The Pain Scale Read Free Page A

his face. His eyes. His smile. There was something missing in every one.
    A slicing pain wound its way up my arm like a twisting chain.
    I knew.
    I didn’t know how or why, but I knew.
    Jen was watching me. “What?” she asked.
    “He’s guilty,” I said.
    “Well, good,” she said with mock relief. “That’ll save us a lot of work.”
    I was working on a comeback when we heard the scream.

Four
    I SUPPOSED THE real problem with the pain scale itself as a diagnostic tool was the patient’s capacity for imagination. At one support group for chronic pain sufferers I attended, we spent the first twenty minutes complaining about the folly of the scale and about the incredible extremities of pain we could imagine. Anyone who has dealt with the medical establishment’s treatment of chronic pain in the last few years has encountered this phenomenon. We’re asked to rate our pain on a scale of one to ten. To assign it a numerical value. One: no pain at all. Ten: the worst pain imaginable. So you can see why what we are capable of envisioning is a significant factor in our estimation.
    Pain does strange things to you. Chronic pain especially so. It changes you. Your feelings. Your thoughts. Your beliefs. Even your imagination. Things that were once abstractions become tangible. Suffering, true suffering, becomes something that is no longer an only vaguely considered possibility but a palatable, day-to-day reality.
    You learn to imagine the unimaginable.
    And to live in pain is to encounter the darkest possibilities of your imagination.
    When you did what I did every day, those possibilities were very dark indeed.

    It turned out that the scream had come from the nanny. By the time Jen and I made our way to the kitchen, she was sitting rigid on a chair at the corner of the breakfast nook. Ruiz was next to her, a fatherly hand on her shoulder and comforting words trickling out of his mouth. We stood back as he eased her into the requisite questions.
    Her name was Joely Ryan, and she’d been working for the Bentons for a little over a year. She was blonde and cute, early twenties, and she seemed like someone accustomed to being in the presence of wealth but not someone born to it. Her demeanor held too much deference to the lieutenant’s authority for it to have developed in any kind of excessive privilege. And her distress was almost surely genuine.
    Ruiz motioned Jen and me to the table. “Joely,” he said, “this is Detective Tanaka and Detective Beckett. They’re going to ask you some more questions.”
    She nodded and removed a fresh tissue from the box on the table to dab at her cheeks.
    Jen took Ruiz’s spot at the table as I leaned back against the large granite-topped counter that dominated the kitchen. I noticed a large Post-it note on the stainless refrigerator door. In large black handwriting, it read:
    D ON’T FORGET!
L UNCH W /C AT
W ED 12
    I looked at my watch. It was after 2:00. Sara missed her lunch. I made a note and turned my attention back to the table.
    “I know this is difficult,” Jen said. “But can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Mrs. Benton or the children?”
    Joely shook her head.
    “How about Mr. Benton?”
    She looked up at Jen. “No.”
    “Have you noticed anything unusual or out of the ordinary recently?”
    “Like what?”
    “Changes in anyone’s behavior, changes in schedules or the way the Bentons liked to do things, new people around, strangers. Anything at all.”
    “No.” Joely shook her head again and wiped her nose.
    Jen let things sit for a moment.
    “Well,” Joely went on, “just tiny things. Like today.”
    “What happened today?”
    “The kids were supposed to be in school. Sara hardly ever keeps them home, but they both had that bug that’s going around, so she asked if I could come early. I wouldn’t even be here yet—” Her voice caught in her throat.
    Jen gave Joely time to compose herself, asked her a few more questions, then told