The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (37 page)

“So you had—he was in the ICU and then he moved?”

“Yeah, they moved him, and, then, they… they all talked how about how he passed away, and the dig levels were high… I’m not sure if I heard the… but I remember seeing him but I don’t remember, so…”

“Who had him, though, when all that went down?”

“It was me, I think I had him that night,” Charlie says. He explains to Amy how they’d shown him his signatures. He says he didn’t remember every time he took meds for a code that wasn’t normal, but he made mistakes sometimes, and sometimes forgot his glasses—and anyway, you know, really, it’s like, who remembers this stuff?

“And management got called in when?”

“Sometime after that,” Charlie says.

“So, when Risk Management questioned you, did they actually show you the chart?”

“They showed me the chart,” Charlie says. “And they showed me my signature. And, I don’t remember doing that, but I cosigned dig. And they showed me the Pyxis records then, they had the records and they showed me how, I guess, I’d canceled orders for the dig, ordering it under another patient. I’d ordered dig for another patient and then canceled the order.”

“You
did
that?”

“Yeah, I did,” Charlie says. He gives Amy his sheepish look. “I did that.”

“Charlie, you’re a dumbass,” Amy says.

“I know, I know!” Charlie says.

H
ear that?” Danny said.

“Lund had the Pyxis for Gall.”

“And the cancels.”

“Yep.”

“Fuckers.”

T
he Southwestern spring rolls are laid like daisy petals around dipping sauce.

“Wait,” Amy says. “You actually have the papers
with you
?”

“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Well, just the one.” He flops the paper on the table like a winning poker hand and watches for Amy’s reaction.

“The—the
New York Times
?” Her shock is genuine.

That is the reaction. “Yeah,” Charlie says.

Amy shakes her head, not sure what the proper reaction should be.

“Um, wow,” she says. “The freaking
New York Times
.”

“Yeah.” Charlie nods toward the paper. “It’s the Metro section.”

Amy reads. He takes in the raw amazement on her face, the way her lips form words as she scans the story, the wisps of blonde hair that fall as she bends to read the description of him.

“It just says ‘a male nurse,’ ” he says.

“And, oh, gee,” Amy says, her voice doofy. “I wonder who it is, ‘… was fired in late October.’ ”

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

“Blah blah blah… five other hospitals.” Amy looks up, squinting and serious. “Charlie, is that
true
?”

“Yeah, see, I mean—I jumped around five other hospitals—”

“Is it
true
?”

Charlie reaches for his beer. “I had—a problem, when I first started out, with uh—the first hospital I worked at was Saint Barnabas, and there was a patient there who crashed with low blood sugar, and there was some question.” He takes a sip. “But nothing came of it. There had been other problems at Saint Barnabas. Somebody had been spiking IV bags in the store room with insulin, and—”

“
What?
” Amy says.

“Yeaaaah…,” Charlie says.

“But—knowing your ICU, I mean, how would they—”

Charlie explains the process and how, after the crashes and confusion, somebody finally checked the IV bags and…

“
All
the IV bags, or—”

“Oh, no. No no,” Charlie says, as if that was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. He reaches casually for a spring roll and holds it, waiting.

“So… why did they pinpoint… but they pinpointed
you
,” Amy says, as if making the connection for the first time. “They
tried
to…”

“Yeah, but—”

“Were these older patients?”

“No,” Charlie says, chewing. “One of these was younger.
³
But, the others… they questioned me.”

“What did you think? What did you think, when they were questioning you?”

It was like a big deal at Saint Barnabas; Charlie wants to make that clear. A mystery. There were all sorts of nurses that hung the bags. Even a smart person couldn’t figure out a pattern from something like this.

“But what did
you
think? When you were going through that, what did you think
could
have happened?”

Charlie chews his spring roll, thinking on it. “I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t,” he says. “There was one patient, that was an HIV patient, she had terminal AIDS, and the mother wasn’t involved, but the
father
wanted the patient… um, and he thought that, maybe, I would do it. But I really didn’t know, about that.” Charlie quickly adds, “You know. I never got accused. But I left there.”
⁴

“But, when did that happen? That happened
years
ago.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what is your opinion? Because
it looks bad
.”

“Oh, I know. I know.”

“I mean, Charlie—it looks
bad
.”

“I mean, I was a target. I’ve been looked at, you know, in Warren County. Warren Hospital, they did interviews. They said, ‘We want to talk to you.’ They said, ‘Now, it would be a long investigation, we don’t have enough to charge you.’ ”

“Yes, but, are you
capable
of doing it?”

Charlie lowers his head. He remains still for a long time.

When he speaks again, his voice is unnaturally slow.

“As far as abnormal lab results, I was… the other time, that was dig. That was at Warren Hospital. A patient that died, twenty-four hours after I’d been her nurse. Someone said, the son had said, that I injected her with something.”

“The son?”

“The. Little. Little woman. The—mother… mother said, that, she
said—yeah, I don’t remember, uh… that, at all,” Charlie says, struggling. “Other than, you know, that the doctor… thought it was a bug bite, and they investigated.” He insisted on taking a lie detector test about the woman’s death. And how, yeah—he passed.

“Nice!” Amy says.

Charlie brightens. “And then I sued them for discrimination,” he says. It was actually an administrative leave with full pay from Warren, which kept Charlie out of their wards for nearly three months, but the cash settlement was basically the same thing, and it makes a much better story. “They settled out of court, and I got, like, $20,000,
⁵
so…”

“
Nice!
” Amy says.

“Yeahyeahyeahyeah,” Charlie says. “And that’s where I was admitted as a patient, to that hospital, after my suicide…. And so—there’s another twist to that story, too.” The newspaper story had mentioned his stay in the Muhlenberg psychiatric ward. It’s a story he likes to tell. “I was going through my divorce at the time. I was at Warren. And then I started… talking with someone.”

Bleep bleep bleep.
Amy fumbles in her purse for her cell phone alarm clock. It’s a signal for the detectives listening to flip the tape. Charlie waits until she’s back in listening position again and he can continue the story.

“So, I started… seeing someone… romantically there. I was technically getting divorced and… whether or not she thought…”

Amy squeals. “You were having an affair?”

“Yeah—but I was actually going through a divorce.”

“You
were
having an affair!”

“Well,” Charlie says, “it
was
pre-divorce, technically.”

“Technically,” Amy teases.

“Technically,” Charlie says. Just as now, he was still
technically
living with Cathy.
⁶

But between the cops raiding the house and Amy’s flirty messages on the machine, Cathy is already convinced that he and Amy are going to take off to Mexico like desperados. It isn’t the worst idea; Charlie is dressed for the tropics.

Charlie tells Amy the Michelle Tomlinson stalking story again, making it sound like a slapstick romance. He liked her, but there was a misunderstanding, which led to this whole ridiculous thing where he sorta, um,
broke into her apartment one night,
and…

“Can I get you folks anything?” Amy turns. It’s the pesky waiter again.

“I’ll tell you what—what’s your name? Jeff? Joel. Joel, we’ll just call you over when we need you, okay?”

Amy watches him go. Between him and Charlie’s free-associating, she is getting nowhere. Her bravery is wearing off faster than the beer can replace it. She has a brief image of her heart exploding, the microphone picking up the liquid sound.

“I just wanna poke his little eyes out,” she says, and shoots Charlie a secret look. There is no way she can handle this much longer.

O
ver the headphones, a door squeaks, squeaks again. The restaurant noise is suddenly small and distant. Then another door, a woman’s hard heel on tile, the hollow metal of a locking public stall.

“Okay, look, you better turn it down,” Amy says.

S
he hasn’t realized how public her life has become until she needs to use the ladies room. Who knows how many people are listening in. Amy squeezes her eyes tight, imagining away the high hiss sounding off porcelain. But she has a microphone strapped onto her heart. They can hear everything.

She let the sink run, the noise of it making her feel alone at last, and studies the girl in the mirror, the one Charlie trusted, the one the detectives trusted, too. Who is she? A friend? A spy? Amy fingers the scar scalpeled across her breast plate, thinking of the damaged heart below it, the microphone strapped close by. This is her life now; you could listen to her pee over the radio. She is utterly transparent, like the clear plastic woman from biology class, the conflicting dimensions of her inner life encapsulated in parti-colored pieces: injuries and insecurities, the glandular excretions of fear and hope. She couldn’t see inside of Charlie like this. Behind the computer screens and paperwork and cancellations and a uniform was a man she does not know. But maybe now, across a restaurant table, she can know him. “You can do this,” she says, trying out the sound, liking it. Then she checks her gloss and pushes back out the door.