Nicole Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Nicole Proctor was born in the autumn of 1974 in the wrong city, as her family says, and has been the calmest person in every room she has worked in since. She was born at Charleston, South Carolina, and is living today in Charleston, where she is a nurse, an emergency-department nurse by training and by temperament. She is a woman of the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but she was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. She is the younger daughter of the electrician George Foster, who died in 2009, and of the nurse Virginia Carter, who died in 2016, and the sister of the slayer Renee Foster Proctor, The Grey Latch. In 1998 she married the software tester Travis Lewis, and they have one son, Curtis Proctor, born in 1999, who was not called. The family remembers her as the nurse who took over her mother's black notebook and who has never, to anyone's knowledge, lost a patient's confidence or misplaced a stick of silver nitrate. She was born in Charleston because her father had a contract there. In the early summer of 1974 George Foster, who was a journeyman electrician working for a Jackson firm and not yet in business for himself, was sent to the navy yard on the Cooper River to wire a hospital annexe, a six-month job with a good rate and a company truck, and Virginia, who was eight months pregnant and did not like the idea of a husband in a strange city eating from tins, took leave from her ward, put four-year-old Renee in the back seat with a bag of crayons and went with him. They rented the upper floor of a clapboard house on a street of piazzas south of Broad, with a fig tree in the yard and a landlady who read palms. The baby came three weeks early, in a thunderstorm in the third week of October, in a hospital on the peninsula, and George, who was up a ladder with a conduit bender at the time, was fetched by a foreman who ran the whole way. He arrived with sawdust in his hair. Virginia said that she had meant it to happen in Jackson and that the child would simply have to put up with having been born near the sea. They were back in Mississippi by Christmas, in the brick ranch house in a Jackson suburb with a carport and a workshop, and Nicole grew up there in the long shadow of her elder sister, whom she regarded, until she was about eleven, as one of the permanent features of the landscape, like the water tower. Renee was grave and quick. Nicole was bright and funny, a round-faced, freckled child who could do the voices of every adult in the street and who laughed first and thought afterwards, a sequence that her mother, who had trained herself to do the reverse, regarded as a gift. When Renee was told what the Proctors were, in her grandmother's sewing room, Nicole, who was eleven, sat on the stairs and listened through the banisters, and was found there, with her chin on her knees, by her mother, who did not send her away. She was told properly the next spring, in the kitchen, with a plate of cornbread, and she said, as her mother had once said, that she would like to be the one who dealt with the part that hurt. It was a settled thing, and no one in the family ever suggested that Nicole should be anything but what she was. She was never called. Her father, who had spent thirty years wiring the Ledger's safe houses and who held that the work of a tradesman was as honourable as the work of a hunter, taught her to turn the power off before touching anything, and Virginia taught her the rest. She took a nursing diploma in Jackson in 1995, graduated at the head of her class and was sent as a probationer to the emergency department of a large hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, where her uncle Earl Carter Proctor, the lineman, kept a house on the hill and where her sister Renee lived with her husband Michael Collins. It was a good place to be a young nurse. Nicole took the night shift, where the work was and where the Ledger's patients tended to arrive. She met Travis Lewis there, in the summer of 1997, in a corridor outside the records office, in the middle of a computer crash. He was eighteen, a thin, bespectacled student in his first year at the university who had been taken on by the hospital for the summer to test its new patient-records system, and he was kneeling on the floor with a laptop, a cable and an expression of tragic concentration. She had been told by three different departments that the system had lost her patients, and she asked him, in a voice that she afterwards described as mild, where they were. He said that he did not know yet but that he would find out. He did. It took him till four in the morning, and she brought him a coffee. They were married in 1998, at her aunt's church in Birmingham, with her father giving her away in a new tie and her sister Renee, who held that a well-kept record was the greatest gift one person could give another, standing up with her. Curtis Proctor was born in the autumn of 1999. What she did for the Ledger she did as her mother had, and then in her own way, for she had been trained in a larger and faster world. In the emergency department at night she saw the patient who had no wound that could be found, the man in the heavy coat who would not give his surname, the girl with two small marks that the intern wrote down as a rash. She did what she had been told to do, which was to keep a note, and she did what her mother never had to, which was to teach the other nurses on her shift to look at a neck. She never said why. She said it was a thing that she had picked up on her mother's ward, which was true, and she kept a private chart in a small black notebook that she had found in a drawer of her mother's things after the funeral. It contained thirty years of dates, beds and symptoms, and a stick of silver nitrate in a cardboard sleeve. Nicole used the stick as it was intended, for the two things it was good for, and she added to the notebook, in her own round hand, another twelve years of her own. The attacks of September 2001 found her on a day shift in Birmingham, with a toddler in the hospital crèche, and she went on with the round. In 2009 her father died of a long illness in Jackson, and she came down to help her mother, taking nights at a Jackson hospital for a year so that she could sit with her in the day. She did the same, with no fuss, through the seven years that followed, and in the winter of 2014, when Virginia was told that she was ill, Nicole was in the next room, as she was in the last weeks of 2016, when her mother died at home, at ease, having told everyone what she needed them to know. Renee, who had driven down from Birmingham with a flat basket of mending on the passenger seat, sat on the stairs. She took the post at Charleston in 2017, because a hospital there, a large trauma centre on the peninsula, had offered her a charge nurse's job in its emergency department, and because she had a feeling, which she did not examine, that she should go back to the place she was born. Travis, who by then was a senior tester at a software company in Birmingham and who could not move without losing a pension, said that he would be glad to have an excuse to buy a second kettle, and the two of them have kept both houses ever since, a marriage of weekends, long drives and a telephone call at nine every evening. She works three twelve-hour shifts and drives to Birmingham for the remainder of the week, where she looks in on her uncle Earl Carter Proctor, now a widower in the house on the hill, and eats a good deal of her sister Renee's cooking, and she says that she has never lived so well or slept so little. In the pandemic years she worked in the intensive care unit, in a face-shield and two layers of gowns, and held the hands of patients whose families were not allowed to, and on the worst night of that winter she wrote in her notebook a single line which she has never shown anyone. She is fifty-one, a short, brisk, round-faced woman with her mother's dark eyes and her father's easy laugh, who wears flat shoes and a lanyard of keys and who can find a vein in a dark room. Curtis, who is twenty-six, comes down to Charleston to eat at her table on Sundays and has never once asked what is in the notebook. Nicole Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the Charleston nurse who inherited her mother's black notebook and who kept the night shift watching necks, the younger daughter of the man who wired the safe houses. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and carers of the White Ledger, the people who were never called, who sat up with the wounded and the unwell and who proved that a steady hand, a clean dressing and an honest chart are as much a part of the hunt as any silver round.