by Devon, Gary;
“Why, Emma May Mattingly, I do believe you’re jealous. Shame on you. Shame on you. Bite your tongue.”
Still it was another half hour, quarter past eight and pitch dark outside, before the upstairs bedroom she had used for almost five months was put back in order, the last suitcase stowed with the other six in the trunk of the blue Buick, and she was ready to go. Grumbling and complaining, Emma had been up and down the stairs more times than Leona cared to count, bringing a box Leona didn’t need, asking questions, and all the time arguing with herself: “I could stop this, you know. I could call the hospital and warn them what you’re going to do. But then I suppose they’d suspect I was in on it.”
“You could always be anonymous,” Leona told her, and grinned.
“Well, it wouldn’t take a mental giant to figure out who it was, now, would it? But don’t you tempt me.”
Leona went up to the bedroom one last time. “For a final check,” she said. “I always feel as if I’m forgetting something.”
Actually, what she went back for was the black lizardskin briefcase she had left under the far side of the bed. It had come to her as part of the Merchassen estate. To Leona, it somehow represented all the years she had been with the Merchassens, first as housekeeper, then as secretary (and nurse in a crisis), and finally as companion to Helen Merchassen until she had died at the age of eighty-two the summer before last.
The black briefcase was what the doctor had affectionately called “a smuggler’s wonder,” and he had bought it simply because it was clever. It opened in half and she laid it flat on the bed. On one side there was a series of pockets and dividers with zippers that seemed to fill the space quite well. But underneath was another compartment at least two inches deep; here is where Leona kept the small vials of medicine wrapped in cotton batting and the compounds and few instruments she had taken from the office before the auction. The doctor had been a fastidious man, so there weren’t many other things she thought she should take, except for the personal documents he and his wife had left behind—drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, appointment books, a diary. She decided it would be disrespectful to allow these small personal items to be passed on to strangers, and the relatives had no use for them. So she kept them—and she kept them in the pockets and dividers that held the medicines it was probably illegal for her to have.
The other side had an actual false bottom. She cleared this half of everything she had originally put in it. There was a slot in the spine of the briefcase, and by fiddling with the small blade of a penknife, she triggered the release of a panel in the bottom, revealing an inch-deep space the full length and width of the briefcase. And that was where she had placed the larger denominations of bills when she closed her account and withdrew her money at the bank in Scranton. She pulled three thousand-dollar bills from the top of one of the bundles and closed the fake floor of the case.
She and Dr. Merchassen had decided that the illusion of false depth was created by the complex, paisley-patterned lining of the case. On top of the secret compartment she refilled the space with the folder of newspaper clippings she had been able to find about the fire and Mamie Abbott’s progress. Then, the beginnings of a runner she had been crocheting on the sly for Emma, and the crochet hook. And finally Doc’s Browning automatic, given to him by a distant cousin who had survived the Normandy invasion.
The barrel of the handgun carried the inscription FABRIQUE NATIONALE D’ARMES DE GUERRE HERSTAL BELGIQUE, but she didn’t know what that meant. Doc Merchassen had a name for the gun she couldn’t remember—maybe it was service issue, or officer’s issue. No, that wasn’t right. She did remember Doc telling her how to cock it by pulling the top sleeve back, and that it held thirteen shots, which seemed appropriate. To the best of her knowledge, the gun had never been fired and it frightened her. Leona imagined it packed with dirt inside, blowing up in her hand when she squeezed the trigger. And yet she kept it because it had been one of his most treasured things.
She put it in with the crochet work and shut the briefcase. She wrapped the three big bills inside a five-dollar bill to keep in her hand, took the briefcase, and turned off the light.
Her perspective slowly changed as she went down the curved staircase. Everything seemed to float away from her—the oblong of the downstairs door, the writing table with its vase of silk chrysanthemums, Emma wearing a fresh orange-colored apron. Feeling light-headed, Leona descended the stairs carefully, holding the bannister by the hand with the money and carrying the briefcase in the other.
“I wish you could at least stay until Frank gets home. I know he’d like to say goodbye.”
Leona could deal with Emma, not her husband; there was no telling what he might do. She’d planned all along to be gone before he came home from his pinochle game. Deep down, she believed he resented her being there. “Emma, if I wait, it’ll be too late to get anywhere tonight and I’ll never have another chance.” It came out sounding too harsh, too selfish, and she tried to lighten it. “Besides, if I have to sit through watching John Cameron Swayze again, I’ll just cringe.”
Emma slowly looked away and went to hold the kitchen door open at the side of the house. When Leona went by, she hugged her with her free arm and kissed her cheek. “Wish me luck, Emma,” she said and slipped the bills, unseen, into Emma’s apron pocket.
“Where will you go?”
“Wherever she wants to go.”
It wasn’t an answer, but Emma didn’t pursue it. “Well, let me know how you are.” Her chin dimpled and creased like a peach pit and she said no more.
Then she was gone, Emma’s image losing detail until it was a waving silhouette, framed in the doorway by the yellow light behind.
Slowly she drove down the street, slowly along streets she had taken night after night, streets so embedded in her memory she could walk them blind a year from now. She knew where the sidewalk bucked up from tree roots and where it was sunken, washed over with grass. Past houses that had never been and would never be hers, past families in rooms of light, glimpsed through swagged curtains. How long her heart had ached for such a place—a home and a family all her own.
Anything could go wrong. If Emma let on or started bawling or told Frank and he called the hospital; or if one of the nurses for some unknown reason decided at the wrong moment to go to the laundry room, and in the dark they collided … But Leona couldn’t worry about that. For the last few days now, she had mentally rehearsed her going in and coming out. By merely closing her eyes, she could visualize the course she would take, the pale yellow-brown floor and the stark white walls flowing by as she passed from the dusky laundry room through the metal-plated swinging doors, up the six or eight steps of the shadowed vestibule, and to the right into the glare of the corridor where five doors away, five rooms on the left, was Mamie’s room.
Now there was nothing to do but wait—wait in her old blue Buick parked in the darkest part of the lot as close to the laundry-room entrance as she could maneuver it without being conspicuously out in the open. She had backed the car up twice now to escape the moonlight, but she had gone as far as she could and the pale glow was catching in a glint on her hood ornament. She stared past it to the window with the speckled light.
Weeks ago, when she bought the blue lampshade with the tiny cutout stars to brighten Mamie’s room, it hadn’t occurred to her that it would make a light in Mamie’s two windows unlike all the others; she’d bought the shade only because she thought the thin cones of light flying from the pinpoint cutouts might arouse a happy response in the child. Now she was waiting, her breath beginning to fog the windshield, for the speckled light to go out. That would be the first domino of the planned sequence.
Long before there was reason to plot anything, she had become familiar with certain of the hospital’s night habits, and they would be used tonight as milestones: visiting hours for children ended at eight, adult patients could be visited till nine, then a brief onslaught of nursing activity followed, the ta
king in of night medications to patients, the plumping of pillows and turning off of lights, the good nights and sweet dreams. This ritual varied only slightly, although some nights it lasted longer than others. Somewhere around quarter to ten, the nurses would drift back to the central nurses’ station (where the three long corridors converged) for a last sip of coffee, to freshen their lipstick and comb their hair, to tease each other about the night still ahead, and to pull on sweaters and wraps, anxious to be relieved by the skeleton late-night shift at eleven. Unless one of the patients pushed his buzzer in the night, the corridors would be deserted until six the next morning. That’s when they would find Mamie missing.
Although he had always infuriated her with his banging and clanging as he checked and locked and rechecked the exit doors, Leona in her planning had almost overlooked the nightwatchman, who made his rounds shortly after the last shift arrived at ten-thirty. So it was in those minutes of shift change and confusion, but before the rattling passage of the watchman, that she had to make her move.
The speckled light in Mamie’s room went out. Leona turned the radio on without turning it up. She checked her watch by the ghostly radio light—ten till ten, right on time. Now her breath came heavier and deeper. She shut the radio off; the pale light blinked to black. The windshield became opaque with her breath, two bluish surfaces fogging up until she couldn’t see out. But, she thought, no one can see in either. She pulled on her cream-colored tam; then, squirming and raising her body under the steering wheel, she changed from her mink coat to a tan raincoat, too thin for this early November weather but practically invisible down a long corridor of doors. From a distance, it would be almost indistinguishable from a nurse’s uniform. On the seat beside her sat the shopping bag of clothes and the new white parka she had brought for Mamie to wear tonight, but it would take too long, would be too much trouble; and she stood out in the bristly cold air, easing the car door shut with only a click.
Across the asphalt in her crêpe-soled nurse’s shoes, into the darkness of the laundry room, through the swinging doors into the shadowed vestibule—empty as expected. Then up the stairs to where the first-floor corridor began. She peered around the corner. Toward the end of the corridor, a nurse pushed a medicine cart and another nurse appeared from one of the distant rooms. They turned toward the station.
Moving quickly but not so quickly as to draw attention to herself, Leona went down the corridor of opened doors, staying close to the wall, down the corridor of moanings and mumbles and a radio playing softly, against the rules. She counted five doors and slipped inside. Stepping out of the slab of door light, she stood still against the inside wall to catch her breath. Blinking, she let her eyes probe the darkness.
A spill of light from the parking lot outside fell through the large window and onto one corner of the bed. In her haste, before she could see as well as she wanted to, the child’s name had formed and been uttered, on a rush of breath, “Mamie?”
Slowly, as her eyesight adjusted to the dark, a flurry of disturbing impressions overtook her other concerns. The room was cold, unreasonably cold. The far wall had curtains that, when drawn, entirely covered two large windows. But tonight the curtains were partly pulled back and a draft of raw wind blew by her and out the lighted doorway. In nearly the same instant, she realized that one of the windows was open, the thin curtains on that side swelling and shifting and collapsing with the movement of the breeze. The venetian blinds had been drawn up. But oddest of all was the overbearing smell of the air itself. It was as if one of the nurses had dropped a bottle of cheap perfume and decided, rather than clean it up, to air out the room. Good Lord, she thought, what have they done? It made no sense.
Taking up less than half the bed and outlined by the sheet tucked in around it, the curled-up figure lay on its side, the top end of the sheet clutched to its chest. Its smudgy eyes seemed locked on a corner of the ceiling. For a stabbing moment, Leona gazed at the door number again to see if she might actually be in the wrong room. Then, confirming that she wasn’t, she wondered if Mamie might have been moved to another room. Had they, perhaps, released her early? There was nothing to do but find out.
She took a tentative step forward. “Mamie?” she whispered across the dark depth of the room. “I’ve come back. Like I promised.” But her voice broke.
The curtains fluttered.
Avoiding the light that fell through the doorway, she moved up past the foot of the bed. She could see that the loosened bandage covering Mamie’s shoulder had shifted sideways; she could see the scabbed edges underneath, and the hard, emaciated face—the face that had been getting softer, fuller, but now seemed even more gaunt. “My God, Mamie, what’re they doing to you?”
As she leaned down toward the child, a cold gust of wind lashed through the room. Half the curtains filled and collapsed so quickly that they snapped. She shuddered, all the while speaking quietly: “I’m sorry I took so long to get here, Mamie, but at least I can stop that wind.” She glanced at the curtains once more and then, without taking her eyes from the doorway where a nurse might appear at any moment, she stepped back, caught the window frame, and pulled the window shut. “There,” she said, hurrying back.
But through her own soft voice, she heard the slow squeak of nurses’ shoes in the hall; in a panic, she glanced about for a place to hide. She thought of the curtains first, but discounted them immediately as too obvious; if she accidentally caused the curtains to move, she could bring her entire house of cards down around herself. She thought of stooping behind the wing chair, but that seemed childish and risky. Then she saw that the door to the shared bathroom near the foot of the bed had been left open; it protruded dimly into the room.
Stepping sideways, she moved behind the forty-five-degree angle of the open door—in the room’s darkest corner. Clasping the edge of the door, she peeked around it, watching the front of the room. And momentarily the light coming through the hall doorway was all but blotted out by a huge Negro woman in a white uniform, buttonholes straining and gapping, the popping tight skirt riding up on her waist.
Leona found it almost impossible to breathe. It was as if she were hanging by a wire in the air, caught up on the hook of her own imagination like a fish, suffocating. She kept her mouth open and let her breath leak out silently. All around her, a dank and moldering odor drifted. It was a particular foul scent, both recognizable and familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
The nurse lifted her head high and Leona heard her say, “You wearin’ perfume in here? Nope? Well, I swear I smell perfume in here.” Backlit, the black face caught chiaroscuro highlights. Her head seemed too small for the rest of her, and she seemed to be looking directly at Leona.
Standing near the curtain pleats and holding the bathroom door before her, Leona felt her fingertips begin to tingle with pinpricks of pain. She was afraid to move her head behind the protection of the door, afraid the movement would reveal her presence. Then, with her eyes locked on the figure at the door and all her senses heightened, she felt a vague stirring at the back of her neck, like something crawling on the outermost ends of her hair. What is that? she wondered. She wanted to slap at it, but couldn’t; she wanted to shiver, but kept herself rigid. Her scalp began to prickle and itch—in a flash, she could feel every pore on her body. She took a slow breath as if pulling it through a straw. Quietly.
The nurse strayed in toward the bed, but in the hall another nurse said, “Did you tell that Wharton kid to turn off his radio?” The black nurse sniffed the air a moment longer before she shook her head, grumbling aloud to herself: “I must’ve brought that perfume smell in with me, from Mrs. Carruther’s room.” Then she backed out the doorway and was gone.
Leona stepped from behind the door, shivering and rubbing the back of her neck. She drank the air. Frowning as she turned, she squinted back at her dark hiding place and at the curtains, but they hung in perfect folds. Again the sound of nurses’ shoes in the hall drew her attention. Hurrying around the b
ed, she went to the front of the room and eased the door shut. The light in the room shrank. She turned back to Mamie. It occurred to her to stoop over into the spill of light from the window so the little girl could see who it was, as well as hear her better. “Don’t they pay any attention to you at all?”
Mamie was trembling hard, but the smudgy eyes didn’t change or respond, and now that the immediate danger had passed, Leona breathed freely.
It was hopeless. Mamie didn’t know who she was, had never known who she was, perhaps was even afraid of her, tonight of all nights. She had never felt less certain about what she had set out to do than she did at that moment. All those sleepless nights, fretting and hoping—all for nothing. After four days’ absence, she had only wanted a glimmering of recognition, but there was nothing more than there had been, and for those endless seconds Leona wanted to change her mind, to turn and walk away and never come back.
But Mamie … Even if she wouldn’t look at Leona or say her name, even if she didn’t know who this woman was who had come to her every night, and talked and read and held her when she trembled, and kissed her goodbye in the morning while slipping a cellophane-wrapped lollipop under her pillow for good luck—even if Mamie didn’t care or know or notice, one day her lips had been purple, the next day orange from the lollipop, and she was getting better. Not completely well, but better. And tonight, as Leona pulled the gray blanket from the footboard to wrap Mamie in, she told her, “If we have to start from scratch, at the very beginning all over again, one day you will know your name, Mamie, and you will tell me mine.”
Mamie was still trembling; Leona had to undo the small fingers one by one in order to pull the sheet down and replace it with the blanket. “This’ll keep you warm,” she whispered. “We don’t want you to catch pneumonia.” She shoved the sheet down. Partway, then farther. Except for a top, Mamie was dressed. In clothes too big for her, but dressed. Girls’ clothes, a size or two too large. Denim jeans and socks and old tennis shoes. An edge of the wadded hospital smock had slipped from under her pillow. “Oh, Mamie,” Leona said, surprised, “were you going to run away? Is it that awful? Where’d you get these clothes?” She shook the blanket open and pressed it around the little girl, and as she leaned over Mamie to pick her up, she saw the curtains shift just slightly and below the bottom edge of the curtain she saw shoes. In that instant, everything—the room, Mamie, even herself—seemed surreal. Then, before that sensation had passed, the window light shining through the fabric weave delineated a moving shape, a very distinct shape of a figure standing as if it were wrapped in gauze. She tried to speak, but her voice was too dry to lift sound; finally, as she exhaled, her thin voice carried: “Who are you?” She gasped. “What do you want?” The curtains stirred and began to part. She couldn’t see who it was—the emerging figure was in shadow. Her heart seemed to stop.