by Brian Hodge
"See who I've brought you, Kraft? Don't you want to say hello?"
He may have guessed by Ariel's tone, then, who it was and even the unholy spectacle she had prepared for him, and maybe that was why he refused to lift his face from his chest. But when he heard her voice—a rag of the silken fabric that had been Danielle's soft voice, croaking his name—he slowly raised his eyes.
Five intuitive females, with their lifetimes of reading emotions, were riveted on him. They pulled in every nuance of color, avoidance, pace, breathing, posture. But Kraft Olson stared through the terrible corruption of his once and forever love as though waiting placidly for a distant star.
Chapter 11
The jaw had been torn away, that was all. That explained why Denny Bryce hadn't been able to reconstruct the thing's mouth when he had stared down at the remains in the heart-shaped ivy alongside the road. Not because it hadn't had a mouth to begin with. That was clearly impossible. But he wouldn't mind having another look at it. Just to be sure. He hadn't actually picked it up and checked the first time. It was a bloody mess, after all, and the flies were swarming. And when it had loped across in front of his car, that was inconclusive too. How could you tell anything when you were fighting to avoid running down an animal with your car?
So now he was driving past the spot again on the way to New Eden, and he slowed and surveyed the ivy but couldn't pick out the place. Things didn't last long out here in nature's cemetery. No coffins, no embalming. Lots of undiscriminating appetites in the adjacent woods. So be it.
He feathered the accelerator faster. A minute later the driveway appeared, and he drove too fast up its shattered surface. The archipelago of asphalt hammered the suspension on his Tercel, making it hard to focus on the farmhouse. It looked so alien and impenetrable. Was his father really in there?
The link between them was forged of something he could follow to hell and back if need be, he thought, but he had an uneasy feeling that his old man was suffocating in that shadowy mausoleum of cellars and high-ceiling rooms. He still thought of him as sitting in the living room of their Cape Cod in Little Canada, his mother in the kitchen or putzing in the garden. In the evenings his parents had always been together, his father's head on his mother's lap on the couch, and she making her gentle outpouring of thoughts and feelings for the day while he listened. That was how they never lost track of each other. As simple and profound as that. How could one exist without the other? So it was natural that he, the son who had grown up witnessing that, had to adjust to a change of environment now, just like his father did.
But there was something different about the farmhouse today, some shade or texture. Denny swung around in a tight turn just short of the willow, whose nesting birds had taught him their range. As he got out of the car, his gaze went to Paavo Seppanen. He had long since concluded that maintenance was one of Paavo's live-in duties, and the burly Finn was leaning wearily on the porch in long sleeves and bib overalls. The front door banged then and Beverly took two steps out, read in his expression that he had forgotten her cigarettes, turned back.
"Do you like filters?" he called lamely.
She put a hand to her hip and swung around not unlike Quasimodo. "They all have filters these days, unless you want to bring me a joint. Which is fine with me. I'm going to smoke my girdle if I don't find something illegal for my nerves."
"Sorry—"
"Oh, don't be sorry. I don't stand here at the door just waiting for you, you know. Standing there, listening to an old man spit"—she glanced at Paavo in disgust—"and Ruta prattling on about her nightmares. Why should I want to smoke? What I need is a drink. Bring me a five-gallon drum of schnapps and I'll give you a drum roll when you drive up."
"Sorry …" he repeated.
She saw that he was; waved her hand fussily. "Don't mind me. I'm a little nervous, that's all. I'll kill Ruta before nightfall, and then they'll put me in jail where you can buy anything you want."
Denny smiled to the side, and that was when he saw it: the chicken wire over the ground-floor windows. That was what had changed the light hitting the house as he came up the drive. And next to Paavo was a hammer and a coffee tin full of nails. He gave Paavo a flicker of a smile as he gestured toward the windows.
"Birds," Paavo explained, punctuating this with a throat-clearing cough and a glance at Beverly.
"Birds," Denny repeated and couldn't bring himself to break the poetry of that taciturn elucidation by asking him to elaborate.
He found his father curled up on the bed in his room, facing the window. Despite the heat, the old man was wearing a sweater. His left slipper was still on, the other floating in the folds of a thin green blanket.
"You awake, Dad?"
"Huh?" Martin rolled a quarter turn. "Oh." He rolled back, right hand pillowing his cheek. "Good to see you, son."
"Sleepy?"
"Just lazy."
"Not you, old guy. You've done enough in your life to qualify for the Goldbricking Anytime program."
"Want your radio on?"
"No."
"I should bring your TV, but you never watched it at … you never watched it. Do you want me to bring it?"
"Want what?" He rolled onto his back, folded his hands on his chest.
"Your TV."
"No."'
The commercials threw his concentration, Denny knew. He couldn't re-engage the story lines by the time they came back on. Maybe he had trouble seeing too.
"I don't see your glasses, Dad. Ah. Here they are. I'll put 'em right here on the nightstand."
"What is this place?"
"It's called Kenyon New Eden Assisted Living." He went through the litany again, explaining everything as he did at least once a visit, until his words stopped registering. "How's the food?"
"I don't remember."
"Well, I see a tray here. You must have room service whipped into shape, eh? Maybe you'd like to go eat with the others more. Get to know them."
"They're all women here."
"Mostly."
"Beth is dead, isn't she?"
"Yeah."
"That's where I should be."
"You've got a contract to live."
"A contract with who?"
"With God. With me."
"Hmm. Says you. I'm tired of waiting. It doesn't seem fair that everyone else is gone but me."
"Maybe there's a purpose for you being here."
"What purpose?"
"Maybe there's something you have to do. Maybe just be happy with life. Then God will take you home."
"I don't know if I believe in God. Bunch of ghosts floating around. Where would they all fit?"
"Mom believed in God."
"What's that you've got in bed with you?"
The old man lifted his head, looked where Denny was fussing with the covers. Something bright red was nestled on either side of him. Bright red and shiny and—
"Fire extinguishers. Now where did you get those?"
They were the small household kind. Denny thought he had seen one of them in the kitchen. His father was genuinely bewildered.
"I don't know."
"You expecting a fire?"
"Yeah, I guess I am."
"Kidde. Good fire extinguishers, Pop. You steal the best."
"Hmm."
"You need a haircut, old guy. Can't let you go on growing hair faster than me."
"I don't think they do that here, so I'll just have to bring some cigarettes—I mean, scissors. Now's my chance to turn you into a skinhead."
"Your mother's dead, isn't she?"
"Yeah. Yeah, she's dead. She was a great lady, and she lived her life, and you had all there was of it, and someday you'll be together again."
"I hope so." The poignancy of that wish squeezed his words as dry as a whispered prayer and seemed to penetrate the torpor. For a moment he was lucid again. "She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I loved her because her idea of romance was giving, not getting. You don't see that anymore
. These women nowadays—their idea of romance is a man giving to them."
"Tell me about it."
"It's a two-way street."
"Yeah. When a woman gives to a man—afterward, that's called rape."
His father strained to bring him into focus. "Well … they're not all like that, Denny. There's some good ones out there."
"I keep looking."
"You aren't married, are you?" Starting to lose it again.
After a minute Denny reached out to lift the fire extinguishers. "I'd better put these back."
"Why?"
"They belong somewhere else, Dad."
"What about your sister? There might be a fire."
The forever fire, burning since 1956. Denny had been there. Whenever he smelled damp soot wafting out of a fireplace, smoke seared his six-year-old throat again.
Why had his father looked for him first and carried him down the smoky staircase out of the house—because he was the youngest? Is that why Tiffany had to wait? His father had saved Tiffany too; saved her for operations and skin grafts and the disasters of her social life and ultimate damnation.
Denny let the old man hug his fire extinguishers. He sat by the bed until his father's eyes closed and the lids began to pulse and the bewhiskered jaw dropped slightly. Then he gently slid the red cylinders out from the thin green blanket and bore them back to their places. He found a bracket on the wall in the annex corridor, so he left one there, but when he took the other into the kitchen, there was Dana Novicki.
Waggling the extinguisher, he shook his head and gave her a crooked smile. "Besides having a killer right hook, Daddy's a kleptomaniac."
"That's better than a pyromaniac."
"Much better. I looked for you the other day. You were going to turn me down for lunch."
"Was I? It's just so … hard to get away. I don't like to leave here."
"Don't like to, or can't?"
The color in her cheeks flushed quarter-size and her slate blue eyes went flat.
"No one seems to go out around here," Denny said. "Beverly is getting ready to hijack passing cars for cigarettes. Is that a rule or something? Everyone has to stay down on the farm? Ariel told me no one ever took trips from here. She didn't say they couldn't."
"I wouldn't call it a rule. Ariel doesn't like to make things formal like that. But no one wants to disappoint her. She … created this place. She brought us together."
"Not to mention she's strong willed."
"Not to mention."
"So no one wants to cross her."
Dana averted her eyes. He saw that the redness where his old man had poked her was nearly gone.
"We're different here," she said. "Your father is the first one to come in the way he did."
"What way is that?"
"Not someone Ariel knew."
"So it's strictly by invitation only?"
"Yes. Invitation only. Everyone was surprised she let you in."
"I put a little pressure on her, and I met her price."
"Pressure?"
"You seem like such a closed shop, I'm sure she doesn't want anyone raising hell with the regulatory agencies. She must get tax considerations for being an assisted-living facility, and I don't know how much beyond that you've been scrutinized, so I fished in those waters a little. But going into town isn't big in my father's priorities, and I'm not going to rock the boat. The other places I saw were nightmares. This place is almost normal, in an abnormal sort of way."
"Good advice, Denny—about not rocking the boat. I hope for your father's sake you mean it."
"For my father's sake?"
She closed her eyes, shook her head. "I shouldn't have said it that way. Now you think your father might be mistreated. I just mean there are circumstances that are unique to the people here. You don't have to know what I'm talking about. You just have to accept that your father won't ever fit them." She began shelving dishes from the rack in the sink.
"This just gets curioser and curioser. Which way to the Mad Hatter's tea party?"
"Well, Ariel may act like the Queen of Hearts sometimes, but that doesn't mean she should be taken lightly. Far from it. Like I said, we all knew one another before we … came here. We went through a lot together. The Great Depression, the wars—everything since. So we're like an extended family."
"Mother Leppa and her ancient children. Not you, of course. You can't be old enough to remember the Depression."
The laugh reached the surface this time, and the quarter-size splotches on Dana’s cheeks spread to a glow. "A woman doesn't tell her age, thank you."
"Well, whether or not you're too old for me or I'm too old for you, we still should do lunch."
She tossed her hair coquettishly. "Why don't we make it a picnic?"
"Done! I've got a blanket in the car."
"Whoa, whoa—not today."
"When?"
"In a week or two."
"You expecting a long rain?"
"It's buggy out."
"Buggy? Does this have something to do with the chicken wire on the windows? You must have some terribly big insects, if it does. Paavo said it was birds."
She gave him a long patronizing look.
"Okay," he surrendered. "Next week. Next month. Anytime. Surprise me. Do you know where this fire extinguisher goes? And I'm glad your eye didn't swell up."
He went to speak to Ariel then, and he did it in the wrong way, because he marched right up the staircase where he had seen her go, calling as he went, thinking it would be all right—that she had an office or something, or at least that she would come out of one of the rooms when she heard him. But when he reached the third floor, the only thing that came out of a room was the wheelchair that suddenly cut him off.
The man who towered out of the chair looked like he had been wedged into it. He had a massive mane of hair, thick features and big, doughy white fingers that fumbled with the armrests. His lips were cracked and dried, and flakes of skin clung to several days' growth of beard. Only his huge eyes seemed to contain moisture, and they were soulful lakes tinged red, as if something molten churned in their depths. "Who are you?" he wheezed leadenly from papery lungs.
"Denny Bryce. My father lives here. Who are you?"
"Oh. That one. You should get him out."
"Why?"
He tried to lean toward Denny as if to speak confidingly but only succeeded in tilting his shaggy head. "Get the hell out of here, if you want to stay healthy."
Denny pursed his lips. "Why is that? This place seems pretty healthy to me for an old-age home."
"It isn't an old-age home."
"No?"
"It's a nursery."
"A nursery?"
"These people were all dead. I was dead."
Third-floor dementia ward, Denny was thinking, despite what Ariel had led him to believe. He wondered if his father might eventually be brought up here. "Well, I'm glad to see you're alive now."
"You think I don't know how lunatic that sounds?" thudded back through the wheelchair man's crusted lips. "I'm telling you, we've all been brought back."
"From … the grave?"
The abject being in the wheelchair seemed to deflate a little then, breathing an affirmative with such sibilant horror that for a moment Denny Bryce wondered how real his nightmares were. Suddenly the man jerked a quarter turn in the chair and grew so rigid that he could have been having a seizure. Tortured cats and cornered dogs looked like that. Breathing faucally, the red eyes transfixed and slightly averted, it only gradually dawned on Denny that the pitiful wretch was reacting to something behind him.
"Well, I see you've met Thomas," Ariel Leppa crooned. "Isn't he interesting? I've been trying for almost a year now to get him to tell me what it was like to be dead. Sometimes he talks about burying himself. I think they call it delusional psychosis—or some term I can never get straight." Her mellifluous tone suddenly went flat as she warned: "He stays up here because he frightens everyone. And they stay down
stairs."
Denny took a deep breath he didn't know he had been missing and turned around. "I couldn't find Molly, and I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I didn't realize this is off-limits up here."
Ariel gazed at him coldly. "Will you excuse us, Thomas? I'll come see you later. Then maybe we'll rebury you together …"
Her words galvanized the helpless giant in the wheelchair to desperation. "It's a nursery …" he shouted as Ariel led Denny down the hall. "A nursery!"
Ariel closed the door behind them in what was obviously a sewing room, complete with a disused spinning wheel and a slightly more recent Singer treadle machine. "This is why I told you that visitors to New Eden are unsettling, Mr. Bryce. If you insist on coming here to see your father, please keep to the lower level."
"Understood."
"Good. Now what did you want to talk to me about?"
"A phone. I'd like my father to have a phone in his room. I'll pay for the installation and the bills, of course."
The icy look of assessment was back, and he saw that this request too was somehow an intrusion on her space.
"I don't think that will work out."
"Why not?"
"No one here has a phone in their room. I tried to explain that to you when you insisted you wanted your father to live here. I said that we were different, and I admitted that by any standards we are considered isolated. Do you remember? But you said your father would fit in. 'A sanctuary,' I believe you said was what he needed. No stimulation, no interventions. He just needed to be left alone—isn't that right?"
"Right. But I'm not talking about stimulation. If he had a phone, he would only talk to me, and only when I call. I haven't seen him dial a phone for three years. He gets frustrated with the buttons."
"Then it's your need for a phone, not his, and you're not a resident here. I'm afraid I'm going to say no."
"It might mean I wouldn't have to come as often."
He had no intention of cutting back on his visits, and she wasn't fooled. "Nevertheless, no," she said. "It would make the others resentful. Really, Mr. Bryce, you must let me make the choices that will be in our best long-term interests, even if they seem unreasonable to you."