“You’re looking good, grandpa” Jamie said as he leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. He pulled a chair over and joined his family.
“You never were a good liar, Jamie,” Hal Whitman chided, his voice deep and strong despite the withering of his body. “I look like shit and I feel like shit.”
Jamie nodded, respecting his grandfather’s up-front attitude. “You’ve looked better.”
“Like when I climbed the temples at Chichen Itza in Mexico with you and Steve four years ago?”
Like you did three months ago, Jamie thought as he nodded. His mind suddenly flashed back to that trip to Cancun four years ago, when his grandfather was in his early eighties but looked like he was in his fifties and acted with the mischievous enthusiasm of a man in his twenties. He had scaled those steep steps at the Mayan ruins in a matter of minutes, never once looking down, never once faltering, reaching the summit well before he or his stepfather had. His grandfather had aged considerably between that trip four years ago and last summer, but it had been the normal, gradual aging of a man in his eighties entering the twilight of his life. The last couple of months, though, had not been kind to his grandfather, aging the man a decade in a quarter of a year. He was a dentist, not a physician, but Jamie knew that something was wrong with him besides just grief.
As if reading his mind, his grandfather said, “Pancreatic cancer, Jamie. Eating me up from the inside out. Diagnosed last month. Aggressive. Terminal.”
Jamie felt tears begin to form at the corner of his eyes. He looked up at his mother and Steve, and their somber expressions told him that they already knew. He turned back to his grandfather and opened his mouth to speak, but his grandfather lifted a single finger to his lips, silencing him. “We’re not here to talk about me. Or feel sorry for me. There will be time for that later. We’re here to remember your grandmother. No one else knows and I’ll not have anyone finding out now. There will be time for the living later.”
Jamie nodded in agreement then studied his grandfather’s desiccated body, saw hints of his own face in his grandfather’s wrinkled features, and he suddenly understood why Steve was so insistent that he speak at the funeral tomorrow. He was all that was left, the last of the Whitman legacy, the only true family that remained. His grandfather had no brothers or sisters, no nieces or nephews, no other sons or daughters or grandchildren. Jamie’s mother and stepfather were family but not in the truest sense of the word. They were visitors in his grandfather’s life, introduced by chance and circumstance, but they were not bound by blood. They could sever all relations with Hal Whitman and never look back. But Jamie couldn’t. He was blood, and that made all of the difference.
His mother would speak tomorrow. Aunt Barbara would, as well. Other friends would also lend their voices to the memory of Anna Whitman at the small service, and his grandfather would find comfort in their tribute and prayers. But the sentiments that would mean the most to the dying man would be those that spilled from his own lips.
Jamie promised himself that as soon as he got back to the motel he would take up his pen and paper again and compose a tribute to his grandmother that would make his grandfather proud.
“So what exactly happened?” Leslie asked. She had obviously been waiting for Jamie to arrive so Hal wouldn’t have to repeat the story twice. “You said Anna had a heart attack?”
Hal Whitman nodded slowly. “She went up to bed at five last night. Said she wasn’t feeling well. You know Anna. She had no love for drama. If she said she wasn’t feeling well, it’s more than just a small chest cold or sinus headache. The woman wouldn’t complain about anything or slow down for anything unless her body physically couldn’t do what her brain told it to do.” He took a sip from a glass of ice water on the table. His movements were slow, jerky, and Jamie was surprised he didn’t spill half the contents on his shirt.
“She had been cleaning up. The bridge game was supposed to be here last night. She said she felt short of breath, thought it was just her asthma acting up. She went to lay down for a couple of minutes to catch her breath. I was watching the news on the couch in the den. When I didn’t see or hear from her an hour later, I went to check on her. I saw her lying in bed, and I knew, I just knew… I knew something was wrong.” His voice quavered slightly and tears formed in his eyes. He slowly collected himself as Jamie and his parents watched patiently. “I went to her and looked at her and I saw she wasn’t breathing and I called 911. They got here in five minutes but it was too late. Would have been too late if they were only seconds behind me when I first discovered her body. Someone told me she had been dead almost half an hour by the time they got here.”
Jamie’s mother clasped her father-in-law’s right hand in both of hers and gave a gentle shake. “She seemed so healthy the last time we saw her,” she said. “Only three months ago.”
“That’s the thing with heart disease,” Hal said. He sipped from his cup. “It’s not like cancer. You don’t slowly waste away. There’s no time to set your affairs in order and do all of the things you wanted to do before the final day comes. No time to say goodbye. One minute you’re here, the next…” He offered a snap of the fingers, signifying how quickly and suddenly the end could come.
“She lived a full life,” Leslie said.
Hal smiled wanly and squeezed his daughter-in-law’s hand. “Thanks to you. After Brian abandoned you… after he disappeared… I thought that would be the end of her. Despite his issues, despite what he did… she loved him very much. He was her only child. But you… you made her feel whole again. Despite everything that happened. You meant as much to her as she meant to you.”
They lapsed into silence again, the low chatter from the other rooms filling the kitchen with the sound of light static. Jamie and Steve said nothing, allowing Linda and Hal Whitman to share their moment.
Jamie’s grandfather took another pull of his water, and the tinkling sound of ice on glass pulled Jamie’s attention away from his family and redirected it to the burgeoning pressure in his bladder. He hadn’t taken a leak since… since the airport hours ago, and he suddenly found that he needed to pee.
“Excuse me,” Jamie said. “Nature calls.” He quickly left the kitchen and made his way to the main bathroom, where he found four elderly strangers waiting to use the facilities. He couldn’t hold it in much longer, so he turned and made his way down a short hallway to his grandparent’s—his grandfather’s—bedroom. A hastily written sign on a piece of lined notebook paper taped to the door said: Private. Please do not enter. Jamie ignored the sign and pushed the door open. He assumed the message was for the neighbors and friends, not family. After all, he had been in his grandparent’s bedroom dozens of times. No reason he couldn’t go in now.
He gently closed the door behind him and surveyed the room. The first thing to hit him was the smell. It was not the stink of sickness and death he had expected he would find. Instead, the small bedroom smelled like his grandmother. Like lavender and vanilla. The gentle scent brought tears to his eyes. His eyes fell to the comforter, which was crumpled at the foot of the bed where he assumed his grandfather had tossed it upon finding his wife not breathing yesterday. He saw the impression on the bed where his grandmother had died. It was a surreal sight to be standing in the room where his Grandma Anna had passed. And at that moment, it finally hit him. He would never see his grandmother again. She was dead and gone and that was it. He almost collapsed onto the plush carpet as sorrow overwhelmed him, but he controlled his emotions. Tamped them down. Smothered them. He had plenty of practice doing that
Jamie would have liked to explore the bedroom further, study the mementos of his grandmother’s life which were scattered on the dressers and nightstands, gaze at the photos which had chronicled her life, but his bladder did protest greatly, so instead he turned to the bathroom in the corner. The door was closed, but there was no secondary signs warning away possible pissers and crappers.
He opened the door and stepped into the bathroom, c
losed it slowly behind him.
Unaware that nothing would ever be the same afterwards.
Chapter 8
The bathroom was small but contained all of the modern amenities a person needed: a sink to the left, toilet to the right, shower with the curtain drawn closed dead ahead. The walls were all bare and painted a soothing robin’s-egg blue. Since the bathroom was tucked inside the house, there were no windows. The only light was provided by several small indoor floods set into the ceiling.
Jamie quickly moved to the toilet, unzipped his pants and pulled out his little friend. He sighed as a stream of urine hit the water in the bowl, creating a low, tinkling sound.
He was still going strong fifteen second later when the temperature in the small bathroom plummeted.
It was as if someone threw open a door to Siberia, allowing a bitter arctic wind to blow in and envelop him in a frigid hug. Jamie instinctively wrapped his arms tightly around himself, not wondering why the temperature had dropped but instead simply reacting to the change. His arms proved little defense against the sudden cold, though, which battered and buffeted him and sent his teeth to violent chattering. Before he had a chance to consider the bizarre situation, a buzzing began in his ears, the low, steady drone of dozens of bees hovering around his head. The buzzing was quickly followed by a sudden, throbbing pulse inside his skull.
Jamie had never had a migraine in his life, but as he stood there in front of the toilet, his cock hanging out of his pants, piss spraying carelessly over the rim of the bowl and onto the tiled floor, he knew that he was now experiencing one. His equilibrium was shot, his senses overwhelmed, and he quickly placed both hands against the wall in front of him to steady himself. He tried to keep his eyes open, tried to concentrate on a black dot on the wall, a smudge of dirt, but his vision wavered, his eyes teared, and vertigo threatened to overwhelm him. He closed his eyes tightly against the outside world and watched as colors exploded like Fourth of July fireworks against the backdrop of his eyelids. He tried to push everything away, tried to ignore the cold around him, the heavy buzzing in his ears, the growing queasiness in his gut, the pounding in his skull that threatened to burst his brain.
I’m going to die, Jamie thought as he rested his head against the wall for added support. He clenched his eyelids even harder. Someone’s going to come in and find me dead on the fucking ground in a pool of my piss. The idea of someone stumbling into the tiny bathroom looking for some relief only to discover him dead with his dick hanging out would have made him laugh if he wasn’t in so much agony. Instead, he clenched his teeth together and strained his lips apart as tears rolled from the corners of his eyes.
Jamie felt his legs begin to wobble beneath him. Can’t fall, he thought. Hit my head. Have to ease myself down. He was about to remove his left hand from the wall and place it on the rim of the toilet when everything stopped suddenly. The temperature returned to normal, the buzzing ended, the throbbing abated. He slowly opened his eyes and blinked several times to readjust to the light. He left his hands and forehead against the wall for several moments, allowing the queasiness and the dizziness to subside. Finally feeling stable, he straightened. He breathed in deeply, happy to be alive but concerned about what had just happened. He looked down at the toilet and the floor, at the beads and puddles of piss everywhere, and brushed his worries aside. His parents would be wondering where he was. He needed to clean up and get back out. He would worry about this later, when there were less pressing matters. The toilet paper holder was to his left, neatly affixed to the wall two feet above the floor and sporting a fresh roll of toilet paper. He reached down to tear several sheets from the roll.
And that was when he saw it, a single foot poking past the shower curtain, its heel resting gently on the edge of the tub at an odd angle. It was white and wrinkled with yellowing but well-manicured nails, the details of the appendage clear against the light blue of the tub and shower curtain.
The foot hadn’t been there when he had entered. Jamie was sure of it. The bathroom was small and he would have seen it. Hard to miss a foot. This was just another what-the-fuck moment in a two-day span filled with a dozen such moments.
A primal part of Jamie’s mind, the ancient part that still believed in wrathful gods and ghostly ancestors, demanded that he turn and run. Forget about cleaning up the toilet and the floor. Forget the sudden migraine he had just experienced. Forget the white foot. Forget the past five minutes. Return to his parents and pretend like nothing had happened.
But the rational part of Jamie’s mind refused to be manipulated by primitive fears. He knew that the foot was not real, could not be real. It was an afterimage, induced by the migraine, and he would not be frightened away by his own mind.
He looked down at the foot. He wanted to touch it, to prove to himself that it wasn’t real. He expected that if he did, his hand would pass right through it and he would feel nothing but the cool acrylic of the tub beneath his fingers. He reached out. But that same primal, paranoid voice which had encouraged him to run only moments ago now stayed his hand, whispered its own advice, pleaded with him to look but not touch because there was a chance that if he did try to touch it, he would feel cool, dead flesh beneath his fingers, and that could easily lead to madness.
He pulled back his hand, didn’t touch the foot. But he didn’t run. Instead, he took a deep breath and grasped the plastic shower curtain in his left hand.
Last chance to run, Jamie boy. Last chance to deny and forget. Last chance to avoid tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Jamie didn’t run. With a mighty sweep of his hand he pulled the curtain aside.
What he saw in the tub made the bile rise in his throat. Made his stomach churn. Made him question the state of his sanity. He resisted the urge to scream as he stared down at the contents of the blue tub, his mind numbed by the horror and impossibility of what he was witnessing.
Anna Whitman’s naked body, her skin as white and wrinkled as that foot that was propped up on the edge, rested in two inches of pink water. More than a dozen gaping stab wounds, each like a little vicious mouth, each still oozing rivulets of blood, stood in stark contrast against the pale flesh. Four in her abdomen, six in her chest, three on her arms, two in her right shoulder. And those were only the wounds Jamie could see; there were possibly—probably—more, just not visible at the moment because of how she was arranged in the tub. Her sagging, wrinkled breasts were mutilated, and a second smile had been carved across her neck, the ragged ear-to-ear slash gently pulsing with blood. Her neck was bent at an impossible angle, and her eyes, blessedly, faced the wall and not the room. A wall that was covered by half a dozen bloody hand prints.
Jamie turned from the corpse, the vision, and fell to his knees before the toilet. He gripped both sides of the rim, ignoring the wetness of his urine which still coated the porcelain and now his knees. Hot tears poured down his cheeks. It’s not real! his mind screamed. It’s just your imagination. Your brain misfiring. There’s nothing there! Real or not, it didn’t matter to that primal portion of his mind that responded to such sights. He felt his stomach revolt, shuddered bit, and braced himself as his fast-food lunch came rushing back up in a burning torrent. He vomited three times—the last being nothing more than a solid, brutal dry heave—then simply sat there, his head hovering over the bowl, the acrid smell of his puke tickling his nose.
Several moments after the last violent contraction, Jamie began to stand. It took him a whole minute to get to his feet; his legs were as steady and supportive as jello beneath him. Using the toilet for support, he pressed the flusher, watched the remnants of his lunch swirl away. It was a disgusting sight but it was a distraction. Every moment he waited to look back at the bathtub was another moment his brain had to correct itself. He watched as the toilet emptied, watched as it refilled. And finally, having nothing left to watch, knowing he couldn’t put it off any longer, he slowly looked back to the bathtub.
It was empty.
There was no
body, no blood, no handprints. No Grandma Anna. Nothing but a spotless blue tub. Jamie sighed as his heart slowed, returned to normal.
He swallowed hard, tore several pieces of toilet paper from the roll, then proceeded to clean up the mess he had made on the toilet and the floor. He dabbed at his knees, knowing that nothing short of a good wash would get rid of those stains. He flushed away the soiled toilet paper then returned the shower curtain to its closed position. He peeked behind after pulling the curtain closed, just to be sure.
The tub was still empty.
Jamie turned to the small sink and turned on the cold water.
What the fuck is happening to me, he thought. I’m falling apart. He took a long, appraising look at himself in the mirror. He barely recognized himself. His skin color was normally on the lighter side but he was far from being pasty. But the face that looked back at him in the mirror was pale, ashen, drained of all color. Bags darker than what he normally sported after a night of little sleep hung heavy beneath large, bloodshot eyes. He looked like a corpse. He couldn’t go back out looking like this. His parents would know something was wrong and he didn’t feel like answering questions at the moment.
He grabbed one of the white hand towels from a hook to the right of the sink and tossed it onto his right shoulder. He bent over the sink and cupped his trembling hands under the running water. It was ice cold, as he had hoped. He closed his eyes and tossed several handfuls onto his face. The frigid water had the desired effect, shocking his system and clearing from his mind the nightmare of the last several minutes. He finally lifted his head from the sink and dried his hands with the towel, his eyes still closed tight against the dripping water. He pressed the towel against his face, drying his forehead and cheeks, his lips and eyelids. Feeling momentarily refreshed, Jamie pulled the towel from his face and looked into the mirror, hoping his little bath had returned some color to his pallid features.
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