by Ronald Malfi
Doctor Carlos Mendes, a fresh smattering of chalky vomit on the front of his white lab coat, washed his face and hands in the men’s room of the Intensive Care Unit at NYU Downtown Hospital. He was thirty-seven, looked fifty, and felt like he was seventy. He hadn’t seen the underside of his eyelids in roughly forty hours, hadn’t curled up behind Marie, a single arm draped over her slumbering form, in what seemed like weeks.
He dried his face and hands with paper towels from the dispenser, then proceeded to rub off as much of the vomit from his lab coat as he could.
There was much traffic in the hallway of the ICU. Three gunshot wounds, eleven auto accident victims, a dozen heart attacks and embolisms, a plethora of near-suicides—pill-poppers, jumpers, inhalers, and a variety of creative self-inflicted gun wounds and knife mutilations. The ICU could beat you to hell and back, if you only let it—Mendes knew this and accepted it the way a fireman tolerates heat, and never allowed it to overwhelm him. A little vomit on a lab coat meant nothing in the whole scheme of things. Sleep, in essence, was the same. Really, what did sleep mean? Shut your eyes for five minutes in the cafeteria then jerk awake again seconds before you planted your cranium in a bowl of rice pudding. It was a perpetual process, a revolving circus carousel.
Mendes checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to have missed dinner but still early enough to make love to his wife. He grabbed a cup of canned fruit and a plastic fork from the nurse’s station, popped the top and forked some chilled pear cubes into his mouth. Deborah tossed a few clipboards on the desk and smiled wearily at him.
“You about closing shop?” she asked him.
“Got about ten more minutes,” he said, flipping through the clipboard charts. “I’ll make rounds, grab a burger from the cafeteria, then head straight home. I feel like I could sleep for a month.”
“You and me both,” Deborah said, disappearing behind a wall of thick files wedged into flimsy manila folders.
A clipboard under his arm and the can of diced fruit up to his face, he moved down the corridor, absently avoiding traffic. He stopped outside Room 218 and peered down at the chart—Nellie Worthridge. Cerebral thrombosis. Still unconscious.
He pushed open the door and stepped inside, the hiss-and-pull of the old woman’s respirator the only sound filling the room. Her stunted form beneath the bed sheets reminded him of her handicap, and he thought, Yes, that’s right, you’re the poor old thing with no legs. It was clinical, yes, but it was too impossible to remember everyone by name. Particularly the unconscious ones.
Setting his fruit up on the table beside the bed, he checked the old woman’s blood pressure and examined her papillary response while thinking about the smooth brown slope of Marie’s back as she lay in bed, and the perfumed scent of her thick, black hair. How long had it been since he’d crept up behind her and nestled his face in that hair?
Tonight, he promised himself, checking off Room 218 on the clipboard chart.
The old woman’s eyes flipped open. The blood pressure monitor above the bed began whirring. The woman’s mouth began working silently while her spotted and bony hands clutched blindly at the bed sheets. Startled, Mendes backed up a step and stared down at the woman who had been completely unconscious two seconds before.
Like a mechanical puppet, Nellie Worthridge snapped upright in bed, her eyes suddenly very wide and glassy, the sclera of each eye tinged egg-yolk yellow. The machines above her head continued to whir while the respirator sped up to double-time. Before Mendes could react, the old woman shot her right hand out (Mendes had time to catch a glimpse of the loose flap of dangling skin swing out from her upper arm) and blindly grasped the fruit cup from the table beside her bed. Syrupy juice spilled across the table as she shook the contents out and yanked the plastic fork from the cup. With a speed uncommon to someone of her age (not to mention a recent stroke victim), she brought the fork up in front of her and, without looking at it, proceeded to break the plastic tines off the fork with her other hand.
Carlos Mendes snapped back into reality, dropped the clipboard, and rushed to her bedside. He rested a hand on both her shoulders and gently began easing her back down onto the bed while yelling for a nurse. With all the commotion in the hallway someone had to hear him.
Pupils dilated and staring straight through Mendes and at the ceiling, the old woman’s hand shot out again and sent the plastic fork sailing across the room. It clattered against the door just as it was swung open, two young nurses rushing in.
“Let’s get her down,” he called to them, the old woman already becoming docile beneath his grip. Her eyes eased closed again. “Her blood pressure just shot through the roof.”
One of the nurses plunged a syringe into the old woman’s arm but by that time, Nellie Worthridge was already out, her respiration slowly returning to normal.
“The hell happened?” one of the young nurses asked.
Mendes didn’t answer her. Massaging his forehead with one hand, he bent and picked up the dropped clipboard, then slowly moved across the floor toward the door. Looking down, he saw the broken fork by his shoe. Three of the four prongs had been busted off, and he had time to think, How incredibly bizarre is that? I swear, with everything I’ve ever seen in all my working years, that was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever witnessed.
He stared down at the fork for longer than he should have, perplexed by it on a level that he shouldn’t have been. It made no sense.
How strange.
Yet by the time he got home and made love to his wife, he had forgotten all about it.
Chapter Five
It had started to rain when Josh put her into a cab to send her off to the airport. Before closing the door on her, he said, “Will you make me a promise?”
“What?” she said.
“Will you give me a call at some point while you’re away? Just, you know, so I know you’re doing all right.”
She smiled wearily. “I’ll find a phone if I have to.”
Josh shut the door.
The cab ride to JFK felt too long. She watched the cool evening rain splash against the windows of the cab while the cabdriver listened to a news radio show, the volume turned low. To keep her mind off her sister (and off the unexplainable tumult in her gut) she flipped through one of the art books she’d taken off her bookshelf and brought with her. But the distraction didn’t last long, and soon she found herself trying to summon the image of her childhood home in her head, to picture it as it had been before she went away.
And why did I go away, anyhow? She couldn’t remember. It was something, and something big, but I can’t remember anything about it for the life of me.
Becky had been only five years old when Kelly finally left the house to stay at the hospital. Her stay was only supposed to be temporary, until she was able to regain her composure, but she had wound up staying for three years. In fact, thinking back, she found it easier to recall her stay at the hospital than her childhood at the house.
Oh, what a bunch of garbage. Let’s just call a spade a spade. The “hospital” was an institution. Just like the “compound” is really just a house.
Alabaster mortar and puke-green cinderblock walls. Fluorescent tube lighting and gray linoleum hallways. Wire-mesh windows and uniform bedclothes, where every bedroom looked like a carbon copy of each other. Three years. She was eighteen when she finally left, legal adult age to sign herself out. And after that, she didn’t go back to the house, to her parents’ compound. No—after that, she went out on her own, fell into a hasty marriage that ended in divorce, and spent the last few years of her life in Manhattan with very little memory of her childhood and the events that led her down such a path. And that was fine, because until a month ago she had no desire to recall her childhood, her parents or even Becky. She’d even kept Collin’s last name.
Kelly Rich is better than Kelly Kellow any day, she rationalized. I don’t sound like some ridiculous fairytale character anymore.
She’d
met Collin in New Hampshire, where she moved after leaving the institution. Even back then it had been her intention to eventually take a shot at New York City, but she decided to take a job as a receptionist at an independent publishing house in Concord which she had been told about by a warm-hearted young nurse at the institution. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was a responsibility she’d never had and attacked the opportunity with gusto. There she met Collin Rich. He was twenty-five then and an in-house editor for the company. Handsome, intelligent, funny, Kelly quickly fell in love with him. In hindsight, Kelly supposed her initial attraction to him (and their subsequent engagement) was something she needed rather than something she wanted. But at the time, it seemed the best way to overcome the embarrassment and solitude of the years spent at the institution.
I don’t want to think about Collin, either. In her head, everything just seemed connected to the same invisible hub, the same unremembered yet uncomfortable childhood. And that video, that pale face reflected in the glass of Nellie’s oven? Was I just seeing things, was I just imagining it or was that reflected face really there?
For the briefest of moments she feared she was cracking up again.
This is what it’s like living on the edge.
The cab pulled into the buzzing hub that was JFK International Airport and, after some driving confusion, the driver let her out. Armed with a single duffel bag, she hurried through the terminal, again feeling the sudden need to urinate. She reached the reception desk and gave her name to the attendant behind the counter.
After a few moments of silence from the perky blond attendant, she turned to Kelly and said that she was not registered for any flight leaving this evening.
“I have to be,” she said. “Are you sure? Are you checking everything?”
The attendant looked a little annoyed, all perkiness suddenly gone. “I’m checking, ma’am, there is no Kelly Rich anywhere in our system.”
“It was left for me by a Jeffery Kildare. I called earlier today and they said they confirmed Mr. Kildare’s ticket purchase.” Then it dawned on her. “Try under Kelly Kellow.”
Exasperated, the attendant retyped the name. The moment it appeared on the screen, the attendant perked up again. “Yes, here it is, Kellow.”
There’s no escaping it, is there? she thought. We can forget about our past but our past will always come back to bite us in the ass eventually.
She urinated twice in the terminal’s restroom, once more while waiting at her gate before boarding the airplane, and a fourth time while on the plane before take-off. Rain sluiced against the side window and she pulled the shade down over the pane. After the plane was in the air, the sensation to urinate subsided and she tried to soothe herself by listening to some soft jazz through a pair of airplane headphones.
She fell asleep midway through the flight.
And awoke to the sound of a million ball bearings crashing down on a tile floor.
Her eyes sprung open and it took her a couple of seconds to realize she was on an airplane. And not ball bearings at all—rather, large clusters of hail smashing against the window near her head. She slid the plastic window shade up and stared at the blackness on the other side of the glass. The hail was so thick, it was nearly impossible to make out the collection of city lights on the ground.
The captain came on the intercom then, informing everyone that all was fine and they would be landing shortly. And as if in spite of the captain’s statement, the plane surrendered in a great heave and shuddered violently. Kelly sat with her hands gripping the armrests, her stare straight ahead, until the shower of hailstones finally tapered off and she could make out the runway lights through the porthole window.
A large black man was waiting by the baggage claim holding a placard that read KELLY KELLOW. He was an easy seven feet tall and nearly busting out of his navy blue chauffer uniform. His eyes were narrow and sober and she caught him staring at her through the mob of people before she even recognized her name (my old name, she thought passively) on the placard. As if he knew immediately who she was.
“Miss Kellow.” His voice was deep, like a rumbling truck. He made no attempt to gather her bag from her. Seeing him jarred her momentarily, and she paused just before him. Some lost memory struggled to surface.
“Hello.”
“DeVonn Rotley, ma’am.”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember.”
“Ma’am?”
“I remember you,” she said. “From when I was a child.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “This way.” And he turned as if on a pivot and began striding through the wedge of travelers like an African elephant marching through a field of overgrown grass.
Outside was brutally cold. The hailstorm had apparently hit the airport pretty heavy; the tarmac and parking lots were already crystallized and even the roof of the black Cadillac that Rotley led her to was covered in the tiny white balls.
In silence, Rotley pulled onto the highway and headed west. Kelly, seated in the back seat, stared out the side window. They crossed Lake Champlain, the moon glowing over the still waters, and headed north on Route 9.
“You never left,” she said at one point. It was not a question and it was just barely directed at the driver. It was spoken, she understood just as the words came from her mouth, more so to enable her to recapture some visage from her youth—something, anything—and to move past the forgetting and the not remembering and to arrive at something of substance and familiarity. “You’ve been working for my father for all these years?” She knew this yet could hardly remember any of it.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s good to see you.” And it was a stupid thing to say, she knew, because it really felt like nothing to see him, and she thought he knew it.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Cold tonight.”
“Hmmm.”
“Winter’s come early this year,” she said to Rotley, not wanting to talk about what was really on her mind.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We hit the hailstorm just before landing.”
“Yes,” said Rotley. From the back, he looked like one of those giant statues on Easter Island.
“Is my sister all right?” Okay, so she couldn’t avoid asking the question. From the moment she heard Jeffery Kildare’s voice on her answering machine, Becky had been the only thing she could think about. Becky…and maybe that pale reflected figure in Nellie Worthridge’s kitchen, the figure from the video…
“I’ve not been detailed on the situation, ma’am,” Rotley intoned. “My apologies.”
Frowning, she slumped back against the seat and turned to stare out the window again. Champlain was gone, hidden behind a blind of black trees. The further north they drove the denser the forestry became, and soon it was almost impossible to even see the moon through the tinted windows. It was cold, even inside the Cadillac, and she leaned forward and peered at the dashboard up front. Rotley drove without the heater on. There was a bloom of frost on the windshield in front of Rotley’s view and each time the giant man exhaled, a cloud of vapor billowed out.
After twenty minutes they passed a hand-carved road sign, half hidden by underbrush and masked in darkness, with one word carved onto it: SPIRES. The roadway deteriorated into a scored dirt path, crunchy with frost and rock. Still, the woods grew denser. A heavy ground fog now impeded her view, and she turned away from the window.
“How did my father track me down?”
“I’ve not been properly informed about that, ma’am,” Rotley rumbled again, briefly glancing at her reflection in the Cadillac’s rearview mirror.
“Who is Jeffery Kildare?”
“Mr. Kellow’s personal assistant.”
“What happened to my sister?”
This time Rotley stared longer at her reflection in the rearview. Then: “I’m sure I don’t know. My apologies again, ma’am.”
Yes, I’m sure you don’t know. I’m sure you’re just as blind
as everyone else my father deals with. No questions asked, just do your job like a good little robot and everything will be just fine.
She turned and looked back out the window. Spires, New York was perhaps the darkest place on Earth. She watched the tops of the trees blow in the strong wind (she could hear it blowing strong against the Cadillac, could feel the difficulty Rotley was having keeping the vehicle straight and steady). It was a fairytale forest, deep and enchanting, just like a small child’s dreams. And nightmares.
Something about a dog, she thought suddenly. I remember something about a dog in those woods, something about a dog and it was hurt and I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I know something did. Or maybe I’m just recalling some ancient, forgotten dream.
The car twisted along through the woods for perhaps another ten minutes. Soon, the forest receded and a series of squat houses, almost hut-like in appearance, materialized through the fog. These were new; Kelly did not remember them from her youth…although there was a lot she could not remember about her childhood. Like the memory of the dog—and what had that been about?—everything seemed like just a half-memory, like a memory that was not truly hers, but maybe someone else’s she had been allowed to borrow.
“Who lives here?” she asked Rotley. “I don’t remember houses being here.”
“I’m not familiar with anyone around here,” was all the driver said.
Thanks, Shaft, you’ve been real helpful. Much obliged.
And then—there it was. Leaning forward in her seat and peering through the Cadillac’s windshield, Kelly could see the looming monstrosity atop its grand sloping precipice, brooding and haunted against the backdrop of the pitch-black night. The compound, she thought, hating that word even as her mind brought it up. It was almost surreal, this Frankenstein image, this postcard from a distant world, and she found she could not take her eyes off it as they approached. The house’s silhouette was all spires and points and arrowhead roofs—something out of an architect’s nightmare. Like a clawed hand ripping out of the ground, reaching for heaven.