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“Hello,” Mrs. Layley says, and I know I have to go to her, that I can’t just stand here and hide out in her room.
I go to the bedside, trying to smile, to be mentally present for Mrs. Layley, but it’s practically impossible because all I can think about is Caitlin.
Her wide eyes. The expression of her face. The way her mouth formed around the word, trying it on for size, like a baby first learning to talk. I could be wrong, but I think her broken body moved too as she said it, that she pulled just barely away from me in bed, slithering like a worm to get away as if she was afraid.
She could have meant anything by it. You are my nurse. You are here.
There could be a dozen things she was trying to say.
Or she could have meant exactly what I think she did. It could have been quite implicit.
You pushed me off the bridge. You did this. You will never get away with it.
There is dampness beneath my arms and I’m grateful for the dark scrubs or it might be visible.
“How are you feeling, Mrs. Layley?” I ask, but as she tells me, fighting to get the words out because her speech and comprehension have been affected from the stroke, I’m only thinking how I have no choice, how I have to do it, how I have to kill her and how I have to do it soon because if I wait too long, I’ll miss the chance. It will be too late. Caitlin gets better every day, and it’s only a matter of time now until she reveals all.
I tell myself that she’s not a good person. She lied to me. She pretended to kidnap my child. She stole from me. She hurt her own parents. She told lies about her mother. She framed a man with child pornography and ruined his whole life. She has no virtue, no integrity. The world would be better without her in it. If there is any justice in the world, Milo Finch said, she won’t survive this.
But how would I do it?
I mull it over. I bat it around in my mind. And that’s when the answer comes to me, sitting there in plain sight, on the bedside cart by Mrs. Layley’s bed and from the moment I lay eyes on it, I know I’ve struck gold.
Mrs. Layley’s insulin pen.
Insulin is a lethal drug. It comes with a warning. Too much of it can kill, enough that people use it to commit suicide sometimes. It’s opportunistic. But I’m desperate. And I’m already rationalizing in my mind how I could get away with it, how I could chalk it up to an egregious mistake, how I gave one patient’s medicine to the other by accident. It happens. It happens more than people know, that nurses give medication to the wrong patient. Because we’re understaffed and overworked and we don’t always remember or have time to do things like scanning wristbands before giving medicine, intentionally skipping those safeguards that are meant to keep everyone safe, for the sake of time.
It’s conceivable that I could move a decimal when calculating the dose too, that I could give Caitlin much more than Mrs. Layley would ever take and chalk it up to another mistake.
In theory, insulin pens shouldn’t be left out in the open like this. We’re supposed to keep them in patient specific bins in the medication room, but that’s not always the most efficient because patients on insulin need it many times a day. We don’t have time to be running back and forth to the medication room all day. It’s become common practice for nurses to leave them unsecured in patient rooms or to carry them around in a pocket.
As a result, they get lost. I hear nurses at the nurses’ station from time to time, troubled by lost insulin pens, looking for them, wondering where they left them. When they can’t find them, they request a replacement from the pharmacy because patients like Mrs. Layley can’t go without insulin without becoming hyperglycemic or developing ketoacidosis, and it’s never a big deal. The pharmacy just replaces them.
I take the pen on my way out of the room, slipping it in my pocket as I leave.
Twenty-Three
I feel the insulin pen through the pocket of my scrub bottoms. It’s not actually visible. I keep telling myself that it’s not, reassuring myself. If anything, it’s just a small bulge that no one would ever notice, but I look down at it from various angles to be certain it’s not obvious.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared or that I didn’t have my doubts. I do. I’m not a murderer. It’s not that I want her to die, it’s that I keep thinking what will happen to me if she lives. Her life and mine are incompatible.
I think through the likely outcomes of giving her the insulin. Bradycardia. Pulseless electrical activity. Death. It’s not a guarantee. There are variables of course because everyone is different. For example, it could take twenty units of insulin to kill a person or nine hundred. There’s no way to know for sure how her body will respond, though this is regular insulin and not long acting; my guess is death will come relatively quick.
Caitlin is asleep, but she wakes up when I touch her, her eyes slowly opening, and I know that if I hesitate, I will lose my nerve. She grimaces, pulling back from the light, getting acclimated to it as I grab her by the arm, thinking, in that last second, about loyal Mrs. Beckett and the day, years ago, that police showed up at her front door because Caitlin accused her of child abuse. I think about what it would feel like to have your reputation tarnished, to be dragged through the mud by someone you love, by someone you would do anything for. I think of Milo Finch and the day the police came for him, taking him away in handcuffs, his family and freedom gone, his life forever changed because of her. None of it is provable.
She’ll heal. She’ll get physically better and walk out of the hospital an innocent woman if I let her, while I’ll go to jail and she’ll go on to ruin someone else’s life.
I give the insulin in the back of the upper arm because it’s easiest to get to. She winces and recoils from the pain of the injection.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am, though I’m not sorry for what I’m doing. I’m sorry that she’s not the person I thought she was. For a moment, I let my thoughts go back to the night I met her at the divorce support group meeting and how grateful I was to have found a friend. I think back to how I embraced her that night in the church, how I held on too long, feeling nostalgic and longing for the past and for simpler, happier times. She preyed on my loneliness and on my desperate need for a friend.
She was never my friend.
My hands tremble as I turn the dial on the pen and inject her for a second and then a third time, having to wrench her arm back into place because she fights harder each time.
When I’m done, I drop the pen back into my pocket.
I move the call button out of reach, stepping away from the bedside.
