by Anne Groß
Fear shot through Elise. She started frantically pulling, hoping to get a majority of the prize before it all ended up in the other woman’s arms. As a result, the black-haired woman approached at a faster clip, still coiling intestine as she came. Finally, face-to-face, the woman smiled in a way that suggested familiarity and friendship, which threw Elise off completely. She had never imagined she’d be eviscerated, and certainly not by a plump woman with a pair of friendly doe-eyes and a sweet smile. Elise was about to feign a lunge to the right to attack from the left, but a memory lit up her mind in a paralyzing jolt.
A dark room filled with mirrors that gleamed with candlelight. A man with a hand like a vise on her neck ground his sharp teeth in a snarl as he squeezed her breath away. In the shadows, screaming women huddled together while high winds lifter their skirts and whipped Elise’s skin. When the black-haired woman joined the chorus with her own full-throated scream, Elise was snapped back from the memory. The woman threw Elise’s intestines into the air and was sucked back up into the tunnel overhead. Elise watched her zip away until the black-haired woman was nothing more than a tiny dot in an infinitely receding void. Then everything exploded out of Elise’s abdominal cavity like pink fireworks.
Elise sat up in bed, gasping, soaked in sweat, and aching all over. In a panic, she threw the covers off her body to look down at her navel, and was relieved to see it was intact. The muscles of her stomach rippled and quickly Elise leaned to her side. Her vomit made a splat, distant and hollow, as it hit the floor. After she puked the second time, Elise heard a stream of curses from somewhere nearby. She laid her head back against the pillow and as she drifted into her fevered dreams, she squeezed her left fist rhythmically. Hadn’t she been holding something beautiful, she wondered?
The next time she woke it was easier to clear away the fog. Something cold and wet against her forehead slowly drew her into the present moment as her strange dreams faded from memory. Water droplets rolled down off her brow and made frigid puddles in her ears. Her hair felt damp and limp around her face. She tried lifting her hand to pull the soggy item from off her brow, but Elise found her muscles unresponsive and weak. Instead, she struggled to concentrate on the two voices that seemed to float above her head.
“Dear God, Richard. Why must you insist upon bringing strays into our home?”
“She’s not a stray, Mother. She’s a girl. And she needs our help.”
Elise sighed with relief as the rag was removed from her head. A slosh of water announced its return to what she assumed was a nearby basin.
“She’s hardly a girl. Young woman, I should say. For that matter, it’s hard to tell even how old she is, isn’t it?”
“Does her age really matter?” asked Richard. “She needs our help, and we’re in the position to be helpful. Where is your sense of Christian decency?”
There was the sound of splashing again, more vigorously this time, and then Elise felt the rag slap back onto her forehead.
“Don’t talk to me of Christian decency. Is it decent to lose the income from the bed this woman is lying in, income that would pay our employees’ wages? This woman is stealing food right out of the mouths of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s grandchildren. How is that decent? I don’t suppose you thought of that before hauling this wretch up out of the street did you? You always were bringing in strays all your life and it was always your father and I who were feeding them.”
“Mother. A kitten here and there is hardly a burden. Besides, they’ve all been excellent mousers.”
“And I suppose you think that when this woman is back on her feet, she’ll keep the kitchen free of vermin. Do you remember that dog you brought home? Do you? It snarled at every customer that walked through our door and when it finally bit someone, it was your father as had to take it out back and get rid of it, not you.”
“I was eleven. A boy. And it was hard of Father to kill poor Rupert without allowing me the opportunity to say goodbye, very hard. Besides, she’s hardly a stray. I’d say she’s merely lost. I’ve a notion her family will be very anxious to have her returned to them. Have you put a discrete advert about her in The Morning Advertiser, as I asked? Her family will be so happy to find her that I’m sure they’ll repay our kindnesses.”
“Repay?” Richard’s mother hooted. “What on earth makes you think that?”
Elise felt cold droplets of water run down the side of her nose and off her jaw as the rag was once again removed and dropped into the basin.
“Oh look! Her nose twitched! Do you think she’s waking up?” Richard asked excitedly.
“Well, you’re no boy now,” continued his mother, ignoring Elise’s return from unconsciousness. “And when this woman, wealthy family or no, goes and bites our customers, you’ll be the one to take her out back this time. Do you hear me? I don’t care how much howling you do, it’ll be you as takes care of the problem.”
“For goodness sakes! I told you she’s no dog.”
“Don’t be so sure, Richard, just look at her hair. The last time I saw a fringe over a brow like hers I was scratching a terrier bitch behind her ears.”
“Mother!” laughed the man. “What ideas you have!” There was a pause in the conversation and Elise realized that mother and son were staring at her. “I must say she does have a most unfortunate nose. Quite like a muzzle.” continued Richard in a thoughtful tone.
Elise struggled again to lift her arms. She was feeling less inclined to stay in bed and it was clear by the conversation she was not welcome by all involved. Suddenly the rag was sloshed back onto Elise’s face. “Do be careful how you tend to your charge,” cried Richard. “You’ve gone and soaked the pillow.”
“My charge?” The woman sounded indignant. “You have some nerve! It was you who saddled me with this creature. Now you’re critiquing my nursing skills?” The woman paused and Elise imagined she was fixing her son with a glare. “Well, I have better things to do. I must make certain that Thomas is at hand.” A final slap of water punctuated her words as the rag was returned to the basin.
“Tom is always at hand,” Richard muttered in a petulant voice.
“Yes. Well. At least he knows his duty and never chases a gamble, like some others I could mention.”
Elise breathed a sigh of relief as the woman’s footsteps terminated with the slam of a door. Then all she heard was Richard’s soft breathing. In the distance, the murmur of a crowd of voices was as mesmerizing as the muffled buzz of a bee from deep within an orange trumpet flower. The sound soothed, making her think of oasis gardens as she floated back off into her dreams.
It wasn’t finding herself in a strange bed with a pounding headache that caused Elise the discomfort and confusion she was feeling when she came around again. She was used to strange beds and pounding headaches. It was her inability to piece together the recent history that had brought her to her current locale. She had tried to play the association game, which usually worked for mornings such as the one she was experiencing. The trick was to find the most recent memory of a place where she’d been and start adding as many faces involved with that place as she could remember. The more faces involved, the more the past events would emerge and interlock events into a timeline. She first thought of the dark bar in Tucson and inserted the face of Anita with her serious eyes and sweet smile. Then she worked forward in time to the text message she had read in her car, her apartment where she’d taken a nap and a subsequent shower, and ended with the trail run in the desert. There were no more faces. Elise raised herself up onto her elbows and grit her teeth against the pain she felt every time she moved. There was something about the trail run that she was missing, she thought. She tried to concentrate on the feel of dust under her feet, the heat of the Arizona air soaking her bones, the smell of rain. The harder she fought to work her mind through the fog, she more she began to worry. There was no memory past reaching her rock and seeing the storm sweep across the valley.
Unable to ascertain where she had been, Elise
tried to figure out where she was now. She looked out across the bed and saw her toes making little tents in the coarse, brown bedcovers. Beyond her feet, a privacy curtain was drawn around the end of the bed and up one side; the other side of the bed was pushed into a corner against the wall. A tiny window suspended in the wall over her left hip let a weak light through its grimy glass. Nothing about the heavy curtain on her right, the filthy wall on her left, or the crunching sounds that came from her mattress when she shifted her weight, gave Elise any clue as to where she was or how she had arrived there. She swallowed her rising panic and sought to clear her mind. Breathing slowly through her nose, she steadied herself to look at the situation clinically—a trick she’d first learned in nursing school. When at a loss for what to do, remember your ABCs: airway, breathing, and circulation. It was a guideline that was supposed to be used for assessing patients, but Elise found it worked better when she applied it to herself as a focusing tool.
Warily, she crooked one finger around the edge of the curtain and pulled it open a crack to peek into the room. There was a short expanse of hardwood floor, a rickety looking wooden chair, and a narrow table on which sat a white enameled basin. Pushed against the opposite wall was what she assumed was another bed—all she actually saw was another drawn curtain. Hung next to a closed door was a rather large and heavy looking wooden cross, which was the only ornament she could find in the dreary space. None of the familiar objects that usually greeted Elise in her morning-after landscapes were there to put her at ease. There was no cheaply made metal and plywood desk holding an expensive laptop computer, no box of Kleenex conveniently located next to the bed, no rinds of take-out pizzas or empty cans of beer or even a single dirty sock.
Elise felt her fear rise as she assessed and cataloged everything. The room lurched and heaved the second she sat up to draw the curtain all the way back. Swimming through her nausea, she kicked her legs over the side of the mattress and leaned forward to place her head between her knees in an attempt to make the room stop spinning. While she gulped and waited, she noticed something gleam under the bed. “Oh thank god,” she muttered to herself, drawing the chamber pot out from its discrete hiding place. She considered her options for only a moment as her bladder pressed against her pelvic wall, then carefully lowered herself from the edge of the low mattress onto the pot while lifting her skirt. Absently she examined the hem of the skirt, noting the beautiful line of irregular tiny stitches and carefully crocheted lace. Someone had made the garment by hand. Then she sighed in relief at the hollow sound of water against ceramic and hoped she had been careful enough to keep most of the lengthy gown on the outside.
It took a good deal more effort to pull herself back up onto the edge of the mattress than she had anticipated; her sore body and weakness surprised her. Curious, she drew open the neck of her gown and peered under the white muslin and over her breasts. Lurid bruises in vivid purple and sickly yellow bloomed across her side. The crest of her left hip was crowned with a partially scabbed, excoriated scrape that stretched down her thigh as though she’d been dragged. There were also bruises on her arms and thighs on both sides of her body, and her knees and shins were skinned. Experimentally, she took a deep breath, expanding her ribcage as far as she dared, and cried out in shock at the searing pain.
Elise leaned back and rested her head on the pillow. The energy that she had felt only moments earlier had disappeared and now it was all she could do to snake her legs back under the covers and fight her nightgown as it bunched uncomfortably up around her waist. Any alarm bells she’d heard earlier had been replaced by an immobilizing lethargy. Sleep and an escape from pain was all Elise wanted, and when she closed her eyes it came to her quickly, if not soothingly.
In the darkness of night, she lay in bed and clutched her chest, taking shallow, painful breaths while trying again to clear her mind of the incessant dreams of falling. She had earned herself some narcotics she thought. Wistfully, Elise pictured all the IV drips she had started in the past year. That’s what she wanted for herself—a morphine drip and a nurse call light. The fantasy made her wonder why no one had taken her to a hospital. Someone must have seen the road rash and bruising when they changed her clothes. There was no telling how long she’d been in bed and her weakness alone would have alarmed anyone with sense. If she could ignore the pain, she’d be fine, eventually. But at that moment she was in no shape to get out of bed. Elise wondered if she could make it out the door she’d seen earlier if she crawled.
Someone cleared their voice from within the room. Elise felt her body tense—her skin tingled, her ears strained. She wasn’t alone. She turned to look out into the room but someone had drawn the privacy curtain closed again. She tried to call out a hello from her bed but could only manage a few croaks and a cough.
The sound of a chair being scraped across the floor alarmed her. When the bed curtain ripped aside, Elise gasped painfully and flinched to the protection of the wall. “What is it?” someone whispered loudly. “Tell me.”
A man leaned in through the curtain and loomed so close he was impossible to focus on—a two-headed monster. Elise squeezed her eyes shut and rolled them around under their lids to loosen the film that mucked her vision. Then, fighting to keep her fear under control, she finally managed to vocalize her most pressing concern. “Where am I?”
“You’re safe here,” he assured without answering the question.
ESCAPE
The mattress shifted when the man took his weight off the edge to lean back in his chair. Now further away, his face was slightly easier for Elise to focus on and what she saw was a huge relief. He was young, perhaps a year or two older than Elise, with an honest face and a strong jaw—far from a two-headed monster. The blonde hair that fell forward in waves like a curtain over his straight brows did nothing to hide the sincerity radiating from big brown eyes that were crinkled up from his large smile. “We thought you would never come back from that fever,” he said. “Mother’s been with you for two days.”
“Mother?” Elise rasped. In the distance she heard a roar of cheers and was relieved to know there were other people nearby.
“Yes, Mother and I run the boarding house as well as the public house downstairs.”
“Boarding house?” Elise was used to the lilting Spanish inflections she heard in South Tucson, but this man’s British accent was anything but melodic. All his vowels were ripened in his sinuses before they slid through his nostrils. Reaching behind her head, she propped the pillow against the wall and slowly eased herself up to lean against it uncomfortably. Echoing her movement in parallel, the man leaned forward with his hands on his knees and studied her face. “You don’t look well yet,” he said. “But I am glad to see you sitting up. You had given us quite a scare.”
“Why didn’t you get an ambulance? Why am I still here?” Her throat hurt to talk. She put a hand to her neck and swallowed hard.
“A what? Speak up, dear. You’re here because you haven’t been well enough to go anywhere else. But it seems you’re now on the mend.”
“Who are you again?” Elise peered closer at him, trying to see if she could place him in a memory. The meager candlelight in the dark room didn’t help.
“How rude of me. You’ve been here for so long now that I completely forgot you would have no idea who I am.” He inclined his head elegantly in a little bow. “Richard Ferrington, at your service.” He smiled again and it seemed to cause his whole body to relax into the act of turning up the corners of his mouth. He slumped back in his chair with his relaxed-body-smile. “I trust you’re feeling better?”
“Maybe a little,” responded Elise. It was hard to imagine feeling much worse than she did at that moment, but at least she was awake. Her dreams had mostly faded out of her memory except for threads of images that made her uneasy.
“I suspect you’ll be recovering quickly from here on out—the worst seems to be over. You should know that all of us here wish to do what we can to help. Mother is
even bringing the barber.” Richard looked at the door. “Actually, they should be here by now, I’m not sure what’s holding them.”
Elise absently put a hand to her hair, and then was drawn to pay attention instead to the tightening she was feeling in her bladder. “Would you tell me where your bathroom is?” She pushed the covers down and prepared to get out of bed.
“Begging your pardon?”
“The bathroom,” Elise repeated sitting forward. She was thankful not to feel the nausea and vertigo she had experienced the last time she’d sat up.
Richard stood nervously. “Of course. You’d like a bath. When Mother arrives, she can help you. She’ll be here soon.”
“No, no. I don’t want a bath,” Elise tried to sound more cheerful than she felt. “I just need to pee. Can you show me the way?”
“The way?” Richard’s smile disappeared. “You want me to show you the way?”
“Yes please.”
“Don’t you know?”
Elise warily eyed the young man. It was likely she had already used his bathroom at some point in her near history. “I forgot. Show me again?”
“How to urinate?” Richard squeaked. He was blushing and backing towards the door.
Elise rubbed her temples. There was something wrong with him, she thought as she wracked her head for more background information. How did he fit into the picture of her recent past? Boarding houses with Mother—that was too much. She was thankful that he didn’t tell her his name was Norman. She pushed the covers all the way down, being careful to draw the hem of her gown down with them so that Richard wouldn’t see anything he shouldn’t. She hoped it had been his mother that had changed her into the nightgown. Then again, she thought as she turned back to appraise him through eyes that still weren’t focusing correctly, it could be that he’d undressed her himself with her permission. He was her type: blond, built like a Viking, and not very smart.