by Melanie Tem
'I am Joan of Arc and they are burning me at the stake! I am Joan of Arc and they are burning me at the stake! Ohh! Yes, yes, it hurts!' Nothing hurt, but Naomi had the glorious sense of being on the very brink of suffering.
Being able to shift position in the uncomfortable chair gave her to understand that she had too much freedom of movement. Not at all unsure of her footing although she wished to be, wished to collapse, she walked down the shiny, acrid-smelling corridor to the clean-linen closet, from which she took one white sheet. No one asked her about it, for she had done this before, fetched a sheet for the purpose of restraining someone, though always someone else. Excitement made her weak for a passing moment, but she held onto a shelf until the weakness waned and was replaced by strength, the promise of transcendent strength.
Back to the empty room and the imprisoning chair, Naomi folded the sheet into a strip narrow enough to go under her arms and across her chest, wide enough to bind her in place. It was too bulky to be reliable, and she wished she had a real Posey vest restraint, but they were in short supply, and the aides said sheets worked fine, never mind that sometimes the Health Department would write you up for using them.
Unable to get the sheet secured behind the chair, Naomi settled for tying it in front, but it wasn't good enough. The knot was right there under her hands and she could loosen it whenever she wanted. Almost, she gave in to despair.
Her chant this time was just slightly audible. 'My name is Myra Larsen and I don't belong here! Sit down and listen, girlie, and you might learn something! Ohh!' The pressure of the sheet over her breasts did cause a little pain, but not very much, not nearly enough. 'Ohh!'
It was lunchtime, first shift, and all the residents from this wing, the intermediate unit, were in the dining room. Staff were at the other end getting people ready for the second shift, or picking up trays for the feeders and others who couldn't leave their rooms.
Abby, unwillingly, was in Alex Booth's room, with the door closed behind her as he had instructed. She was standing all the way across the room from him, with her hands behind her back, and his head thrashed on his flat pillow as he tried to find an angle from which he could see her. 'Abby, Abby, I've got to get out of this place. So do you. Something's going on around here. It's not safe.'
'Where can you go?' Where, she almost added, can I go?
'Come home with me.'
She was afraid of him. She was afraid of herself with him. If she ran out of this room right now, he'd have no way to make her come back. 'What are you talking about?'
'Ordinarily I would require my wife's agreement. As it happens, she and the girls are in Texas, staying with her mother. Indefinitely. I think they've left me.'
'You didn't tell me.'
'You've been avoiding me.'
Abby leaned her head back against the wall and burst into tears. 'I'm sorry, Alex! I don't know what happened! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you! I'm so sorry.'
He didn't say it was all right, he understood, although he did, fully, understand. He didn't tell her he hadn't been hurt, although he hadn't. He didn't urge her not to cry. He said, 'I haven't told anyone about that, Abby. I haven't notified the authorities.'
It was a measure of his own agitation, which he had no physical means of relieving or expressing, that he couldn't tell whether or not she'd taken his point. He couldn't afford to lose his bearings like that.
He waited only until her weeping had quieted enough that he could be heard over it. 'I have a proposition for you,' he said then, and Abby had no choice but to listen. He spoke quickly. He had given this a good deal of thought. 'Room and board for you and the girls, plus a salary we'll negotiate but certainly more than you're making here. In return, you take care of all my physical needs—you know what they areas well as other personal services such as correspondence, driving the van, and so on.'
Abby seized on something to object to. 'I don't know how to drive a van.'
'It isn't hard,' he said gently, reprovingly. 'I'll teach you. Oh, and you'll do all the cooking and housework.'
'Kind of like a wife.' She laughed nervously through the still-falling tears and pushed herself away from the wall to go forward, not close enough to touch him but into his field of vision.
He regarded her steadily. 'In some ways. Not in all. Some things cannot be paid for.'
She blushed. 'What will Jenny say?'
'I told you. Jenny is in Texas. Indefinitely.'
'But what about when she finds out another woman is in her house?'
'Let me take care of that. What do you think of my offer?'
'I have to think about it.'
'But, Abby, do you have an objection?' He knew she didn't.
'I just need time to think about it.'
He pressed. 'We don't have much time. I don't think either one of us has much time.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' she said feebly, but it seemed to her that somehow she did, and that scared her even more.
'Abby,' he said again, quietly, 'we need each other.'
No one was aware of Naomi in Myra Larsen's old room, in Myra Larsen's chair, assuming as much of Myra Larsen's aspect as she could fix in her mind. Naomi didn't intend to be heard, certainly did not want to be rescued. When behind her lids her vision began to fill with fuzzy pink and lavender swirls, and a carefree little song came into her ears, she thought perhaps she was losing or altering consciousness. But then, clearly, she felt hands untying the sheet, and she squirmed in protest.
'Wait,' a pretty voice crooned. 'Let me help you. I know how.'
'My name is Esther Rosen and they are taking me to the camps! My name is Esther Rosen and they are taking me to the camps! Ohh!'
The sheet had been passed under Naomi's arms, between her legs, and behind her back, where it had been pulled up snug and knotted tight. It hurt. It hurt. The fetid aroma of too many roses—fake, rotting—made her swoon. In her ears, in her face, somebody was giggling, a cruel and threatening sound.
'Ohh! Ohh! Sit down here by me, girlie, and you might learn something! Ohh!' Her cries were still quiet and tentative. Petra, though, was attracted by them.
Petra hadn't eaten anything for lunch because it was all poisoned, she could smell the poison and see it in the mashed potatoes and chicken and jello, they couldn't fool her. They were trying to get rid of the red ants in her rectum. If the red ants died she would die, too. Without red ants nesting in her rectum, Petra would be nobody.
She wandered into the room where Naomi was, and stopped, shifting the weight of her wiry body from one foot to the other, talking to herself, repeating without even any need for embellishment the story she had settled upon for herself. The story was about red ants in her rectum, and Naomi didn't fit into it. Petra needed a cigarette, so she left.
'I am Myra Larsen and I don't belong here! Ohh!'
It didn't hurt enough. Nothing hurt enough.
A pretty painted fingernail, long and perfectly curved, came into Naomi's eye. She yelped and her head jerked—of its own accord, its own instinct, involuntary, not because Naomi herself was trying to avoid suffering—but it was held firmly in place. The nail scratched, drew blood and tears.
Pouting crimson lips parted around pearly teeth, and the teeth bit down on Naomi's bared clawed hand. She cried out.
A weight lowered onto her, round knee in her belly, sharp little ringed fists grinding into the hollows of her shoulders. A forehead knocked into hers again and again. 'Ohh!' Naomi wailed, and there was an answering wail,
'Ohh! Ooohh!' playful, mocking, goading.
Now the sheet was being tugged from behind, twisting and tightening as if ratcheted. Naomi's arms were pulled wide at the sockets. Her thighs were spread. Still the sheet was tightened, a hard strip now, sharpened by the pressure. It sawed up under her skirt and through her underwear into her vaginal fissure. She screamed.
Scraping trays, Shirley looked up. Myra Larsen, she thought tiredly. Doesn't she ever quit? And then remembe
red with a start that Myra Larsen was dead. 'Who is that?' she remarked to the orderly beside her, but he was from the pool and he wouldn't know. Shirley thought about going to check it out, but it wasn't her group and she had this whole stack of trays to scrape before she could go on break. Besides, nursing-home patients were always making noises that from anybody else would mean something. Especially at The Tides. Especially lately.
'I am Naomi Murphy! I am Naomi Murphy! Oohh!'
Chapter 17
Rebecca was standing by the dining-room window gazing out at the bowl of the lake, dimly imagining it undulating with heavy waves and creeping, pounding tides instead of clouded with the cold dust of this windy spring afternoon, when she recognized Dan's rapid footsteps behind her. Vaguely taken aback that she could identify him by nothing more substantial than the pattern and rhythm of his walk, she didn't turn.
No one else was in the dining room, but he pulled her rather roughly into a corner to demand, 'Now what?' She stared at him, uncomprehending. He shook her shoulder. 'Why is the fucking state in here again?'
'Alexander Booth filed a complaint of abuse against Abby Wilkins. And fraud against the management of The Tides.' She scarcely felt his hand and made no move to shrug it off. 'Alexander Booth is a patient.'
'I fucking know who Alex Booth is. I thought I told you no more complaints. I do not have time for this.'
A tiny tunnel of Rebecca's mind cleared, and through it she asked him anxiously, 'Oh, how's Naomi?'
Plainly, he didn't want to answer. 'Out of the hospital.'
'Is she home? Is she okay?'
'Shit, no, she's not okay. What's this about somebody
abusing Alex, for Chrissake? That's all I need.'
She meant to face him squarely but his image swam. 'I can find out about the abuse, Dan. But you'll have to tell me about the Medicaid fraud. Alleged.'
He released her and swung away. 'Get out of here.'
He was nearly out of range, badly distorted by the contrast between the glaring white corridor lights and the yellower, browner ones in the dining room, between the cube in which she stood and the interconnecting linear spaces he was entering through the small square arch, before Rebecca was able to say, 'What?'
'Get out of here. Go home.' He didn't pause or turn.
'My place is here'
'Just go home.'
She stayed where she was, not out of defiance - though that was what Dan would think - but because she couldn't tell whether she was staying in a particular place or not. She meant to move. In fact, she scissored her legs one in front of the other and then reversed, as if in steps, toward a door. But a slippery sparkling patina had formed between her and the surface that supported and defined her, and her attempts at motion took her nowhere.
From behind the kitchen wall to her right came noises she recognized - pots clanging, food sizzling, tinny country music echoing among all the metal and tiled surfaces. But she heard no voices and was instantly, profoundly, disoriented: what could be making those sounds?
Straight ahead of her was a square hole of brilliant pulsating white light in a dimmer plane. Was she supposed to go there?
A mounded figure in a wheelchair appeared in the arch, features obscured by the bright backlight but clear in its motion, intent, and, somehow, in its identity. Trudy, it was Trudy, beckoning her madly. As if flung, Rebecca was at her side and kneeling, off-balance, clinging to the arm of the chair. Trudy, it was Trudy, unpainted mouth a sad clown's smile. 'How long can I stay here, dear heart?' was what she needed, urgently, to know.
Rebecca couldn't answer.
Already uneasy, Trudy now became seriously alarmed. She grabbed for Rebecca's shoulders and missed. 'Tell me. You have to tell me. How long can I stay here?'
Rebecca could not answer. Gauze gagged her, stuck her tongue to her teeth.
Trudy glared down at her, but the directedness of the gaze melted. She swatted haphazardly, the backs of her arthritis-swollen knuckles connecting with Rebecca's cheekbone. It was a glancing blow, but pinwheels spun behind Rebecca's eyes, she swayed, and she heardperhaps she vocalizeda little shriek, outraged and delighted to be outraged. She straightened. Trudy wheeled away, calling to someone else, 'Dear heart! Can I ask you something? How long can I stay here?'
'As long as you like, honey,' came a loud, falsely reassuring replyDiane, Rebecca thought. This is your home now.'
Dizzy, Rebecca trailed the outside of one elbow along a wall for support and guidance, with no hint, however, of where the wall would lead or what space it was dividing. Darker squares in the vast expanse of white floor tiles looked like gaping holes, but even as she made her way around them she knew they were only darker squares; her misplaced caution, then, was not only unnecessary but self-destructive, for it drew her attention away from real dangers of which, when they did come, she would have no warning, even a false one. She thought that was probably why the floor tiles had been installed in patterns like this. Someone wanted her to fall, or to think she was falling when she was not.
The handrail pressed into her flank. She could feel it wobbling, and made a distant mental note to add it to her repair list.
Then both the handrail and the wall vanished. She must be crossing an open doorway. She proceeded carefully.
From a long distance away—disproportionately small, blurred around the edges, then huge and sweet-sour-smelling and much too close—Marshall Emig materialized. Her father, and of course he hadn't materialized; he had been there all along, all her life, the same man now as when she had been born, but vastly changed and never the man she'd thought him to be. Something in her rose to him in a way not her own, giddy, purposeful, like a lover no longer required to bide her time.
Dimly she wanted Kurt. But Kurt had left her long ago, although he might at this moment or any moment be in the house they shaved.
She thought to get out of her father's way, duck into a room, turn her back and hope he wouldn't notice her. He might well not. She thought to open her arms to him. He was carrying his walker poised as if looking for something to set it over. His downcast gaze slid along the floor just ahead of his feet shuffling among the dark gaping holes that could have him or swallowed him up if they'd been real.
He kept coming toward her. She thought he wasn't going to stop and wondered who would pass through whom. With an abruptness that threatened his balance and hers, his gaze rose to her face and he cried out, raised the walker, struck her with it and captured her among its metal legs. 'Leave us alone! Go back where you came from! Leave my daughter alone!'
Rebecca said, 'Dad, I am your daughter. I'm Rebecca,' but his look of furious horror intensified as if at an utterly shameless gambit, and then she wasn't sure.
'Marshall, it's okay.' Abby put her arm around Rebecca's father's waist, which was something Rebecca could bring herself to do only when she thought of him as a resident of The Tides and not as her father. 'Come on, come with me, let's go eat dinner.'
He turned to her pleadingly. 'I have to protect Becky. I'm her father. I have to take care of my daughter.'
'Your daughter's fine. See? Right here, she is. Becky's fine.' Gesturing toward Rebecca for Marshall's sake, Abby - unintentionally, Rebecca was sure - brushed and then grasped her wrist.
Something in Rebecca flared like a Roman candle, cold vivid fire, and she swung around to look hard into the younger woman's eyes. She expected to encounter their characteristic limpid brown and to be able easily to stare her down. Instead, Abby's eyes blazed.
Marshall was looking from one to the other of the young women, torso jerking, face crazed. At some point he had started whispering, 'Faye! Faye! Faye! Faye!' with each turn of his head, and the staccato cries became louder and more rapid: 'Faye! Faye! Faye!'
'Hey.' Dan Murphy stepped between Rebecca and Abby, breaking the hold. 'You can't be talking to her in the middle of an abuse investigation. Jesus, don't you know better than that?'
Abby looked at Dan. 'Abuse?' Then she turned her bewil
dered gaze to Rebecca, where she was more likely to find an explanation. 'What's he talking about? Who abused who?'
'Get the hell out of here;' Dan said in a vicious undertone to Rebecca. 'You're just making this shit worse.'
Fighting with only partial success the urge to laugh, Rebecca squirmed out from under his towering bulk and nearly skipped down the hall, past Petra tugging at McAleer's gray sleeve. 'Cigarettes,' she hissed. 'Hey, lady, give me two cigarettes and I'll let you see my red ants.'
Rebecca was nearly running by the time she reached the door. If she went out this way an alarm would go off, and, imagining all those people running around looking for her, she could hardly wait. All but giggling, on the verge of tears, she pressed down on the bar, but was brought up short by a shrill proclamation. 'I am no one! I am no one! Ohhh!'