“All her meds,” he said. “Leave them to me.”
When Moulson asked to be fed, he took care of that too. The hypertonic drip, then the solids. He bought baby food from a chemist’s in Fletchertown on his way to work and fed her that, cold and straight out of the jar. The prison canteen wasn’t geared up to making nutritious meals for people with heavily ulcerated mouths.
Moulson got to spend six more days and nights in the quarantine unit. The nurses were pretty punctilious about her dosage now, especially Sylvie Stock, so she spent a lot of that time in carefully regulated tramadol sleep. Way too deep for dreams.
Then when she woke up, she was in muggy, gluey tramadol withdrawal. Not too much of an ordeal for someone who’d gone cold turkey from heroin, but more than enough to take her edge off. She didn’t know where she was, and wherever it was, she felt like she was melting into a puddle.
All this while, she was putting on body mass like she was on steroids. Patience DiMarta weighed her three times a day with awe and delight: she was recording Moulson’s immaculate resurrection on a graph that she’d pinned up on the wall next to the bed. When Dr Salazar asked her whether this was a clinical tool or a motivational one, she just said, “I know a miracle when I see one.”
Nurse Stock felt much the same way and kept on avoiding Moulson as far as she could. She felt like Moulson had been brought back from the brink on purpose to accuse her, and she was waiting for the other shoe to kick her in the stomach. If this was a miracle, it was a miracle that was aimed right at her.
Meanwhile in the prisoner wings, the whisper line was still humming, still digesting the astonishing fact of Moulson’s recovery and the associated fact of Grace having to pay out on her book. Each of those two miracles substantiated the other one. Moulson was a very hot topic, and Shannon McBride’s story about meeting her in the infirmary was once again much in request.
Shannon was more than happy to oblige, expanding her little turn into a one-act play. But she was still casting around for a theme, so the details changed a lot from one rendition to the next. Sometimes she had Moulson singing a recognisable song, but most times the song was in some weird foreign language Shannon couldn’t identify (“Cyndi Lauper? No! Where did you hear that?”). Sometimes Moulson stroked her hair, or her brow, and Shannon drew strength from the touch. And sometimes – the best version, after a lot of scene-setting about how dark it was and how she couldn’t be certain if it was a dream or not – Moulson was cuffed to the bed, but the cuffs fell away when she stood up and came over to where Shannon was crying on her bed of pain. Don’t be afraid, she said, and started to sing…
Most of the Goodall women at this stage still held to the facts of the case. This was a kiddie killer, after all. Not a paedo, which would have put her beyond every pale there was, but still close enough to the lowest of the low that you could measure the gap with your hand. They liked a good story – who doesn’t? – but they didn’t believe that God would choose Jess Moulson as His servant, no matter how hard up He got.
Moulson did choose God though. Or at least she went for the initial consultation. She told Sally when she was able to talk that she’d had a change of heart. She wanted to see that pastor after all.
Jess liked Sarah Afanasy a lot, almost in spite of herself.
The non-denominational pastor didn’t look very much like a spiritual adviser. Jess’s mental image of a priest was of someone thin and pale, halfway out of the body into the spirit, and that was what she thought she needed. Pastor Afanasy was built to a more roly-poly body plan, and she seemed wholly comfortable with that. Instead of clerical robes, she wore black jeans, red plimsolls and (although she was well into middle age) a T-shirt with anime characters on it.
“Oh wow, they keep it hot in here, don’t they?” she said as she dropped herself down without ceremony into the visitor’s chair next to Jess’s bed. Her voice had a slight transatlantic lilt to it. “What do I call you? Is Jessica okay?”
“It’s Jess,” Jess said.
“Jess. I like that. And you can address me as ‘your holiness’. What can I help you with, Jess?”
Jess smiled dutifully at the joke, but she didn’t have a ready answer for the question. What kind of help was she looking for here? And how could she describe what she didn’t understand herself? She tried to push past the blockage by stating the obvious. “I did a terrible thing,” she said.
The pastor nodded. No jokes now. She was instantly serious. “And it’s weighing on your mind?”
“Yes.”
“I heard about your hunger strike. Was that your way of saying you were sorry?”
“It started out that way.”
“And you really wanted to die?”
“Oh yeah.” It was the simple truth, and Jess said it with no self-consciousness. It was all she’d wanted. “But then when I was very close to dying, I thought… I saw…”
“You thought that there might be a reason to live after all.”
Jess considered. That was what Alex had offered her. And the answer was surely the same even if she was hallucinating him. If all of this was just her own mind trying to find a loophole, scraping around at the last moment for a get-out clause.
The answer was the same, but the verdict couldn’t be. Either she’d found a reason to live or she was lying to herself on so deep a level that she’d effectively lost her mind. And it seemed so obvious when you looked at it like that. This was exactly the wish-fulfilment fantasy she would have chosen for herself. That Alex wasn’t dead. Or if he was dead, that he still needed her somehow, however little sense that made…
But the counterargument was staring down at her from the wall next to the bed. DiMarta’s neat, fussy little line graph charting her inexplicable weight increase. I know a miracle when I see one.
Pastor Afanasy didn’t seem to expect Jess to confirm or deny. At any rate, she carried on after the long pause as though Jess’s silence was an answer in itself. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, “whether you want to hear it or not. Contrary to what you might think, you can’t make up for something bad you’ve done by killing yourself. In fact there’s almost nothing you can do by killing yourself except make the people who love you unhappy.” Jess thought of Brenda and felt a moment of nausea – a disgust with herself that pushed her back towards despair. “If you’re genuinely troubled, genuinely penitent, you’ve got to try to do good things going forward. Whatever you think God wants from you, whatever you think his plan is, that’s the only deal that makes any sense. You understand me, Jess?”
Jess made a non-committal sound, half laugh and half sigh. She didn’t. She didn’t understand at all.
“He never asked you to die,” Afanasy persisted, with a harder edge to her voice. “Nobody did. That was you shutting down because life was hurting you too much to bear. The very best you can say about it is that you were pouring good money after bad – making an awful mistake even worse. It wasn’t ever going to do anybody any actual good.”
There were lots of answers to that. That doing good was something she’d never managed yet, and it was probably way too late to start. That Alex’s parents might get some crumb of comfort from the blunt equation of an eye for an eye. That at least she was making damn sure she never fucked up again.
But it was all irrelevant. What counted was what came next.
“If there was something good I could do…” she said. “If I could help somebody…” But she couldn’t finish the sentence, still less start to explain it.
“What?” Pastor Afanasy prompted her.
“No,” Jess said. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”