Ghost Summer, Stories

by Tananarive Due

  She could never catch hold of a moment.

  Señora Suerte

  I hate this place.

  Someone got the idea—brilliant or inane, depending on how the meds are tickling my brain that day—to dress up this place with games. Someone thought the general air of Death might smell better with a whiff of Fortune. General collection of losers that we are, it would be nice if someone could win something once in a while. That’s the idea.

  Brilliant or inane, it truly does not matter. You’d have to live here to see the boldness of the notion. You’d have to be breathing in the urine-soaked air. Picture Fidel’s worst prisons with festive shooting galleries—not with real bullets, mind you, but pellets knocking over rows of smiling duckies—and maybe you would get the picture.

  Have I mentioned yet that I don’t like it here?

  I hate this place.

  A few years ago, I could have sat you down over a few rounds of mojitos and sifted through other facts that could have been called pertinent, at least at the time: Born in La Habana province outside of Mariel, Cuba. Second of five children. Bank manager in Hialeah, Florida, for thirty years. Married twice, once happily. Widower twice, once unhappily.

  Brace yourself: Only child, a son, died in a car crash at seventeen. That was once the defining fact of my existence. A whisper of my son’s death, and I got hisses, moans, blinking eyes, tears. I got laid, even. It was a powerful fact. That’s Gilberto. His son died. His only son. His namesake. (Gilberto. Not Gil. Not Bert, for God’s sake. Gilberto.) Gilberto lost two wives and a son, they clucked. What an unlucky man. Come to me, pobrecito.

  But before I came here, I was a virgin. I thought bad luck was a myth, and had vastly underestimated the phrase’s meaning in either Spanish (mala suerte) or the English I worked so hard to learn as a young man in my twenties, when I had to begin my life anew. Mala suerte. Now, I live in bad luck’s bosom. It suckles me to sleep—that, and the meds. Thank goodness for sleep. My only goal in life is more sleep. I’m so far behind. Raul, in the bed next to mine, sleeps all day, the lucky bastard. All day, and no one bothers him.

  No sleeping for me. When I first arrived, I got trotted around like a poster boy for recovery. Look at Gilberto, Mrs. Sanchez. He had a stroke only three months ago, and he can stand on his own two feet. Look at Gilberto, Mr. Ortiz. He’s already feeding himself with both hands. Look at Gilberto, Mr. Benton. Look at Gilberto.

  The day of the stroke, I had a beautiful dream. No pain, just visions. One minute I’m munching on pastelitos at my favorite Cuban bakery on Flagler, and the next minute I’m at the emergency room. In my dream, I see my first wife, Maritza. The woman had a beautiful face, but I called her El Diablo. She was a horror. When I saw her again, I thought I must be on my way to Hell. So I asked her: “Why were you so unkind?” And she shrugged her shoulders in her awkward, unrefined manner. “I didn’t know how to be another way,” she said softly. Of course, no? It made sense at the time, so I forgave her. Deep in my heart, I forgave her. I told her I was sorry for the way I danced when her headache turned out to be a brain aneurysm, my problems gone like that. And she smiled. Such a weight was lifted from me!

  Then, her face became Camila’s. Mi reina. Mi vida. Not as beautiful as Maritza—in her younger years, judged by her face, Camila had been lonely—but I saw her clean, pure spirit. All kindness. And I understood: As in life, I had to pass my first test, Maritza, to see Camila again. Perhaps it was Heaven calling for me. She touched my face, and an indescribable feeling bathed me. Better than sex, better than rum, better than music. A feeling we don’t find in this world.

  The next thing I knew, no Camila. I was in a hospital room. I could not speak, I could not move the right side of my body. After an eternity, in answer to my prayers for a cessation of misery, I was brought here. So, either God has a grudge against me or has no better way to amuse himself. Either way, we don’t speak anymore.

  Was it not enough I was an exile? Exiled first from my homeland, and next from my loved ones? Did I ever complain? When others would have cursed God, I never did. But for this place, God has some answering to do.

  There is no excuse.

  I hate this place.

  Here, we are not exiles, engineers, postal workers, grocers, bankers, grandparents, or deserted lovers. No—here, we are beds. Sixty beds. This is a place where people come to die when there is no one to take them in, like unwanted mongrels. Most of us are helpless to carry out even the most basic dignities of life, worse than babies. And someone of authority—the new administrator, or someone trying to impress him—looked out at this collection of sad human debris and said, “Ah! Let the games begin.” So now, there is bingo. B-I-N-G-O, like the gringo children’s song.

  I can hear you laughing, so you must get the joke. Bingo in Hell’s parlor.

  “You have a very bad attitude, Gilberto,” a young nurse, Antoinette, chides me. No one has taught her not to call her elders by their Christian names, but I tolerate this because she understands the words from my ruined mouth. My translator.

  “¿Que? Did I say anything?”

  “You don’t have to say it. I see it in your face. They like the bingo. Why come watch others play every day just to make fun? You should play, too.”

  But she is wrong. I don’t come to watch the others play. Only a sadist would be entertained watching scarecrows listing in their wheelchairs, raising trembling fingers when they win, hardly realizing when they are wetting themselves. Does this sound like a sane person’s amusement? Yet, it is true. I come every Friday. I wheel myself to the lounge by 2:00 p.m. without fail. I am the first one inside, the last one to leave.

  But I never win. Remember? Mala suerte. Playing to win would be a waste of my time.

  I come for Her. My angel.

  Unlike me, she doesn’t come every week. Angels cannot be summoned like pizza delivery, and I accept this. But the entire room changes when she walks inside. The light shifts to a bright golden hue, the exact color of twilight. The walls, which are usually growling at us with the promise of suffering, begin to sing.

  The first day I saw her, I admit it, I believed it was only the meds at work. At first glance, she seemed to be a typical nurse, invisible in a powder-blue uniform that would make any woman seem boyish, white shoes squeaking across the floor, and a name tag that read ROSARIA. Her skin was browned with the echoes of an abuela negra whose African genes kinked her hair into tight brown ringlets she wore like a crown atop her head.

  Then I noticed her eyes.

  Dios mío, such eyes! Beneath her luxuriant lashes, her eyes are black coffee beans, shining like the night itself. I saw her eyes from across the room, and they stole my concentration from the droning call of the bingo numbers, my hand frozen above my cards. Her eyes held none of the dull dispassion or thinly masked contempt of the other nurses who occasionally gazed upon our pathetic game. Her eyes darted and dashed the way my little Gilberto chased our housecat to and fro when he was small, soaking up every detail about us. Instead of seeing only our tubes and wheelchairs, she lingered on our faces, memorizing our existence, blessing us with personhood.

  You can believe me or not, but I swear to what happened next on my dear Camila’s soul: As soon as I noticed her eyes, I gained new eyes myself. Her image changed. I was no longer staring at a nurse in a uniform, but a visage who glided across the floor in a sheen of pale light. Floating, you see. Her hair was suddenly an impossibly long mane behind her, following her on the floor like a wedding train spun of dark lamb’s wool.

  She met my eyes and smiled at me. I have seen dying men resuscitated with electric shock, and that sensation can be no more jarring than her eyes. Her gaze shocked me back to life.

  No one else at the bingo game seemed to notice her. Not Pedro, who breathed through oxygen tubes and coughed blood into his handkerchief, making such a racket that it was hard to hear the numbers—not Dixon Washington (or Washington Dixon, I forget which), who always sat with his hand shielding his bingo
cards as if his neighbors could somehow cheat if they saw what Fate had dealt him—not Mrs. Martinez, who dressed up for bingo games in her fading white lace dress and spring hat as if bingo days were Easter Sunday—not Stella Rothman, a World War II widow who always cupped her ear to try to hear the numbers, complaining that her hearing aid was made in Japan and therefore wasn’t worth a damn—and not Crazy Joe, who called Bingo! every other number even though he was the only one with worse luck than mine.

  No one else glanced in the direction of this magnificent creature. Only me. To them, she was a nurse named Rosaria making an obligatory tour to see to it that no one dropped dead at a table. Such a death, after all, might ruin the game.

  But she is much more than a nurse. I know that now. Perhaps she is Oyá herself. I have reasons for speaking so. I alone see her. I alone know what she does.

  Our game is the perfect place for her to visit undetected. Bingo, you see, is not a game of skill, nor of will. There are no true choices—only luck. Each player is issued six cards, so in our game, anyone can expect to win at least once, even in a fellowship as cursed as ours. During the three hours we play, there are three or four winners. Sometimes more. Not me, of course—winning is not in my makeup—but usually. From time to time, even Crazy Joe is right when he claims he has his bingo numbers lined up. A broken clock tells the time twice a day, after all.

  So, I do not blame the others for not seeing it as I do. They would have to see her.

  The first day Rosaria arrived in the bingo room—the first time her eyes gave me access to the truer vision of her—I watched her glide from table to table, pausing like a honeybee collecting nectar. She lingered over one wheelchair for a time, then moved to the next. And the next. With each person she passed, she seemed to be listening for something only her ears could discern. I watched her so closely that I lost my concentration, forgetting the administrator’s bored drone as he called the bingo numbers. How I longed for her!

  Not as a woman, mind you. I will confess she is beautiful—with a face that is fine-featured and yet ever-changing, with cheeks as hollow as an Indian princess in one moment and then as full as my Camila’s in the next—but it was not her beauty that commanded my eyes. I have not known hunger in my loins since Camila left this Earth, and my body no longer craves a woman’s touch. But as I watched her, even the first time, all of my heart cried out: Choose me.

  Bless me. Save me. Choose me.

  But she did not.

  Several minutes passed before she made her decision. My eyes had never left her, so I saw the exact moment: She took her hand and rested it across Pedro’s shoulder, her lithe fingers weightless. He was so intent on smothering his constant cough in his handkerchief that he never noticed the rare gesture of kindness. But I did. All at once, Pedro’s cough went silent.

  The visage was gone. And the nurse Rosaria, unnoticed, slipped away to her duties.

  But the change that came over Pedro! Without his cough to bedevil him, Pedro sat straighter in his chair, with a young man’s posture. He marked his cards with fervor, his ears virtually twitching every time a number was called. His pencil flew. I heard him laugh to himself, a sound of boyish joy. On that day, as I witnessed the transformation, I believed the bingo games were a brilliant stroke, and felt my faith in our caretakers renewed. I shared Pedro’s sudden belief that he could win, and that winning a simple game could matter to creatures such as we.

  As I had anticipated, it was only moments before Pedro’s voice rose, silencing the room: “Bingo!” he called through phlegm. Like a conqueror. He waved his card above his head.

  The prizes in our bingo game are nothing to speak of. What is money to us? The staff gives the winners little tokens—brightly wrapped sugarless candies, postcards of beaches and mountain ranges, photo frames in which to display the evidences of younger days on our nightstands—but winning the game meant everything to Pedro that day. His skin flushed pink. His eyes danced. I never heard him cough again the entire game. When he won the second time, he nearly leaped from his wheelchair.

  Pedro was not the only winner that day. But he was the only one chosen.

  That very night, you see, Pedro died in his sleep. His monitors made no sound to alert the nurses, and later it was discovered that his oxygen machine had been unplugged. His roommate, Ben Wallenbech, said he slept so soundly that he never heard his neighbor’s machine stop.

  There was no outraged family to answer to, so the “investigation” amounted mostly to shrugged shoulders and shaking heads. Many speculated that Pedro himself had unplugged his oxygen. Those who had seen him at bingo recalled his last moment of triumph, saying he chose death on that night because he wanted to leave this world on a winning streak.

  After that, I kept a special eye for the nurse, Rosaria. She frequently visited the bingo games, but I never saw the amazing metamorphosis I saw the day she chose Pedro. I came to believe I had hallucinated, or perhaps that I’d simply had a flash of premonition like my Tía Maria, the way I knew in my bones that my little Gilberto would not come home from football practice the night he died.

  A week after Pedro’s death, I suffered another stroke, one so minor that I did not notice it while it happened. But one morning I realized I could no longer stand and walk even the few steps I had mastered a short time before, the model of recovery. To this day, whenever I try to stand, my legs tremble as if I have no bones.

  I can still mark the bingo cards. But most days for a time after that, I only watched. Even the sight of Rosaria could not cheer me, because she never again appeared as she had that day, and I stopped believing in magic.

  I lost my spirit of play.

  Until a month passed. And everything changed.

  The bingo game was flourishing. A male nurse named Jackson volunteered to be the new caller, and he was so animated that he might have been a preacher at a Baptist church. Jackson made all the difference. The sound of laughter regularly filled our tiny bingo hall now, ringing through the hallways to the ears of those who were not well enough to participate. But I could not share their laughter.

  “Gilberto, your face is gonna be in a permanent frown if you don’t practice smiling again,” Antoinette told me as she wheeled me into the hall, as she always does. “Don’t worry, papi. Your legs will grow stronger.” Such a sweet, young face to already be such a liar! The truth is plain to me now. I believed their lies, even when I fought not to. No one here grows stronger. No one here gets better.

  And on that day, when I felt most mired in my helplessness, I saw her again.

  This time, I did not even see her as plain-dressed Rosaria, the nurse who came and went without notice. I saw a shadow emerge in the doorway, impossibly long for the lighting from the hall, and at its tip was a large, winding spiral shape I could hardly make sense of.

  She followed her shadow into the doorway. This time, she wore her dark hair in thick, ropy shapes splaying from all sides of her head. The largest was an oversized, upright whorl the size of a python that looked as if it weighed several pounds. Her face was obscured behind the light that floated around her like a swampland mist, but how could I mistake her?

  This time, I knew. My veins raced with adrenaline.

  “We got luck-y number O-72, ya’ll. That’s the year the Dolphins went undefeated, so you know that’s lucky. You got O-72, you’re a winner.” Jackson called on, unaware.

  She floated serenely down the rows of tables, toward mine. Something blocked my ears suddenly; perhaps my heart itself, silencing everything except its own excited thrashing. If my legs had obeyed me, I would have stood up and fallen to my knees in her path. When she passed only a foot from me, I nearly pissed myself. I smelled Camila’s favorite perfume in her wake, and tears came to my eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but I had forgotten all language.

  “What’s that? N-32?” Stella Rothman said, cupping her ear.

  “O-72,” someone yelled. “Jesus, will you get that thing fixed?”

  Stella tugge
d at her hearing aid. “It’s my fault it’s made in Japan? Not worth a damn.”

  The entity did not dally this time, as she had the first time I saw her. She went straight to Stella. She glided behind her, and laid her hand gently on Stella’s shoulder, her fingers like twigs.

  “Seventy-two?” Stella said. “Wait a second. Just a second.” As she stared at her cards, light brightened her face, erasing her furrowed brow. She had told me once that her life ended the day the telegram from the War Department came; I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her smile. “Seventy-two? I can’t believe . . . I got it! Bingo!”

  Need I tell you? It was only Rosaria who stood behind Stella then, stripped of her magnificent visage. Amidst the groans of disappointment from players who had not been as lucky as Stella, no one saw Rosaria lower her face, hiding her inscrutable eyes. I was the only one who watched the nurse leave, back to her mundane duties.

  I was in a state that night, as you can guess. I had less appetite than even this food deserves. I could not sleep. Had I more control of my limbs, I might have taken myself to Stella’s room to watch her doorway. To see the outcome for myself.

  But in the end, of course, I already knew.

  Stella died in her sleep. There were no machines unplugged this time, and fewer questions. She was eighty-six, after all. When an eighty-six-year-old dies, it isn’t a mystery.

  I wrestled with myself in the days to come, as anyone would. Should I report the girl, Rosaria? And tell the administrators what, exactly? That she touched the dying? That she gave them one last smile? That I suspected she was sneaking into their rooms at night? Or that she was Oyá herself coming to call, shepherding her chosen from one realm to the next?

  No one listens to our kind, those who are cloistered away from the raging world outside. That is why living here is worse than death, you see. Bingo for the damned? The idea seems brilliant or inane to me, depending on how the meds are tickling my brain that day.

  I hate this place.