I skittered back to my room to find a member of the cleaning staff hovering over my bed. She turned and looked guiltier than the cat with canary feathers protruding from its mouth. She flapped her hands and backed off. She was tiny. Even I could have handled her with one hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked, glancing about to make sure there was no one else with her. She hesitated and glanced out the window as if looking for help.
“I was taking out the garbage.” I looked at where she stood, a good ten feet away from the garbage bag she’d propped against the wastebasket. Jesus. Was she after me? Did that mean that Ella had recruited someone to get me? That I had to be worried about everyone and not just Ella?
The woman was wringing her hands, clearly anxious. “I saw a squirrel. I went to see and rubbed my eyes. How could a squirrel be there?” She gave me an uncertain smile, then retrieved the garbage bag, and hurried out of the room.
Plausible story if the premise was correct. And I knew it was correct because I had seen the squirrel. Therefore her story was logical. She wasn’t after me.
I hadn’t thought about where I wanted to go, just that I wanted to be outside and moving. Even a big city can be brought to its knees by weather, and the snow had crippled the sidewalks and roads. People and cars were moving at less than half speed and all the noises of the city were muffled by the snow, so that it almost felt like being in a forest, where the trees were buildings and the streets were frozen rivers. How fast weather can change the city, I thought. I walked and I walked. One stretch of sidewalk that I came upon had only one set of footprints. A man with a long stride. I followed in his steps almost doing the splits at each stride, the snow well above the ankles of my boots.
At times like this people band together to help a car stuck in the snow or an elderly man trying to cross the road. But it is also solitary. You’re an island unto yourself, separated from the world by the swirling snow that blurs the vision and dulls the senses of touch and hearing, all swaddled up in clothes, safe from the elements. As long as you have a warm place to go back to. I had passed several homeless people curled up in shop doorways or lying in sleeping bags on grates where the warm air would thaw them. I went into some of the funky stores on Markham Street and ventured into the giant empor-ium that was Honest Ed’s.
Bigger than a giant hangar and more convoluted and frustrating than a maze, it spanned numerous floors and half floors, blind alleys, and open-ended rooms that went on forever. It was full of people and endless bins of endless merchandise you don’t even know you want until you see it. I suddenly felt empty, watching all these people looking so busy and occupied, and me just biding time, waiting to get better. I didn’t buy a thing. I just walked down aisle after aisle. It was not that I didn’t see anything I wanted. I did. But I had no energy to find the checkout and stand in line. I left the store ten minutes after I wanted to because I couldn’t find an exit, which gave me a panicky feeling. I felt truly sorry for Leo because I knew my panic was magnitudes weaker than his.
The snow was coming down in a desultory fashion now and I walked through it thinking about Mavis and missing fingers and how it was a good thing that I didn’t want to die. It meant I was getting better. It was the cold that finally brought me back out of myself and I had to search out street signs to figure out where I was. I was tired and I had walked a long way from the hospital, but when I looked at my watch only an hour had gone by. I spotted a subway entrance and so I took it.
It was evening and there were quite a few people on the platform. It was one of those split platforms where the trains are separated from each other by the platform itself. It was cold and drafty and dirty and the tiled floors were covered in slush from the snow falling off hundreds of winter boots. I stood on the yellow danger line halfway down the platform and looked to the left from where the train would come, the tunnel dark and empty. I looked in the other direction. Two dark and empty tunnels. And then lights, growing bigger, piercing the gloom of the tunnel on my left, bringing lightness out of the dark. I shivered involuntarily at the imagery, when I should have been paying attention to what was happening around me. Without warning, someone plunged into me.
I lost my balance and pitched forward, the gleaming metal of the tracks burning their twin images into my brain. Thoughts and feelings are so much faster than words. I felt sick, scared, thought, This can’t be happening to me, I’m going to die, all in the space of the two seconds it took me to fall onto the tracks. I was pitching forward, so I let myself go, hitting the surface between the two tracks with my upper back and shoulder and then rolling to break the fall. I came up standing, facing the fast-approaching train with its mesmerizing twin beams.
I was aware of people yelling and waving their arms, trying to get the train to stop. I was aware, too, that there was nowhere for me to duck out of the way. The far side of the track was a sheer wall right beside the rail and there was no lip under the platform to protect me. So I turned and ran. As fast as it was possible to run. I could hear the brakes of the train screeching behind me, knew it was coming at me, knew I could not waste time to turn and look, knew that I also wanted to see the death that was facing me. I overcame that urge and kept running down the uneven track toward the darkness of the tunnel.
It seemed ironic that a dark tunnel would mean my salvation when it’s the phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” that people use to describe getting out of trouble and getting out of depression. I ran, in my clunky winter boots, my coat flapping, the train at my back. I felt like a hiker who has seen a bear between herself and safety, and turns to run, waiting on every stride for the ripping sound of the bear’s claws in her flesh.
And then I felt it, the slight grazing on the backs of my legs, a mere caress, as I was ten feet from the tunnel. I pitched forward and grabbed my head with my hands in a ridiculous attempt to protect it. But when nothing happened to me, no tearing of flesh, no rending of limbs, I took my hands from my head and looked up. The train had run out of steam.
“She’s okay!” someone yelled.
I felt a pair of strong arms help me up and I let their owner lead me down the tunnel to the steps and up to the very end of the platform. I was feeling hot and shaky and I just wanted to sit down. So I did. Right at the end of the platform. People milled about me and I could hear snippets of conversation.
“I saw her fall.”
“She went over like a sack of potatoes.”
“She must have tripped.”
“No, no, surely she fainted.”
And then a voice, alone among the babble, said,“She was pushed.”
Chapter Eight
I insisted I didn’t need to go to the ER. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me and the paramedics who arrived on the scene said I was good to go. The police suggested I call a friend but I said no, that I was okay. When they found out where I lived they insisted on driving me home. They said they were heading in that direction anyway. So I let them. What else could I do? I couldn’t have them drop me off at the hospital. If they thought I was not right in the head, it would colour everything I had said to them. They wouldn’t believe me. There was so much prejudice surrounding mental illness. Then again, there was no doubt I had fallen onto the tracks and there were lots of people to corroborate that. Maybe I was just being paranoid.
At least I hadn’t told them that I thought someone was trying to kill me. Why hadn’t I? Did I doubt myself that much, or was it because whoever had said I was pushed had disappeared into the crowd and nobody else had seen anything? The police waited politely in the circular drive of Governor’s Manor condominium townhomes, where Ryan had rented me a furnished place from a friend, until I had let myself in. I waved and they pulled away.
The apartment was in darkness. My timer for the lights must have been broken. There was mail strewn all over the floor and still more piled up on my hall table. Ryan must have come in and done that.
She was pushed.
The words came storming out at me from the darkness of my home away from home, and I stood there momentarily paralyzed by my thoughts. Had someone just tried to kill me? Could it have been Ella? Had she been following me? What time was her shift over?
I felt so alone, standing there in the hall and feeling sorry for myself. I really missed my little log cabin on our farm in the shadow of the Eardley Escarpment. I mentally doused my mind with cold water and turned on the lights. Everything was as I had left it on that night that Ryan had come and brought me to his home, scared and very depressed. I wandered around the apartment, picking up my belongings, a little statue of a whale, a book, my mail. I wanted to stay, but I knew I couldn’t. I had a 9:00 p.m. curfew and it was 8:30.
The cabbie dropped me off at the hospital at 8:55. The snow had stopped falling now, and I walked down a newly shovelled, winding path to the side door, which was the entrance to a small two-storey cinder-block building that had been added on like a limpet to a rock. This was the smokers’ haunt and even in this weather there were four people huddled by the door, playing Russian roulette with curfew. There were giant icicles hanging from the roof above the door and I stepped quickly across the threshold. Jacques was there, amongst the smokers, shoulders hunched, an unlit cigarette dangling from his hand. I hesitated, not knowing what to do and then he smiled. I smiled back and our eyes met.
Can eyes kiss? It sure felt like it. He opened the door for me.
“I seem to always be trying to get you warm,” he said as his arms encircled me from behind and stopped me dead in my tracks, physically as well as emotionally. He gave me a breathtaking hug then, and let me go. I was trying to find something clever to say as he went ahead of me and pushed the up button on the elevator.
“You all right?” he asked, a worried look on his face. Do I look that bad? I wondered. I wanted to tell him right then and there about my fall onto the subway tracks, but we were late and there was no time. We had to return to our rooms.
I had missed dinner and my stomach was churning, as much from the lack of food as the trauma I’d undergone. Such a sharp contrast to my apartment, the cold walls of my room, the bare linoleum floor, the metal beds, with all four solid sides flush to the floor, their meagre blankets, and the metal bedside tables with a single drawer and a little cabinet underneath. Bigger than a jail cell, but almost as sterile.
Kit was sitting on her bed when I entered our room, her red curls springing as usual to every point on the compass. She had laid out a large hardcover picture book on her bed and on it she was meticulously sorting a box of Smarties, the blues, the browns, the oranges, the yellows, the greens, all laid out in neat square patterns with the red ones set to one side and forming a circle.
“Do you like the red ones best?” I asked, trying not to drool over the candy.
“They have to be eaten in a certain way or they don’t taste the same and you’ll get sick,” she said. She didn’t look up.
“Red ones last?” I asked, thinking I knew what she was going to say. Save the best for last. And it suited her red hair.
She looked up then, a flash of impatience creasing her face.
“I don’t eat the crimson ones anymore,” she said.
I waited.
“They’re bad luck.”
I waited some more.
“They’re the colour of blood,” and she shivered and pushed the red ones, one by agonizing one back into the Smarties box, got up and placed them in the wastebasket. She returned to the bed and ate a single green Smartie before looking up at me.
“There wasn’t any blood, was there.” Kit said this as more a statement of fact than a question, and it was disconcerting.
I didn’t know what to say. Was she talking about Mavis? Did that mean she believed me?
I shook my head. It seemed safer than saying anything.
“Was she really dead?”
I chose my words carefully. “The staff say no.”
“What do you say?” She ate another green smartie. My stomach whined like a begging dog.
“I thought she was dead, but I guess I was mistaken.” For some reason I felt the need to lie about Mavis. Maybe I didn’t want to upset Kit. But that made me complicit with the cover-up. She ate the last green smartie and moved on to the yellow ones, one at a time, her trip around the circumference of the book, a clockwise journey. That meant the brown ones would be last. I’d never known anyone to like the brown smarties best. Save the worst ’til last?
“You need to trust yourself more,” Kit said with her head down, but it was the way she said it, as much as what she said, that made me pause. It was almost as though she knew something, but was afraid to say.
I was about to do a little probing when the night nurse came in to tell us it was lights out in half an hour. I sat down on my bed and watched Kit eating her smarties.
“How long have you known Mavis?” I asked, not sure what I was trying to jumpstart.
“She was here when I came.”
“Did you like her?”
“What was not to like about her? She was kind.”
“Can you think of any reason why someone would want her dead?” To hell with lies.
“You mean, if she is dead.” Kit locked eyes with me, and again I had that disconcerting feeling that she was hiding something. She looked away.
“Okay,” said Kit. “Mavis was really messy. There were days when I wanted to strangle her.”
Strangle. Odd choice of word, I thought.
“Other than that,” Kit went on, “I can’t think of any motive for anyone. People liked her.”
Lucy interrupted us at that point as she bounded into the room. She and Kit exchanged glances and Kit’s face became an inscrutable mask as she turned away. Lucy stared at her, her own face looking almost exasperated, as if Kit had done something wrong. It was a strange little tableau but it passed, as Lucy, apparently needing to talk, described the whole story of a TV show she had just seen. I couldn’t help but notice that she was talking only to me. Not once did she look at Kit after that initial exchange of glances, yet I was pretty sure they had been friendly before. Figuring out what was going on between them was a job beyond my pay scale.
After lights out I lay in bed, nursing my grumbling stomach and listening as the silence gave way to the even breathing of my two sleeping roommates. Quietly I got up and retrieved the Smarties box from the wastebasket. By the light of the moon streaming in my window I ate all nine of those ruby red Smarties, the colour of blood, and to hell with superstition.
Normally I like to sleep in but I woke at 6:00 a.m. and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was reluctantly getting into the routine of the floor. We were woken up at 8:00 a.m. — which was way too early for me — for 8:15 breakfast. After that we had time to ourselves until classes started at 9:00. It was unspoken but understood that if you didn’t go to at least some of them, you weren’t getting better. Lunch was at noon and classes started again at 1:00 and ran to 4:00. None of the classes were more than an hour long and they ran the gamut from self-help stuff and self-confidence boosters to spiritual classes and cognitive behavioural therapy, plus crafts like drawing and painting. Dinner was at 5:00 and then we had a long stretch until snack time at 8:00 and lights out at 10:00.
I got to breakfast bang on 8:15, just as the cook was raising the metal accordion window that hid the kitchen from view. I was so hungry that I went back for what seconds there were. Usually we were allowed more toast, but everything else was off the menu once we’d had a first helping. Today, however, was different. The cook, incredibly, had made too much bacon and a couple of others and I got seconds.
I sat by myself and surveyed people as they ate. Most of them were still in pajamas and I wondered what their lives were like at home. They suddenly all seemed so lonely and injured and pathetic. I waited ar
ound for a while, hoping Jacques would show, but he must have had an early doctor’s appointment or something.
As I was heading back down the hall to my room someone called my name. I turned to see Ella walking toward me. She was wearing a utilitarian pants uniform, all white, that failed to hide the voluptuous figure underneath. I hated having to admit something good about her when her intentions toward me might be anything but. I stopped and waited for her to catch up to me, wondering all the while what dire plans she had for me and if I’d be able to outsmart her, as I had, barely, on the subway — if indeed she was the one who’d pushed me. I couldn’t be certain, of course, but it made me more determined to find out what had happened to Mavis.
“Dr. Osborn will see you at 9:30.” Ella didn’t seem like a murderer. She was calm and looked me in the eye, as if everything was perfectly normal. I thanked her and watched as she walked past me to the nursing station. I went into my room, where I lay down on my bed and tried to read a book until my appointment with Dr. Osborn. At 9:25 Ella came and got me. We walked through the empty cafeteria to the door that Mavis had gone through for the last time, and I watched as Ella unlocked it and let me through. She didn’t stay with me this time. I knew how to get to the doctor’s office. Osborn’s door was slightly ajar and I knocked lightly on it. There was the rushing sound of a babbling brook and then his voice.
“Come in,” he said. He was sitting at his wooden desk, but he stood up when I came in and walked around and gestured toward the sofa, where I’d sat last time. But instead, I chose the chair and he took the sofa, without blinking an eye. I wondered how many of his patients always sat in the same place, visit after visit. What was it like to listen to people’s despair day after day after day? Did it become like an assembly line? Or was it more like a never-ending puzzle, with Osborn tweaking medications, hoping to find the right cocktail of drugs to ease the pain?
Crazy Dead (A Cordi O'Callaghan Mystery) Page 7