“Mary.” She smiled at the word. “Mary Gavin. Now go while you still can.”
In the parking lot waited her accomplice, and Erica turned her head to see if the car was still there. When she looked back, the child had flown. With a sigh, she picked up the shotgun and raced to the car. The screendoor whined, then slapped shut in her wake, and the houseflies buzzed in chaotic loops. Following the country road south to its source, Wiley bumped along for a few miles, shaking with adrenaline while she sweated in the heat and curled like a baby bouncing against the passenger door. “Angels of Destruction!” he hollered out the open window.
“Stop,” she said.
“Baby, in a war there's bound to be some casualties—”
“No, please. Stop the car.”
“Erica, we got to get out of here. We can make it to Oklahoma City by suppertime and be as invisible as two ghosts—”
“Shut up and stop the fucking car. Now.”
In the dust just off the deserted road, she managed just in time to pull back her hair, lean out through the open door, and retch into the dry brown grass.
26
Lost, not all at once, but in stages of suffering, the girl vanished into her own oblivion. Gone was the ebullient spirit she must have had before the long stay in the hospital, replaced by an imposter, an eggless shell. The child in the bed opened her eyes for the first time in a week as Paul pushed the morphine through the syringe and into her bloodstream. In her eyes, cognition at his act, a mix of shock and gratitude for the mercy he bestowed before she went to sleep for good. She was the seventh and last of them to endure beyond bearing. Though they were under orders not to treat the radiation-sickness patients at the Nagasaki Prefecture medical center, but merely there to observe and advise the Japanese doctors, Paul knew the seven were dying and no amount of rest or penicillin or vitamin therapy would ever cure them. Sent a month after the bomb, the Army Medical Corps had missed the worst of it, the utter devastation. While the city itself looked as if it had been stomped on by the gods, the dead had been buried. The thermal burn victims, the maimed, and the injured took priority in the immediate triage, and then those with highly penetrating radiation—the hibakusha—whose debilitations varied widely began arriving. Paul witnessed the delayed effects in some patients, initially asymptomatic, but who showed up days or weeks later. A woman whose hair fell out in hanks. An elderly man with a crosshatch of burns on his back. Dozens complaining of fatigue. A husband and wife who both started bleeding uncontrollably from their mouths one morning after breakfast. They all thought themselves survivors, but the unfortunate who crowded the wards could not outrun the slow poison in their bodies.
He had written just once of the mercy killings. A heartfelt letter to his sister Janie back in the States, and it was her reply that had lain hidden in his files since 1945. She had offered consolation and assurance—“you were putting them out of their misery”—so that when he finally came back home, he could leave the horror behind him. Returning to his new wife, Margaret, and his small-town general practice, having safely buried the memory of the seven euthanized patients, he talked in vague measures about Nagasaki, chose not to dwell on the past, but to move on as quickly as possible to the normalcy he craved.
Penned in old-fashioned handwriting on nearly translucent paper, the letter from his sister seemed like a relic unrelated to his life's story. He had no memory of it when Erica confronted him the night she came back from her high school trip. He had no idea why she was waving the thin sheet like a toreador's cape. Misplaced, forgotten, the words brought back the anguish of his decision, the memory of each lethal dose. After reading the letter, he folded his hands over the paper and closed his eyes, and a vision appeared of the young Japanese girl, wrapped as if for the grave beneath the thin hospital sheets, her life and pain draining away, a wry smile on her lips as if she dreamt of the summer days before the shattering blast. Paul did not see his own daughter's distress, her confusion over this damning evidence, and that look in her eyes that said she had already found him guilty before he could speak.
Erica stood across from him in front of his desk, suddenly tall and imposing. Her face was red and raw from crying.
“It was just after the war,” he told her. “And the patients were all in such excruciating pain. They'd never get better, so—”
“How could you do such a thing? I thought you took an oath. First, do no harm.”
He rose and walked to the door, closing it with great care. “Please keep your voice down,” he told her. “Your mother doesn't know.”
“Doesn't know? You never told her? How could you?”
“I thought it best—”