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respective patients tended, Charlie offered up slapstick tales of debilitating depression, bad luck, and bullied victimization with a wry honesty he believed Amy would connect to; she’d reply with laughter and the maternal attentions Charlie needed. As the weeks passed, they graduated from familiars to friends.

    A my Loughren had emerged from an abusive childhood with a bold defiance toward the fundamental bullshit of life and a mystical conviction that the universe owed her one. Thirty-six hard, impulsive years had brought Amy ten boyfriends, two daughters, an RN degree, and a leased white Jaguar, but behind the blonde highlights lay a void she struggled to name. Her off days were punctuated by panic attacks that sometimes kept her from even leaving the house, and her nights were spent either working or drinking wine. She split her time between her house in upstate New Yorkand her job in New Jersey, her personality between home and hospital, and worked hard to maintain the shelter of that division. She didn’t share herself fully with her daughters or boyfriends or most of her coworkers; only her new friend, Charlie Cullen, made her feel totally safe. Charlie seemed to need her protection, too.

    W hen Charlie had first started working at Somerset that September, Amy knew, almost right away, that she liked the new guy—not ‘liked-liked’; she was single, but not that single, not in a million years, and she sensed the new guy understood that. He seemed to know his limitations. Amy was blonde, nearly six feet tall and conspicuously curvaceous, even in scrubs, and she was accustomed to unwelcome attentions. But Charlie seemed safe to Amy. He paid attention without an obvious agenda, and he never hit on her. And if he didn’t always keep eye contact, at least it wasn’t because he was trying to steal glances down her scrub tops. He was quiet, too, at least at first, and Amy was instinctively drawn to quiet people. This guy, she thought, has secrets, too, just like me.
    The new male nurse also seemed as serious about the job as Amy was, maybe more so—efficient and attentive to the point of obsession. He was a little eccentric, but he wasn’t flakey. Charlie tended his patients alone, with the door closed and the blinds drawn. He stripped them naked and bathed them before lathering them comically pearlescent with moisturizer. Amy called them his “Butterball turkeys,” too greasy to turn. His other eccentricity was an obsessive use of the Cerner machine. Charting was the necessary paperwork of nursing but Charlie took it to an extreme, spending hours tapping away on the mobile unit far from the scrutiny of the nurses’ station. Amy teased him that he was writing a novel. Uncharacteristically, he welcomed her teasing, recognizing it as guileless affirmation.
    Like many nurses, Amy saw herself as a hero defending humanity’s most fragile, an advocate and facilitator for the voiceless and immobile. With his question mark posture, soft gray hair, and ratty old-man cardigans, the new nurse struck Amy as another sensitive soul in need of defending—a sad Mr. Rogers type, both drippy and depressed. His nurse whites had the dingy air of bachelor washing, and behind his greasy drugstore glasses his eyes held a darkness and desperation that Amy recognized as maskedanger. It took only a couple overnights together before Amy realized that Charlie Cullen was also one of the funniest people she had ever met. At 4 a.m. Charlie could make her laugh with a story or complaint that put her own crazy life in perspective. Humor and gossip provided a buffer against the suffering and grief that came with the job, and Charlie always delivered. Several stories centered on the absurdity of his Navy years, his assignment to guard nuclear missiles with a billy club, or the indignities suffered when he refused to pee into a cup in front of another man, but most involved Charlie’s girlfriend, Cathy, and her sporadic attempts to get Charlie