The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [6]
Canada had both hands to her face and began gasping for air, drowning between sobs, appealing to the nurse for an explanation. That this program wasn’t real. That it was like a reality show where they pretend daddies are dead when they’re really not.
The nurse went to Canada and hugged her for a minute or ten minutes or twenty. She couldn’t feel time, only helplessness. The other patients on the floor disappeared from her mind and eighteen years of training and experience were reduced to rocking and stroking, rocking and stroking.
The nanny arrived soon, out of breath, desperately worried about the girl. The night nurse put Canada, her face a wet tragedy mask, into the nanny’s care and backed from the room. Someone said a counselor had been summoned. A crowd of nurses and doctors had gathered a short distance from the door, and when the night nurse saw them, she burst into tears for the innocent girl whose short life had been hard and whose long life, the life ahead, had just become several magnitudes more difficult.
A decade later, when the devices had become so commonplace that a single hospital might give them to a dozen outpatients in one shift—for back pain and birth control and bulimia and impotence and anxiety and obesity and Parkinson’s and plantar fasciitis—the night nurse remembered Canada and wondered how things had worked out for her. With some patients—not all but some—she wished they really could implant a tracking device. And when things were slow, from her computer at the nurses’ station, she could drop in on them, quietly and without judgment, just to see what they were thinking now.
DYAD
How’re you going to make your way in the world, woman
When you weren’t cut out for working
And you just can’t concentrate
—Warren Zevon
3
TUESDAY, JULY 13
PHILLIP TRUMAN was twenty-two years old, with hair like indigo silk, black marbles for eyes, and a slim body fitted for thousand-dollar slacks. As of last October 7, when a vacationing Baltimore teenager sneaked out of her family’s suite at Mandalay Bay to attend Truman’s party on the seventeenth floor, he was also an alleged rapist, which was why Canada Gold, on the afternoon of her otherwise-uncelebrated twenty-fourth birthday, had followed him through the doors of the most expensive French restaurant in downtown Las Vegas.
He sat facing her in an upholstered booth along the wall, maybe twenty yards away. While he waited for the rest of his party, he drummed his thumbs expertly against the face of his BlackBerry, casually answering his e-mail the same way nonrapists would. Nada didn’t own a BlackBerry, or even a computer. Her unassisted senses already input as much information as a mind was equipped to handle. Maybe more.
Free on bond with his daddy’s cash, Truman was in sexual predator limbo—his sin committed, he now relied on the petitions of others to save him. Since the night of his arrest, Truman’s primary advocate had been a Vegas lawyer named English Judson. Fedoraed, mustachioed, only slightly less infamous (and far less handsome) than his client, Judson had a turbulent history with Canada, which would be a kind way of saying they disliked each other profoundly. In reference to Judson, she often used the word despise, usually followed by “his ugly, arrogant guts.”
She knew many things about Judson—such as the sort of jurors he preferred when his client was guilty, as well as the Vintage Porto he always ordered when one of those grateful, guilty clients had his hand on the check. She could name his least-favorite jazz singers and the poets he loved the best. She knew the brand of fuel additive he put in his Porsche and that behind his back his partners said he looked ridiculous driving it. She could tell you that Judson liked cats better than dogs and both cats and dogs better than children. She knew he adored his wife but hated her friends.
She knew he’d sent someone to break into her apartment and run his hands through her underwear.