The nurse they had on the schedule for our house every night was a man named Alvin Brooks, who had worked for the hospice for twenty two years. The woman at the office, her voice rising, told me that he had arrived every evening at nine o clock for the last six weeks. I looked across the living room at the empty armchair, at the hospital bed with my husband in it, at the clock on the wall. I had not seen any Alvin Brooks. I had seen Brandi, a pretty woman in blue scrubs, who brought butterscotch candy. The woman at the hospice said very slowly, “Mrs. Stidham, please stay where you are.”
I stayed. I sat in the recliner beside Coy with my hand on his arm and the sandwich bag in my apron pocket, and I watched the clock tick toward noon. At twelve ten, two cars pulled up in the driveway. A sheriff deputy in a brown uniform, and an elegant older woman in a gray coat, with a medical bag. She was the director of the hospice, she said, and her name was Carol Eubanks, and she was so sorry. She asked to see the lockbox. I gave her my key. She counted the vials and looked at the four with the glue marks, and her face tightened.
The deputy, who was young and soft spoken, took statements at my kitchen table. Brandi was not a nurse, he said. Her name was Brandi Kessler, thirty four years old, a former licensed practical nurse whose license had been revoked in 2019 for stealing narcotics. She had been hired by no agency at all. She had found my husband name on a hospice list, knew the scheduled night nurse was home with a broken leg since Christmas, and had presented herself on our doorstep in scrubs with a plausible story. She had been selling the diluted morphine to someone for the better part of a year, in at least six other homes.
The most terrible thing a person can do to the dying is to take away the one mercy they have left, and the kindest is to give it back.
I put my face in my hands. Six other homes. Six other husbands and wives, lying in beds with their mouths open in pain while the poison dripped. I thought of Coy screaming for three nights, and of the hospice woman telling me that is what this disease does. My shoulders began to shake. Carol Eubanks put her hand gently on my back. She said, “Wilma, you did exactly the right thing. You listened. You kept still. You saved him.” I said, “I did not save anybody.” She said, “You are going to save six more.”
They arrested Brandi at one thirty, in the parking lot of the Walmart on Bridge Street, as she was getting out of her car. She had a bag of vials in her purse. The sheriff told me later that she did not resist; she looked almost relieved. Alvin Brooks arrived at my door at three, bringing real medicine in a real locked case. He was a big gentle man with a gray beard and a voice like warm syrup. He knelt by the bed of Coy, checked his chart, and said, “Mr. Stidham, I am sorry we are late.” He gave him the correct dose. Within twenty minutes, Coy face smoothed like a sheet being pressed.
I watched the lines leave my husband forehead, one by one. I had not seen him sleep without pain in a month. He slept for nine hours. I sat beside him the entire time, holding his hand, and Alvin sat in the corner with a paperback, saying nothing, and I thought that in forty one years of marriage I had never been so grateful for the silence of a stranger. At dawn, Coy woke and looked at me clear eyed and said, in a voice like dry leaves, “Wilma. I had the strangest dream. We were at the lake in 1968.”
Dakota was arrested that afternoon. He walked into the sheriff station himself, in the middle of the afternoon, with his hands in his pockets, before they could come for him. He told them everything. He had been using again since November. He had owed money to the men that Brandi supplied. She had offered him a deal, a cut of the sales, in exchange for a ride and a silence. He said it had not seemed real until he heard Coy scream. “I thought I could stop it,” he said. “I could not stop it. And I could not tell Grandma.” The deputy said he cried the whole time.
I went to see him in the county jail on Friday. He sat behind the glass with his hair shaved close, in orange, with his hands pressed flat on the table. He looked fourteen. I said, “Dakota, I am so angry with you that I can barely speak.” He nodded. I said, “And I will be here every Friday until you are well.” He put his forehead against the glass, and I put my palm against it, and we stayed like that for a long time, a grandmother and a grandson on either side of a window.
Coy lived eleven more days, and they were good ones, as good as dying days can be. Alvin came every night. The bird feeder outside the window filled with finches. On the tenth night, Coy asked to hear the radio, and I found the oldies station, and we listened to the Four Tops in the dark. On the last morning, he opened his eyes and looked at me, and he squeezed my fingers three times. Then he turned his head and looked at the empty chair where Dakota used to sit. He squeezed my hand three times again, and I understood, and I said yes.
Dakota was released in the spring, after a plea, into a residential program in Columbus, where he is now eleven months clean. Brandi will serve nine years. Carol Eubanks wrote a letter to the state board, and it led to an investigation of every home care agency in the county. A new rule now requires a photograph on every nurse badge. I carry a copy of it in my purse. Last Sunday, at the cemetery, I laid a handful of butterscotch candy on the headstone of my husband. Dakota stood beside me. Then he took my hand, and squeezed it three times.