“We need to talk,” I say. “I mean, I need to talk.”
I pause, as if Lenora can respond. Instead, her silence fills the bathroom like steam, making it feel small, almost oppressive.
“You’re right. I’m scared. I’ll try not to be. But it’s hard. Maybe it would be easier if I knew why—”
I catch myself before I can finish the sentence. Why you killed the rest of your family. Lenora knows what I mean anyway. I can sense it as I squeeze shampoo into my hands and start to lather her hair.
“Because I might understand.”
I cup water into my hands and pour it over Lenora’s head, taking care to keep soapy water from getting into her eyes. My mother did the same thing when I was young. I returned the favor when, years later, I had to bathe her. The act has always struck me as something sacred. Like a baptism. Doing it now, in this stuffy, silent bathroom, puts me in a confessional mood.
That’s something my father suggested, right before he all but stopped talking to me. Go to the priest. Confess my sins.
I didn’t then. But I attempt it now.
“It turns out, we’re a lot alike, Lenora.” I cup more water, splash it onto her head, let it trickle down her hair as if the act will absolve us both. “We both like books. We haven’t been anywhere for years and years. And I know what you’re going through.”
I pause, unsure if I should continue. Or if I even want to. But then Lenora gives me a sidelong glance, looking as curious about me as I am about her.
“That’s the biggest thing we have in common,” I finally say. “That everyone thinks I also killed my mother.”
EIGHT
Even though I would have cared for my mother for free, my parents insisted on hiring me through Gurlain Home Health Aides. My mother’s idea. Such a proud woman. There was no way Kathleen McDeere would accept charity. Even though stomach cancer was eating away at her—and even though everyone knew it was far too late to do anything about it—she insisted on paying.
So I left the patient I had been caring for, a rather boring octogenarian with chronic arthritis, and moved back into my childhood bedroom. At first, it was weird treating my own mother like one of my patients. They all seemed so old. She didn’t.
Not that she was young. My mother was thirty-four when she had me and my father thirty-nine. I always assumed that one day I’d be expected to care for them. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.
Or this brutal.
That was something I wasn’t prepared for, no matter how many other patients I’d cared for. It’s different when it’s your own mother. It matters more. It hurts more, too. But none of the hurt I felt could compare to what my mother was going through. She spent the first few weeks of her illness in a daze, gobsmacked by all the ways in which her body had betrayed her. Then came the pain, so sharp it sometimes left her doubled over and weeping. I urged her doctor to prescribe fentanyl, even though he wanted to wait.
“Just a few more weeks,” he said.
“But she’s in agony now,” I said.
He wrote out the prescription.
Two weeks later my mother was dead of a fentanyl overdose.
To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a tragic accident. A sick woman rendered mad by pain taking more pills than she should have. To a trained eye, however, it was worse than that. Because of her condition, it could be argued that my mother was not in a sound state of mind. Which meant that I, as her caregiver, was responsible for making decisions on her behalf and in her best interests. Since I’d left a drug known for its overdose potential within her reach, one could also argue that I was negligent in her care and therefore responsible for her death.
That’s what Mr. Gurlain thought, once I admitted I forgot to put the pill bottle in the lockbox under my bed. He didn’t tell me this, of course. He simply contacted the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, who then contacted the local police.
A day after my mother’s funeral, a detective came to the house. Richard Vick. Because he and my father had been friends back in the day, I knew him slightly. He had the look of a sitcom grandfather. Full head of white hair. Friendly smile. Kind eyes.
“Hello there, Kit,” he said. “My deepest condolences on your recent loss.”
I looked at him with confusion, even though by then I should have known why he was there. “Can I help you with something, Mr. Vick?”
“Detective Vick, if you don’t mind.” He gave a half smile, as if apologizing for the formality. “Is your dad around?”
He wasn’t. My father, stoic in his grief, went to work as usual that day, off to fix the clanging pipes in old Mrs. Mayweather’s house. I told this to Detective Vick, adding a polite “I’ll tell him you stopped by.”
“I’m actually here to see you.”
“Oh.” I opened the door wider and told him to come in.
Detective Vick straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and said, “It might be better if we did this down at the station.”
“Do I need a lawyer?”
I was told no, of course not, it was just an informal chat about what happened. I wasn’t a suspect because there was nothing to suspect. All lies, as I learned when I followed Detective Vick to the station and was escorted into an interrogation room with a tape recorder he turned on the moment we sat down.
“Please state your name,” he said.
“You know my name.”
“It’s for the record.”
I stared at the tape recorder, watching the reels turn and turn. That was when I knew I was in trouble.
“Kit McDeere.”
“And what is it you do, Kit?”
“I’m an in-home caregiver with Gurlain Home Health Aides.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Twelve years.”
“That’s a long time,” Detective Vick said. “I assume you’re probably an expert at it by now.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
Detective Vick opened a folder in front of him, inside of which was the coroner’s report on my mother’s death. “It says here your mother died of an overdose of prescription painkillers and that you, acting as her caregiver, had been the one to find her body.”
“That’s correct.”
“How did you feel when you realized your mother was dead?”
I thought back to that morning. How I woke early, took one look at the gray-streaked sky, and just knew my mother was gone. Before crossing the hall to her room, I could have woken my father, who had taken to sleeping on the couch to give my mother more space in bed. We could have checked on her together, sparing me the burden of being the one to find her dead. Instead, I peeked into her bedroom and found my mother with her head on her pillow, her eyes closed, her hands folded over her chest. Finally, she was at peace.
“Sad,” I said. “And relieved.”
Detective Vick arched a brow. His eyes were no longer kind. Instead, they radiated suspicion. “Relieved?”
“That she was no longer suffering.”
“I suppose it’s natural to think that.”
“It is,” I replied, with more bite than was appropriate under the circumstances. I couldn’t help it.
“Your employer, Mr. Gurlain, told me it was standard procedure to lock away all pills while you’re asleep to prevent patients from having access to them. Is that true?”
I nodded.
“I’ll need you to answer that, Kit,” Detective Vick said with a nod toward the tape recorder.
“Yes,” I said.
“But Mr. Gurlain also told me you confessed to not doing that with the pills your mother overdosed on.”
“I didn’t confess,” I said, thrown off by the word.
“So you did put the pills away?”
“No,” I said. “I left them out. But I didn’t confess. That makes me sound guilty of something. I simply told Mr. Gurlain I left them out.”
“Have you ever left medication out like that before?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Ever.”
“So this was the first time you forgot to lock away the pills like you’re supposed to?”
“Yes,” I said, sighing the word as my frustration increased. I looked again to the tape recorder and wondered how the sigh would sound when played back. Impatient? Guilty?
“Did you intentionally leave them out?” Detective Vick asked.
“No. It was an accident.”
“I find that hard to believe, Kit.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“For the twelve years you’ve been a caregiver, you’ve never once left medication within a patient’s reach. The one time you do, the patient just happens to overdose. But not just any patient. Your very own mother, who was in so much pain that you begged her doctor to prescribe the very drugs that killed her. And when she died, you admit to feeling relieved. That doesn’t sound like an accident to me, Kit.”
I continued to eye the tape recorder, the reels turning and turning and turning.