“Alright,” the girl said and smiled.
“Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
The next evening Pauline came on shift to find a dark-haired man in his twenties in Jo’s room. He had a handlebar moustache and was seated in the chair across from her, dressed in black jeans, a black leather coat, and motorcycle boots.
“I’m Randy,” he told the nurse. He stood up tall and lanky, and put out his hand and Pauline shook it. “I’m the youth pastor at Carol’s church.”
“Carol?”
“I think you might know her as Jo. Her real name is Carol Coller.”
Pauline said hello to the girl, checked her IV, and looked at the packings. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” she said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Pauline winked at her. “Then I’ll leave you two alone,” she said and charted on the computer in the corner of the room and left. When she came back an hour later the youth pastor was gone. The girl was alone and facing the wall and quietly crying to herself.
“Carol’s a nice name,” Pauline said. “Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured.
“Well it’s a good name.”
“The guys called me Jo,” she said as she still faced the wall. “And when I got here I wasn’t going tell them my real name . . . Do you want to know why they called me Jo?”
“Why?”
She squeezed her eyes closed and covered her face with her hands. “They called me Jo ’cause there was a crazy girl they knew named JoAnne. They called her Jo-blow ’cause she’d have sex with everyone. She’d blow anyone. All you had to do was ask her.”
“But that’s not your name, is it?”
“No,” she said.
“You’re not her, are you?”
“No.”
“I like the name Carol,” Pauline said. “May I call you that?”
“Okay.”
“Was the pastor alright?”
Carol didn’t answer.
“He likes motorcycles, huh?”
She smiled and opened her eyes. She turned to Pauline. “He thinks he’s cool ’cause he rides a motorcycle around. But he’s seriously not cool.”
“How did he find you?”
“There was a child welfare lady that came by. She scared me so I told her my real name.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly.
“It was a good move,” Pauline said and looked at her watch. “But now we’re going to have to get to work ’cause I’m a little behind tonight. Are you up for me changing the packings?”
Carol nodded and Pauline left the room and came back with a cart of supplies. She set it next to the bed and pulled the curtain around. She washed her hands and put on a pair of sterile gloves.
“It’s time for you to close your eyes, okay?”
“Okay,” Carol said, and Pauline began removing the bandages and packings from her leg.
“Have your parents come yet?”
“Pastor Randy said my mom’s so heartbroken she missed two days of work. They don’t want to see me until I get better.”
“She’ll change her mind. She’s probably just scared.”
“They want me to go away.”
“Go away where?”
“A Christian rehabilitation camp.”
“They have those?”
“Yeah, and they cost a lot of money. They want me to go there until I’m eighteen.” Carol suddenly cried out in pain.
“Are you alright?”
“I just started thinking about what you’re doing, and I opened my eyes. I know I should never do that, but I can’t help it sometimes.”
“It’s gonna get easier and easier,” Pauline said. “They’re healing so fast now that pretty soon we won’t have to do it at all. So where is this rehabilitation place?”
“In Idaho somewhere.”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
“They’ll all hate me there. I know they will.”
“You’re a good kid. You’re not any worse than anyone else. Maybe you’ll meet nice people there.”
“You don’t understand anything.”
“Maybe not, but the place could be alright. You never know.”
“You hate me, too. I can tell. I can tell by your voice. You think I’m a freak and you want me to go to some camp for freaks so you’ll never have think of me again.”
“You know that’s not true,” Pauline said. “So lay off saying stuff like that, alright? Nothing’s changed. I’m just trying to understand what’s going on . . . Okay, we’re half done.” Pauline stood up, took off her gloves, and threw them in the basket along with the used packings and bandages. She washed her hands again, put on new gloves, and began repacking the abscesses.
“How’s the pain? You holding up alright?” she asked, but this time Carol wouldn’t answer. The girl kept her eyes squeezed shut, and turned her face to the wall and didn’t speak again. Pauline finished her work and left the room. When she came by again for the last time during the night she knew Carol was faking sleep.
The next shift, Pauline came on to find that the girl had disappeared in the middle of the night. The graveyard shift nurses had seen a boy in her room. They’d told him to leave and he had. They hadn’t seen him again and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary after that. She was just there one moment and then the next she wasn’t.
The hospital called her parents and the youth pastor but no one had seen her. They called the police and filed a missing persons report, but her whereabouts were unknown.
Pauline worked the rest of her shift that night but when she got home she couldn’t eat or sleep. The next morning she walked across her apartment complex and climbed the stairs to the second floor. She knocked on a front door until a naked man answered.
“Are you trying to scare me to death, Gary?”
The man was heavyset and in his late fifties and bald. His body was covered in black hair, and his penis was nearly hidden under his sagging belly.
“It’s six o’clock in the morning,” he grumbled.
“I called you three times last night.”
“My phone doesn’t work.”
“Your phone works. I called from outside the door once and heard it ringing. Can you put some clothes on? I have to talk to you, and I can’t do it this way.”
Gary turned around and waddled down the hallway toward his bedroom. Pauline went inside, turned the heat up on the thermostat, and stood in the kitchen and waited.
“I thought nurses were used to seeing naked men,” he yelled from the bedroom.
“I get paid to see people naked. That’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I’m taking you out to breakfast.”
“Why, what do you want?” He came from the bedroom in threadbare white Jockey shorts and sat down on his couch.
“I told you to get dressed.”
“I have underwear on. What do you want?”
“I checked the janitor’s schedule last night and you have today off. I need your help.”
“I don’t want to help.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“It can’t be good if you’re here this early.”
“How’s the job I got you?”
Gary coughed for a long time and shook his head. He got up and spit in the kitchen sink and then sat back down on the couch again. “You’re going to hold that over me forever and that’s bullshit.”
“I was just asking. You don’t need to get ugly. Seriously, how is it going?”
“Alright I guess,” he said. He put his feet up on a plywood coffee table.
She pointed to an ashtray full of butts and half-finished cigarettes on the table next to his feet. “You know you’re supposed to quit smoking.”
“I have
quit,” he cried. He rubbed his face with his hands and sighed.
“There’s more than twenty butts in there.”
“They’ve been there a long time.”
Pauline took the ashtray and emptied it in a trash basket in the kitchen. “If I see more than five in here the next time I’m over, I’m going to show up every morning at six and take you running.”
“I’d like to see you go running,” he said and laughed.
“Well if you make me, I’ll start. Anyway, come on. Get dressed.”
“First tell me why.”
“ ’Cause I’m taking you to breakfast.”
“Then what?”
“Come on,” Pauline said.
He coughed again but got up and went back to his room. He came out five minutes later wearing jeans and a worn flannel coat.
“I thought you quit drinking,” said Pauline.
“I have, mostly.” He sat on the couch and put on his shoes.
“There are four paper sacks full of empty beer cans.”
“They’ve been there a long time. I recycle now.”
“I bet you recycle. Do you have a gun?”
“Jesus, Pauline,” he cried. “You’re getting me into something where I need a gun?” He walked to the kitchen table where a new pack of cigarettes and a lighter sat. He opened the cigarettes, took one out, and lit it.
“I’m glad you quit.”
“Get off my back. Jesus, you could drive a man nuts. So why do I need a gun?”
“It’s for just in case,” Pauline said.
“I hate guns. Why would you think I’d have a gun?”
“What about a baseball bat?”
“Christ, can’t we go eat first?” he said. “And if you tell me I have diabetes one time while we’re there I’ll get a gun and shoot myself.”
“Don’t worry,” Pauline said and opened the front door. “I want you to eat a lot. You might need your strength.”
The morning was clear and the sun was rising into a dark-blue sky when they arrived at the white farmhouse with the yellow barn. The fields surrounding it were still half-covered in snow, and they could see their breath as they got out of the car. In the early sunlight the house looked even more desolate and tired than Pauline remembered. She opened the trunk, took out a tire iron, and handed it to Gary. They walked past the gravel driveway and up the steps to the back door. Pauline knocked and looked inside, but this time she didn’t see any movement or any sign of a fire. She knocked again and checked the door handle to find it unlocked.
Inside, the kitchen’s cabinet doors were gone as was the wood trim on the baseboards, the doorway, and the windows. The pictures that hung on the walls had disappeared, and there was more trash everywhere. Old wrappers and food containers, fast-food bags, dirty clothes, and soda and beer cans. She walked to the living room where the windows were still covered and called out the girl’s name in the darkness. Gary used his cigarette lighter to see his way to the blacked-out windows. He pulled the garbage bags down and light filled the room.
“Whose house is this?” he asked.
“I don’t really know,” Pauline said. They walked down a hallway into the first bedroom. There were holes in the walls showing old lath and plaster and on the floor was a broken-up wooden dresser and a door they had tried to bust apart. All the baseboard and window trim was gone. The next bedroom was empty except for a pair of stained men’s underwear and a frozen pool of vomit. All the trim on the baseboards and windows was gone. In the bathroom, the toilet and tub were full of shit and piss, and Gary gagged at the sight of it and went to the living room and lit a cigarette.
It was there that he called for Pauline.
In a sleeping bag behind the couch was the outline of a body. Pauline entered the room and went to the bag. She pulled it back to see the redheaded boy, frozen and dead. His young face pale and blue, his eyes still open. Around him on the ground were bloody rags, a box cutter, an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol, and two nails. She could see that he’d been lancing the abscess himself. He wore no shirt and his arms were covered in frozen pus and blood.
“Is there someone in there?” Gary said from the edge of the room.
“Yeah,” Pauline said. “Don’t come over here. You don’t need to see it. It’s not Carol. It’s a boy that I’ve seen here before.”
“Is he dead?”
She looked at Gary and nodded. She walked to the corner of the room where another sleeping bag lay with something inside it. She pulled it back to see an orange suitcase. On the tag it said the girl’s name, Carol. Inside were clothes, two empty notebooks, and a small photo album. There were pictures of her holding a cat, of her standing next to a horse in the middle of a stream, her with a volleyball team, and another of her sitting on a couch with a boy who looked like her brother. She rummaged through the girl’s clothes to find clean socks, folded underwear, and T-shirts. There was a volleyball jersey and a baggie full of medals. There was a plastic sack full of dirty clothes and a pair of sandals. She took a photo of the girl from the album, put it in her coat pocket, and turned to Gary. “Does your phone work out here?”
He looked at it. “Yeah,” he said.
“Will you call the police?”
He nodded and called them and gave them the location, and they went outside, to the porch, and waited.
“Why would they just leave him out here?” Gary asked.
“He was probably too sick to travel and they didn’t care about him.” Pauline sat down on the porch steps. She tried to remember the redheaded boy’s name but couldn’t. “It’s my fault,” she said finally.
“How is it your fault?”
“I’d seen that boy out here before. I knew he was sick. I tried to get him to come to the hospital with me but he wouldn’t. I should have called the police that day. I knew he was in trouble.” Tears began falling down her cheeks and she wiped her face on her coat. “I knew he was in real trouble, but I blocked it out . . . I was so mad at them for being cruel to Carol, for taking advantage of her, that I didn’t care what happened to them. She was safe so I blocked them out. But what does that make me?”
“He could have gone with you. He chose not to.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Where do you think the girl is now?”
“I don’t know.”
22
It was just a blur of light when he opened his eyes. He could hear the TV. He wasn’t in pain. The tube was out of his mouth, but he could just see that there was now a tube coming out of his windpipe. He could feel someone’s hand holding his, and he knew instantly it was his mother’s hand. It was warm and soft and he could feel the only ring she wore on her left middle finger.
And then for a moment he could see her clearly. She was sitting next to his bed watching the news. A wave of emotion overcame him. He tried to grip her hand to let her know he was there but his fingers wouldn’t move when he asked them. He tried to make a noise, but no noise would come. He tried to move his feet and when that failed he again tried to move his fingers. But all the effort was exhausting him, and his eyes grew heavy and closed.
As she held his hand he remembered years before, her sitting at a high-school football game on a cold fall night. Her shift manager had let her leave work early and she sat in her uniform, in a winter coat, and drank coffee and watched him play. Every time he looked at the stands he saw her sitting by herself. He knew she didn’t understand the rules of the game, and that she had never liked sports. Not any of them. There were groups of families in front of her and cheerleaders on the track in front of them. Around her were various other people: high-school kids, the occasional single parent, and then rows of empty bench seats. Snow began drifting down as the clock neared the end of the game. He was sure she was probably freezing, but he knew she wouldn’t leave. And then finally he caught a pass. It was a good catch but he got hit hard right afterward and the ball sprang loose. He’d fumbled. The opposing team picked it up and ran it into the end zone
for a touchdown. The score was now 27–10; his team was behind. The game ended as dusk set into night. The next game began and she went to her car and waited.
He appeared forty minutes later and got into the passenger-side seat with a swollen nose and wet hair.
“Are you freezing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“They don’t have blow-dryers in the locker rooms?”
He laughed. “No, Mom.”
“What happened to your nose?” Under the dome light she could see it was swollen, with dried blood around the nostrils. She took a pack of Kleenex from her purse and handed it to him. “You might need these.”
“I don’t think it’s broke, but it sure hurts,” he said.
“Do you think we should go to the doctor?”
“The coach looked at it and thought it was fine. He said he knew about broken noses.”
“Good. Then are you hungry?”
“Not really,” he said and put his book bag in the back seat and they began driving home. “How much did you see?”
“I got off early and saw the second part.”
“The second half,” he said and laughed.
“I saw the second half,” she said and smiled.
“Did you see me fumble the ball?”
“That guy hit you pretty hard.”
“Not that hard, I just dropped it. I don’t know why. I try so hard not to make mistakes but I make a lot of them. He stuck his hand through my face mask and hit my nose, too. You should see my uniform. It’s all covered in blood.”
“Did you bring the uniform with you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s in my bag.”
“I’ll get the blood out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. That’s just the game. I feel bad for your nose though.”
“You’re not disappointed in me?”
“Why would I be disappointed?”
“ ’Cause I fumbled the ball and got blood all over my uniform. Plus I missed two blocks and then when I played defense I missed a tackle. I bet I won’t start next week.”
“Everyone has bad games,” she said.
“I hate that you have to sit out there in the cold just to watch me screw up. I know you don’t like football. I don’t think you should come anymore.”
The Free Page 18