The night shift at St. Catherine's Hospice began the way it always did, with the day nurses hurrying through their handoffs like commuters catching the last bus home. Rosa Manlapaz stood at the nurses' station, her small hands wrapped around a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago, listening to Marcus Washington describe the evening's events with the kind of weary precision that came from too many years of watching people die.
"Room 104, Mr. Kowalski, getting more agitated at sundown," Marcus said, his voice low and measured. "Increased his morphine at four. He's been talking a lot—nothing that makes sense. Something about fires and Vernor Highway. Family was here until six."
Rosa nodded, making notes in her careful script. Five years in Detroit and she still wrote her reports like she was being graded on penmanship, the way the nuns had taught her at St. Scholastica's in Quezon City. "His daughter?"
"Every day like clockwork. She brings him those Better Made chips he can't eat anymore. Just leaves them on the nightstand." Marcus gathered his things, his movements efficient but unhurried. There was something about Marcus that reminded Rosa of the old carabao farmers back home—steady, enduring, shaped by work that never ended.
The hospice at night was a different country from the daytime. The hallways stretched longer, the shadows pooled deeper in corners, and the sounds—every cough, every labored breath, every whisper of slippers on linoleum—carried weight they didn't have when sunshine streamed through the windows. Rosa had learned to love these hours, when the building felt like a ship moving through dark water, carrying its cargo of souls toward whatever shore awaited them.
She made her rounds methodically, checking on Mrs. Chen in 102, who slept curled like a comma against her pain; Mr. Jamison in 106, whose sons took shifts so he was never alone; Mrs. Adamski in 108, who hadn't opened her eyes in three days but whose fingers still moved as if knitting invisible yarn.
Room 104 was at the end of the hall, and Rosa could hear Earl Kowalski before she reached his door—a low, continuous mumbling punctuated by sharp gasps. She knocked softly, a courtesy more than a necessity, and entered.
Earl Kowalski had been a big man once. The pictures his daughter had taped to the wall showed him broad-shouldered in a UAW Local 600 t-shirt, arms thick from decades on the assembly line, standing in front of a pickup truck with a deer strapped to the hood. Now he was a geography of bones under thin skin, his breathing shallow and quick like a bird's.
"Mr. Kowalski," Rosa said gently, checking his IV line. "It's Rosa. I'm your night nurse."
His eyes opened, pale blue and unfocused. For a moment they sharpened, fixed on her face, then clouded again. "You weren't supposed to be there," he said, his voice ragged. "Kids weren't supposed to be out. Curfew. There was a curfew."
Rosa had heard confused ramblings before—memories tangled like fishing line, past and present collapsing into each other. She adjusted his pillows, her movements practiced and gentle. "You're safe, Mr. Kowalski. You're in the hospice. Your daughter Diane was here earlier."
"The fire," he said, gripping her wrist with surprising strength. His hand was cold, the skin papery. "Everything was burning. Vernor Highway. Grand River. You could see the smoke from Dearborn. Black smoke, like the world was ending."
"Try to rest," Rosa said, but he held on.
"We were protecting the neighborhood. That's all. Three of us with baseball bats, walking the streets. Protecting our families." His eyes searched her face, looking for something—understanding, maybe, or absolution. "You don't know what it was like. The coloreds—the Black people—they were burning everything. Stores, houses. forty-three dead. Maybe more."
Rosa gently extracted her wrist, made a note on his chart about increased agitation. She'd seen this before—the dying often needed to confess, to empty themselves of the weight they'd carried. In the Philippines, they had the sacrament of confession for this. Here, they had night nurses.
"Would you like me to call the chaplain?" she asked.
Earl's head moved against the pillow—yes or no, she couldn't tell. "Stanley had the gun," he said. "Not supposed to, but he brought his service pistol from Korea. Tom had a bat. Louisville Slugger. I had a piece of rebar from the plant."
Rosa felt something cold settle in her stomach. This was different from the usual confused rambling. There was a terrible clarity threading through his words, like a steel wire through smoke.
"The boy was running," Earl continued, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Maybe fifteen, sixteen. Had something in his hands. Stanley said it was a Molotov cocktail, but... but I saw after. It was just a bottle of Faygo. Red pop. The kid was trying to get home with a bottle of pop."
Rosa stood very still. Outside the room, she could hear the soft ping of the elevator, the whisper of another nurse's shoes on the floor. Normal sounds from a normal night, while this man's words opened a door to July 1967, to streets on fire and young men with bats and guns and fear.
"Stanley shot him first. In the shoulder. The boy went down, and then..." Earl's breathing became more labored. "Then we all... we made sure. Had to make sure. That's what we told ourselves. Had to make sure."
"Mr. Kowalski," Rosa said carefully, "what was the boy's name?"
But Earl had drifted away, his eyes closing, his breathing settling into the morphine rhythm. Rosa stood by his bed for a long moment, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the numbers on the monitors, the steady drip of the IV. Then she left the room and walked to the nurses' station, where she sat and stared at her notes without seeing them.
The rest of the night passed in its usual rhythm—medications distributed, vitals checked, families called when the end came close. But Rosa's mind kept returning to Room 104, to Earl Kowalski's confession. In the break room at 3 AM, she found herself at the ancient computer the staff used, typing "Detroit riots 1967 missing persons" into the search bar.
The results flooded the screen—articles from the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan Chronicle, grainy photographs of burning buildings and National Guard troops. She refined her search: "missing teenager July 1967 Detroit." More results. A list compiled by the Detroit Historical Society. Names and ages. Several teenagers, Black boys between fourteen and seventeen, never found.
Jerome Washington, 16, last seen July 24, 1967, near Vernor Highway.
Rosa stared at the name. Washington. She thought of Marcus, of the careful way he'd described Earl's agitation, the slight tension in his shoulders when he'd mentioned the old man's rambling about fires.
"Can't sleep?"
Rosa jumped. Luz, one of the Filipino CNAs, stood in the doorway with a cup of instant noodles.
"Just checking something," Rosa said, closing the browser window.
Luz sat down beside her, the smell of artificial chicken filling the small room. "You look troubled, ate. One of your patients?"
"It's nothing," Rosa said, but Luz knew her too well.
"Mr. Kowalski? Marcus said he was difficult today."
"He's dying," Rosa said simply. "They're all difficult when they're dying."
Luz slurped her noodles thoughtfully. "My lola used to say the dying can see both worlds—this one and the next. Makes them say things. True things, sometimes. Things that were buried."
After Luz left, Rosa returned to her rounds, but the weight of Earl's words followed her. She thought of her ethics training, of mandatory reporting, of justice delayed but not denied. She also thought of Diane Kowalski-Meyer, who came every day with chips her father couldn't eat, who had shown Rosa pictures of her grandchildren, who spoke of her father as a man who'd worked hard his whole life, provided for his family, never complained.
The next night, Earl was more lucid. His daughter had gone home an hour before Rosa's shift started, leaving behind the smell of her perfume and a new bag of Better Made chips—barbecue this time.
"I know you," Earl said when Rosa entered. His voice was clearer, though weaker. "You're the Filipino girl. Rosa."
"Yes, Mr. Kowalski. How are you feeling?"
"Like I'm dying," he said with a ghost of a laugh that turned into a cough. "Which I am, so that's about right."
Rosa checked his vitals, adjusted his medications. Earl watched her with those pale blue eyes.
"I was talking yesterday," he said. "Wasn't I? The morphine makes me talk."
"You mentioned the riots," Rosa said carefully.
Earl's face tightened. "I was twenty-eight years old. Had a wife and two babies. The city was coming apart. You didn't live through it. You don't know."
"No," Rosa agreed. "I don't know."
"They burned down whole neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods, mostly, but it spread. Everybody was scared. The police pulled back. The National Guard was shooting at shadows. It was war in our own streets."
Rosa finished her tasks, made notes on her chart. She could leave now, move on to the next room, the next patient. Instead, she pulled the visitor's chair closer to Earl's bed and sat down.
"Tell me about the boy," she said.
Earl's eyes closed. For a moment she thought he'd fallen asleep, but then he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Jerome. I found out his name later, from the newspaper. Jerome Washington. Sixteen years old. Honor roll at Northern High School. Was working at his uncle's grocery store for the summer."
Rosa felt her breath catch. Jerome Washington. Marcus Washington. Marcus who was in his forties, who would have been born years after 1967, but who might have grown up with a family story about an uncle who never came home.
"We buried him," Earl continued. "There was a construction site off Grand River. They were putting in a new auto parts store. We buried him in the foundation trench, and the next day they poured concrete. As far as everyone knew, he was just another kid who disappeared during the riots. Maybe ran off to Chicago or Canada. Maybe died in a fire. Nobody knew."
"Three of you," Rosa said. "You and Stanley and Tom."
"Stanley's dead. Heart attack in '92. Tom moved to Florida in the eighties, died of cancer five years ago. I'm the last one." Earl opened his eyes, looked directly at her. "I've carried it for fifty-four years. Every day. Every single day."
"Why are you telling me?"
Earl's laugh was bitter. "Because you're here. Because I'm dying. Because maybe... maybe someone should know. Maybe that boy's family should know."
Rosa thought of her own father, who had died when she was twelve, how her mother had searched the hospitals for days after his motorcycle accident, needing to see him one last time, needing to know for certain. The not knowing was its own kind of death, renewed daily.
"His family," she said slowly. "They never found out what happened to him."
"There was a mother," Earl said. "I remember seeing her on the news, holding his picture, begging for information. Marie Washington. She's probably dead now too."
That night, Rosa couldn't concentrate on her other patients. She went through the motions—medications, vitals, comfort care—but her mind was in 1967, on Vernor Highway, watching a sixteen-year-old boy run through the smoke with a bottle of Faygo in his hand.
At her break, she searched again. Marie Washington had died in 2003, but she'd had other children. A daughter, Denise, who became a teacher. A son, Anthony, who joined the army. And years later, after remarrying, another son. Marcus. Born in 1978, eleven years after his half-brother Jerome disappeared.
Rosa stared at the screen. Marcus Washington, who worked the day shift, who cared for Earl Kowalski with professional competence, who had mentioned once that his father had lost family in the riots but never elaborated.
The moral weight of knowledge settled on her shoulders like a yoke. In the Philippines, there were clear hierarchies, clear rules about authority and justice and family. Here, in America, everything was both simpler and more complex. She could report Earl's confession to the police, but what evidence was there after fifty-four years? A construction site that was now probably a parking lot or another building. The words of a dying man on morphine. It would destroy Diane and her family, might bring some closure to Marcus and his, but would it bring justice? Could there be justice for something that happened when the city was burning and young men made terrible choices in the name of fear?
She thought of the priest at St. Albertus, where she sometimes attended Mass, who spoke of mercy and justice as two sides of the same coin. But this felt like no coin at all, just a weight that grew heavier with each breath.
The next night, Earl was worse. His breathing was labored, the death rattle beginning in his chest. Diane was there when Rosa arrived, holding her father's hand, her face puffy from crying.
"The doctor says it won't be long," Diane said. "Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow."
Rosa checked Earl's vitals, noted the changes that marked the body's final shutdown. Diane gathered her purse, preparing to leave.
"I'll be back first thing in the morning," she said, kissing her father's forehead. "Unless..."
"We'll call you," Rosa assured her.
After Diane left, Rosa sat with Earl. His eyes were closed, but she knew he was conscious, floating in that space between sleep and waking, between life and whatever came after.
"Mr. Kowalski," she said softly. "It's Rosa."
His eyes opened slightly. "The Filipino girl."
"Yes."
"Did you... did you tell anyone? What I said?"
Rosa was quiet for a moment. "No."
"Will you?"
This was the question she'd been wrestling with for three nights. In her pocket was a piece of paper with the address of the construction site Earl had described, now a strip mall with a nail salon and a cash-for-gold store. Also in her pocket was Marcus Washington's phone number from the staff directory.
"I don't know," she said honestly.
Earl's hand moved slightly on the blanket. "I want... I want them to know. The family. They should know where he is. But Diane... my daughter..."
"She loves you."
"She loves who she thinks I was." His breathing was becoming more difficult. "Maybe that's better. Maybe some truths should die with us."
Rosa thought of her own secrets, smaller but still heavy—the money she skimmed from her own meals to send home, the loneliness that sometimes threatened to swallow her whole, the degree in engineering she'd abandoned to become a nurse because it was the fastest way to America. Everyone carried something.
"There's no good answer," she said.
"No," Earl agreed. "There never was."
That night, Earl Kowalski died at 3:47 AM. Rosa was with him, had given him the last dose of morphine that would ease his passing, had watched his breathing slow and finally stop. She performed the necessary tasks—confirmed the absence of pulse, noted the time, called the funeral home, called Diane, who answered on the first ring as if she'd been waiting.
While waiting for the funeral home to arrive, Rosa sat in the break room with the piece of paper in her hands. The address. The name. Jerome Washington, sixteen years old, who never came home.
Marcus arrived early for his shift, as he sometimes did. He found Rosa in the break room, still in her scrubs, though her shift had ended an hour ago.
"Heard about Mr. Kowalski," he said, pouring himself coffee. "His daughter okay?"
"As okay as she can be."
Marcus sat down across from her. Up close, she could see the resemblance she'd found in the old newspaper photos—the same broad forehead, the same determined set to the jaw.
"Rosa," Marcus said, and something in his tone made her look up. "I know you stayed with him at the end. That means something to families. Thank you."
She nodded, the paper burning in her pocket.
"My father," Marcus continued, stirring his coffee, "lost his older brother in '67. During the riots. Jerome. Just sixteen. My father spent years looking for answers, hired private investigators, everything. It broke him a little, not knowing."
Rosa's mouth was dry. "That must have been very hard."
"It was. He died five years ago, still wondering. My aunt Denise, Jerome's sister, she still lights a candle for him every July 24th. The not knowing—it's its own kind of grief. It never ends."
Marcus stood, checked his watch. "I better get to report. You should go home, get some rest."
After he left, Rosa sat alone in the break room. Through the window, she could see the Detroit skyline beginning to lighten with dawn. The city that had burned and been rebuilt, burned and been rebuilt, over and over. She thought of Earl Kowalski, who had carried his guilt for fifty-four years. She thought of Marie Washington, who had died never knowing what happened to her son. She thought of Diane, who would remember her father as a good man who had worked hard and loved his family.
She thought of mercy and justice, those two sides of the same coin, and how sometimes the coin landed on its edge, balanced impossibly between one and the other.
Rosa took out the piece of paper and looked at it one more time. Then she stood, walked to Marcus's locker, and slipped it through the vents. On it, she had written: "Your uncle Jerome is buried beneath the foundation of 4782 Grand River Avenue. Earl Kowalski, Stanley Nowak, and Thomas Patterson, July 24, 1967. Mr. Kowalski wanted you to know. He wanted you to be able to bring Jerome home."
She didn't sign it.
Outside, the morning was cool and damp, the air smelling of rain and exhaust. Rosa walked to her car, a ten-year-old Honda that needed new tires, and sat behind the wheel for a moment before starting the engine. In twelve hours, she would return for another night shift. There would be other patients, other deaths, other confessions whispered in the dark. She would carry them all, the way nurses did, the way women always had—silently, competently, with grace that looked effortless but cost everything.
She drove home through the awakening city, past the abandoned houses being reclaimed by nature, past the new coffee shops and urban farms, past the old men sitting on porches already, watching the street like sentinels. Detroit was a city of layers, each generation's sins and salvations built on top of the last, concrete poured over old bones, new growth pushing through cracked asphalt.
In her apartment, Rosa made herself a cup of tea and sat by the window. Her phone buzzed—a text from her sister in Quezon City, asking for money for her daughter's school fees. Rosa calculated what she could spare, made a mental note to pick up extra shifts. The work never ended. The weight never lifted. But sometimes, in small ways, it shifted, redistributed itself so it could be borne.
She thought of Marcus finding the note, of what he would do with the information. Would he go to the police? Would he tell his aunt Denise? Would he dig up a parking lot looking for fifty-four-year-old bones? Or would he, like Rosa, sit with the knowledge and weigh mercy against justice, family against truth, the living against the dead?
There were no good answers, Earl had said. But perhaps there were necessary ones. Perhaps the mercy was not in the keeping of secrets but in the choosing of who should carry them. She had passed the weight to Marcus, who had a right to it, whose family had borne the absence of Jerome for half a century. What he did with it was not her burden to carry.
Rosa finished her tea and went to bed. Through her thin walls, she could hear her neighbors beginning their day—doors closing, children laughing, the rhythm of ordinary life continuing despite all the weight it carried. She closed her eyes and thought of Earl Kowalski, wherever he was now, finally unburdened. She thought of Jerome Washington, sixteen forever, running through the smoke with a bottle of red pop, almost home.
In her dreams, the city was burning and not burning, was 1967 and 2021, was Detroit and Quezon City and every place where the past refused to stay buried. But when she woke that evening to get ready for her shift, the weight felt different. Not lighter, exactly, but more properly distributed. Like she had finally learned the correct way to lift, using her legs instead of her back, sharing the load across all the muscles that were meant to bear it.
She returned to St. Catherine's that night to find the day shift in its usual controlled chaos. Marcus was at the nurses' station, finishing his notes. He looked up when she approached, and she saw it in his eyes—he had found the note. He knew.
"Rosa," he said, his voice careful, controlled.
"Marcus."
They looked at each other across the nurses' station, across the divide of knowledge and choice and consequence. Then Marcus nodded, once, and gathered his things.
"Have a good shift," he said.
"You too," she replied, though his shift was ending.
He paused at the door, turned back. "Thank you," he said simply, and then he was gone.
Rosa began her rounds. Room 104 was empty now, cleaned and waiting for the next patient, the next death, the next confession. The Better Made chips were gone, the photos removed from the walls. It was as if Earl Kowalski had never been there at all, except for the weight Rosa carried, the knowledge she had passed on, the small act of mercy or justice—she still wasn't sure which—that she had performed in the space between night and day.
The hospice at night was still a ship moving through dark water, carrying its cargo of souls. Rosa was still its shepherd, its keeper of last words and final breaths. But something had shifted, some small recalibration of the universe that made the work, if not easier, then at least more bearable.
She thought of writing to her sister, of sending a little extra money this month. She thought of lighting a candle at St. Albertus for Earl Kowalski and Jerome Washington both, for all the sins that couldn't be undone and all the mercy that might still be possible. She thought of Marcus, going home with his terrible new knowledge, deciding what to do with the gift or curse she had given him.
The night stretched ahead, full of its usual demands and sorrows. Rosa moved through it with practiced grace, tending to the dying with hands that were steady despite the weight they carried. This was her work, her calling, her burden and blessing both. To be present at the end, to hear the confessions, to hold the secrets, and sometimes—just sometimes—to find a way to let them go.
In Room 106, Mr. Jamison was asking for water. In Room 108, Mrs. Adamski's fingers had finally stopped their invisible knitting. The work continued, as it always did, as it always would. And Rosa continued with it, carrying what needed to be carried, releasing what needed to be released, finding the balance between mercy and justice one patient, one confession, one night at a time.
The weight of mercy, she had learned, was not in the carrying but in the choosing—choosing when to hold on and when to let go, when to speak and when to remain silent, when to preserve the peace of the living and when to honor the claims of the dead. It was a weight she would carry for the rest of her days, along with all the others who had sat by besides in the dark, listening to the final words of the dying, bearing witness to the truths that could only be spoken when there was nothing left to lose.
And perhaps that was enough. Perhaps that was all any of them could do—carry what they could, share what they must, and trust that somewhere in the balance between mercy and justice, between truth and kindness, between the living and the dead, there was a kind of grace. Imperfect, incomplete, but grace nonetheless.
The night moved on, and Rosa moved with it, through the halls of St. Catherine's, through the city that had burned and risen, through the long watch that would end, as it always did, with dawn.