The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (5 page)

Charlie saw no benefit to be gained from talking. He liked drinking. It lifted his spirits, at least initially. It drowned out the noise. It transformed slippery minutes into a constant Now. He felt at once more distant and more focused. That focus was dedicated primarily to himself. He felt wronged, and deeply misunderstood, and considered it criminal and tragic that his own wife didn’t appreciate his frailty, the verity and intensity of his internal suffering. Because Charlie
was
suffering, deeply and daily. Adrianne never appreciated that—not that he didn’t try to show her. He staged demonstrations of his pain carefully, making sure that, for example, Adrianne would walk into the living room while he was on the phone with the local funeral parlor, inquiring about their burial rates.

Charlie’s demonstrations did little more than further annoy his wife and confirm his own sense of futility. And so, he tried again. He waited until he heard Adrianne walking from the kitchen, then flopped dramatically off the couch onto the living room floor—tongue out, prescription pills spilled like blood spray from the amber bottle, suicide in flagrante. Surely, Charlie thought, this bit of stagecraft would demonstrate the
sincerity of his pain. But Adrianne only heaved a great annoyed sigh, stepped over him, and grabbed a magazine from the coffee table, leaving Charlie lying there, unsure how long to hold the pose. Crouching on the rug, picking up the pills one by one and placing each carefully back in the bottle, he allotted himself an extra dose of sympathy, knowing how very wrong it was for his own wife to ignore the obvious agony that he had demonstrated. He’d hang on to that hurt for a few days, then devise some other way to elicit the proper sympathetic attention. But the more he tried to show Adrianne how he needed to be taken care of, the more Adrianne hated him for it.

F
inally, in November 1992, Adrianne decided she’d had enough. She didn’t tell Charlie, but she did tell a lawyer; she was worried that what happened to Queenie could happen to her kids. Afterward, driving home in the early dark, Adrianne felt fortified by her secret decision. The only problem was that Adrianne needed to go in for gallbladder surgery that coming January, and that surgery had been scheduled to take place at Warren, where Charlie worked. The lawyer said the paperwork wouldn’t be ready, but Adrianne insisted. There was no way she was going into that hospital—Charlie’s hospital—without a piece of paper declaring her intent to divorce and the reasons behind it. If Charlie was working, she said, something might happen to her, as it had with Queenie. She didn’t articulate exactly why she felt this way and she didn’t dare to. All she told the lawyer was that she needed it done. Adrianne’s father escorted her to the surgery and waited for her to emerge from the recovery room. She told him not to allow any other visitors, especially not her soon-to-be ex-husband.

Charlie was working in the Warren ICU that afternoon when the legal paperwork for the divorce was delivered. The man had tricked him, it seemed, into identifying himself, then put the envelope directly into Charlie’s hand, and in public. He was humiliated at having such a personal thing served to him there, in his hospital, but when he tried to find Adrianne in the post-op recovery ward, he found his father-in-law and a closed curtain. And when Adrianne was sent home from the hospital, her father went with her, and he stayed on the foldout couch like an implied threat. Charlie became indignant, then pathetic. And gradually, Adrianne began to feel
some of the old sympathies for her husband. The man was suffering. He was the father of her children, after all. He was no longer fighting the fact that their lives would be separated—did she need to punish him as well? It was agreed: Charlie would move out as soon as he could afford it, but they would continue to live in the house together until they could figure out the details. Adrianne regretted the decision almost immediately.

8

January 1993

I
t was night when the police arrived, the two young patrolmen toting heavy Maglite flashlights, the cop car parked conspicuously outside. This was new for Adrianne, taking it beyond the house, putting it on paper.
¹
She told the troopers that her soon-to-be ex-husband was a dangerous drunk, and accused him, vaguely, of domestic violence. She’d found her husband loaded in front of the fireplace, staring dead-eyed at the AA books, poking the pages to fresh flame. She told them everything she could think of, including about the investigation at the hospital, and how Charlie had once bragged about poisoning his pregnant sister’s abusive boyfriend’s drink with lighter fluid as a child. She hadn’t yet connected the dots herself, but she wanted to make an official statement linking those stories to his drinking and to her fears for her children and herself. Maybe bringing in the cops would force the issue. She was flexing a little, but it felt good.

Adrianne told the officer every odd thing about Charlie she could think of. The domestic abuse call quickly became a monologue about the strange occurrences surrounding the Cullens’ pets. So much wasn’t adding up—at the hospital, at home, in their marriage—but the animals were something she could put her finger on. It wasn’t just the missing puppy—at various points there had been ferrets, hamsters, goldfish, and, of course, Lady, her maiden animal. She told the officer how Charlie used to keep the Yorkie chained to a pole in the yard while Adrianne was at work, how it barked and turned around its worn track until the animal cruelty people took it away. Adrianne had to drive to the ASPCA and beg for her back, a truly humiliating experience. After that, they kept the dog inside, and then the noises started coming from the basement. Sometimes the thumps and yelps would wake her up. Charlie maintained he was training the dog, but to her it sounded like punishment. Adrianne would pad over in her robe
and slippers and crack the door, afraid to go further. She would yell down from the top of the stairs, “Leave her alone!” Charlie wouldn’t answer, but the noises would stop. Adrianne would stand there, listening to the silence, waiting him out. She could tell he was down there, standing frozen like a child playing invisible under a blanket. Finally she’d close the basement door, pad back to bed, and put the pillow over her head.

Charlie was livid. It was simply inconceivable, not to mention totally unfair, that his wife would tell these stories to the police. There wasn’t a good reason for her to have called them in the first place. Charlie was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a wife beater. She was playing a game for the lawyers. She was making him out to be a bad guy, crazy even, creating a paper trail for the divorce settlement. Forget about the reason she had called the police, once they were there,
whammo
. She’d even told them about his feigned suicide attempts. Charlie replied by washing down twenty pills with a bottle of supermarket Cabernet. Showing her what it looked like, for real this time.

C
harlie had often imagined his own death, even as a child in West Orange. In the dream, his hair was parted by a bullet. He was a war hero, a cop, a popular and important senator giving speeches that would ring forever in marble halls. And he was dead. Martyred. Heroic and noble. But it was always a dream. He would open his eyes, alive, a child, a nobody. This wasn’t the life he was intended for. At Catholic school he felt incompetent and humiliated; in the world he was disconnected and alone. He was often so depressed that he refused to go to school or even move. All he wanted was to stay in the house with his mother.

His first suicide gesture had come at nine years old. Charlie had mixed the contents of a chemistry set from the church charity box with a glass of milk, but the chemistry set wasn’t that good, and he succeeded only in making himself sick. His second came one afternoon in December 1977. Charlie was home in bed, playing sick from high school, when the phone rang; his mother had been in a car accident after having an epileptic seizure at the wheel. They didn’t tell Charlie that the collision was head-on, or that his mother was already dead. Charlie tried to find her at Mountainside Hospital, but the staff told him his mother had died and her body had been
taken away. Charlie felt that they’d lied to him at Mountainside Hospital,
²
a crime he would come to believe was characteristic of hospitals in general, and one that he would never forgive. He was angry and beyond consolation, and turned again to the relief valve of suicide. This attempt yielded his first hospital stay and his first psychiatrist, but Charlie wasn’t willing yet to talk to anybody. He didn’t want to say, yet,
Nobody treats my pain. Only I treat my pain.
The psychiatrist sent him home again, back to the hole where his mother had been.

Charlie hadn’t wanted to go back to school, or to the dank wooden house and the men who arrived at all hours with who knew what on their breath or their minds. The only option he saw was the Navy. The recruiters in his school had promised an identity and a uniform: white shoes, white pants and belt, even a white hat, whites that hadn’t gone gray on another boy’s life. It felt to Charlie like the most passive branch of the armed services, heroic but safe, like his childhood dreams of death.
I won’t die,
Charlie thought,
but I could.
He pictured the immaculate silence he’d seen in submarine movies, that regular, pinging heartbeat, the amniotic red lights, and he signed on for training as an electronics technician, servicing the sixteen Polaris nuclear missiles on the USS
Woodrow Wilson
.
³
But Charlie soon tired of the routine, and realized that he didn’t like electronics anyway. And he didn’t like taking orders, or being stuck for months under the ocean surrounded by strange, rough men. Tour after tour, the pale young seaman they called “Charlie Fishbelly” was the punchline for even the most novice seamen. He tried repeatedly to cancel his six-year Navy contract, but succeeded only in being repeatedly busted in rank and pay for refusal of orders
⁴
and his increasingly bizarre behavior.
⁵
His final year
⁶
would be spent above the waves, mopping out latrines and getting hammered as often as possible.
⁷
When the booze ran out, he turned to Listerine
⁸
or cleaning fluid. On January 13, 1984, Charlie downed a bottle and reported to the USS
Canopus
’s sick bay. “I drank some poison,” he told the medic. “I don’t feel well.” This was already his third suicide announcement since joining the service, and his third ambulance trip to the Charleston Naval Hospital’s psychiatry ward.
⁹
But for all his suicide gestures, the fact was that Charlie wouldn’t kill himself, not really; the nuns in Catholic school had taught him that suicide was a sin, and Charlie didn’t want to end up in purgatory.
¹⁰
But he could make himself sick, and in many ways, sick was better. Nobody loves you the way they do when you’re dying.