Chapter 3 Nathaniel’s Past
Iarrive at the hospital early. Bag in the locker, hands washed, hair tied back. The routine is the same as it always is, and I keep waiting for it to feel different.
It doesn’t.
I thought it would. Some part of me genuinely believed that once it was done, something inside me would settle. The part that spent the last week mapping floor wax and cross-referencing employee records and standing at that woman’s eyehole until my back ached. That part was sure.
Nothing settled.
I’m reviewing charts at the nurses’ station and I write the date at the top of a form and my hand pauses on the second digit. I know the date. I always know the date. But whether this is a Tuesday or a Thursday is gone. Just a blank spot where that information used to sit without effort.
I write the date and move on. Shouldn’t be a big deal.
Mrs. Adeyemi, Room 4. Post-op drainage. I read the numbers and they’re fine and I initial the box and flip to the next page and somewhere between those two motions my brain offers me, unbidden: Leonard Garza didn’t feel any regret.
I set the chart down. Pick up the next one.
Mr. Torosian, Room 7. Elevated white cell count, pending culture results. My eyes track the lab values, column by column, and the thought comes back.
No regret.
He killed the woman who taught nineteen residents how to stabilize a tension pneumothorax, and his punishment is that he stopped existing. That’s it.
He got to just stop.
I flip the page.
There’s a water stain on the upper right corner of Torosian’s chart, a faint brown ring where someone set a coffee cup down. I stare at it. My mother would have written someone up for that.
I realize I’ve been staring at it for a while. I don’t know how long. Could be three seconds, could be thirty. The chart is still open in my hands and I’m standing at the station and the world hasn’t moved and nobody is looking at me, so it was probably three seconds.
Probably.
I close the chart and move on.
The looks start registering before I understand what I’m registering.
A conversation dipping as I walk past. Someone mid-sentence trailing off, eyes sliding to me and then away.
A nurse at the end of the hallway sees me turn the corner and adjusts her posture, softens her face, arranges herself into someone ready to be supportive.
I watch the whole performance happen in real time like I can dissect every facial muscle she moves.
Everyone here knows.
My mother worked these corridors for almost two decades. Half the staff trained under her. And now they’re all watching me with this careful, measured tenderness that makes my teeth itch, because what they think they’re looking at is a man barely holding it together.
They think I went home last night and stared at the ceiling.
I went home last night and sat on the bathroom floor and went through every step backward. The gloves. The door. The hallway. The stairs. Each surface I touched or didn’t touch. Each second I was visible or wasn’t. I found nothing out of place. My work was clean.
I am not falling apart.
I pull on gloves. Room 4. Mrs. Adeyemi is awake, slightly groggy. I check her drainage output. I press two fingers to the skin around the insertion site and ask if this hurts and she says a little and I nod and say that’s normal. My voice comes out exactly right.
“Your numbers look good,” I tell her. “We’ll check again at four.”
She thanks me. I make a note. Something about the way my hand moves across the page feels disconnected, like I’m watching it from slightly behind my own eyes. The letters are neat. The handwriting hasn’t changed. But there is a thin layer of something between my skin and everything I touch.
It must be fatigue. I haven’t slept much lately.
In the hallway I pass Dr. Reeves, who squeezes my shoulder and says hang in there, son.
I say thank you with the right amount of eye contact and the right amount of restraint.
After he turns the corner I stand still because the pressure from his hand is still sitting on my shoulder.
I can feel the exact shape of his fingers, all four of them, the weight distribution, the precise boundary where contact ended and air began.
These sensations are goddamn annoying.
For the next hour I register more and more people paying attention to me. This is not the first day I came into work after my mother’s death, but somehow it’s the first day I notice so much of it.
Logically I shouldn’t be surprised. My mother spent thirty years in medicine. She trained the residents who trained the residents who are now saving lives in hospitals she’ll never set foot in. Everyone here knows her and will grieve her in their own way. They will miss her, the person.
So will I.
But I also miss something else. Something I cannot shake.
The cascade of her. The enormous cascade her existence set into motion.
All the people she would have helped, the sacrifices she would have made, the students she would have pushed past the point where they wanted to quit because she could see what they’d become before they could. All of it just stops. For nothing.
How many people are there creating that kind of cascade with their existence? Not many.
And Leonard Garza got what for stopping it? Half a second of pain. Maybe not even that. Maybe he was still blinking at me when it happened, still processing the face in his doorway, and then nothing.
She would be on this floor right now.
I stop at the water fountain and press the button and watch the arc of water. The arc is perfect, a clean parabola, and I watch it for longer than a person would normally watch a water fountain and I know I’m doing it and I can’t find the part of me that’s supposed to care.
Someone walks past behind me and I hear their footsteps slow for a moment, maybe wondering, and then speed up again, deciding it’s not their business.
I let go of the button. I walk.
The thought comes back like breathing.
He didn’t suffer.
My phone buzzes.
MANDATORY ATTENDANCE: Grief Counseling, 3:00 PM. Noncompliance may affect your position.
I read it twice. Grief counseling. Mandatory.
I put the phone back in my pocket. One of the nurses glances over. Chen, I think. Second year. She asks if I’m alright. I nod without looking at her.
Am I dissociating right now?
I must be.
I breathe out through my nose. Slowly.
Dissociation is a stress response. The prefrontal cortex deprioritizing sensory integration in favor of executive function. The brain doing triage, same as I do every day in this building, deciding what matters and what can wait. The trick is that it doesn’t know when to stop.
And what if I make mistakes and give someone a reason to realize I killed Leonard last night?
I need to calm down.
I look at the hallway ahead of me and count the ceiling tiles from here to the corner and I get nineteen and I count them again and I get nineteen again and that means my brain is working.
Spatial processing intact. Numeracy intact.
Fine motor control. I’m charting accurately.
I’m speaking in complete sentences. I’m modulating my tone for patients without conscious effort.
I have to manage the grief counseling session at 3:00 where someone is going to sit across from me and look for cracks, and I have to give them a surface so smooth they see nothing but their own reflection.
And I have to do it while some back corner of my mind keeps running the same useless arithmetic, weighing all the years of my mother’s life against half a second of Leonard Garza’s death and finding the math obscene.
I start walking. I straighten my coat. I check my watch.
I’m going to go through this.
I’m going to be exactly the person they all expect to see.
There is no other option for me.
At 2:15 I sign out and grab my coat. The drive across town takes twenty minutes longer than it should because of traffic, which gives me plenty of time to sit with the absurdity of a system that insists on processing emotions instead of addressing the failures that caused them.
The counseling center is housed inside a renovated church. A small old building some might call cozy, with pointed arch windows and a steeple that’s been repurposed into an office.
I park, cross the uneven walkway, and follow a volunteer down a narrow hallway to a dimly lit room where chairs are arranged in a circle.
Group therapy.
I take a seat near the corner and rest my hands on my knees. A dozen people occupy the room. Some older, some younger, some guarded, some already crying. They look like people who have been torn open and rearranged by loss, and within seconds I know I don’t belong among them.
I am not stricken by pain like this. I am unraveling, yes. But that’s because of the social constructs drilled into my mind that say seeking revenge and taking lives is wrong. Not because of sadness.
Taking lives is not wrong. It should be even. It’s not even either, but that’s the best a man like me could do.
What was the alternative? Capture Leonard and torture him until he felt as much pain as I believed he deserved?
That would have been playing god. A supernatural creature with too much power in its hands.
And perhaps someone should hold that power and wield it, but how could I, in good conscience, claim with any fairness that person should be me?
My thoughts threaten to spiral deeper until the door opens again.
Two men walk in who, unlike everyone else in this room, seem different. Somewhat like me.
The first one is already agitated. Ginger hair, green eyes, jaw clenched tight in a way that telegraphs irritation before he’s even fully through the door.
He lingers near the threshold, scanning the room like he’d rather be anywhere else, until the man behind him murmurs something low and pointed into his ear.
The redhead rolls his eyes, mutters under his breath, and steps inside.