The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (39 page)

OFF AND ON, DURING THE
next months, Maureen would promise herself that this next injection would be her last. She was lucky not to have been found out, and she would stop after this one, and no one would be the wiser. It wasn’t like she was depriving any of her elderly patients of meds they needed; she would never, ever do
that. But most of the docs overtranquilized these frail, underweight elderly. She and Jackie had concurred about that.

In July, Jackie finally confronted her about her suspicions. Mo had cried, begged her not to go to Gillespie, made promises she had every intention of keeping. And she
had
kept them, too, until mid-September, that long stretch when she’d worked ten nights in a row because Claire’s husband was so sick.

The accident happened on Saturday, October 9.

IN PART TWO OF
“A Victim’s Victims,” investigative reporter Rosalie Rand shifts focus from the Seaberry family to the other two principals in her story: Maureen and Resident State Trooper Brian Gatchek. Gatchek, a thirty-two-year-old third-generation cop, was the first responder at the scene. He told Rand he had suspected from the start that there was more to it than a nurse’s exhaustion after a long overnight shift.

Rand’s depiction of Maureen is evenhanded. She first recounts Mo’s troubles: the Columbine murders and the emotional and physical ravages that survival had cost her. On the advice of her lawyers, Maureen granted Rand an interview; in it, she talked frankly about her posttraumatic stress, her drug dependence, and—this surprised me—her father’s sexual abuse. (Arthur had pledged to pay half of Mo’s legal costs, but after the article ran, he withdrew the offer and, through his attorney, notified Mo that she’d been disinherited and disowned.) Rand does not, as I feared she might, reshape Mo’s words to push a thesis or an agenda. Nor does she discredit the mitigating factors in the case. Instead, she presents them objectively and lets the reader decide: Should the quality of mercy be strained or unstrained, given the facets of the case?

For the section on Maureen, Rand also interviewed Jerry Martineau, Jackie Molinari, Connecticut Health Department attorney Peter Hatch, and Lindsay Peek. Jerry spoke candidly for a cop,
second-guessing his decision not to arrest Maureen the day the system had red-flagged her as a substance abuser. (“The truth is, I felt sorry for her. What she’d been through out there in Colorado. She looked so pathetic and scared when my detective brought her in that day. I’ll admit it. I let my sympathy cloud my better judgment.”)

Jackie said she suspected Maureen might be using, and falsifying med log records to cover her tracks. “She kept asking me to sign off on witnessing discards when I
hadn’t
witnessed them. We were friends; we worked the same shift; we trusted each other. It happens sometimes when you’re in a hurry, or when you space out and squirt out the rest of an injection without thinking about it. But it started happening pretty consistently, usually with Ativan or Xanax. And I began to ask myself if she had a problem.” Rather than report her suspicions to her supervisor, Jackie had confronted Maureen directly, and Mo had admitted everything: “doctor shopping,” NarcAnon, and how she’d first injected herself on New Year’s Eve when that creep had gotten in and it had triggered a flashback. Jackie believed Maureen’s promise that, as of that moment, it was going to stop. “I’m convinced Maureen believed it, too,” Jackie told Rand. “Look, she had an illness, but she was a great nurse. If I had reported her, the Health Department would have swept in, prosecuted her, and taken away her license. Do I feel horrible about what happened? Sure I do. Guilty? You bet. But what I want to know is, why the system lets doctors who have a drug problem keep their licenses and their anonymity, but if you’re a nurse, you get publicly humiliated and they take away your career.”

“Because drug addicts are in denial,” the prosecutor told Rosalie Rand. “They won’t stop until the profession stops them. Or until there’s a dead kid lying in the middle of the road. Which do
you
prefer?”

“She was nice enough when she worked at Columbine,” Lindsay Peek told Rand. “Kids liked her. I liked her. She’s probably the main reason I decided to go into nursing. But nurses are supposed to heal
people, not kill them. When you think about it, what she did dishonors all the kids who died that day at Columbine.”

I tried to convince Maureen not to read “A Victim’s Victims” when it came out, but she didn’t listen. When she got to Lindsay’s quote, she wailed like a wounded animal.

THERE WERE TWO EYEWITNESSES TO
the accident that killed Morgan Seaberry that morning. Tawnee Shay, herself a recovering addict, was running down Route 32, late for work at McDonald’s. Later that night, she’d watched the TV news footage: the car up on the lawn, the sign knocked crooked. They’d shown the victim’s high school yearbook picture, and Gerry Brooks from Channel 30 had asked anyone who might have witnessed the event to contact the state police. Tawnee had not contacted them, though; she wanted nothing to do with cops. But Officer Gatchek had gone into full-bore investigative mode and, a few days later, had ferreted her out.

The other eyewitness was the victim’s older brother, Jesse Sea-berry. It had been a strange night, Jesse told Rosalie Rand—the strangest night of his life. His mom, his brother and sister, and he had arrived the night before at the Comfort Inn. They’d checked in and, on the recommendation of the desk clerk, had gone to the Chinese buffet in the mall, rather than to the Mickey D’s across the road. The food had sucked, Jesse said; he and his mother had finally agreed on
something.

When the four of them got back to the motel, Jesse told Rosalie Rand, his mother said she was going to arrange 6:45 a.m. wakeup calls for both rooms—hers and Alyssa’s and his and Morgan’s. She’d given a twenty-dollar bill to Morgan (not Jesse) so that they could buy some breakfast at McDonald’s the next morning, if they got ready early enough. She said she wanted them outside, at the car, by seven thirty sharp. She wasn’t quite sure where to go when they got to campus, and she didn’t want to be still driving around when the thing
was already starting. She was a typical Type A, she told them for the billionth time, and liked to arrive a little early to avoid stress.

Morgan and he had gone to their room, flopped on their beds, and agreed that the motel their mother had picked out was a shithole: burned-out lightbulbs, a broken lock on the bathroom door, cigarette burns in the drapes. And if those
weren’t
cum stains on the carpet, it sure looked like it. Jesse told Morgan about a reality crime show he’d seen where the detectives had solved a rape-murder by bringing this special light to a hotel room, and turning off all the other lights, and the spots where there were body fluids had fucking
glowed,
and that was how they’d matched the dude’s DNA or whatever. Morgan fell asleep listening to him, Jesse said, but he, Jesse, couldn’t sleep, so he watched some pay-per-view and smoked a little of the weed he’d brought along to make the trip bearable. Then he’d gotten nice and mellow and fallen asleep, too.

The weirdness began later, at about four in the morning, Jesse said, when he woke up with some serious cotton mouth and needing to take a leak.

He didn’t think to look over and see if Morgan was in his bed, which he wasn’t. Morgan was in the bathroom with the broken lock, sitting on the toilet, butt-naked, and cutting slits in his pecs with a single-edge razor. “Get out!” Morgan had screamed, and Jesse was about to when he noticed these pictures on the floor around the toilet, which Morgan started snatching up, fast as he could—these computer printouts, skin pictures that, at first, Jesse assumed, were women, but then he realized were
dudes.
Muscle guys with stiffs. And Jesse had said to Morgan, who’d begun to cry, “Holy shit, you’re
gay?
Mr. Perfect is
gay?”

Morgan went at him, Jesse said, throwing punches, pretty fierce ones, too. Then Jesse got Morgan in a headlock and squeezed his neck so hard that Morgan said, “Okay! Stop! Please stop!” And after they’d both calmed down and caught their breath, they’d started talking.

They talked for a long time, an hour maybe, about everything: the divorce, their lives before their dad left, their mom’s cancer. It was weird, Jesse said, but in a way, it was the best talk they’d ever had. The most
real
talk they’d ever had. Morgan told Jesse he cut himself to relieve the pressure. “What pressure?” Jesse had asked. “Everything in your whole fucking life’s come super easy.” Morgan said it was hard always trying to live up to their mother’s expectations. To be the one person in the family who wasn’t going to disappoint her. It was hard to explain, but sometimes, he said, his skin felt too tight from having to hold in his
real
self. Constricted, like, and it
hurt.
So he’d cut himself to relieve the pressure, and it would feel, not good, but better.

“Like when you pop a zit?” Jesse had asked, and Morgan had said no, not really, but kind of. Yeah.

Jesse wanted to know if Morgan had ever made it with a dude, and Morgan said he had, once, with one of the other actors in
Of Mice and Men
—this kid named Danny, who played one of the ranch hands. He’d almost had sex with this other guy, he said—this guy he’d met in a chat room. Morgan had driven to Asbury Park to meet him, but the guy had turned out to be in his forties, not twenty-two like he’d said, so Morgan had decided not to get in his car, and the guy had kept going, “What’s
wrong
with you?”

Jesse said Morgan begged him not to tell their mother. She’d been through so much already: getting dumped by their dad, getting cancer. Instead of saying whether he would or wouldn’t tell, Jesse had suggested they smoke together. Morgan said he couldn’t, because the open house was in, like, three hours, and because weed was illegal. Jesse’d laughed at that. “You cut yourself, have sex with
guys,
and you won’t smoke a blunt with your own
brother?”

So they’d smoked. And the more Jesse thought about it—that his Mr. Perfect little brother was more fucked-up than
he
was—the freer he felt and the harder he laughed. But Morgan was one of those guys who smokes and, instead of kicking back and enjoying the ride, gets
all paranoid. He started whimpering, thinking the cops were going to storm their room. He begged Jesse again not to say anything, and Jesse said he hadn’t decided yet what he was or wasn’t going to say, and then, all of a sudden, Morgan bolted.

Jesse ran after him, down the hallway, and out into the dim daylight. And Morgan, without looking, started across the road just as that woman’s silver Tercel came out of nowhere and plowed into him without even tapping her brakes. And then the Tercel had jumped the curb and crashed into the sign, “Billions and Billions Sold” or whatever, and there was his brother, lying there in the road, not moving, and Jesse knew he was dead.

Carole Alderman told Rosalie Rand that Jesse was hateful—that he had been “pathologically jealous” of Morgan his whole life, and now, unforgivably, he had concocted this whole malicious story to discredit Morgan in death. Morgan had not ever cut himself intentionally, Carole said—he would never,
ever
do something self-destructive like that; Jesse was the self-destructive one. And Morgan was certainly not a homosexual; that was simply
ridiculous.
Morgan had been a normal, kindhearted boy whom everybody loved, and he had been the biggest blessing of her whole life. He had started across the road that morning to go to McDonald’s and get himself some breakfast, just as they had planned the night before, and that woman, that Quirk person, had come along and
murdered
him. And, Carole said, she was sure, beyond the shadow of a slightest doubt, that Morgan had looked both ways before he ventured across.

WHEN MORGAN SEABERRY WAS STRUCK
and killed, Officer Gatchek was just across the road, coasting slowly through the mall parking lot, front and back, checking on things to make sure everything looked “copacetic.” He had recently learned that word, he told Rand, and he usually tried to use new words once he discovered them. He loved words. Kept a pocket dictionary in his cruiser and,
when things were slow, would open to a random page, stick his finger somewhere on the page and, more often than not, increase his vocabulary. It helped him out when he played Scrabble with his wife and his in-laws. Sometimes, but not always. He couldn’t, for instance, use “copacetic” because the word had three c’s in it and there were only two “c” tiles in the Scrabble game. Well, unless he had a blank tile. “This probably sounds screwy,” he told Rand, “but for me there’s a correlation between police work and Scrabble. You stare at what you got in front of you. At first you don’t see anything much. Then, boom, you do.”

He was at the scene in two minutes, max. He called immediately for an ambulance, but it was just a formality; the kid was already gone. Later, in his report, he would estimate that Mo had hit him while traveling at an approximate speed of fifty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five-mile zone.

Officer Gatchek called for backup—someone to direct traffic, someone else to talk to the brother, who said he’d seen it happen, but who, Officer Gatchek had observed, looked and smelled like he’d been smoking cannabis. He’d smelled cannabis in the victim’s hair, too, but would probably keep that information to himself, at least for now. The victim’s mother had arrived on the scene by then and was hysterical. He decided he’d send her off in the ambulance; let the EMTs deal with her, maybe get one of the ER docs to give her something to calm her down. He told Maureen to just sit on the grass near her car. To not get back into the car. Could she just get her purse? He said no. She should just wait right where she was. “Oh, my God,” she kept saying, over and over, like a chant. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

It was the dazed look in her eyes, he said later. The fact that her pupils were dilated. Maybe she was in shock, or maybe she was just exhausted after her shift, like she said. Dozing a little, maybe, though she hadn’t copped to that. Or maybe, just maybe, she was DUI. People’s pupils dilated when they were stoned, and also when they
were lying about something, and hers were as round as saucers. The victim’s brother said she hadn’t put the brakes on
after
she hit him, let alone before. And he, Gatchek, hadn’t heard any brakes, either, which he would have over in the mall parking lot. Hadn’t seen any rubber in the road. Overtired or not, it was instinct, even if you
were
dozing: you felt your car hit something, you braked. But instinct, when you were DUI, could betray you. Liquor? A belt or two out in the parking lot before she took off? He didn’t think so; he hadn’t smelled it on her. Drugs? Downers, maybe? That was more likely. An RN would have the key to the candy store. She was wearing a wedding ring, he noticed, but she hadn’t said anything about calling a husband. That was usually the first thing a wife in her situation would do. Maybe her marriage was in trouble and, to cope, she was swiping happy pills. There were things you had to do when there was a fatality—procedures you had to follow. Legalities you had to be cognizant of. But as he was following these procedures, he was fiddling with his observations like they were Scrabble tiles. And his instincts kept spelling out DUI.