Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Larson’s voice broke through Wayne’s thoughts, which vanished with the anger as suddenly as they had come. He finished with, “The girl who found her said she had been incredibly distraught moments before. She was trying to tell the girl what was happening to her, I guess, but from the sounds of it, she wasn’t making much sense.”

  The girl, Wayne supposed, was probably the one he’d seen talking to the police, the one with the hot boyfriend who seemed so attentive. And he had known the old woman by sight, had seen her around the building. She always smiled and said hello when she passed him in the hallway or shared an elevator. He hadn’t known her, but he’d liked the vibe he got from her, the grandmotherly warmth she exuded, light and airy, like her floral perfume. Poor old lady. She’d come apart.

  “Pardon?”

  Larson was watching him expectantly, as was the couple beside him. The woman, in particular, seemed to be sizing him up.

  Wayne hadn’t realized he’d muttered anything out loud until Larson had spoken. It took him a moment to recover from what felt like a sudden invasion into his personal musings. “I—I said she came apart, sounds like. Onset of dementia. Sad.”

  Larson nodded. “Sad indeed. By all accounts, Mrs. Roesler was a nice lady. It’s a shame.”

  A nice lady, yes. Wayne shifted his weight and glanced at the door. Cops seemed to be conferring on how best to manage the people waiting to get back into the building. Sure, the good people of Bridgewood thought Mrs. Roesler was a nice lady...and an unfortunate and unpleasant incident quickly and neatly cleaned up, while people not much younger hurried on to their lives. The group of faded gray people that had arrested Larson’s attention were already gone. There but for the grace of better meds, Wayne thought unkindly, and the image of them coming apart, too—quite literally—respawned in his head.

  A lot of waiting followed, while by degrees, the CSI, then the nonessential police personnel, finished their tasks, packed up, and left the scene. Finally, one of the detectives who had spoken to Larson announced to the milling tenants that they could return to their apartments. From their spot in the parking lot, Wayne, Larson, and the old couple (Larson introduced them as Hal and Eda Corman) watched the others pass through the front doors. There weren’t many yet in residence at Bridgewood Estates, but there were enough to deter Wayne from joining the jostled, largely confused line as it filed into the lobby. Wayne’s profession (like Larson’s, he supposed) suited his natural sense of security and his inclination to people-watch.

  He didn’t register the limping figure in dirty, loose-fitting gray clothes right away. She was a good deal shorter than the people ahead of and behind her, and seemed less substantial somehow than the others in the line—more like an afterimage of someone than a real person. Ultimately, though, it was the limp—it was pronounced and arrhythmic—that tripped some inner alarm, wading through his non-thoughts to trigger a sense of familiarity. A heavy lump dropped from his chest and into his gut.

  —Oh God, she has no—

  The wet, stringy dark hair of her bowed head hung forward, obscuring her face. She was shorter...shorter than the others, because—

  She—oh God, she’s missing—

  He moved closer, not quite at a jog, craning his neck and impatiently dodging police and other tenants who obscured his view of their feet, but he knew. He knew. It was the way she limped, dragging what he remembered as rabid stumps ending around the ankles. He vaguely heard Larson calling to him, but he ignored it. He had to see—and to make sure others saw.

  Just before she passed through the front doors and into the lobby she looked up and right at him, stopping him short. The lump in his gut rolled heavily, painfully.

  Filmy cataracts clouded the eyes but he could feel their precision focus, their malevolent glare. A long lash from the corner of her bluish lips opened up her right cheek to reveal graying teeth clotted with something he didn’t want to identify. Her head jerked slightly as if its supports were wrenching away from her neck. In the next moment, she had passed out of sight and into the lobby.

  Revulsion sat like dead weights in his shoes, solidifying his legs and arms so that he felt welded to the spot. It took several seconds for feeling to return to his limbs and allow movement again, and even then, it took a supreme effort on his part to half-walk, half-jog to the lobby doors where the last of the tenants were filing in. His gaze swept frantically around the lobby, taking in a glimpse of torn cheek and black hair by Sunderman’s door before a man passed between them. Then the girl was gone. There was no sign of her at all, and no indication, given their bored and placid expressions, that anyone else had seen her.

  He moved inside, the lump in his gut dropping to a painful place just above his groin. What the hell was going on?

  With a trembling hand, he stopped a middle-aged woman heading toward the elevator. She turned and offered a small, polite smile.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, aware that his voice sounded small and scared. “Did you see a young girl, uh, dressed in gray sweats? Black hair, pale face, a limp....” His voice trailed off. What else could he say? A slash that opened her mouth almost all the way to her right ear? Cataracts over dry, dead eyes? A girl missing her hands and feet, and yet dragging her corpse toward the landlady’s door?

  The woman seemed to sense there might be more forthcoming from him, but when he didn’t speak, she shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t recall seeing anyone like that.” She walked away from him.

  He tried again with an elderly man shuffling across the lobby floor, describing the black-haired girl in gray sweats as “sickly-looking, and with a bad limp.” That seemed sufficient.

  The old man hadn’t seen her, either. Wayne knew he wouldn’t have. No one here had. He waited until the lobby had mostly cleared before getting on the elevator. The others in the car got out on the first floor, and he rode up one more floor alone. For just a moment before the doors opened, it occurred to him that the footless, handless girl might be limping toward the elevator, smearing her bloody stump of an arm across the wall between apartments, leaving a gory double-trail behind her as she dragged her legs forward. That and the lurch of the rising elevator threatened to double him over and force up his lunch from the depths of his stomach. He swallowed several times, a technique he’d learned in childhood to calm his insides and return order to his mind. Usually, it worked.

  The doors opened, and with one final suck of air, he stepped out.

  The second floor was empty. He felt tears of relief well up in his eyes, and he let go of the breath in his chest. He made his way to his apartment, glancing around to ensure the hallway was still empty as he unlocked his door and stepped inside. Immediately, he locked the door behind him, sighed, forced a smile at the cat, who purred against his legs, and then stumbled quickly to the bathroom to throw up.

  ***

  Derek had accepted early on that the women in his life were complicated, and that their complications made them both strong and fascinating. This extended from his mother and two sisters to the love of his life sleeping in the other room. And they had all taught him that it took a strong, multifaceted man to handle women like that without going crazy. Derek had known a lot of women in his life. He knew his way around them. He knew how to make them smile, to turn them on, to pique their interest. He knew how to read them. But the women in his life now knew and understood him—they knew how to wow him, how to move him, how to infuriate him and how to soothe him. Weighing the passion, the excitement, and the great memories against their soapboxes, their fits of passionate discourse, their unpredictable moods and whims, these women intrigued him, captured his interest as well as his heart and mind.

  He often thought it was a shame that his mother and sisters had such a problem with Myrinda being white. They were all so much alike, and it ought to have bonded them. But then, maybe the very qualities he found so interesting, those they shared in common, could only naturally push them apart, like similar magnetic poles. He accepted that, too.
So long as they were civil, even if it was cool politeness and guarded respectfulness, he was okay with it. He was a grown man, in control of and happy with his life. The army had put him through college, where he’d earned a Master’s degree in National Security, and had gone on to build up an impressive reputation in private security for a small handful of powerful clients. He attributed these successes to the strong women who had raised him, and to the beautiful, remarkable, strong woman he now had to share them with. He felt pretty strong and pretty remarkable himself for achieving—and balancing—a good life.

  His mom and sisters hadn’t been thrilled that he was moving so far from Philly. To them, New England was too far and too white, and he supposed they thought he would have to fight for acceptance so far away from his old, familiar stomping grounds. They were fairly insulated, though, in their community, and didn’t realize that in more than one aspect of his successful, happy life, he’d had to fight for acceptance anyway, in passive and sometimes even in direct ways. It was, by now, naturally assimilated into his social interaction. That he was black meant something to him, but he knew it made many people uncomfortable if they thought (or believed he thought) it was his sole defining feature. That was one of the reasons he loved Myrinda; all the things that made him who he was, she loved and respected. She wanted to know all about what mattered to him because he mattered to her.

  He glanced in the direction of the bedroom as he got a beer and a Tupperware container of leftovers—one of Myrinda’s “chicken surprises”—from the fridge. He was worried about her. It wasn’t just that she’d been quiet. He’d expected that, after what had happened down in the laundry room with Aggie Roesler from across the hall. He’d expected her to be troubled—distracted, moody, even. But she was different in a way that unsettled him. Different in a way he couldn’t read, couldn’t understand. He’d always prided himself in knowing what she needed almost before she did, but this brooding, jumpy woman with shadowed, far-away eyes exuded a kind of alienness to him. She wasn’t distant and distracted; she was there with him, all right, but she was...not herself. It was almost like whatever she had seen had loosened some pipe inside her, and she was dripping, dripping, filling up slowly with someone else. Someone darker. Someone he couldn’t quite reach.

  At the kitchen table, he ate the leftover chicken cold, right out of the Tupperware container, thinking about her earlier request. When he’d denied her gently, she’d gone off to the bathroom. She wasn’t angry, he’d seen, but anxious, like her thoughts were already ahead of him and on to other things. As an afterthought, she’d called back that she was going to go soak in the tub, and Derek had let her go. He’d figured it was a possibility she was just hormonal, and maybe feeling the natural stress of moving away from family, friends, and familiarity. She took baths to ease menstrual cramps sometimes, or when she wanted to relax alone. Also, she got anxious nearly to the point of obsessive-compulsive for a day or two when she had PMS, and sometimes presented odd distresses to him that seemed constructed of a logic only she could follow. He didn’t always understand the origin of her worries, but he was and had always been a fixer, so he did his best to reassure her, and it passed quickly enough.

  It was really her request more than anything that had thrown him off. She’d wanted him to leave the packing tape she’d plastered all over the heating vents. She wouldn’t tell him why she’d done it, other than that she thought there was some sort of infestation. However, she’d denied seeing any insects in the apartment, and jumped up when he moved to call the landlady about sending someone up to check the vents out. No, she emphatically insisted he not involve the landlady. She just wanted him to leave the tape on the vents for a few days. Like fly paper, she said. Just in case, just to see. When he’d explained to her that it was probably a potential fire hazard, she nodded, and reluctantly let him peel it off. She’d still insisted no one needed to be called, that she’d let him know if any other problems with the vents presented themselves.

  Usually her stress revolved around the cleanliness, order, and structural integrity of the things in her charge. The sloppy, excessively applied wads of tape over her beautiful living room vents made no sense to him. Derek knew this apartment meant a lot to her. It was more than just a place to live. It was meant to be a soothing sanctuary, an inviting and comfortable hang-out, and a neat and orderly command post. To her, it was a collection of treasured possessions and furnishings, which in turn, displayed a lifetime of cherished memories. Myrinda didn’t ask for much, really; she had only ever wanted a home of her own. To her, an apartment meant home in all its warmest connotations, and home meant family, security, and a future.

  Maybe he was overthinking it, but this move seemed to be more stressful than anything to Myrinda. He wondered if they should have just stayed in PA.

  Soft mewling sounds coming from the bathroom threaded through his thoughts. At least, he thought he heard something, though he couldn’t be sure. The way this building was, the sounds could be coming from another apartment, up through the floor, or through the ceiling maybe. He put down his fork and listened. A distinctive thump from their bathroom confirmed it, followed by little cries of pain, and a wet dripping sound.

  He rose and moved out into the hall. At the far end, the bathroom door was closed, the sliver of space beneath it dark. He listened again, and thought he heard water running in the sink. It stopped, and there was another thump, a kind of crystal sound like a fist (or face) hitting glass, and a small cry so heartbroken, so forlorn, that it made Derek’s own chest ache a little. What was Myrinda doing in there in the dark? He moved quickly down the hall to the door and knocked, his hand already on the knob. “Babygirl? You okay in there?”

  There was no verbal answer, but he could hear the sucking of the drain in the sink being released, and the wet splash of liquid hitting the floor.

  “Myrinda, baby, what’s going on? Talk to me.”

  “She isn’t here,” a faint female voice said from the other side of the door. It had a quality to it he didn’t recognize at all.

  Derek frowned, trying the knob. It was locked. “Myrinda?”

  “I said,” the voice from the other side replied, dropping octaves with each syllable, “she isn’t here.”

  Derek jiggled the handle, then threw his weight against the door. A cold fear spread quickly from his chest, enveloping his arms, rising up his neck and fanning down into his gut. Myrinda didn’t—couldn’t—sound like that. He slammed a shoulder against the door again, and then a third time, but it wouldn’t budge. Beyond it, he thought he heard a low kind of chuckling, devoid of humor. He shouldered the door again. “Open this door, or I’m gonna break—”

  He tried the knob again, and the door swung easily open, breaking off his words. He tumbled through, his hand flicking the light switch and bathing the bathroom in bright white light. His gaze darted between sink and toilet, then across the tiled wall to the tub and shower.

  The room was empty. Well, nearly empty.

  In the mirror, Derek’s forehead bled. Still confused, he frowned, his fingers rising to feel the spot. They came away clean. He blinked, and the blood somehow refocused, appearing smeared on the glass. He glanced down and saw that there was also a dark smear of blood, like dragged fingers, across the tan counter, spilling into the sink. Grabbing a large wad of toilet paper, he turned on the faucet, wiping the blood from the counter and mirror and rinsing it out of the sink. He chucked the pink wad of paper into the small trash bin between the counter and toilet, then turned off the light.

  He quickly crossed to the bedroom, opening the door. The bedroom was dark. A shape lay beneath the covers.

  “Babygirl?”

  EIGHT

  Myrinda lay in the darkness, willing sleep to take her. It didn’t. She could hear Derek moving around out in the kitchen—soft sounds, lithely confident. She imagined him heating up the leftovers or brewing up some coffee, and it was soothing. His solid, sure presence, his thereness made her feel better. Th
ere, but not on top of her with questions she couldn’t answer just then. Whether or not he knew she was awake didn’t matter; he knew she needed to rest, alone in the dark. He was good like that; it was one of those endearing qualities about him that she found herself appreciating a lot just then. He knew when to be there, but not too there.

  Her thoughts turned to Aggie. She’d heard people murmuring about her as she’d turned to go, and it had hit a nerve. It had been idle talk, clueless and unfounded, about how the way she was dressed suggested she might be going senile, about her being too old to live on her own, about strokes and heart attacks and even terrible accidents that could befall little old ladies when wandering basements alone.

  At first, Myrinda couldn’t quite put a finger on why such talk got under her skin the way it did. No one had looked at her like she should have or could have done more, or that she had somehow done something wrong. And it wasn’t that Myrinda felt a comparison to her own current life. She was young, strong, and certainly not alone. She had Derek. She had been growing quite fond of Aggie in a grand-daughterly sort of way, and she supposed gossip about the sweet old woman was part of what bothered her. Despite her current situation, she could imagine what it might have felt like to be an old woman living alone, learning to balance what her mind could still do with what her body could, learning to accept increasing limitations and relinquish certain freedoms. On top of that, to feel like the world was watching her, waiting for a sign of unmistakable frailty, waiting for any shred of evidence to prove it was time to give it all up and accept infirmity....