Most of the orderlies and nurses had gone home for the evening. Word had spread like wildfire around the hospital about Dr. Thackery's personal tragedy. The syphilitic women with the patched nose and the beautiful hair who had wanted to look better for her renewed sweetheart, Dr. Thackery himself. The irony of this trivial vanity had been death. And at the very hands of the man she was wanting to please the most.
The hallways were deserted by 8pm and Dr. Thackery edged with staggering steps along the corridor wall, having consumed alcohol in his office for several hours before sneaking out and hiding in various empty rooms and hallways until he knew he get about without being seen. His head was pounding and his heart was broken. The entire day now seemed like a distant nightmare which couldn't really have happened.
The panic in the surgery room, the sudden shock of Abigail's dead stillness, the tubes to try to revive her breathe, the hopelessness of a lost cause. Fittingly, the two people to witness his failure were the two he had disappointed the most in their short careers at the Knick. He felt like some sort of King Lear losing control of his kingdom. It was as if his surrogate son, Bertie, had dealt the unwitting deathblow to his Queen while his surrogate daughter, Lucy, had stood by as a helpless witness to the death of her rival. Lucy certainly thought of him as some sort of father figure. However he looked at it, this strange trio has made something of an Oedipal deathtrap out of their intertwining destinies.
"'Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination'," Thackery heard himself mutter.
Shuddering in his mind, Thackery started to feel the tears coming again. He wanted to see her one last time so he made his way to the morgue. That cold, gray, hideous room of failure which so many patients ended up in when all the doctors and nurses' efforts – those heroic efforts! – went sideways.
Switching on the light of the morgue room, Thackery stood for a while, his arms limply at his sides. Which one of these dreadful boxes which lined the wall should he open first? It seemed a pointless and dreary choice. On his shaky knees, Thackery moved forward to weakly opened the first one. He heaved it open with a long motion of his arm.
He instantly stepped back with a gasp. He was staring down at the face of a girl dressed in white who looked alive. It was Sonia, the young anemic girl who had died at his hands a few months prior during a blood transfusion gone terribly wrong. But she was dead and buried with a new gravestone, surely? Why was she still here, haunting him? Hadn't he made amends?
Thackery slammed the morgue box back in place with an angry snarl, briefly holding his aching head in his hands. After a long moment he tried another box. He saw the very same body in it. Sonia, asleep and in the pink of her health. Not dead. Not buried.
Determined to banish this drunken hallucinations, Thackery continued to open the heavy, metal morgue boxes along the wall, and each time the same result. Abigail was not here! Sonia was in her place. He could not look at Abigail's sweet but scarred face one last time. All he kept seeing was this girl he thought he had put to rest finally. It wasn't even someone he knew very well at all. It was a haunting vision of failure and madness and presumption of skill. It was his own arrogance mocking him.
Finally discouraged and lost in remorse, Thackery stumbled out of the morgue.