The Dark Hour

by K. J. Young

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” A look of concern crosses her face, as if something just occurred to her. “You won’t repeat any of this, will you?”

  “No, I promise. This is just between us.” He leans against the brick facing of the building, hands in pockets.

  “I’ve been looking at apartments for rent in the newspaper. I’m thinking I’ll move in September.” Lisa cocks her head to one side. “I didn’t make a mistake telling you all this, did I?” She stares at him, waiting. “I don’t want to hurt their feelings—I just can’t keep doing this anymore.”

  “I promise not to say anything.”

  “You better not,” she says.

  Chapter Six

  The front door swings open so suddenly it takes Mark by surprise. Reflexively, he steps aside. A man carrying a leather medical bag, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, steps out and joins them. “Here you are,” he says, his voice mellow and warm.

  “Dr. Cross.” Lisa nods. “This is our new employee, Mark Norman.”

  Dr. Cross pulls the door shut behind him and extends a hand. “Nice to meet you, Mark.”

  Mark sizes him up as they shake hands. Dr. Cross is strikingly tall and younger than he anticipated, thin with sharp features, impressive sideburns, and a head of curly brown hair. His grip is firm, and he gives Mark a friendly smile.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Dr. Cross,” Mark says.

  “Welcome aboard. I take it that Lisa’s shown you the ropes?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You will today, then?” Dr. Cross says, giving Lisa a pointed look. His voice is still friendly, but his tone gives Mark the impression that he’s giving an order rather than making a suggestion.

  “Of course,” Lisa says.

  The doctor gestures toward the door. “Lisa, why don’t you go on inside and check in with Alma and Roy? I’d like to get Mark up to speed on a few things.” Off in the distance a truck rumbles, and a bird lets out a distinctly angry-sounding squawk. Lisa hesitates, and Dr. Cross adds, “Just for a minute. Mark will be with you shortly.”

  She nods and goes inside. It isn’t until the door closes that Dr. Cross addresses Mark again. “I was glad to hear you’d been hired, Mark. Roy and Alma need two home health aides, and Lisa is getting a little frayed around the edges.”

  From the ensuing pause, Mark senses he’s waiting for a response. “I hadn’t noticed. She’s been helpful.”

  “That may be, but I’ve been worried about her. It’s not easy caregiving for the elderly, especially when they’re declining so rapidly.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this,” Mark says, when what he really would like to know is exactly how rapidly.

  “Yes,” Dr. Cross says sadly. “Alma is suffering from a cognitive decline. You may notice some confusion or repetition in her speech. Her physical health isn’t optimal either. She’s very frail. Roy has end-stage congestive heart failure. It’s being treated with medication, but it’s just a matter of time for him. Of course”—and here he gives a wry smile—“it’s just a matter of time for most of us.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hear that you had an outing with Roy the other day that lasted several hours?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dr. Cross crosses his arms. “And last night the four of you went to dinner at Duke’s Supper Club?”

  “That’s right.” Mark senses disapproval and tries to lighten his response with a smile. “We had a delicious meal. Everyone had a nice time.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case, but I have to tell you that these kinds of outings take their toll on older people. Today Roy is exhausted, and to be honest, I’m worried about the strain on his heart. Not your fault, of course, but if he suggests this kind of thing again, you should discourage it.”

  Mark says, “Of course.”

  “I’m also hoping that you’ll be there to bolster Lisa so that she doesn’t get too burned out. Alma is very fond of her, and we don’t want her to quit. Lisa already knows the workings of the household. She’d be hard to replace.”

  “I’m happy to help.”

  “Older people can sometimes be odd when the end is near. He might ask you to do some things that don’t seem to make sense. Just be agreeable.” Dr. Cross reaches into his pocket and pulls out a white business card. “Feel free to call me for any reason. Any questions or concerns, I want to hear them. Alma and Roy are important to me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mark tucks the card into his pants pocket. “If anything comes up, you’ll be the first to know.”

  After Dr. Cross leaves and is striding down the sidewalk to his parked car, Mark goes inside to find Roy and Alma at the dining room table. Lisa’s there too, pouring coffee and asking if they want jelly on their toast. When Mark walks into the room, Roy greets him with a friendly smile, and Lisa nods, while Alma doesn’t acknowledge his presence at all. Why is it, Mark wonders, that old people so often have a vacant look about them? It’s as if the life force has leaked out of them, leaving empty shells of cloudy eyes, papery skin, and trembling limbs. Their bodies are all used up and barely functioning, and still they keep on, breathing in, breathing out, eating and dressing and bathing, a burden to everyone around them. He met these two a few days earlier, and already he can see that they are all used up. Roy acknowledged it himself—it is young men who rule the world.

  Lisa directs Mark to the kitchen, where she puts him to work cutting cantaloupe into thin wedges and arranging them on two separate plates. “Like this?” he asks, and when she nods, he presents the plates to Roy and Alma as if he were an enthusiastic waiter. “Fresh fruit, just for you!” he proclaims.

  After breakfast, Lisa helps Alma to her feet, brushing the crumbs off the front of her shirt as if she were a child. Mark hands Roy his cane and follows the trio down the hall to what Lisa calls the television room. A boxy TV sits on wooden legs in one corner, rabbit-ear antenna perched on top. Two recliners with plastic over the arms sit on the opposite side of the room. After getting Roy and Alma situated, Lisa kneels in front of the TV and turns the dial until she finds a game show, The Price Is Right. As she adjusts the antenna, Mark watches as a contestant unsuccessfully bids on a stereo. “Oh, too bad,” Roy says to no one in particular.

  “Mark and I are going to clean up the kitchen,” Lisa announces. “We’ll be back soon.”

  Once they are in the kitchen she begins to bustle around, gathering up the breakfast dishes and stacking them next to the sink. “What did Dr. Cross want to talk about?” she asks, handing him a dish towel.

  “He’s worried that you’re getting frayed around the edges.”

  “Hmm. Frayed around the edges?” Lisa turns off the water and dips a dishcloth into the suds. “That’s his take on it, huh? I’d say I’m ready to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “If you tell me what to do, I can take some of the load off.”

  “There’s no real load. It’s just this. What I told you about already.” Her eyes dart around the room. “A big gloomy house where time stretches on endlessly and presses in on you until you feel like you want to scream.”

  Mark allows a small silence before saying, “So what are my chores? What’s the routine?”

  “Regular housework. Cleaning, food prep, getting the mail. That kind of thing. Dr. Cross comes by frequently to check on Alma and Roy.” Lisa returns her attention to the sink. “Other than that, the only time they have visitors is when they have their dinner meetings.”

  “What kind of dinner meetings?”

  She straightens, soap bubbles still clinging to her fingers. “They belong to this group. The Redevine Society. Every few weeks the group comes for dinner, and then they have some kind of meeting. Those are my favorite evenings because all I have to do is set the table and leave the front door unlocked for the guests. The society members bring the food and the wine, and I get to spend the night in my room.” She wipes and rinses a plate and hands it to him. “They even help Alma and Roy with their
nighttime routine, which is a nice break, let me tell you.”

  “What’s the point of the group?”

  Her mouth twists. “I don’t know. It seems to be some kind of social dinner thing.” She shrugs. “All I know is that I have to wash the dishes the next day.”

  “The Redevine Society.” He lets the words roll around in his mouth. His mother once belonged to a card club of women her age who called themselves “the Posse.” That name didn’t make much sense either, although it definitely amused the middle-aged women in the club.

  “The other members are much younger than Alma and Roy, but it doesn’t seem like they do much besides eating and talking. I do know that the group has been going on for a long time, though, because I’ve seen pictures of them over the years.”

  “So you never asked about it?”

  “Nope. I mind my own business.” She continues soaping the plates, juice glasses, and silverware, rinsing each item before handing it to him. Letting out the water, she sighs, and the sound is heavy and dejected.

  No wonder she feels time stretches on endlessly in this house, Mark thinks. The job is drudgery because she makes it that way. Left to his own devices, he would have the dishes done in half the time. He’s new now, but once he gets the routine down, he knows he’ll be taking over. It’ll be better that way, and in the long run she’ll be happier too.

  Folding the dish towel, he turns to her and says, “Now, what about that tour?”

  Lisa nods and leads the way, identifying rooms as they go. So many rooms that they soon begin to blur. The library. The drawing room. The blue room. The dining room. A powder room. The pantry. And on and on. She waits patiently while he opens doors and looks in cabinets. “I just like to know where everything is,” he says, although there’s more to it than that. He’s scoping out the place, looking for forgotten valuables, but what he encounters is more dust, rather than items that can be easily lifted and resold. Too bad.

  Passing the TV room, she calls out, “I’m giving Mark a tour of the first floor.” When they get to the back of the house, she points out her own bedroom, letting him view it from the doorway. Across the hall are Alma and Roy’s bedrooms, linked by a bathroom between the two rooms. “They share a bathroom, but I have my own,” Lisa says.

  “Cool.” Mark gives an admiring nod.

  She leans toward him, and for a moment he thinks she’s going to hug him. Instead, she quietly says, “One time they slept late, so I went in to check on them, and they were both in Roy’s bed. Naked.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes. I swear it’s true. They were snuggled up together, stark naked. I almost quit that day.” She scrunches her nose and makes a slight gagging noise.

  “Are you sure they were naked? Maybe it just looked that way.”

  “Trust me, I’m sure.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you think I did?” Her tone is bitter. “I backed out of the room, closed the door, and knocked. Roy yelled out for me to come back in half an hour, and when I did, they were in pajamas in their own beds. I seriously wanted to quit. Right then and there. Just walk out the door.” She exhales loudly. “But of course I couldn’t leave. I had nowhere to go.” She wanders into Roy’s room, her fingers trailing across the chenille bedspread on the double bed.

  Mark tries to make sense of what she’s just told him. Why would a brother and sister be in bed together at all, much less naked? The image of the two old people—their bodies as bare as the day they were born, spooning in that same bed—comes to mind, and he is sickened by the thought of their tissue-paper skin laced with blue veins, the sagging folds of skin, shriveled genitals, and gray pubic hair. If they even have pubic hair. It occurs to him that maybe even that goes sparse with age. Gross.

  He shakes off the mental image and walks into the shared bath, taking in the octagon-tiled floor, the pedestal sink, and claw-foot tub. A walk-in shower has been installed more recently, as has the light fixture above the mirrored medicine cabinet. The room’s antiseptic appearance is heightened by the smell of Lysol. Opening the cabinet, he finds a bowl containing a bar of shaving soap and a brush, along with a razor, toothpaste, bandages, and other typical bathroom accessories. The top shelf has four vials of prescribed medication. “What are these?” he asks, taking one down and reading the label. Dr. Cross is listed as the prescribing doctor, but Mark doesn’t recognize the name of the drug.

  “One is for blood pressure, one’s a water pill, and one is nitroglycerin for Roy’s heart condition. And this one,” she says, holding up the largest of the four, “contains tranquilizers. They use them when they have trouble sleeping.”

  “Do you have to give them their medications?”

  “No, Roy keeps track of that. At least for now.”

  Mark nods and proceeds to Alma’s room. It’s nearly identical to Roy’s in size, with the same chenille spread covering the bed and a dresser to match. It’s plain compared to the rest of the house. “Their bedrooms aren’t very big.” He walks over to the window. A strip of grass separates the space between Alden Manor and the industrial building next door. “Not much of a view, either.”

  Lisa joins him, looking out. “These rooms weren’t intended to be bedrooms, originally. The actual bedrooms are on the second floor. They just converted them as bedrooms so they don’t have to go up and down.”

  “The stairs,” he says, realizing. The staircase rising up to the second floor would be as insurmountable as Mount Everest for someone like Alma.

  They step out into the hallway, and he says, “Do you think they’d notice if we went upstairs and took a quick look?”

  Lisa shakes her head. “Not now.” She lowers her voice. “But if you want, you can come back tonight after their bedtime and I’ll take you up then.”

  Chapter Seven

  The bus ride is completely different after dark. For one thing, getting a seat to himself is not a problem. Just a handful of riders this time of night. An old man with closed eyes, his head pressed up against the window; an older woman in a waitress uniform, her pad still sticking out of her front pocket. Most notable, though, are two attractive young women sitting up front right behind the driver. They wear clinging dresses with plunging necklines, their hair curled back from their faces. At a glance he knows they’re disco girls. When he boarded the bus, he walked past them and kept going, taking a seat several rows behind them. They’ve made sneaky looks back at him a few times, laughing in the way of flirty girls who’ve had too much to drink.

  He’s on a bus for the third time today, not even sure why he’s returning to Alden Manor except that Lisa seems to think it’s the only time they can safely go upstairs. He’s curious—but not expecting much. Lisa strikes him as someone who is having trouble holding it together and may be prone to exaggeration.

  When the bus gets to his stop, Mark is already on his feet and making his way down the aisle. As he passes the two women, one of them says, “Bye, now,” while her friend giggles. As the bus rolls away, he hears their laughter through the open windows. Walking down the block, hands in his pockets, he’s on high alert after dark in this sketchy neighborhood, but he finds himself alone.

  Somehow that makes it even more frightening.

  The landscape has transformed after dark into something eerie; the air is cooler too. The wind has picked up, a foreshadowing of the storm front predicted for later on. He hopes to leave Alden Manor before the rain comes. He’d like to be on the bus safely heading home at that point. If the timing is right, he’ll get back at the same time as Monica gets home and will join her in her after-work shower. After every shift she can’t wait to take off her waitress uniform, saying it stinks of cigarette smoke and kitchen grease. She usually kicks off her shoes and sheds her pantyhose right inside the apartment door, then unzips her dress. She drops her clothing on the floor, one piece at a time, until she’s at the bathroom door, deliciously nude, a trail of clothes behind her. He smiles at the thought. What he wouldn’t g
ive to be there, seeing her like that right now.

  But first, he has to see what Lisa is talking about on the second floor. How did she put it? I wish I hadn’t seen what I did. He has to admit he’s curious.

  When he gets to Alden Manor, he pauses for a moment on the sidewalk in front, perturbed to see it’s completely dark. Dammit. Lisa has forgotten to leave the porch light on. When he left at five, she told him the porch would be lit and the key would be under the mat. She assured him that Roy and Alma would be sound asleep by the time he arrived.

  Above the house the slimmest zigzag of lightning lights up the sky for just an instant; the flash of light makes him feel exposed. Off in the distance he hears a car honk on the main street, and overhead comes the flapping of wings of what has to be a very large bird. For a moment, Mark has an urge to turn and run before anyone sees him there, but something keeps him rooted to the spot, and he makes a sudden decision—if the key isn’t where it it’s supposed to be, he is going home. No way will he ring the doorbell and risk waking up Roy and Alma. At this hour, any excuse he comes up with will sound suspicious.

  After Mark locates the key under the doormat, he figures he’ll see it through. Waiting for his eyes to adjust, he goes to the door and locates the lock plate. With one turn of the key, he hears the satisfying click of a metallic release. Inside the house, the engulfing darkness sets loose another raft of doubts. At night, the interior feels like the haunted houses he frequented as a child at Halloween. He envisions ghoulish faces popping out and monsters grabbing at him with long claws. A large, dark mass off to the left towers over him, threatening to swallow him up. His heart gallops in his chest. I’m in Alden Manor, he reminds himself. Just an old building. Nothing scary at all.

  Within a minute his pulse has slowed. Around him the dark woodwork comes into focus, and the monster rising up on his left is only the winding staircase. He’s such a pansy. There’s no reason to be frightened. If anything, Mark rationalizes, he is the frightening one. Anyone seeing him here at this hour, creeping in the shadows, would assume he’s come to burglarize the place. Did Lisa set this whole thing up to trap him into looking bad so he would lose his job? He doubts it. Although there is something off about her, she doesn’t seem that cunning.