by Melanie Tem
backward, but she always forgot how strong he was and he barely budged. His yelling sent vibrations through his body and into hers.
This was stupid. She knew how to handle Paul. She didn't let go of him, but she moved her hands on his back and sides, massaging a little, soothing. She stepped up beside him. 'What's wrong, Paul?' she asked, hoping her voice was more or less calm.
Still yelling and waving his arms, he let her bring the top half of his body back some, not completely inside the room but a little better balanced. Hanging onto him, she looked out the window, saw nothing out of the ordinary, then lifted her gaze to the expanse of the empty lake behind The Tides, which seemed to go on forever in the night. She could have sworn it had water in it, and that the water was rising, and that sent a buzz of unaccountable fear through her even before she saw the bodies on the bank.
Two of them, she thought at first, but then she saw that it was just one, Larry, sprawled over the rim of the lake-bed with his head at a wrong angle to his body and something dark and glimmering oozing out of a hole in his throat.
Chapter 9
Many of the residents, routinely sedated and in any case acclimated to commotion at all hours and little explanation afterward, slept through the night as well as they ever did. Others, though, were to a greater or lesser extent disturbed by the phones ringing, by the rushing footsteps and echoing voices in the halls, and by the lights and sirens outside, including out where the lake had been in the field behind The Tides.
In her new baby-doll pajamas, Petra was down there with the police, declaring in her furious undertone that it was the Mafia that did it, she had proof. She was so small and her speech so soft that one officer after another bent low to hear her, whereupon she'd grab his front uniform pocket and stand on tiptoe to murmur a proposition: a look at the red ants nesting in her rectum in exchange for three cigarettes. Okay, okay, two.
Gordon Marek hovered around his cache of wine bottles under the scraggly back hedge, some empty and one or two with a little left in them, hoping he wasn't being too obvious. Feeling bad for his Princess that she had to come out in the middle of the night for something bad like this, some guy stabbed in the throat, but wishing she'd get here and take care of things so the fuzz would leave.
The nurse tried to get Paul to go back to bed, but he was too agitated to stay put even after she called the doctor and got orders for an extra shot. He kept talking, his speech even less intelligible than usual. He kept crawling over the bedrails and he was going to fall and hurt himself, so finally they gave up and got him dressed and let him sit in a chair by the nurses' station. Every time a uniformed police officer or ambulance attendant went past, Paul's eyes lit up, his loopy voice rose, and his hands shot out more or less in the direction of the person he wanted to stop.
Rebecca, hurrying with a detective into Paul's room again, was struck in passing by the sound he kept making, a sibilant F followed by a long bray: 'Fff-aaaaaaaay.' More than a few times lately, she'd heard her father make that sound.
But this odd coincidence was obscured almost at once by the questions the detective was asking, most of which she couldn't answer: Had Larry seemed depressed? Had there been anything unusual in his behavior lately? Was there anything in his employment history that would indicate mental instability?
'I don't know,' she kept saying. 'I don't know. I hardly ever saw him. I hardly knew him,' and was vaguely ashamed to admit it, although not knowing a night orderly would not have shamed her if he hadn't killed himself.
Suicide, almost certainly; they'd found a note under Paul's window—unsigned, but presumably in Larry's handwriting—saying he'd done things he couldn't live with, and the bloody knife had still been in his hand.
It was well after six when Abby finally got to Alex to get him up. He smiled when he saw her and said a pleasant, 'Good morning, Abby,' with a personal, affectionate spin on it, making it clear he was glad to see her, not just anybody. She couldn't believe he didn't know what had happened. Alex knew everything. But he didn't say anything about it, and so, stubbornly, neither did she.
Alex's morning routine was long and complex, like all his activities of daily living. Abby knew perfectly well what to do, and she should have been in a real rush because they were so far behind, but she found herself perversely waiting for him to tell her each step. She could feel his displeasure in the stiffening of his body, which was making it harder for her to do what she had to do for him. Handling him almost carelessly, she was very aware of his helplessness and of the power she had over him. She'd never thought of that before and didn't like to be thinking it now, but she couldn't seem to help it. She was tired. She was badly shaken by the events of the night. Her thoughts didn't seem to belong to her.
She stripped and bathed him. First the water in the basin was too hot and then it was too cold, though she noted nastily that he did not flinch, because he couldn't. She soaped and rinsed his body, running the washcloth between his fingers and toes and quickly between his thighs. His toenails needed trimming and his penis was soft. Some of them got woodies when you took care of them, which could be enough to scare off a new aide. Abby took a sort of nervous pride in his skin, which was intact without even any reddened areas. Buzzers were going off all up and down the hall and she thought she heard someone calling her name, but she ignored it, taking care of Alex, doing it right.
It wasn't working, though. Concentrating on Alex wasn't making her stop thinking about Larry. She kept seeing his body the way it had looked from Paul's window, draped over the edge of the lake-bed, throat turned up and cut open as if to let something outs, the way you'd lance a boil. She kept seeing his blood. She'd never seen anybody stabbed before, but on this job she'd seen blood and all kinds of other bodily fluids and she'd never seen anything that looked like that. Gushing out. All different colors, though now she couldn't understand how she could have seen colors when the only illumination had been from the city streetlights around the edge of the field, none of them close, and the security light mounted on the back of The Tides.
And she kept wondering what Paul was trying to say. 'Fff-aaaaay,' he whined and whispered and hollered. 'Fff-aaaaay.' Ever since she'd known him, Paul had said things you couldn't understand; the older aides said they didn't mean anything, they were just noises, but this time especially, Abby wasn't so sure.
'Now the lotion,' Alex prompted as she towelled him dry. 'Don't forget the lotion.'
'When do I ever forget the lotion?'
'You're awfully rough this morning, Abby. Usually you have such gentle hands.'
'Beggars can't be choosers,' she snapped, astonishing herself. She was sure she'd never used that saying before, couldn't think of anybody she'd heard say it, but his offended gasp gave her an ugly little jolt of satisfaction. 'It's been a long night,' she added, through his bedside table in search of the tube of lotion, disturbing his things.
'Are you mad at me?'
'Not everything in the world revolves around you, Alex, you know.' Why was she talking to him like this? Worse, why was it fun? She dribbled lotion onto his skin before it
had had time to warm up against her own. He didn't move, and she reminded herself resentfully that he couldn't even feel the cold lotion or her hands in the crevices of his body. She didn't know why she should be mad about that, but she was.
'Abby, Abby, you're in such a hurry. You're not taking time with me.'
'I don't have time, Alex. I have a whole floor of people to take care of, and you're not even in my group.' You're in Larry's group, she thought but did not say. He was, after all, a patient.
'Well, you're not doing anything right.'
Before she had time to realize what she was doing, Abby had slapped him hard across the face. The lotion on her hand left sticky white streaks on his check. He didn't move. He lay naked in front of her, his green eyes narrowed and his tongue protruding slightly between his teeth. She stared at him in horror as his penis hardened and rose.
At the
very stroke of eight, a tall balding man in a gray suit and gray tie found Rebecca serving trays in the dining room and introduced himself as Ernest Lindgren, Administrative Specialist, State Department of Health, flashing his state ID. Rebecca finished her last table and led him to her office, trying to decide when and whether to tell him about Larry. Unless that was why he was there—but it didn't seem likely that things would have moved that fast.
'We've been expecting you,' she said, because that was what she'd rehearsed to use when the Health Department showed up, wondering too late whether it was a politic thing to say. 'Here's all the documentation about the oven-cleaner incident.' To her own ears, the term 'incident' sounded euphemistic, even cavalier.
Lindgren did not accept the folder, and Rebecca felt something akin to socially awkward as she laid it back down on her desk. He consulted his notes, although she had the impression he would not have needed to. 'I'll get to that. But I am primarily here to investigate a series of other complaints.'
'Complaints?' Rebecca echoed. Her knees weakened and she held onto the edge of the desk as she sank into her chair.
'On September fifteen two residents reportedly had some sort of altercation in the dining room.'
'Oh yes.' Gordon Marek and Cardenio Martinez, but she didn't tell the man from the Health Department their names. Doubtless he already knew. There was an argument over who would sit where. Not an uncommon conflict when people don't have much that belongs to them anymore.
'Later that same month, on the twentieth, a resident allegedly threw a cup of hot coffee at a staff member.'
'That was me.' Rebecca couldn't help chuckling, had to consciously stop the laughter before it veered into nervous giggles. 'We have a lady here who believes she owns the place. That's who she is, The Owner. When I tried to get her into her room for a fire drill, she threw her coffee at me. She missed, by the way.'
'That kind of behavior is unacceptable in a setting like this.'
'What would you recommend?'
'Discharge her.'
'She's been here over ten years. This is her home.'
'Allegedly there have also been several incidents of residents using foul language against staff.'
She blinked. 'Occasionally people become angry, yes.
Even at staff. Maybe it's a way of retaining some sense of self, of resisting the effects of institutionalization.'
'You are taking a risk whenever you encourage the expression of strong emotion.'
'Yes,' said Rebecca, giving up, 'we are taking a risk.'
'The complaint alleges that you have alcoholic patients who actively drink despite doctors' orders to the contrary.'
'None of them has ever been declared legally incompetent, so we have no right to control what they do with their money. To my knowledge they've never been really abusive, except that now and then Gordon Marek likes to play the piano at three in the morning.' She smiled, recognized her need to relocate the little markers of normal life at The Tides.
Florence burst into the office without knocking and stopped short at the sight of the investigator. Breathless, her usually ruddy face florid, the aide announced, 'Sorry, Rebecca, but Mickey just went through the window!'
To her chagrin, Rebecca's first reaction was to glance at Lindgren, who had turned sharply in his chair to look up at the flustered aide. 'A new resident,' Rebecca explained hurriedly to him.
'Schipp,' he said, without consulting his notes. 'Admitted directly from the State Hospital.'
Rebecca ushered Florence out of the office, firmly shutting the door behind her. Unsure whether there could be conversations about nursing-home business kept private from a Health Department official, she half-expected Lindgren to come out and join them, but he didn't. 'What happened?' she asked Florence.
'Nobody knows. He was on his bed asleep last time I checked. Next thing we knew he'd gone out the window.'
'Is he hurt?'
'Not a scratch. We've got him restrained in bed now and he's putting up quite a fuss. Diane's afraid he's fixing to have a seizure. He's seeing things too. Says some woman's trying to get inside him. Says this place is possessed.'
'Ask Diane to request that the doctor review his meds, would you? He's probably been on the same ones for years.' Florence nodded, glanced at the closed office door, and went off down the hall.
Reluctantly, fighting her impulse to rush to the scene of any crisis anywhere in the facility, even though she knew she was often only in the way, Rebecca went back into her office. Lindgren wasn't there. Stretching across the desk as she rounded it to sit down, not needing to look up the number or to see the phone while she punched it in, she dolled the Mental Health Center and was put on hold before she could cut in. A page came for her to take another line. She was afraid to lose her connection to Mental Health; sometimes you could get a busy signal for an hour. But she was still on hold when Sandy repeated the page, so she switched to line 2.
A creditor. Finding the file for his company in the correct spot in her file cabinet, correctly labeled and arranged in approximate chronological order, afforded her considerably greater satisfaction than it warranted, until she saw the light for line I go out.
Meanwhile, Mickey Schipp bellowed and did his best to fight off the voice, the tongue, the teeth and pointed nails. Tied down, there wasn't much he could do; there really never had been. But the creature that had been trying to choke him this time, in this place, by filling him with itself so there was no room left for him, had eased up, and abruptly Mickey slept.
In the room where Viviana Pierce lay dying, her son and grandson, keeping vigil, both thought they saw something drift around her. The grandson wondered with a chill whether he was seeing his grandmother's soul leave her body. But the phenomenon was so subtle neither spoke of it to the other.
Viviana stirred, gave a soft moan. Her grandson brought ice chips in a thin cloth to her lips again, all he knew to do; her lips parted. Her son murmured, 'Ma?' His mother didn't answer, nor had he expected her to.
Viviana was aware of certain sensations: cool dampness between her lips, murmuring, the fragrance of roses, sunlight glimmer, music from the bedside radio and noise from the hall, hunger and thirst and loneliness and an utter lack of desire to satisfy any of them, all in the middle distance and receding. More immediately, she was aware of the presence insinuating itself into the spaces that emerged in her as she approached death. It seemed no more strange than dying itself, or than still being alive. It nudged to get in. It made promises and threats.
The longer she'd lived, the surer Viviana had been of who she was. She knew now, too: a woman dying. Almost, she absorbed the thing that was trying to absorb her, almost she took it with her, but it pulled free.
The Administrative Specialist came back into Rebecca's office, red-faced and gesticulating. Still on the phone, Rebecca had just talked at some length about Mickey Schipp to somebody at Mental Health, and she held up a restraining hand in Lindgren's direction as someone else came on the line. He scowled and took his seat again. She hoped she hadn't seemed insolent. More than that, she wished he wouldn't sit there listening. But a harried voice was at last saying, 'Intake,' and she couldn't miss this chance. Rebecca identified herself again and again outlined the situation. 'I'll need to have that intake worker call you back.'
Rebecca rested her forehead in her hand. 'Aren't you intake?'
'I deal only with the first half of the alphabet.'
'This is an emergency,' Rebecca pointed out helplessly, gave her name and number and hung up.
'It really is not acceptable to have a public restroom in that condition,' Lindgren said to her at once.
Thinking Gordon might have sprayed the wall again or the housekeepers might not have cleaned the toilet well enough, Rebecca felt herself redden. She half-rose. 'I'll get somebody on it'
'First I'll need your policies and procedures book, and a place where I can work in some peace and quiet.'
She didn't say how unlikely that was aro
und here. She showed him to-the staff lounge, closed the door behind him, and went in search of a mop and cleaner to clean the worst of the offending restroom herself.
Her dad, weeping, was just then faltering in the front door, his walker like the cage a tomato plant might lean on, but tipped and wobbling. Hands full of cleaning supplies, bucket clumsy over her arm, Rebecca backed out of the utility closet and called to him. 'Dad? What's wrong? How was your trip?'
'I got lost,' he told her plaintively. His voice and body quavered. His spine scarcely supported him. He still didn't know where he was. But now he was with his daughter and to he must be all right (once their being together had signalled that everything was all right for her). He didn't-know who this young woman was, but she was someone familiar, someone important to him, so that was all right (he wanted it to be all right, but he was cognizant of the fact that perceptions could be altered by innumerable internal and external factors and that his might well be being altered at this moment without his knowledge or permission, most likely by Faye). People pushed to get past him. He stood his ground. This girl was a stranger, wanting something from him he didn't dare give, and he recoiled. Rebecca was right beside him, but she was his daughter and he shouldn't be depending on her. Marshall pitied the man who'd been lost and who was still so scared of being lost. 'I didn't know where I was.'