by Ronald Malfi
“You look exhausted, dear,” Glenda said, taking her empty plate to the sink. “You should get some rest.”
“Yeah, I think I will.” She stretched and stood up from the table, kissed Glenda on the cheek. “Despite the circumstances, it’s good to see you again.”
Her words apparently touched the woman, and for a moment Kelly thought Glenda was about to say something, but she didn’t.
Tired, Kelly turned to leave—then stopped in the kitchen doorway.
“Glenda?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Why would Becky’s bedroom door be locked?”
Glenda looked surprised. “The door is locked? I was just in there no more than an hour ago, it wasn’t locked then.”
“Who would have a key?”
“I’m sure there are keys lying around. I don’t see why anyone would lock that door, though. Perhaps your father did it before retiring for the night…”
“Yes,” she said, “maybe he did.”
But why?
Moments later and she was upstairs, standing outside Becky’s closed door. This time there was no blue light glowing from beneath the door. Thinking it odd that the door should be locked, she reached out and grasped the knob again, shook it.
It turned.
What the hell…?
It was as dark as ink inside the room, and about as cold as death. Kelly stepped inside, sliding one hand up along the wall, searching for the light switch. She found it but, at the last second, decided to leave the light off. Instead, she opened the door wider, allowing the light from the hallway to slip inside and illuminate some of the spacious bedroom. It was dark, almost too dark to see anything properly, but Kelly was able to make out the shape of her sister bundled beneath the floral bedclothes on her canopied bed (the bed itself was nearly an exact duplicate of the one in Kelly’s childhood bedroom). Beside the bed, the two large windows were open all the way, and the frigid night wind blew the curtains out in great gusting billows.
Are they crazy? She could catch pneumonia.
In the dark, she went to the windows, pulled them shut and locked them. The curtains fell limp on either side of her. The windows looked out from the right side of the house—all sloping forest and large, angry crags of sandstone. The moon was high and full, glowing on the misty valley below.
As if in a dream, she turned and moved to the side of the bed, her eyes now growing accustomed to the darkness. With the help of the moonlight, she could make out Becky’s face in the dark, and it suddenly occurred to Kelly that she was just as much a stranger to this fifteen-year-old girl as anyone could be. She hadn’t seen nor spoken to her in years, and maybe Becky didn’t even remember her. And if she did, maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe—and this, Kelly abruptly realized, was the most horrifying of all—Becky no longer wanted anything to do with her.
“I didn’t mean to leave you like that.”
But that was not exactly true. The fact was, she hadn’t thought about Becky at all back then. And she certainly hadn’t been an older sister to the girl.
That’s because I was too busy running away from this place to ever look back, to bother seeing anything good that might have been here.
But she had been a child herself, really, and she couldn’t blame herself for those mistakes, could she?
Becky’s face was pale, but even in the moonlight Kelly could see the discoloration of her skin, the places where the bruises had blossomed, where her attacker had left his mark.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “and I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
She reached out and smoothed the girl’s hair off her forehead. She felt so cold. Stepping backward away from the bed, she didn’t want to take her eyes off the unconscious child. This, she was certain, was what it felt like to be a mother. And again, she could clearly see Glenda scooping seeds and slimy guts out of the hole in the top of the pumpkin. So long ago.
Something crunched beneath her foot and she jumped.
She backed up and looked down, saw herself surrounded by a spillage of what appeared to be plastic forks, all strewn haphazardly across the carpet. The broken one—the one she’d stepped on—had splintered into three sharp pieces, like little plastic daggers. Forks. Plastic forks, like booby-traps set into the carpet.
Forks. And on closer inspection, she noticed that each fork only had one tine, and that all the other tines had been broken off. At first, the image simply registered itself as bizarre…but then a moist wave of panic fell over her, and she suddenly felt the burning need to urinate rise up in her bladder, so strong she was hardly able to make it across the carpet without walking bow-legged.
Ready to dash down the hallway to the bathroom, the moment she stepped outside Becky’s bedroom, the sensation to urinate immediately subsided.
That can’t be. How could a feeling that intense just disappear in a flash like that? What’s wrong with me?
She could only stand there in the hallway outside Becky’s room, her feet now planted firmly to the floor, her hands beginning to tremble at her sides. From where she stood, the bedroom was too dark to make out the shape of her little sister sleeping in bed. Instead, everything took on the inarticulate forms of shadowed silhouettes.
It’s just been a long night, whispered a voice inside her head. For some reason, she associated the voice with old Nellie Worthridge. Everything will start making more sense to you in the morning. So go get some sleep.
Closing Becky’s bedroom door and moving quietly down the hallway, Kelly Rich thought she would do just that.
Chapter Seven
Josh Cavey spent the morning working at the bookstore in the Village, and when he finally got home around midafternoon, there were five messages on his answering machine. He listened to all five, and all five were from the same person—some doctor named Mendes from NYU Downtown calling about the patient he’d admitted yesterday, an old woman named Nellie Worthridge. Mendes left his office number, which Josh called only to get his voicemail. Though Mendes did not go into any detail beyond the fact that he had “some questions about Miss Worthridge,” there was an urgency in his voice that made Josh both concerned and a little bit curious. He changed his clothes and grabbed a cab to the hospital.
There, a young nurse directed him out back to a shady little courtyard where Carlos Mendes sat on a weathered bench, smoking a Lucky Strike.
“Doctor Mendes?”
The doctor looked up. He was ageless. There were dark rings around his eyes and his lips were pressed tightly together, almost crushing the cigarette that poked out from between them. Between his knees, he rubbed his hands together nervously, like a child seated outside the principal’s office.
“Yes?”
“I’m Joshua Cavey. Apparently you’ve been calling my apartment all morning…”
“Mr. Cavey.” Mendes was quick to stand, shake his hand. He looked about on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There was a dark coffee stain on the light blue Oxford shirt he wore beneath his white lab coat. Josh could imagine Mendes filling his coffee cup this morning, shaking so badly that he’d spilled roughly half the cup down the front of his shirt. “You didn’t need to come down here, I’m sorry, I just needed to speak with you.”
“It’s all right, I wasn’t busy.” Also, that urgent tone in Mendes’s voice on the machine. Looking at him now, Josh thought that tone fit the man perfectly. “Is something wrong with Nellie?”
Carlos Mendes motioned for Josh to sit down, and they both did. He offered Josh a cigarette, which he declined, and Mendes hurriedly crushed out his old stick and lit a fresh one.
“You are a relative of Miss Worthridge?”
“No.”
“You signed her admittance form?”
“Well, yes. I found her unconscious in her apartment yesterday.”
“So you’re a friend then?”
Josh nodded. “Yeah, I guess you can call me a friend. Is something wrong? Something must be wrong…”
“
Miss Worthridge is stable, Josh,” said Mendes. His eyes darted around the courtyard, refusing to lock a gaze on anything for longer than a millisecond. “She’ll be all right, which is…well, it’s good. The type of stroke she suffered is the most common there is, and although we can’t really do anything to treat it or prevent any more, she should almost fully recover.”
“Almost?”
“Well, for one, there’s the aphasia, the slurred speech. I’ve managed to speak with her a few times, and she does try to communicate, but not without some difficulty. There has also been some paralysis of her left side, particularly her left arm. It’s not total, but it’s severe enough to sufficiently impede her day to day, and I would think she…” He trailed off. Mendes hadn’t called him to discuss Nellie’s recovery, Josh realized. There was something else, something that was nearly driving the poor doctor over the edge.
“What is it?” Josh said. “What’s this about?”
Carefully choosing his words, Mendes said, “The extent of her paralysis wasn’t examined until this morning, before I even arrived. When I saw the chart, the diagnosis was hemiplegia, which is basically the paralysis of one side of the body, and when I later examined her I saw that was true, that her left side—her left arm was…”
“Hold on,” Josh said, “I don’t understand.”
“Me, neither,” said Mendes, and for the first time, the doctor brought his dark brown eyes up to Josh’s, held them there, studied Josh’s face. “Before leaving the hospital last night, I stopped in to check on her and she…it’s bizarre, I know, but she sat straight up in bed, grabbed a can of diced pear cubes from the table beside her, and broke the plastic fork that was in it. She used both hands, Josh. Are you following me? I questioned the staff whether she had another stroke after I’d left for the evening but she hadn’t, there was no medical record of it, and she’s been hooked up to monitors since her admittance. So there’s that. And yes, it’s damn strange, but that’s not the strangest part, not the part that prompted me to call you and leave those messages on your machine.”
He smoked his second Lucky Strike down to the filter, examined the butt, then tossed it on the ground and stomped out the cherry with the heel of his shoe.
“There was a word she continued to say over and over again, mostly in her sleep,” Mendes continued. “At first I thought it was a color she was saying—the color yellow. It’s difficult to make out, what with the slurred speech. When she awoke I asked about it and she didn’t know what I was talking about, but while she napped she began saying it over and over again. In her sleep, she pronounced it repeatedly, almost like a chant, and I thought—yellow? Hello? Jell-O? I didn’t understand. While she slept, I brought in a hand-held tape recorder and recorded it, then brought it around to show some of the nurses. Most of them agreed, after some scrutiny of the tape, that it was actually a name she was saying—‘Kellow.’ Just talking in her sleep, right? So when she awoke later this afternoon I asked her what Kellow meant, who was Kellow…”
Josh waited, but no more came. He urged the doctor along: “What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything, as if she’d never heard of the name but was thinking real long and hard about it…and then she grabbed me real tight around the wrist—grabbed me with her left hand, her paralyzed hand—and looked me right in the eyes and said, in perfectly clear speech, ‘Julian will be born dead.’ Then her voice went up in pitch, almost like a little girl’s, and she yelled, ‘We almost killed that fucking dog!’ Then she fell silent and dropped back down on her pillow, her eyes closing immediately and her hand around my wrist falling limp.”
When Mendes finished, he rubbed his eyes with his fingers and exhaled shakily. Perhaps he was waiting for Josh to contest what he’d just said, or perhaps even react with utter shock or disbelief, but Josh did not. The truth was, Josh didn’t fully understand the gravity of what Mendes had told him. Wasn’t there some sort of delusion that went along with strokes, something Josh’s mom would have called a tumble of loose screws?
Mendes recognized his ignorance. The doctor said, “Josh, people who are paralyzed like that can’t just turn it on and off like a switch. Either they have motor control or they do not. It’s not an option, not like wiggling your damn fingers or choosing the type of tile you want to go on your kitchen floor. For the sake of argument, we’re talking permanent here.”
“All right…”
“Josh, my wife is five months pregnant. If it’s a boy—and I have a strong feeling now that it just might be—we’re going to name him Julian, after Marie’s father.”
Josh just looked at the doctor. In some distant part of his brain, he wondered how old Mendes was. It was nearly impossible to tell for sure. Carlos Mendes, with his dark eyes, dark skin, dark hair, dark aura. This man before him—this doctor—looked very, very frightened.
“I guess,” said Josh, “that I don’t need to ask if you’d previously told Nellie about your son’s name?”
The doctor exhaled with a shudder. “I’m not usually a superstitious man,” Mendes said, his voice quieter now, “but there are some things that can get lodged in the heads of even the most rational and cynical human beings. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“How do you explain it?” Josh asked him—then realized it had been Mendes’s intention to bring him here and ask him that very same question. “I’ve only known Nellie Worthridge for a few months,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “I don’t know how…” But there was nothing he could say.
“Does she have any family that you know of? Any living relatives at all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“How about close friends?”
“I’m not sure.” Then he remembered: “She told me once that she played bridge with group of women on Wednesday nights.”
“Bridge,” Mendes mused. He produced a third Lucky Strike from the pack in his breast pocket, lit it, and inhaled deeply.
“I’d think a doctor would know how unhealthy those things are,” Josh said, trying for levity.
“Knowing and caring are two different things,” said the doctor.
“True,” said Josh. “Could I bum one from you now?”
Forty minutes later, Josh pulled up a plastic folding chair beside Nellie Worthridge’s hospital bed. The old woman was asleep, or perhaps just resting soundlessly, and did not stir when he entered the room and sat down beside her. He watched her for an exorbitant amount of time, watched the reluctant rise and fall of her frail chest, her withered old hands folded neatly atop the bedclothes. Her left hand, he noticed, appeared somewhat gnarled and tense, painfully frozen. The tips of her fingers looked almost blue.
Startling him, a wan smile crept across the old woman’s face.
“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath. Then, in a whisper: “Nellie?”
“Dear?” she whispered back. Her voice sounded strained and was difficult to hear. The left side of her mouth did not move at all. “Dear?”
“Did I wake you?”
Her smiled only widened. Such a crooked, obscene smile, as if half her face was trying to scowl at the same time. Again, when she spoke, it was like she was sucking on a mouthful of chew. “I was just resting my eyes.” And then she opened them.
Why is it, he thought then, that old people’s eyes look so wise? Is it really possible that you can see all the years of knowledge they’ve attained just by looking into their eyes?
“The doctor phoned me,” he told her. “Said you were doing some weird stuff. How you feeling?”
“Could be better.” With some difficulty, she raised her right hand and extended it across her midriff to rest it atop Josh’s own. “Thank you. The nurses told me what happened. Thank you, Josh. Dear.”
“He said you sat up in bed and used your hurt arm.”
“I know.”
“You remember?”
“I remember him telling me that’s what happened.”
“But you don’t
remember?”
She looked past him and at the window on the far wall. The blinds were pulled, but she stared at it nonetheless. And after two minutes, as if she’d summoned it, it began to rain. Josh heard it begin to patter gently on the glass.
“It’ll turn to snow before dark,” the old woman muttered, more to herself than to him. “Been around long enough to know such things.”
He squeezed her hand lightly. “Some other things too,” he continued. “Something about a baby named Julian?”
“Julian?” she said, and for the briefest moment her eyes shifted away from the window. “Who told you that?”
“Doctor Mendes, the fellow who’s been treating you, Nellie. That name doesn’t sound familiar to you? Julian?”
She rolled the name around on her tongue, and when she finally spat it out, it came out sounding like Droo-leen. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said, uninterested.
“Did you happen to overhear any of the staff talking about Doctor Mendes’s wife having a baby?”
“No, Joshua, I don’t know what this is about.” She tried to adjust the pillow behind her head. Josh leaned over and did it for her. He was right—it was starched to all hell.
But aren’t you even curious? And then as if to scold himself: No, she’s old and she’s been through enough already.
“One last thing,” he added quickly. “The name Kellow—does that mean anything to you?”
This time there was something behind the woman’s old eyes. Recognition? He couldn’t be sure, but there was something, some glimmer, there and then gone. Split-second action, as his mother had been fond of saying. The woman had a saying for everything.
“Kellow,” he repeated, hoping to see that spark again. But no, not this time.
“I don’t know anyone by that name.”