Best Place to Die

by Charles Atkins

  She took shallow breaths as the smoke tickled her throat. It was impossible to see through the haze and falling water that dribbled down her glasses. Around her, other elderly and semi-infirm tenants emerged from their apartments. Scared faces in cracked doorways. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Is there a fire?’

  ‘I need help! Tell someone I need help!’

  Navigating by the red EXIT in the distance and keeping to the side of the wide carpeted hall, Rose held tight to the rail and tried to remember how far it was to the outside. All the while, thinking of Ada – all her fault. I didn’t want to move! Tears streamed, mingling with the sprinkler water that soaked her hair and dribbled down her back. I just want my apartment back! Knowing that could never happen. Not stopping, she shuffled forward on stiff knees and hips, taking careful sips of dirty air, trying not to cough and using her fury to quiet the fear.

  ‘Ma’am,’ came a young man’s urgent voice, and then a firm hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, not wanting to lose her momentum and only able to glimpse the outline of a dark-haired man in a parka holding the hand of a shorter woman, but something about him familiar.

  ‘Please help her. Just get her out, please; she has dementia.’

  There was no arguing, as a woman’s shaky fingers were joined to hers. ‘Alice, stay with this woman . . . Rose, right?’

  ‘Yes, Johnny,’ said the thin woman in a drenched white flannel nightgown dotted with flowers, her dyed hair – impossible to tell what color – plastered to her face. ‘I want to go home. Are we going home? I don’t like the water.’ She looked at Rose. ‘I can’t swim.’

  ‘Please, help her,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose said. She shifted her pocketbook to her wrist, tried not to think how heavy it was and gripped Alice’s hand. ‘You’re the nurse. But your name’s Kyle.’

  ‘It is,’ he said quickly. ‘She thinks I’m someone else. Please, just help her out. I have to make sure everyone gets out. Just follow the red exits. It’s not much further, and please don’t let her out of your sight. She wanders.’ And then a siren from far off. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You can’t go back there,’ Rose said, feeling Alice’s hand trying to pull free, a part of her wondering . . . hoping, if maybe this were all still part of the dream.

  ‘I have to check on others,’ Kyle said, and, squeezing both their hands, he was gone.

  ‘Johnny!’ Alice tried to pull free and go after him. ‘Johnny! I want to go home! Johnny!’

  No dream. ‘Come on, Alice, we have to get out of here.’

  ‘I want to go home!’

  ‘Alice.’ Rose felt the woman pulling away. The smoke was everywhere and if she let go . . . ‘No, You’re coming with me!’ She clenched the woman’s hand with her left, while trying to not lose her grip on the hallway railing with her right. ‘I’ll take you home. Just come with me, we’re going home.’ Strangely, just saying those words, gave her hope, even though they contained not an ounce of truth. ‘Yes, we’re going home.’

  ‘Oh goodie,’ Alice said, and like a switch had been thrown, she stopped resisting.

  Moments later they’d found their way through the smoke and the frightened cries of the residents of Nillewaug Village Assisted Care to a still dark and very cold early April morning. The only illumination coming from the burning building’s windows, exit signs, and faux gas lanterns that lined the property’s drives.

  Soaked to the skin, her nostrils thick with smoke, and heart beating out of rhythm, Rose steered them to a wooden bench at the periphery of the sprawling facility. A wave of shivers shook her stocky frame as she sat, pulling Alice down beside her. We’re still too close, she thought, not more than fifty feet from the side of the four-story structure, where dense smoke billowed through two shattered second-story windows and glimmers of orange flames peeked over the sill. A few other residents trickled through the side exit, one woman with a walker crumpled to the ground, a man with a cane stood behind Rose and Alice, using the bench for support.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Alice asked, as they stared back at the central building of the assisted care facility, with its ersatz Georgian brick architecture and white shuttered windows. Sirens wailed and the first red engine with its lights flashing roared down the long drive, with its ornamental pond and beautifully tended boxwood hedges.

  Clutching her pocketbook Rose had no answers, just a growing ache of loss. She thought of her home on Rivington Street, the three-bedroom apartment in which she’d raised her children and sent them out into the world. The furniture she and Isaac had bought when they’d learned they were going to be able to move out of their cramped tenement quarters on Delancey and into the brand new rent-stabilized towers. Everything’s gone, she thought, and what little she was able to take from New York, now likely ruined. What was so wrong? she fumed. Why couldn’t you have let me be? I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want this. And now . . .

  ‘What’s that?’ Alice asked as her hand patted Rose’s. ‘Up there, what’s that?’

  Through smudged glasses Rose tried to see what had Alice so excited. Something sparkly was falling, like glitter coming down. She tried to see what Alice was pointing to, at first she thought it was the windows now spitting flames over thick waves of dark gray smoke, but no, something higher up on the top floor. A blackened window surrounded by jagged shards, bits of glass falling and then something . . . someone . . . at the edge, paused and then dropped to the ground not forty feet from them.

  ‘What’s that?’ Alice repeated, now pointing at the unmoving shape.

  ‘Oh God, no! Stay here,’ Rose said with a sick feeling in her stomach, and, leaving her pocketbook, she stood. Her knees felt like they might buckle, but she had to see, maybe they were OK, just unconscious. But in her gut, she knew it was just like 9/11 – people jumping to their deaths. She edged forward, as flashing lights bounced off the brick. A shiver edged down her spine, and she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep her teeth – mostly still her own – from chattering. As she approached, the crumpled shape didn’t move. Through smeared lenses she saw it was a blonde woman with one pump on and one missing. Years of being in retail identified her cherry-red suit as a good Chanel knock-off, probably from Talbot’s. Closer still, she recognized her – Delia Preston, the administrative director of Nillewaug Village and the woman who had rolled over her every objection to this ill-fated move. The energetic Delia who had talked, seemingly without need of breath, about the wonders of life in the Connecticut countryside, of clean air and distant mountain views, of picturesque season changes, and activity-filled days. And her obvious pride in Nillewaug: ‘Voted four years in a row the best assisted-care facility in Connecticut.’ She was certain the woman was dead, and in this growing nightmare found her voice. ‘I need help! Someone help me!’

  And from where she’d left her, Alice chimed in, like a parrot with a single phrase: ‘Help me! Help me! Help me!’

  TWO

  Lil Campbell woke to the sound of sirens. She lay still, and wondered if Ada was awake, as she counted at least half a dozen – that’s not good. Living in a retirement community the occasional ambulance in the night was to be expected, even in the dark of an early Sunday morning . . . Although all the local companies and Pilgrim’s Progress’s own emergency-response team rarely used sirens out of respect for the sleepy community of well-to-do retirees. What had pulled her from sleep at 4.15 a.m. and had her staring at the drape-hung sliding doors of her bedroom was frightening. She tried to count them, letting the different tones and cadences filter through the night and into her head. She’d get up to six or seven and then lose track – what’s happening? From the volume, she could tell they were close, not more than a half mile – could be one of the town homes or connected condos in Pilgrim’s Progress, the sprawling ‘Active Adult’ community on the outskirts of her hometown – Grenville, Connecticut. She’d moved here to Pilgrim’s Progress nine years ago with her now departed husban
d, Dr Bradley Campbell, and where she now remained with her best friend and lover, Ada Strauss. That last bit still quite new, and wonderful . . . and strange.

  ‘What’s going on, Lil?’ Ada asked, pushing back in the bed.

  With her eyes adjusted to the dark, Lil turned, catching the outline of Ada’s close-cropped silver hair, and glints of moonlight through high transom windows reflected in her blue eyes. Ada’s hand reached under the covers and found hers. She squeezed.

  ‘Must be a fire,’ Lil said.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Ada whispered, clearly frightened.

  ‘I know,’ Lil said, the two of them having recently survived a devastating fire. ‘It’s close, but not that close.’ She let go Ada’s hand, and got out of bed. Her heart pounded as she went to the sliding glass doors, and drew back the green silk drapes that Ada had just sewn. The moon was near full and dawn – because of the recent shift forward to daylight savings – was still a good hour away. The backs of their adjoined condos in this carefully planned retirement community in the rolling hills of Litchfield County Connecticut faced east and had tremendous privacy on account of acres of protected wetlands.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Ada asked.

  ‘No.’ Lil pulled up the latch on the sliders, and bent down to pull out the safety bar. Stepping into the cool and dewy dark morning she caught glimmers of flashing red lights over the condos and sloping hills to her right, and the sounds of sirens wailing from the north. Something big. She shuddered, while from behind her Ada had turned on the TV and was flipping through the channels.

  A light went on in Ada’s condo, her nearly seventeen-year-old grandson, Aaron, was up. He opened the bathroom window and yelled out, ‘Lil, what’s going on?’

  ‘Has to be a fire; I’m trying to figure where it’s coming from.’ She stood still, imagining a map of Grenville and the surrounding towns. This is where she’d lived her entire life – all sixty-one years – with the exception of four at Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts where she’d gotten an English degree with a focus on journalism. ‘It’s coming from the north.’ Not Grenville proper she thought, but heading out on Old Farm Road. Her mind ran scenes of the old Old Farm Road of her childhood. Harrington’s idyllic orchards with apple picking in the fall, berries in late spring and summer and a corn-stalk maze for Halloween. Theirs had been the only pies her mother would buy, and then the Harringtons died and their fourteen hundred acres of mature orchards had been sold. As she mentally traveled down Old Farm, trying to pinpoint the sirens, she realized there wasn’t a single patch of farmland left. Instead, it was strip malls, with jumbo-chain drug stores that had killed the two local pharmacies. There was an office-supply megastore, a cluster of old brick municipal buildings that housed the police and fire departments, the spanking-new library whose board she sat on, more strip malls, the supermarket that had recently changed owners again, and many empty stores, some quite massive, victims of the recent recession, which was supposedly over. And finally, with her gaze focused over a copse of white pine and budding hickory and maple she saw what could have been a blossoming cloud, and it wasn’t coming from the sky but from the ground. Dear Lord, she prayed, let it be one of the empty stores and not . . .

  ‘Lil,’ Ada called from inside the condo, backlit by the flickering screen, her voice cracked . . . ‘It’s on Channel Eight. What have I done? Oh, God!’

  ‘What? Where’s it coming from?’ But she already knew, and it filled her with dread.

  ‘It’s Nillewaug. My mother. We have to go. Oh Lil, what if?’ And Ada’s short, spry frame dressed in blue silk pajamas bolted from bed and vanished into the walk-in closet.

  ‘Don’t even think it,’ Lil said as she ran back in and stared at the flat screen, where a news crew was filming a nightmarish scene. The central building of Nillewaug Village – the one where Ada’s mother, Rose Rimmelman, had recently moved to a first floor apartment – was on fire. Bright orange flames shot over the roof and smoke obscured the upper floors, while on the ground frail residents in nightclothes and underwear were being herded by EMTs and firefighters, their glimpsed expressions confused and frightened. Lil stared at the screen, searching for Rose Rimmelman’s short, stocky frame.

  A knock at their bedroom door. ‘Grandma, Lil, you guys decent?’ Aaron had let himself in with his key.

  ‘Give us a second,’ Lil shouted back, and heading toward the closet pulled off the thin nightdress, one of several Ada had made out of a bolt of unbleached Egyptian linen she’d found at the flea market. In the closet – the right side being mostly Ada’s, as was readily apparent from the lush and vibrant colors, and the left being mostly Lil’s, a symphony of conservative grays, blues, dark greens and browns – the two women dressed hurriedly.

  Ada turned, her expression wide eyed and scared. ‘Oh, Lil.’

  Without pause, they hugged. Ada’s heart beat too fast and she was fighting back tears.

  ‘Lil, what have I done? Oh, God . . .’

  ‘We don’t know what’s going on. We have to find out,’ Lil said, holding her tight, wanting her to know that everything would be OK.

  They threw on whatever seemed quick and right. For Lil it was a pair of flannel-lined LL Bean jeans and a dark gray pullover. And with no time to braid her long, still mostly blonde, hair, she grabbed a seldom-used scrunchy and yanked it back into a messy pony tail. Ada grabbed her favorite robin’s-egg-blue fleece sweat suit and zipped up. With rubber-soled walking shoes in hand they headed back toward the bed.

  ‘OK to come in?’ Aaron asked from outside the bedroom.

  ‘Sure,’ Lil said.

  ‘Are you going to be warm enough?’ Ada asked, as her tall and handsome hazel-eyed grandson entered in jeans and a black zip-up hoodie, his sandy hair as badly mussed as hers. Aaron’s father, Jack, or, as Ada referred to him, ‘That right-wing Nazi’, had essentially kicked the teenage boy out of the home for being gay. He’d sought shelter with his grandmother who loved him beyond words. And to this point, he was the only one who knew about Ada and Lil, and that they were more than just good friends.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Who’s driving?’

  ‘We’ll take my car,’ Lil said, and, grabbing her brown leather satchel, made for the front door. On the way she spotted her Canon digital camera/camcorder – the one she used for her weekly columns about antiques in the Litchfield Sentinel. She unplugged it from the laptop and dropped it in the bag.

  The trio moved fast down the steep walk Ada had dubbed the ‘goat path’ that separated their adjoined condos from the others in the cul-de-sac. At the bottom of the hill were a few guest parking spots and the garage. Lil hit the button on the side of her bay and waited as the door rose, revealing her new pearl-white Lincoln Town Car – an absurd gas-guzzler, but a brand and make that held too many good memories for her even to consider something different. Plus, as they piled in, the thing was damn comfortable, reliable as a Swiss watch and if some crazed psycho decided they wanted to ram you – repeatedly – as had happened to her last fall, it was built like a tank.

  As she drove, taking the right out of the Pilgrim’s Progress gate, she sensed Ada’s panic, her gaze fixed out the side window. As the crow flies, Nillewaug Village is less than a mile from their condos, but the drive is more than twice that on account of the swamp that separates the properties. From Pilgrim’s Progress a couple of rights brought them to the four-way intersection with Old Farm. But as soon as she’d made that final turn she had to pull to the curb as a caravan of screaming emergency vehicles barreled past – a hook and ladder from two towns away, the Grenville Fire Marshall in a bright red blazer, two ambulances, and a Grenville police cruiser. Behind them other sirens were rapidly approaching, and, rather than lose more time, Lil got back on the road, and sped the rest of the way.

  As the widow of Dr Bradley Campbell, Lil was far from squeamish. At least she didn’t used to think so. She’d helped deliver babies, applied pressure to gaping wounds that should have gone to the
emergency room, but because everyone trusted Bradley – and his discretion – they’d come to their front door, typically in the dead of night. She’d calmed grieving parents, and distracted children as Bradley had set bones or popped dislocated shoulders back into place. But as they drove to Nillewaug Village, the largest assisted-care facility in Western Connecticut, she knew that she’d never encountered anything so horrifying.

  Still dark, the morning pulsed with hundreds of flashing lights, but it was the flames – bright orange and clearly not under control, shooting stories high into the sky that made her breath catch and triggered memories of another fire, not so long ago in which Ada and she had nearly died.

  ‘They’re not going to let us through,’ Aaron fretted, as they approached the drive for Nillewaug. State troopers were setting blue wooden barriers across both lanes of Old Farm. On the wrong side a news crew – likely the one that had filmed the footage they’d seen on the news – had cameras trained on the unfolding tragedy. Behind them, more sirens, and Lil made a quick decision. Pulling into the right lane she headed toward the barriers and lowered her window.

  A trooper in gray and blue, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five came over. ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to turn back this road . . .’

  Lil interrupted, and, using the same take-no-prisoners tone that had gotten her entry into countless emergency rooms and operating suites in the past, said, ‘I’m Lillian Campbell – Doctor Campbell’s wife and assistant.’ She didn’t want to say more, and hoped this young trooper, whose attention was now being pulled by advancing ambulances and fire trucks, wouldn’t ask questions such as, ‘Didn’t Doctor Campbell die nearly three years ago?’