“Yes.”
She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Sorry. Parts of that day are fuzzy. I was pretty upset.”
There was something she wasn’t telling me, and I knew it.
Of course, since we hadn’t so much as kissed over the past few weeks, it wasn’t hard to figure out.
“So, who is he?”
“Who?”
“The guy you’re dating? Someone who’s trying out for the show, as well?”
She sipped her root beer and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him with you. I don’t like talking about other guys with you, okay?”
“Okay…?”
“I’m sorry I brought up your dad, but I just don’t want to reach the end of my life and have only regrets. Does that make sense? Acting is something I’ve always wanted to pursue, so I’m going to. And don’t you worry-I’ve got no illusions about going to Broadway or being in the movies. Community theater is the ticket for me.”
“And I can come watch you rehearse?”
“And you can come watch me rehearse.”
I couldn’t come watch her rehearse; the director-a pretentiously flamboyant small-town ar- teest who was so enamored of his own incomparable brilliance it was everything he could do not to fuck himself twenty-four hours a day-wouldn’t allow it. Beth got the female lead and was scheduled to rehearse four nights a week, then-as opening night loomed closer-every weeknight and Saturday evenings, as well.
I took a part-time janitorial job to fill the evenings. I liked janitorial work; you were alone, it was quiet, no one was breathing down your neck, and at the end of the shift you could actually see what your labors had accomplished: a disaster area was now rebuilt and tidy, things shone where before they looked lightly sheened in rust, the smell of the bathroom was pleasant and clean, nothing crunched underfoot as you walked across the carpet, the windows now glistened. Let’s hear it for the bad-ass with his mop bucket and Windex.
I finished each night in plenty of time to take Mabel to work. On nights when I knew Beth’s rehearsal would run late, I stopped in and talked with Whitey so he could update my growing list of character flaws. At home, I took care of dinner and laundry and paying the bills and making sure that Mom didn’t discover where I’d hidden the rest of her medicine; after the first time I caught her trying to take a triple dose of sedatives-“Oh, hon, I didn’t think it would hurt anything, I’ve just been real jumpy” (which I didn’t buy for a second)-I made it a point to get one of those pill trays and fill only one compartment at a time with only the prescribed doses. I did this three times a day. I wanted to trust her, wanted to believe that she’d never try taking more than she was supposed to… but I didn’t.
I started to understand why Mabel sometimes seemed so depressed at the end of her shift; despite telling yourself you were doing this for someone’s good, you felt somewhat like a captor.
The week Beth’s show was to open, I picked up Mabel after I got off work, as usual. She said hello and asked me how my night had been, then sat staring out the window, nervous and tense, chewing at her thumbnail. I asked her if everything was all right and she mumbled something that was supposed to be in the affirmative, then returned to silence for most of the ride. As the nursing home came into view, she cleared her throat and said: “You won’t have to do this anymore after tonight.”
“I don’t mind, Mabel, really.” She’d been doing this a lot lately, telling me how bad she felt about imposing on my time, how she’d just find another nurse to ride with; for a while that’s endearing, then it just starts to offend. I did not want anything bad to come between us. “You don’t have to find someone to ride with, I-”
“Oh, no, it’s not that at all.” She smiled at me, a full, cheek-to-cheek smile that should have been radiant but instead seemed an affectation. “I’m buying a new car tomorrow morning. Got it all picked out, have the down payment, the whole nine yards.”
I pulled into our usual parking space, killed the engine, and looked at the building. The Cedar Hill Healthcare Center no longer looked like the same place; two new additions (a larger and more up-to-date Physical Therapy unit, as well as a second-and nicer-visiting area) gave the place an almost regal, ersatz-exclusive appearance, and a third addition-what would be a friendlier employee break area, complete with a bunk room for those working double shifts-was nearing completion. Whoever had taken over the place was making serious changes.
“The new owners must have some capital behind them,” I said.
“You have no idea.” Her smile wavered for a moment, then came back just as bright and twice as phony as before. “Beth wants the station wagon for God only knows what reason, so we’re going to get that fixed up, and I’ll have my own car. Do you know this is the first time in my life that I’ll have a car that’s all mine? The very first time. It’s nice to able to afford new things, better things. For the first time in my life I don’t go to bed worrying about having enough to pay the bills at the end of the month. You have no idea how good that feels to an old gal like me. So I figure I deserve a new car. You can come over and see it. Maybe I’ll even drive you around.” Cheerful words, mundane words, words you hear in various combinations every day from various people; someone’s getting a new car, independence, go where they want when they want… nothing special in these words.
Except that her inflections were all wrong. I don’t want this to sound histrionic, because there was nothing overtly dramatic about it; it’s just that as I’d come to know what Beth was feeling through her body language and silences, I’d come to know Mabel’s moods through her speech patterns, her tones and inflections and pauses, and that evening they were wrong; her tone would rise where it should have lowered, she’d stretch out syllables for no reason, her volume would sometimes go from a normal conversational level to a near-shout to a conspiratorial whisper in the same phrase, once even in the same word. A stranger meeting her for the first time would assume that she was just a little tense and distracted; I knew that something dire was going on and she wasn’t talking about it, and it was going to end badly. I had seen this happen enough with Mom to know when someone was about to implode.
“Okay, Mabel, c’mon. It’s me, okay? What’s the matter?”
She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. “There shouldn’t be anything wrong. I don’t know why I’m acting like this. You get to be my age, you learn to live with things that bug the shit out of you; you learn not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Did you just skip to the end of this conversation or did I miss something?”
“Huh?” She looked at me, blinked, and shook a small but at least genuine smile onto her face. “I, uh… I’m sorry. I guess I drifted off for a minute.”
“What gift horse? What’re you talking about?”
She pulled in another drag, let the smoke curl in front of her face for a moment, then exhaled. “It’s been so great since they took over, it really has. We’ve got new uniforms, extra help, better food, the working atmosphere has never been so good, and the money… Lord, I’m making almost twice what I was making this time last year, and that’s on top of the great bonus we got for-” Her eyes flashed a quick oh-shit and she left the sentence unfinished.
“The bonus you got for…?” I prompted, then it came to me: “The confidentiality agreement. Is that it?”
“I really can’t. I just”-She reached over and took my hand-“really can’t talk about it. The way I figure it, I’m just about a year away from having everything paid off and being able to afford a house-not just rent a nicer one, but buy one. Do you know I’ve never owned a home? Isn’t that a pisser? It would be nice to spend the third act of my life in my own home. And if I don’t screw up, if I do what I agreed to and keep this job, then I can have all that. Is that so bad? Does that make me callous? Is it such a terrible thing to want an actual home and peace of mind? Christ, I’ve spent so much of my life worrying over one thing or another that by the time I took a r
eal breath it was halfway over.”
“No one’s saying you haven’t worked hard for everything, it’s just-”
“-and I’m not going to find anyone, you know.” This followed by a phlegm-filled, bitter, ugly little laugh. “Sure, if I lived in San Francisco or Los Angeles or someplace like that, someplace where they don’t look down on you because you’re gay, I might stand a chance. But look at me-I’m an old gal. Whatever chance I had for a great romance in my life has long past, so if I’m going to be the lovable old-maid aunt, why can’t I at least be comfortable and content? Dammit, I’ve helped people, you know? I’ve cared for them when no one else wanted to-and not just because it was my job, understand. I did it because I wanted what was best for them. All of them. This is no different, really. Is it?”
Look up “bemused” in the dictionary and you’ll find a picture of my face at that moment. “What the hell is wrong, Mabel? Why are you talking like this?”
She squeezed my hand and opened the car door. “I have no idea. They say the mind is the first thing to go.”
I held on to her; I wasn’t going to let this drop. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What I’m not supposed to. Maybe I’ll be able to explain it someday, but not now. I don’t know. I keep my word. I’ve always kept my word, that’s important. For right now will you just answer a question?”
“Sure thing.”
“Am I a bad person?”
“God, no! You’re one of the finest people I’ve ever met. Why would you even ask-”
She pulled away from me and closed the door. “I’ve got a ride for later. I’m going straight to the dealership when I get off. Come by later this week and see the new car. I’ll drive us to Beth’s opening night.”
I watched her go inside, then started the car and drove away. I was almost home when I jerked the wheel around, made an illegal U-turn, and went back. Maybe Whitey would still be up and could tell me something. Even if he wasn’t up, I’d shake his ass awake. I figured I was owed one genuinely rude interruption.
I parked in my usual spot and started to go through the back entrance.
It was locked. Not only that, but it now required a card-key to open. Something made a whirring mechanical noise over my head and I looked up in time to see a security camera pirouette on its wall-mount and point at me.
I did what we’ve all done at one time or another-made a goofy face and waved. A few moments later one of the regular shift nurses-Arlene-appeared at the door and used her card-key to open it. “Let me guess-Mabel forgot something?”
“Maybe I just wanted to flirt with you.” Arlene was sixty if she was a day.
“Maybe if I was twenty years younger I’d drag you into the linen closet and make you do more than flirt.” She opened the door wider and let me in. “But my husband wouldn’t like it.”
“It’s the thought that counts,” I said, moving past her.
“Mabel’s in the break room having coffee. Come get me when you need to leave and I’ll let you out.”
I pointed at the new lock. “Has there been much of this? I mean the new security?”
“They’re turning this place into something out of that 2001 movie, I swear. You need card-keys to move between units now, and every hall has its own camera and a microphone so we can hear if anyone calls out for help. You’d think we were guarding the gold at Fort Knox. There’re even three more full-time security guards, two inside and one covering the grounds for each shift. We’re getting to be quite the place, we are.”
“I don’t have to worry about being stopped or something, do I?”
“No,” she said, reaching into her pocket and removing a plastic credit-card-looking thing at the end of a dark ribbon. “Just make sure you wear this where it can be seen.” She draped the visitor’s pass over my neck. “You have to wear one of these at night-even a fixture like you.”
“‘Fixture.’ Oooh. I love it when you talk like an interior decorator. Tell me about accouterments next. Whisper about them slowly.”
“You are the most evil boy, aren’t you?”
“I get a lot of complaints about that, yes.”
“Who said I was complaining?” And with that Arlene led me to the unit and left me to my own devices. The break room was in the hall opposite the one leading to Whitey’s room, so it didn’t exactly take a lot of sneaking and skulking to get to his room-though I was anxiously aware that I was on camera now.
I passed the room which had been the former home of the Captain Spalding Brothers and slowed. The new occupant-who for the moment had the room to herself-was sitting in her wheelchair, asleep in front of a color television displaying a muted re-run of The Waltons. There was a vibrantly green potted plant on the windowsill, several books stuffed between a set of hand-carved cherry-wood bookends, themselves shaped like books; an antique Tiffany lamp whose stained-glass shade glowed softly from the 40-watt bulb underneath, diffuse sunlight warming church windows. A patchwork quilt lay neatly folded at the foot of her bed, while the head was covered in an assortment of small, colorful pillows. There were framed photographs hanging on the wall next to her bed; a black and white wedding picture, so faded around the edges it looked like something glimpsed through a fog; several color photographs of the same cat and dog taken years apart, the cat going from a bright-eyed gray-furred kitten to something that looked like an overused feather duster with a rheumy gaze, the dog journeying from its days as a square-bodied bundle of muscles and legs to an arthritic bundle atop an old throw rug that, like the animal lying on it, had seen better days. I wondered if the animals were still alive, and then why there were no pictures of children and grandchildren anywhere to be seen. Everything about the room and the woman sleeping in the chair whispered of weariness, of too much quiet, not enough voices and visitors. A lamp, a quilt, some books, a television, and frozen moments from memory framed on the walls; this is what her life had come down to. I wondered if any of those books were poetry collections, if perhaps it contained any Browning, if she had certain well-thumbed pages marked for easy finding or knew them by heart; did she ever fall asleep repeating snippets of sonnets in her mind as she looked at the frozen moments from her life?
My heart is very tired, my strength is low, My hands are full of blossoms plucked before, Held dead within them till myself shall die .
I knew Whitey would kick my ass up between my shoulders if he knew I was thinking these things. (“Know what your name would have been if you’d’ve been born an Indian? ‘Dark Cloud.’ Trust me on this. They wouldn’t have had to worry about having their land stolen by the White Man and then being systematically slaughtered, no. You would’ve depressed them to death!”)
I smiled at the thought, wished this sleeping woman pleasant dreams and a happy day to come (I also couldn’t help but smile at the bumper sticker someone had pasted to the back of her wheelchair: I ACCELERATE FOR FUZZY BUNNIES), then headed on down to Whitey’s room.
His door was closed.
I stood there staring at the thing, my poised fist frozen in mid-knock.
Maybe this was part of the new security measures, keeping the doors closed at night-but then why hadn’t Miss Acceleration’s door been closed, as well? No, this wasn’t what it appeared to be, it couldn’t be, I wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t allow it. Whitey might not be in the best shape, but it had only been three days since I’d last seen him (he wasn’t very talkative and insisted he wasn’t feeling well, though I suspected he was just depressed and wanted to be left alone) and I refused to believe that anything had happened to him. Mabel would have told me. I knocked, then waited for him to shout something insulting.
Nothing.
I grabbed the door handle and began to open it when the rest of it finally registered: his nameplate had been removed from its slot in the wall next to the door, the clipboard that held his chart was no longer hanging on its hook underneath his name, and the lights in the room were off. Whitey always kept the bathroom light on at night so
he didn’t have to stumble through the dark to take a leak.
If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine, I thought. Right now it’s dark and you’re not looking at anything that confirms what you’re trying not to think about, so for this moment, in the dark, Whitey’s here and sleeping and everything’s the way it was the last time you were here.
The smart thing to do was not turn on the light. I’d lost too many people recently. Dad was chewed up and dead and gone, Mom might as well be dead for all the joy she found in her day-to-day existence, and I’d seen so little of Beth for the last six weeks she might as well have been in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. I would not allow another person to slip away from me. And the best way to ensure that would be to do the smart thing, and the smart thing was not to turn on the light.
I turned on the light.
Two beds, both empty. No television, no video tape machine, no pictures, no books in precarious stacks; nothing in the closets but hangers, nothing in the restroom except an unused roll of toilet paper, a full soap dispenser, and a tub and sink that were desert-dry.
I stood in the empty room shaking my head while something in the middle of my chest tried to snap through my rib cage. This was not-repeat not -happening. Maybe I’d gone into the wrong room, it could happen. So there I was back out in the hall checking the room number and it was the right number but that didn’t mean anything, Whitey was always bitching about how little space he had in there so maybe they’d just moved him to another room, a bigger room, one big enough to hold all of his stuff and leave space for his ego, left side first, I went down the left side of the hall first, checking and double-checking the names next to the doors and Whitey’s wasn’t among them, so now it up the right side, double- and triple-checking the names and it wasn’t there, either; I reached the end of the hall and went left toward the break room because Mabel was there and she’d know, she could tell me what was going on – unless she didn’t know, unless something happened earlier today and the detritus had already been cached away and no one had told her – the door to the break room stood half-opened. I started to push my way inside when I heard Mabel say, “It’s probably for the best,” but there was something in her voice that told me she was simply parroting a practiced response, that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but wanted whomever she was talking with to think she did. Then a male voice replied, “It’s always for the best, it’s important you remember that.” Then I had the door open and was standing there long enough to see that the man she was speaking to was dressed in an expensive gray suit with white shirt and blue tie and wore a bowler hat on his head that was pulled down to cover the top half of his ears-then he noticed me.
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