by Austin,Robin
“Goodbye, Eunice. It was nice to see you again.” I don’t look at her before going to the door. I don’t want to see that bend neck again, those crazy-lady eyes, the damage that causes her to wear a perpetual smile that isn’t a smile at all.
“Yellow.”
“What?” My breath draws back in my throat and the word comes out like a hiccup.
“Yellow is my favorite color… and blue.” Her words are soft, but not whispered, and tinny as if teetering on the verge of hysteria.
It’s seven minutes to three. Palmer will come unglued if I don’t call right on time, but I can’t stop staring at Eunice, still in that same painful position.
“You do... you do understand me—”
“Bye, Jan.”
“You know me, you know—”
“Bye, now.”
“Bye… goodbye, Eunice.”
Chapter Twelve
§
I rush down the corridor and wave to the desk nurse, who I hope will press the buzzer for my quick exit. It’s already three o’clock, but she finishes a call before letting me out. I’m still trying to catch my breath while waiting for Palmer to come on the line. She keeps me waiting long enough to not only calm my breath but think through my conversation.
I’ve never been good at snap decisions. I’m a debater, internally anyway. A weigher of all sides of an issue, a pros and cons list maker. I swear by sleeping on things. To think something as simple as the color yellow, a few words spoken, could scatter my plans like a puzzle in a wind storm is unfathomable.
Editor-in-chief approach, I remind myself but that isn’t good enough. Palmer and even Rodham have their own agendas, and despite spewing good intentions, neither agenda has anything to do with Eunice.
Matilda’s words ring more true to me than anyone’s including my father’s: If you must help Eunice, you must. Okay, I’m taking those words out of context, but who’s ever helped Eunice? Nobody according to Matilda, according to me… and she’s in there. She’s real and she’s really in there… almost trusting me enough to come out. Almost—
“Yes, hello Melissa.” Palmer’s voice is rushing around in my brain, trying to find neurons that will decipher what the hell’s wrong with her now. Apparently it’s me. She’s demanding to know why I’m asking Rodham to sign a release to obtain thirty year old medical records.
I check my notes and see that I failed to include a bullet point for Rodham squealing on me. I blather about journalistic protocol and get another earful about wasting her time and expensables. I like her a hundred times less than I did before.
When she finally finishes her tirade, I hit her with the cold hard facts of the possible pregnancy of her sample and possible killing of that sample’s baby.
Journalists are taught to be tough, at least at the university level. I was taught to be tough. Don’t back down, the professors warned. Remember people won’t always tell the truth. Sometimes you have to force it out of them. Putting them on the defense is the best way to get them to say exactly what they never planned on saying. Fight for the story at all costs.
That works in LA and probably every other big city, but my New England temperament clicks the off button when I get close to torpedo mode. Palmer has found my on button.
I don’t know if she’s busy with another lackey, seething under her breath, or tasting a dose of bitter reality, but the line is silent and I’m not blinking first. The definition of tough is relative.
“How credible is this Matilda person?”
I start to say alter personality, but it’s too much effort. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Eunice is barely talking and Rodham doesn’t seem to know much about either. I still have the nurses to interview, and I have a lead with some church members. I’m meeting with them on Wednesday.”
I can’t believe what I just said. Not the slightly fabricated lead– that’s just part of the job. But the fact that I’m practically pouring maple syrup over my pancake dinner surprises even me.
“Of course,” I say, before she can agree with my newly skewed position, “it might be wiser to request a different patient to interview. Like I said, Dr. Rodham isn’t fully informed about Ashland’s history, Eunice, or Matilda. He wants the same positive article you do, I’m sure if you two discussed the matter—”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll take care of this. Stay in town another day, but don’t go back to Ashland. Don’t talk to anyone at all about any of this. Go shopping or something– don’t expense it. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon. We may reschedule the interviews. I’ll run what you’ve told me by Rodham. Unless he has information to the contrary, we may go with another approach.”
Palmer spits words like shell strikes but she’s twitchy too, as much as her fossilized exterior allows. She barely finishes her last sentence before disconnecting.
I’m relieved and feeling a little cocky. I not only put her in her place, I may have saved her ungrateful ass. Problem is, where does that leave Eunice? The luxury of basking in my cockiness is short lived; so might be this assignment, and that sad truth doesn’t shock me. It wouldn’t be the first one that ejaculated prematurely.
In hindsight, I don’t know why The Herald kept me on as long as they did. I was the first to go as soon as digital began its takeover of paper news. As soon as keywords and likes and shares all steered facts and fairness and reliability in different directions. I was the first to go, but at least they let me stay as long as they could stand me.
“It isn’t that you’re unlikeable,” my editor had said, then mumbled something about how it was more like I was lifeless. I’m not sure which L-word was more painful. “Maybe the news game isn’t for you,” he’d said. That one was devastating and not something I told my father. Besides, I knew he was right. I, that me, wasn’t in any game at all.
The Ashland molestation case was the first hard-hitting story I’d been assigned. I wasn’t qualified to cover it, not in the way The Herald wanted it covered. Not in the way any paper would want it covered.
Halfway through the trial, they sent a more experienced reporter to finish the job. Pity on the part of my editor was the only thing that let me save face. I was allowed to stay through the end of the trial and contribute to the coverage’s conclusion. It was pitiful. I was pitiful.
After I returned home, I was assigned the dreaded neighborhood stories: a golf course opening, Mildred Thompson’s ninetieth birthday, the grade school’s holiday pageant, and of course, the psychics of Salem.
A year or so after Kaufman’s trial, I swallowed my pride and went to interview the psychics. The witches had been done to death, so the paper’s editor thought the psychics would be a fun twist on the annual fair.
I still remember the woman with the long black hair, cliché purple velvet turban, and nose rings whose booth I sat at for a reading. But it is her words not her that I remember now. Ashes cross the land, a wee one’s plea not heeded. You will go back.
I’d smiled at her mystical yet spooky revelation, asked my questions, and wrote my article, which had not one word about that wee one.
For a short time, I saw a therapist but she seemed as clueless as me about me. It wasn’t fair to her because I never told her everything. That was two years after Rick and I got married. A time when I should have been enjoying wedded bliss.
I told the therapist about how disjointed I’d felt in LA, how I’d bungled coverage of the trial, the public humiliation of failure, the head injury I still couldn’t recall, the pressure to have children, Rick’s silence.
I had a long check list to explain my inertia, my ineptness. What else could I do? I thought I was cracking up, and I couldn’t admit that. I couldn’t admit that I saw shadows. That I’d been seeing them since shortly after my fall, but that it was at Ashland where they took form.
After Ashland, I stopped telling the doctors that the shadows were dark patterns dancing between the orbs, or hazy lines that formed when I moved too fast. I didn’t mention the ob
scure shapes that slipped quickly in chiaroscuro, more brilliantly than by the brush of da Vinci. After Ashland, I told no one that the shadows walked on two feet, watched me with black eyes, reached out their hands to take mine.
One night, I searched online for a diagnosis that I could live with. I found pareidolia. Shadow people, man in the moon syndrome. I knew it wasn’t real. Really, I knew this. I also knew I wasn’t alone and hadn’t been for years.
Then as now, I’m silent. I’ll tell no one that when I looked at Eunice lying on her bed with her neck painfully torqued and her body as still as a corpse, that beside her lay a tiny shadow. A shadow with little hands and feet. A shadow that took comfort in Eunice’s stillness, a stillness that only a mother would know so necessary.
No matter what story is written, at the end of the day, after Ashland’s lights have all been turned off, I’ll stay silent to ensure they still open the doors and let me out.
On Tuesday, I take Palmer’s advice and go shopping. Not to the Ruston Mall, which is little more than a shopping center, but out to the Old Ruston Highway. A quiet country road lined with antique and souvenir shops, fruit stands, and an artists’ colony that’s tucked into the woods.
I’m seriously admiring an herb basket when I hear someone calling my name. That’s another thing about small towns: once you meet someone, you know them for life. Shirley from the Methodist Church is waving and coming my way with a smile so wide I can’t help but smile back.
“Jan, I’m so glad I ran into you. Oh, that’s a lovely basket.” She rummages in her extra large bag and produces a slip of paper. “I was going to give this to you on Wednesday, but here you are so I’ll give it to you now.”
I recognize the name right away, Martha Blackwell.
“I found her in an old guest book. Her and Bob weren’t regulars, but their niece Arlene is one of our members. As soon as I saw Arlene’s name– known the woman for ages, lives out on Pine Ridge? Oh, anyway, I gave her a call. Bob died some years back, but Martha’s still going strong.”
Shirley pokes at the writing on the note, which I can’t make out. “Now she’s a little senile, but Arlene says she has her good days too. I know she’ll enjoy a visit and a chance to reminisce about Ashland.
“You know I feel so bad that we stopped doing our outreach visits there. After the trial and all, well, we just stopped and for no gosh darn good reason. I’m not trying to make excuses because that was so long ago. It’s just not worth the waste of words to try. But I do plan on speaking to Pastor about those good folks, and I have you to thank for bringing it to my attention. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to form a ministry group and make regular visits out there.”
Shirley waves to a few women who are watching us before telling me she has to run. She says she’ll see me at the pancake dinner tomorrow, and I don’t say otherwise.
After heading towards her friends, she turns back. “I think you should talk to Martha. Arlene thinks so too.” She says this with her eyes and nose crunched painfully as though she’s trying to see from a distance, a far greater one than the few feet between us. I tell her I will, and I almost mean it.
It’s dark when I take the Old Ruston Highway back to town and my hotel. Besides the herb basket, I bought Eunice a very bohemian blue and yellow dress from a very underage looking girl at the artists’ colony– a departing gift that I hope to give soon.
I’ve checked my phone a half dozen times for a call from Palmer– sending me packing, I suspect. I hope? She hasn’t called, and just as well because I had no intention of making a nighttime drive home.
At the hotel, I eat dinner in the bar and by my third gin and tonic, I’m searching for Shirley’s note in my bag. It doesn’t take long to convince myself that the smartest thing to do tomorrow is to drive to the Sunset Nursing Home to talk to Martha Blackwell, and if she’s having one of her good days, maybe find out why Shirley and Arlene think I should.
Chapter Thirteen
§
Palmer did her homework on me as well as my coverage of the Ashland trial. On the latter, I give her a D minus for not discovering I’d blown the assignment. She made it very clear that I wasn’t to write a single word about that tabloid rubbish, as she called it. I agreed the less said the better, for an entirely different reason.
The first time I saw shadows at Ashland, one shadow actually, was in a corridor on the west end of the facility. This was where the older patients were housed, back when they kept people separated by age and race and capriciously determined levels of insanity. I’d been granted permission to interview one of the Jane Does that Kaufman was accused of raping. She was the oldest of the five, whose name I was not given.
One of the nurses escorted me and stayed in the room while I asked Jane Doe number three, how she was doing, how she felt about what had happened to her, and made other intrusively distasteful and naïve inquiries.
All I remember about the woman was that she was nervous, inside and out. My tone was that of an impassioned reporter directed to a woman whose anxiety level was so turbulent she could barely stay seated, let alone answer my questions.
After I’d botched the interview, I went with the nurse back to the lobby. In that long corridor is where I saw the shadow. It crossed in front of us, leaping like a gazelle from one side of the hall to the other, appearing and disappearing through the walls.
With a frenzied pitch, I’d asked the nurse if that was one of the patients. I knew it wasn’t. She looked at me in an understanding way; a practiced face to turn agitation to calm. “Where?” she’d asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
I weighed revealing the depths of my fright versus the absurdity of saying I’d seen a black silhouette with lips that spread wide in a silent laugh. “Just a shadow,” I’d said, with a girlish giggle.
When I saw another shadow while interviewing the visiting director the following day, I jumped and asked the doctor if he’d seen that. I was twenty-three years old, stressed out, and genuinely terrified by then. The doctor, a serious but kind older gentleman, had a nurse bring me a cup of tea. Later he walked me to my car, later still he called The Herald.
My editor sent Jimmy Paine to rescue the story. “Boss said you’re seeing ghosts.” He teased like a big brother would tease a younger sibling. But Jimmy wasn’t teasing, he was stepping up to the plate, swinging the bat in my direction, and knocking me out of the park. James Paine is a TV anchor now with a pretty boy face, killer smile, winning on-air personality, and a sociopath’s determination.
I had no worthwhile explanations for what had happened, not that I wanted to share anyway. I’d freaked out at the Asylum. I’d let the decay and gloom and hopelessness of Ashland shove me sideways– according to those who whispered loud enough for me and everyone else to hear. But when the once fluid forms I’d grown somewhat accustomed to turned tangible, I knew a gateway had opened. I realized the blurry charcoal vapors were no longer on the outskirts of my vision, but solid and lucid and motivated.
I’d dared to hope that in coming back to Ashland all these years later that I would confirm I’d been both young and befuddled. I’d declare the hallways shadow-free and close the gateway for good. Not only was that not happening, the gateway had become a tunnel and it was sucking me through.
The next morning, I find a message from Palmer telling me she’ll let me know first thing tomorrow whether I should proceed. Rick left an early morning message as well asking what day I’d be coming home. I decide to let him wonder awhile and call the Sunset Nursing Home instead.
The receptionist is delighted that Mrs. Blackwell will be having a visitor. I lie and tell her I met the woman years ago, drop Shirley’s and Arlene’s names and, of course, the church’s as any good reporter would do to get the story.
Ruston is small in population but not in acreage. It would make a good size city if fully inhabited, but it’s mostly cow pastures and rural roads. Sunset is a half-hour’s drive north. I’m now just one direction short of co
vering the entire town.
I find the nursing home after traveling down a long two-lane road lined with birch trees. Sunset is a cheery pastel single-story building with expansive windows and white curtains, all drawn open. The grounds are lush green and generously peppered with flowering plants and comfy outdoor furniture in tidy open arched enclosures. It’s a thousand times more cheerful than Ashland.
There are no iron gates or nurses who must be cajoled into opening the door. The lobby is blindingly bright, the walls a soft rose, the carpet a trendy abstract design. The smell of old and ill is masked with understated mint and vanilla.
The receptionist greets me with a wide smile and helpful attitude. I’m asked to wait in the community room where I find residents playing cards, knitting, and watching TV. Laughter dominates. After a young woman in a floral leotard announces yoga classes, cheers erupt and the room quickly thins, leaving a few of the quieter residents.
Martha Blackwell is delivered to me in a wheelchair, her eyes look tired but her smile is genuine, and I feel guilty about my reporter’s lies. Once we exchange pleasantries, I feel compelled to confess my half-truths about how I found her, about Ashland and Eunice. This relaxes Martha and she tells me she’s relieved I’m not a black hole in her expanding universe of fading stars. I like her even more.
“Of course I remember Eunice Cohoon,” she says. “Odd looking woman with those dish plate eyes and that loppy jalopy smile. Stuck in that same position for who knows how long or what reason. I eventually got used to it, but she scared the dickens out of me a time or two.”
I try to shift the conversation to Matilda, but Martha is having none of it. She’s filled with advice about how to treat Eunice, the still young girl she recalls.
“You have to win her trust. Take her outdoors, she loves the fresh air. Offer her your arm. If she takes it great, if not, don’t touch her. She’s damaged goods, treat her gently. You should bring her things, she has so few, and sweets. She loves those and she’ll eat anything you give her. Oh, but that was many years ago. She was barely a teenager back then. I imagine she’s changed, as we all have.”