seemed to be four or five years old. The same age I was at the Infant Home. The same age my nephew was by now.

“You’re welcome,” I said, resisting the urge to wrap him up in my arms.

They settled in, the family with their baskets and bags packed around their feet, toddler wedged between parents, boy beside them. He twisted to look out the window, even though there was nothing to see but streaking darkness as we moved under the city. His neck was so slender its fragility alarmed me. Below his little legs with their dimpled knees, an untied shoelace dangled. I wanted with all my heart to kneel before him and tie it in a bow.

As the subway rocked along its tracks, I couldn’t keep the drowsiness at bay any longer. When the train emerged to cross the river, the brightness forced my eyes closed. I turned my face to catch some breeze from the open window, my head resting against the vibrating glass.

“Lady.” I felt a nudge. “Lady, wake up, it’s the end of the line.”

I pulled my sticky eyelids apart. The boy was tugging at my sleeve.

“Everyone has to get off now, lady.”

“All right, thank you, I’m awake.” My head was throbbing, my
vision blurry. Through the open doors of the train car, I saw his father with the beach bags, his mother holding the toddler’s hand. They beckoned to the boy.

“Gotta go now, lady.”

“Okay, have fun,” I said, because that’s why people came out to Coney Island on a summer morning. I stood unsteadily and made my way onto the platform, squinting against the sun. I practically sleepwalked down Mermaid Avenue, bumping into people as I shuffled along, heading away from the boardwalk and the crowded beach. The modern apartment blocks that had replaced the old warehouses and workshops rose up ahead of me, our building among them.

I checked for a letter or postcard, but our box was empty. If it wasn’t for her name on the card I might have begun to believe I’d invented her. I’d call, I promised myself, and this time she’d answer. I’d call as soon as I got some rest. I was afraid I would have a breakdown if I heard her voice now in my raw exhaustion.

I pushed the button for the elevator and let my eyes shut for just a moment. Listening for the elevator bell, I heard the lobby door open, footsteps across the terrazzo floor. I looked and saw Molly Lippman carrying a grocery bag. Stepping back, I feigned impatience, readying a comment about deciding to take the stairs. But it was too late to avoid her. The elevator arrived as Molly came up beside me. We entered together. I hoped she’d see how tired I was and not talk to me today.

“Rachel, darling, you look asleep on your feet. Did you do a double shift? The elderly must be so demanding.”

I muttered something, watching the elevator light blink past each floor. I willed it to move faster.

“My mother, blessed woman, was so good it was like a sickness, but in her last days, oh, what a handful she was. So, what’s new with you?”

The elevator jerked to a stop and the door slid open, but the ordeal wasn’t over yet. I mumbled some words about work and the weather as we walked side by side to our adjacent apartment doors. I fished my key out of my pocketbook and held it ready.

“Tell me,” she said, putting her hand on my arm, “have you had that dream again? I haven’t stopped thinking about it, it was so interesting.” Molly set her bag on the floor, making herself comfortable for an extended conversation. I pushed my key into the lock. The notched metal clicked into the tumbler, the sound of my escape.

“I have to run, Molly,” I said, turning the handle. “Take care.”

“But, Rachel, dear, I meant to tell you who I saw at the grocer’s. . . .”

I shut the door, snuffing out my neighbor’s words. I was relieved to have escaped Molly but reluctant to face the empty apartment. When I last went through this door, I’d been on my way to see Dr. Feldman and hope was still a straw I could clutch. I could hardly believe it was only yesterday morning. Where did all the hours go? My last birthday and this one would soon match up like the corners of a folded sheet, the months in between ironed away. I wanted them back now, those unnoticed days.

As for the future, I couldn’t see any further into it than the couch across the room. In the steps it took me to reach it, I pulled off my dress, stepped out of my sandals, rolled down my stockings. In my slip, I stretched across the upholstery, the nubby fabric rubbing at my skin. It should have been uncomfortable, but somehow
it wasn’t, like scratching an itch. I watched the sunlight slanting into the room, chopped into slices by the window blinds. In each lit slice, specks and threads swirled.

I closed my eyes, observing the pink latticework inside my lids. I wanted nothing more than the oblivion of sleep. Instead I pictured the woman on Dr. Feldman’s wall, her face impassive to the dashed lines that crossed her chest. He’d said I was lucky that my tumor was still operable, but I didn’t feel at all grateful. My mind reviewed a lifetime of ways I was unlucky. I might as well have been counting sheep.