by M. R. Carey
27
Grace lost a packet when Moulson rallied.
It wasn’t a little bit here and a little bit there: it was a single massive payout to a dozen or so long-shot punters when Moulson hit the six-week mark with a heartbeat, a pulse and a full matching set of vital signs. Grace paid out in the ballroom that evening. She handed over the money without a murmur, as a bookie was bound to do, but the muscles in her jaw got tighter and tighter until Big Carol Loomis became seriously scared and tried to deflect the lightning with a change of venue.
“Look at this,” she said, pointing to a poster on the wall. “Film club is showing Angels with Dirty Faces. ‘Top of the world, Ma!’ You want to go watch it, Grace?”
Grace turned to stare at her with flinty eyes. “White Heat,” she said.
“What?”
“‘Top of the world, Ma!’ is the last line in White Heat. Angels with Dirty Faces has Cagney dying like a coward to stop impressionable young kids from following in his footsteps. No, Carol, I don’t want to watch it. But I want you to. And when you’re done, you can write me a fucking review.”
Loomis weighed up many possible replies, but settled on a nod. She kept her face carefully expressionless as Grace walked away with her empty cash box dangling from her hand.
Dr Salazar witnessed Moulson’s return from the dead with mixed emotions. He was amazed and overjoyed when he saw that she was rallying – an instinctive response arising out of a fuzzy but firm conviction that life was better than no life and that his job was to push as hard as he could in the right direction. But as a professional, he was mystified and almost affronted. How could this thing have happened? How could it be continuing to happen in front of his eyes?
Nurse Stock, who was actually the first to see the change in Moulson’s condition, had a more straightforward and primal reaction. When she told Sally about the spike in the readings, she was whey-faced and terrified, close to breaking down. The whole time Salazar was examining Moulson, she was babbling away to him about how she’d made a mistake with Moulson’s meds. She should have reported it, but it was late and it was dark and she didn’t realise… and on and on.
Sally saw exactly what mistake she’d made: the violent purple bruise on Moulson’s thigh made it clear as day that Stock had injected the last dose of tramadol into the artery instead of the vein. Moulson ought to have died, or at the very least gone into a cardiovascular crisis.
It wasn’t an easy mistake to make with the femoral artery. It was a big target, whether you were trying to find it or (which was much more likely) avoid it. Stock had almost killed a patient through the kind of blunder you might expect from a first-year med student. A sloppy first-year med student with a happy-go-lucky attitude. The initial mistake was compounded by her not reacting properly to the sudden rush of blood that must have occurred as soon as the needle was withdrawn. Instead of seeing this for what it was – proof positive that she’d pierced an artery – Stock had just staunched the flow and walked away.
And now she was watching him, tense and rigid, as he inspected the damage. She was waiting for the axe to fall. But Salazar had a problem with axes. Evil had to be identified and extirpated, obviously. But he’d flinched from that test before, when the evil was a lot bigger. Stock most likely had just made a mistake, and who was he to judge another human being’s failings when he was such a desperate mess himself?
She was waiting for him to say something.
“Better get another bandage,” he muttered. “This one is soaked.”
Stock made a small, unidentifiable sound and retreated. When she came back with the bandage, Salazar stood aside and let her change Moulson’s dressing herself. He thought he ought to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’ll give her the tramadol from now on,” was what he finally came up with. “We’ll change the schedule so I can do it last thing before I leave.”
Stock mumbled something he didn’t hear. It was probably just, “Yes.”
“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 Jes
s,” 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.”
“Then give yourself the benefit of the doubt,” the pastor suggested. It was exactly what Brian Pritchard had told her to do, only he’d been referring to things in the past, and Sarah Afanasy was talking about the future.
Which made Jess wonder for the first time whether she – or Alex, for all the seeming finality of death – might actually have one.
28
Another night, another dream. A banal and ordinary one this time. Jess was playing hopscotch in the playground of her primary school. She was her nine-year-old self, acutely conscious of the dental braces she was wearing and the new shoes she was supposed not to scuff.
She woke to find Alex sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed. Actually he wasn’t quite touching the bed. He hovered an inch or so above it, casting no shadow on the crisp white coverlet.
Something dark and curdled rose in Jess’s mind where her unbelief touched her fear, and both refused to dissolve. If Alex was a figment, just her own guilt wearing a dead child’s face, then she was mad and lost. If he was real, then she was penned in with a monster, something utterly impossible and wrong.
No, I’m the monster, she told herself. Not him. Anyone who hurts a kid is a monster, whether they meant to do it or not. Cling to that. If there was one wrong, sick, unnatural thing in this room, it was her. And whether Alex was real or not, this was her penance, dangling within her reach. She could grab for it or she could go down into the ground as she had intended, with nothing done. Nothing changed or atoned for.
I like your uniform, Alex said. He said it loudly, even though he wasn’t speaking aloud. She had the sense that he was trying to change the subject, though not a word had been spoken. I had a black blazer with a red badge. There was a goat and a flag and dum spiro spero underneath.
In her dream, Jess had been wearing the blue blazer and skirt of Heathcote Road County Primary.
“I want to help you,” she said in her rusty, closed-for-repairs voice. “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.” She was eliding a lot of things, including I have no idea if you’re really here or if any of this means anything but maybe, if there’s a God, he sees me trying and that somehow counts. She could have said those things but it seemed easier to let them slide for now.
The dead boy smiled. Thank you, Jess!
“You want to know… what happened before the flats burned down? This woman who hurt you – you want to know who she was?”
A vigorous nod. And why she hated me. And where my friend went.
“Your friend? You never mentioned…”
It was something else I only just remembered. There was a girl who was my friend and another girl who hated me.
“A girl, or a woman?”
Alex frowned, visibly turning that question over in his mind. I don’t know, he admitted at last. I remember it lots of different ways. I think before I forgot it I dreamed it a lot, and where I live now dreams are the realest thing. I see her as a woman and I see her as a girl.
“Your own age?” Jess hazarded.
How old am I?
“You were ten when you died.” Putting it into words made her mind rebel all over again against the craziness of it all. She was diving down the rabbit hole with her eyes wide open. There might not be a bottom.
Then probably older than me. But I don’t know.
Which was hardly surprising, Jess thought bleakly. If he was a child, or the remnant of a child, then his perspective was limited by a child’s understanding of the world. If he was a fantasy of her own making, then everything he said was meaningless and it all came down to some happy daydream of making amends. Either way, she was on her own.
Or maybe not. Not entirely. If she reopened contact with her lawyers, told them she’d changed her mind about lodging an appeal, there might be a way to get them to take another look at the events that had brought her here: the fire, and Alex’s death.
It was better to believe, she realised, suddenly and all at once. If she believed, then she would have Alex with her, for a while at least. She’d have that solace, and perhaps another chance to prove that she could be the friend he needed. All she’d lose, even in the worst-case scenario, was her mind, and what the hell else was she using it for?
Pastor Afanasy’s words came back to her, and now she could open up her arms and embrace them: this was a much be
tter deal than dying.
Wherever it might lead, she decided she would take it.
29
Dennis Devlin was very unhappy about the collapse of the Jessica Moulson book. Grace had tasked him with keeping track, through Salazar, of the stages of Moulson’s decline so that she could adjust her spread of odds accordingly. The Devil had done his best to meet this brief, and had had to work hard at it on account of Salazar’s reluctance ever to call a spade a fucking spade. When Moulson lived, it seemed to Grace that there had to be a problem with the quality of her intel.
Devlin felt much the same, only where Grace blamed him, he blamed Salazar. And in due course he paid the doctor a house call. He found Sally up in the infirmary with Sylvie Stock, Sally filling in order forms for his pharmacy while Sylvie changed bedsheets. He was no judge of atmosphere, but he was pretty damn sure he hadn’t interrupted a love-in.
“You’re wanted in Franklin,” he told Stock. “Stay there a good long while.” She took off without a backward glance. As soon as she was gone, Devlin told Sally how unhappy he was with how the Moulson thing had worked out.
Sally was apologetic, which was right and proper, but he was defiant too. “It was a miracle,” he said. “A little way outside my remit, Dennis.”
“No man can serve both God and Mammon, Sally. Moderate your fucking language.”
“Well, what would you call it?” the doctor demanded, slightly wild around the eyes. “She was right there, on the edge. Her weight had dropped to five stone. She had a thready pulse and her blood glucose was about one third normal. Below that, even. I would have said she had a day left at best before either her diaphragm gave out or she went into cardiogenic shock. And then—”
“Don’t say a miracle happened,” Devlin warned him.
“Well, something happened. And it’s not something I can explain. She came back. Looking at her vitals now… it’s like it’s not even the same person.”
