Page 24 of The Only One Left

So I left the patient I had been caring for, a rather boring octogenarian with chronic arthritis, and moved back into my childhood bedroom. At first, it was weird treating my own mother like one of my patients. They all seemed so old. She didn’t.

Not that she was young. My mother was thirty-four when she had me and my father thirty-nine. I always assumed that one day I’d be expected to care for them. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.

Or this brutal.

That was something I wasn’t prepared for, no matter how many other patients I’d cared for. It’s different when it’s your own mother. It matters more. It hurts more, too. But none of the hurt I felt could compare to what my mother was going through. She spent the first few weeks of her illness in a daze, gobsmacked by all the ways in which her body had betrayed her. Then came the pain, so sharp it sometimes lefther doubled over and weeping. I urged her doctor to prescribe fentanyl, even though he wanted to wait.

“Just a few more weeks,” he said.

“But she’s in agonynow,” I said.

He wrote out the prescription.

Two weeks later my mother was dead of a fentanyl overdose.

To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a tragic accident. A sick woman rendered mad by pain taking more pills than she should have. To a trained eye, however, it was worse than that. Because of her condition, it could be argued that my mother was not in a sound state of mind. Which meant that I, as her caregiver, was responsible for making decisions on her behalf and in her best interests. Since I’d left a drug known for its overdose potential within her reach, one could also argue that I was negligent in her care and therefore responsible for her death.

That’s what Mr. Gurlain thought, once I admitted I forgot to put the pill bottle in the lockbox under my bed. He didn’t tell me this, of course. He simply contacted the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, who then contacted the local police.

A day after my mother’s funeral, a detective came to the house. Richard Vick. Because he and my father had been friends back in the day, I knew him slightly. He had the look of a sitcom grandfather. Full head of white hair. Friendly smile. Kind eyes.

“Hello there, Kit,” he said. “My deepest condolences on your recent loss.”

I looked at him with confusion, even though by then I should have known why he was there. “Can I help you with something, Mr. Vick?”

“Detective Vick, if you don’t mind.” He gave a half smile, as if apologizing for the formality. “Is your dad around?”

He wasn’t. My father, stoic in his grief, went to work as usual that day, off to fix the clanging pipes in old Mrs. Mayweather’s house. I told this to Detective Vick, adding a polite “I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

“I’m actually here to see you.”

“Oh.” I opened the door wider and told him to come in.

Detective Vick straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and said, “It might be better if we did this down at the station.”

“Do I need a lawyer?”

I was told no, of course not, it was just an informal chat about what happened. I wasn’t a suspect because there was nothing to suspect. All lies, as I learned when I followed Detective Vick to the station and was escorted into an interrogation room with a tape recorder he turned on the moment we sat down.

“Please state your name,” he said.

“You know my name.”

“It’s for the record.”

I stared at the tape recorder, watching the reels turn and turn. That was when I knew I was in trouble.

“Kit McDeere.”

“And what is it you do, Kit?”

“I’m an in-home caregiver with Gurlain Home Health Aides.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Twelve years.”

“That’s a long time,” Detective Vick said. “I assume you’re probably an expert at it by now.”

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