The Night Nurse

Chapter One: The Job Nobody Wanted

The agency called me at nine o'clock at night, which told me everything I needed to know about the job.

Good placements come in on Tuesday mornings, from a coordinator with a headset and a schedule. Bad placements come in at night, from a woman named Dot who smokes while she talks and calls you honey because she has stopped bothering to remember names.

"Night post," Dot said. "Ten to eight. Seven nights on, no rotation, no relief nurse. Live in. Two hundred forty a night, cash on Fridays if you want it that way."

"Nobody pays two hundred forty a night for a night post."

"They do when they can't keep anybody. Three girls in five months, honey. One lasted nine days." A drag, a long exhale. "ALS. End stage. Suction, feeding pump, repositioning, morphine for the air hunger. Family's difficult."

"Difficult how?"

"Difficult like rich," she said. "You want it or not?"

I was in a motel outside Lewiston with four hundred and six dollars in a checking account and a bag of clothes that still smelled like the last motel. I had eaten dinner standing up at the sink, over the wrapper, because that is what you do when you don't want to sit down and look at the room.

"Where?" I said.

"Coldbrook. Up past Ellsford. Two hours if the roads are clear."

"Send me the address."

Dot hesitated, and I heard the hesitation, and I knew what it was. The agency had my paperwork. My paperwork said Maeve Tilton, licensed practical nurse, State of Maine, current and in good standing. It did not say Maeve Ansell, registered nurse, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, surrendered. It did not say what a jury in Erie County had spent ninety minutes deciding, or what the internet had spent two years deciding after them.

But Dot had a laptop and a search engine like everyone else, and the difference between Dot and the nice woman with the headset was that Dot had already looked and was going to send me anyway.

"Family knows you're coming," she said. "They asked for somebody who could handle the hard end of things. Don't make me look bad."

Here is the hard end of things, for anyone who wants to know it plainly.

Two years ago I worked nights for a man named Floyd Underhill, seventy-eight, pancreatic cancer with bone mets, in a brick house on a street where the maples had grown so big the sidewalks had cracked into little hills. He weighed a hundred and eleven pounds at the end. He had been a high school band director for thirty-one years, and when he could still talk he told me about a girl who played the French horn so badly he used to go out to his car and put his head on the steering wheel.

He died at 4:20 in the morning on the sixth of February. The dose in him was larger than the chart could account for. Not enormously. Enough. Enough that a hospice pharmacist frowned, and a medical examiner wrote a careful sentence, and a district attorney with an election coming asked a grand jury for an indictment and got one.

The trial took six days. The jury took ninety minutes. I stood up when they read it and my knees did not work and my lawyer had to put his hand under my elbow.

Then came the part nobody warns you about. Acquittal is a legal event. It is not a public one. A columnist in Pittsburgh wrote a piece with my photograph in it, the one where I am squinting into the sun outside the courthouse and look like a woman deciding whether to lie. Somebody in the comments called me the Night Nurse, because I worked nights, and because it sounded like a headline, and headlines are what survive. It went into the aggregators and out the other side. There is a message board where people still post my face every February.

I stopped being Maeve Ansell. I had married the name and I gave it back. I let the Pennsylvania license go rather than fight a board hearing I could not afford, and I took the humbler license in a state where the winters are longer, and I stopped applying to hospitals, and then to nursing homes, and then to anything with a human resources department, and eventually I ended up in a motel outside Lewiston eating over the sink and answering the phone at nine at night.

So when Dot said the family had asked for someone who could handle the hard end of things, I did not hear a warning. I heard a door.

I want that on the record. I heard a door, and I drove toward it.

CoLDBROOK, MAINE — POP. 1,180, said the sign, and somebody had put three bullet holes through the O's.

It was the fourteenth of March, that stretch of the year up there when winter has stopped being weather and become a condition. Snowbanks the color of dishwater. Ice on the north side of everything. I came in past a shuttered mill, a church with a plow-scarred lawn, a diner called Ruthie's with four trucks in the lot and light coming out of it like the only lit window in a hallway.

The town had been a granite town. You could tell from the buildings — a bank front with columns, a library with a carved lintel, all of it in that gray-white stone with the little glitter in it, all of it far too grand for eleven hundred people. Sowell Granite Works had cut curbstone and bank fronts and cemetery monuments for a hundred and twelve years. It closed in 2009. Everything that had been in Coldbrook because of it left within four years, and what stayed, stayed because it had nowhere else to be.

The quarry itself was two miles up Quarry Road, and when the pumps stopped it filled. That's what happens. You dig a hole a hundred feet deep in granite and the groundwater has been waiting the whole time. In eight months it was a lake. In two years it was a lake with a name — people called it the Cut — and in five it was a lake that had drowned two teenagers, and after that the town put up a fence that somebody cut open every June.

The house sat on the rim.

I came around the last bend and there it was, and I slowed the car without meaning to. Glass and cedar, three levels stepped down the rock, cantilevered out over the water so the bottom floor hung in air. Every light in it was on. It looked like a lantern set down at the edge of a well.

Below it, a hundred feet down, a set of switchback stairs went to a floating dock and a boathouse, and past the dock the water lay absolutely flat and absolutely black, holding the house upside down on its surface in perfect detail.

I sat in the car with the engine running and the heater ticking and I looked at it a moment too long.

That's the thing I keep going back to. I had a whole minute at the top of that drive when I could have turned around. There was room to turn. The plowing was excellent. Somebody in that house paid a man to keep the drive perfect all winter for a family that almost never left it, and the road was wide and salted and there was absolutely nothing stopping me.

I cut the engine and got my bag out of the trunk.

The woman who opened the door was thirty-nine and looked it in the way expensive people look their age, which is to say deliberately. Dark hair pulled back wet from a shower. Cashmere, gray. Bare feet on heated stone. She had a phone in one hand and a dish towel in the other and she looked at me for a second and a half longer than a person needs to look at a nurse.

"You're early," she said.

"Twenty minutes. I can wait in the car."

"God, no." She stepped back. "Come in. I'm Erin Leavitt. Sherman's wife." A pause exactly the width of a swallow. "Second wife."

I came in. The entry opened straight into a room two stories tall, all glass on the lake side, and the black water filled the whole wall like a screen showing nothing.

"He's awake," Erin said. "He'll be awake all night. He sleeps from about nine in the morning until two in the afternoon and the rest of the time he lies there thinking, which is the worst thing that could have happened to him." She said it flatly, the way you'd report a fact about a road. Then she looked at me again, and I understood that she had also looked me up, and that she had decided something about it, and that she was not going to tell me what.

"Ground rules," Erin said. "You don't go into my office. You don't go down to the boathouse, that's Hazel's. And if he says anything to you at three in the morning, you write it in the chart and you tell me in the morning and you don't do anything else with it. All right?"

"What kind of thing does he say at three in the morning?"

Erin Leavitt smiled at me with her mouth only.

"You'll see," she said.