Here On Earth

Susie parks in the nurses’ lot, and props her Bugle parking sticker up against the windshield. The bad thing about living in a small town is that everyone knows your business, but it’s a good thing too, since it makes for co

“Honey, everybody knew about Belinda,” Maude says.

But unfortunately, all of Belinda’s hospitalizations date to the time before admissions were computerized. Try as she might, Maude can’t call up anything on her terminal.

“That’s that,” Susie says, disappointed and starting in on the chocolate chip cookies herself.

“Not likely,” Maude says, and she leads Susie down to the basement of St. Bridget’s, to a room filled with ancient, mildewed files, suggesting that if anyone discovers her, Susie should say she’s gathering information for the hospital’s fiftieth a

Maude, Susie believes, would have made a great mother-in-law, and she gives the older woman a hug before getting down to work. It takes an hour and a half, but Susie finally finds what’s left of Belinda’s file. The file, however, covers only the last two years of Belinda’s life. The upside, if one can call it that, is that even in that relatively short period of time there were four admissions. More than average, Susie would guess, but proof of nothing. Two of the entries are illegible, but the other two-“broken mandible,” “fifteen stitches”-send chills along Susie’s spine. What, exactly, she can do with this information, she’s not sure, at least not until she notices Dr. Henderson’s name at the top of the page in the listing for the patient’s physician.

Susie eats from a container of yogurt while sitting in her parked truck; then she heads over to Main Street, where, to her surprise, Dr. Henderson agrees to see her, although he has a waiting room filled with patients.

“Are you writing an article about Belinda?” he asks when she brings up the name.

“I’m just interested.”

“In?”

“The circumstances of her death, for one.”

Susie would have guessed that Dr. Henderson, who’s known to be cool and businesslike. would insist that the circumstances of a patient’s death were privileged information, but he seems relieved to be talking about this subject. He takes off his glasses and leans back in his chair.

“Acute pneumonia,” he tells Susie. “Which, of course, is absolute bullshit.”

“Excuse me?” Susie says.

“She died because he let her die. I could have done something if someone had called me. By the time she was brought into the hospital-and then only because Judith Dale had happened to stop by and Judith had understood how desperate the circumstances were-Belinda’s fever was raging and she couldn’t breathe. She died of neglect.”

“But she’d been your patient for years, surely you must have sensed something was wrong with her situation at home before that?”

“My dear, something’s wrong in every situation if you look hard enough.”

“Well, let me ask you this. Did you feel that some of her physical ailments, not the pneumonia of course, but the broken bones, the bruises, were caused by her husband?”

“It doesn’t matter what I feel,” Dr. Henderson says in his coolest tone. “Did I see him hit her? No. Did she ever confide in me that she was abused in any way? No. She did not.”

Susie Justice can feel a pulse in the side of her throat.

“But she’s dead,” Susie says.

“That,” Dr. Henderson allows, “is the sad truth.”

That night, after Susie has told Ed Milton everything, he simply shakes his head. They’re at his place, an apartment on the High Road, and he’s cooking fettucini Alfredo, which smells even better because Susie is starving, in spite of the yogurt and the box of cookies she ate earlier in the day.

“All you have on him,” Ed says, “is that he was guilty of ignoring her.”

“Come on,” Susie says. “It’s like some secret that everybody knew, including that damned Dr. Henderson who always acts as if he was higher than God.”

“Everybody thinks. If you ask me, she killed herself.”

“How can you say that?” Susie can’t wait for di

“She could have phoned Dr. Henderson herself. It sounds like she wanted to die.”

“That’s horrible,” Susie says, but she is not entirely sure he’s wrong. “So what do I do now?” she asks.

Ed Milton smiles. He used to hate it when cases didn’t get solved; now he figures that some situations are simply beyond human control. “Belinda died twelve years ago, and it seems that legally Hollis had nothing to do with it. He probably smacked her around, but there are no comprehensive hospital records to back that up and no eyewitnesses. Basically, you have nothing.”

“I don’t accept that,” Susie says, which may be the moment when Ed finishes falling head over heels for her.

“You don’t have the makings for a criminal case,” Ed says. “What you have, Susie, is a moral issue, and it’s one which can’t be tried in front of your dad.”

Susie doesn’t ask Ed’s opinion about whether or not she should pass this new information on to March, who, it’s quite clear, doesn’t want to hear anything negative. This is not a new dilemma for Susa

Once, and only once, she tried to tell her mother. She was a freshman at Oberlin and home for the holidays. She was full of herself, and how much she had learned in a single semester. She was certain of everything a woman could be, all of which, of course, her mother was not. They had been wrapping presents at the dining room table, bickering over why Susie would not be allowed to move out of the dorm and into an apartment with her then boyfriend, when the argument had become heated.

“End of conversation,” Louise had finally said. “Your father will not allow it.”

“My father!” Susie had shouted. Why, he was probably with his mistress at the very moment they were wrapping his Christmas presents in gold paper. “Why should I listen to anything he has to say about morality? If you knew what he was really like, you’d walk out of here and divorce him!”

Louise Justice had gotten up and slapped Susie across the face. Louise had never hit anyone before, but she hit Susie so hard she left a mark on her cheek, making certain to silence her daughter before she could divulge anything more.

“You don’t know the first thing about love,” Louise Justice had told Susie that night. “And you certainly don’t know anything about marriage.”

This assessment is probably still true, Susie thinks as she takes off her clothes and gets into bed with Ed Milton later that night. She circles her arms around Ed and kisses him. Does she love him or not? How will she ever know? She loves the way he is in bed, she trusts his opinions, values what he thinks, yearns to see him at odd hours of the day. So what does all that add up to?