I did not tell Ed where I was going. I took the folder with the typed letter and drove to the address on the envelope of Raymond Fenwick, a small yellow house on Pawnee, and the man who answered the door had a scar over his left eye, exactly where I had put six stitches thirty four years ago. He looked at me for a long time. “You are the nurse,” Michael Fenwick said. “The one with the green eyes. You gave me a graham cracker in the hall.” I had forgotten that. I had forgotten that I had held his hand.
He let me in. On the kitchen table sat the recipe box of his mother, a tin box with roses on the lid, open. “I got here before the niece sold it,” he said. “My father told me about it on the phone three weeks before he passed. He said, the truth is where your mother kept the pie recipes. He did not say more.” He pushed a stack of papers toward me. Pages and pages from the typewriter of Raymond, with the crooked e. “I have read it six times,” Michael said. “I need you to tell me if the part about the hospital is true.”
I read it standing up. Raymond had written that on the night of December 14th, 1991, he and his wife Lorraine argued over the money of the grain elevator, and he grabbed her by both arms, and she fell backward down the basement stairs. He did not push her, he wrote, but he did not catch her either. He drove her to St. Francis and told the doctors she had slipped. Then he wrote about the bruises on her arms, and about the chief of the ER, Dr. Lloyd Stamper, and about a nurse who wrote a true note, and what happened to that note.
A dresser drawer and a typed letter gave one retired nurse the length of a long Saturday to bring a grown son back to the truth in Wichita.
I gave my terms at that kitchen table. I would tell Michael what I wrote on the chart that night, every word, and what I was told to take out, and what I did. I would not hide my part in it. In return, he would do nothing until we had sat across from Dr. Stamper together, because the man was alive, eighty seven years old, in a retirement home in Newton, and he was the only one left who could say why. Michael studied my face. “Why are you doing this, Mrs. Hartwell?” “Because I was thirty nine and scared,” I said. “And I am seventy four, and I am done.”
Dr. Stamper received us in a sunroom, in a cardigan and slippers, with a blanket on his knees and a cane against his chair. He looked at the scar on the face of Michael, and then at me, and he did not pretend. “I told her to take it out,” he said quietly. “Raymond Fenwick sat on the hospital board. He had paid for the new wing. I told myself that a boy with a broken arm had enough trouble without his father in jail. That was a lie. I wanted the donation.” He turned to Michael. “Your mother was awake for ten minutes at the end. She asked for you.”
Michael did not shout. He sat still as a fence post. But in the doorway behind us, a stout woman in a pink uniform who had been listening, the daughter of Stamper, named Pauline, lost her head. She snatched the old carbon of my chart note from the table, the paper I had kept in my own jewelry box for thirty four years, meaning to flush it down the toilet in the hall and say the family had imagined it, and she ran in her white shoes with the cane of her father clattering behind her.
She did not get far. At the end of the hall, an old man with a walker, a resident named Mr. Gilliam, a retired Marine, put out his arm and blocked the corridor with the whole width of his walker. “Madam,” he said, “you will not flush a thing in this building.” Pauline stopped. The paper trembled in her fist, and then she began to cry. She walked back and handed it to me, and apologized to Michael, and apologized to me, and then to her father, who stared at the blanket on his knees and said nothing at all.
The paper turned out to be enough, together with the confession in the recipe box and the testimony of an old man who finally wished to speak. It was too late for charges against Raymond, who had passed, and too late for Stamper, who had only months. But the state board that keeps old records took his name from the register and noted the reason, and the hospital took his name off the plaque of the east wing. Michael asked for only one thing. He asked that the line from the chart be read at a service for his mother, and that it be read by me.
In the name of Lorraine Fenwick, who passed in 1991, I started the Lorraine Fenwick Fund. It pays for emergency rooms and safe housing for women leaving unsafe homes, in Sedgwick, Butler and Harvey counties. In the first year we helped one hundred seventeen women, with motel nights, new locks, and a pair of nurses who sit in the waiting room at St. Francis on Friday nights. One young mother told me she had not known anyone would look at the bruises and write them down. I told her I had learned to, late, and that I would never again take a word off a chart.
Ed and I still go to estate sales on Saturdays. He likes old tools and I like old furniture, and last month I bought a small oak table for twenty dollars, and I looked under every drawer, out of habit, and found nothing. Ed laughed so hard he had to sit on a bucket. Michael comes to our house on Sundays now, with a pie his wife makes, and he calls me Glory, like Ed. Sometimes I catch him touching the place above his eye. He says the stitches were good ones. I tell him they were the best I ever sewed.