by PW Cooper
She hadn't read the novel. It didn't seem very different from the last book they'd read, nor the one before that. The same stories over and over, always the stories of the tragic middle-class, broken families and the unexpected dead pushing the characters over the edge of some mental abyss, just so that they might be watched crawling back. If that was heartwarming, Adelaide could do without.
Isabelle Wernick leaned close and murmured, “Did you read this one, Addie?”
Adelaide shook her head very slightly.
Isabelle covered her smile, “Me neither.”
Adelaide wanted to smile back, felt obligated to do so, but she couldn't manage any better than a tight grimace. Isabelle was one of those ladies who was ceaselessly insinuating herself with anybody who would listen. Adelaide had never had the patience for her sort. She turned her attention pointedly away.
The library beyond the book club's meeting room was slouching along, inching towards closing time. Adelaide recognized the Riley girl, surreptitiously clearing away the dirty coffee mugs from the table at the other end of the room. Adelaide had heard rumors about the Rileys. Something about a divorce. She found it difficult these days to be muster up concern for other people. The book club ladies were in the habit of confiding secrets to her – usually secrets not their own. Gossipy old women. She'd hated that when she was younger, hated seeing the hungry gleam in their eyes when they whispered confidentialities to each other, vicariously sated in the telling. She had always wondered if they were talking about her. There was something dismissive about the way they shared the pain of near strangers, like vampires pointing and laughing at the foibles of mortal children.
What a morbid thought that was! Adelaide supposed that she was getting a touch grim in her old age. The book club ladies were all laugh and nibbling at their carrot cakes. Adelaide forced a smile and sipped her tea.
* * *
Several weeks later, in the dead of night, her telephone rang.
Adelaide woke with a cry, pulling blindly at the bed-covers. She felt a surge of panic coursing through her as the tight sheets wrapped about her legs. She tore her hands free and clawed down her black velvet sleeping mask. The street light outside her window glared in, harsh and blinding and white hot. She had been having the nightmare again: the one where she was drowning.
The buzz of the phone bell clanged through the trailer, shattering the stillness of the night.
Adelaide squinted at the clock on the far wall. The thin dark fingers on that round white face were indistinguishably blurred, long and narrow as the legs of a spider. Either three-twenty or four-fifteen. Still nighttime.
The headlights of a passing car streamed between the blinds, printing bar-code shadows on the wall.
The phone kept ringing.
Adelaide tugged her mask off and crawled out of the bed, straightening her nightie. She glanced at her reflection in the window: her hair was a mess, a grayish tangle all caught up around her face. She brushed at it, fighting the impulse to fuss with her appearance before answering the phone. There was a time when she hadn't been able to answer the phone without putting on lipstick first. Silly, maybe, but that's how it was. Vanity had been the first thing to go with age, by necessity. It was survival instinct, making herself not care about her appearance. It hurt her to be looked at, to be seen as she was. She'd been beautiful once – beautiful to him, anyway, and that had been enough.
Her bare feet slapped on the plastic tile floor. The phone was just inside the kitchenette, cord looping down dangerously close to the trash can. Every time she saw it, she thought to herself that she ought to find a better place for the garbage, but of course she hadn't ever done anything about it.
She picked up the phone, wishing for the thousandth time that she owned an answering machine. “Hello,” she yawned, “who's calling, please?”
“Addie?” the voice on the other end of the line was weak, broken to a mechanical rasp. Female.
“Who is this?”
“It's me, it's... it's me.”
Adelaide hesitated. “Isabelle?”
“Isabelle,” the person on the other end of the line parroted softly back, “I can't remember where my keys are...”
“Isabelle, what's the matter? Why are you calling? Is something wrong?”
The other woman breathed slowly, her exhalations hissing over the phone line like moving water. “...I'm on the kitchen floor. This number was on the paper by the phone...”
Adelaide felt her voice rising an octave, her grip on the receiver tightening. “Isabelle, are you hurt?”
“...I can't get up...”
“Are you in pain?”
There was a sound from the other end of the line. A hesitant sound, a panicked sound. “No,” Isabelle finally answered, “no, it doesn't hurt. I can't feel anything. I... I think I fell in something wet, can you imagine that? There's something wet in my hair...”
“Isabelle, I'm coming over there, alright? I need you to hang up and call 911, okay?”
“Oh no, I couldn't do that. Please, Addie, it's nothing... Just come over. I'll be fine, I promise. I just... oh, I'm so embarrassed...”
“I know, Isabelle, I'm sure you will be. But do me a favor and call anyway, understand? 911, Isabelle. I'm on my way over. I'll be there in ten minutes.”
“Oh, thank you, Addie. You're a good friend. I'm so sorry to be a bother, it's just that-”
Adelaide squeezed her eyes shut. “Shh, Isabelle, shh. I'm going to hang up now, alright? I've got to leave the phone.”
Isabelle moaned wordlessly. Then the familiar click and the dial tone.
Adelaide's knees were shaking. She wondered if she should find someone else. No, Isabelle had called her. She could do it. The receiver trembled, cold in her clenched palm.
On her way out the door she shrugged a down jacket on over her nightie and pushed her feet into a pair of soft slippers. Her car keys jingled ominously in her hand, tinny little death bells. She felt her way through the darkness, out into the chill of the wet summer night.
It was beginning to rain. The first cool drops spattered on the steps and across her face.
The park was glowing around her, a glimmer held against the dense black. The pine trees were shuffling in an invisible wind, animated to a slow thrashing anger. All those restless spirits under a moonless sky. She shivered, tugging her coat tight about herself. It was cold for August. All summer long it had been cold.
Her slippers squishing in the cool mud. Her fingers trembled as she pushed the key into the lock, shaking almost uncontrollably. Raindrops rolled down the window. The keys slipped from her fingers and fell in the mud.
She hissed at herself, crouching down in the mud and feeling for the keys, fingers scrabbled at the moist soil. The key's serrated edges were rough on her fingers as she clawed them out of the muck. She straightened and slid the key into the lock. It bit in with a satisfying click. The rain was coming down harder now.
She looked up and gave a heart-pounding start. There was someone looking back at her, an indistinct shape standing on the other side of the car, motionless in the rain.
The figure lifted one arm. “Hi.” A man's voice, slurred and cold.
“H-hello?” She could feel her hair being plastered wetly down over her forehead, and wished she'd taken the time to get a hat.
“Are you alright?” the man asked, “it's awful late.”
She nodded stiffly, her body gone rigid and numb. All she could think of was the news report that Michael may have been murdered and that someone in the park must have done it. Across town, Isabelle Wernick was bleeding to death on her kitchen floor. Adelaide's heart struggled to beat in her chest, tightening as though there were a fist closing around it. Was this how it felt to die?
“I said it's awful late.” The man repeated. He came no closer. A black rubber hood covered his face. The wind howled between the trailers, groaning eerily over the tinkling sound of the light rainfall.
“I suppose it is,�
�� she said, and swung the car door open. The light inside sprang on, illuminating the scuffed interior of the vehicle. The man turned away, throwing up a hand against the light as though it were too bright for his eyes. He shuffled wordlessly out into the night. Adelaide stared after him until he was gone and, once she'd gotten into the car and shut the door, she was no longer entirely sure that he had ever been there. His voice seemed familiar somehow, though she couldn't quite place it.
Her tires squelched wetly in the soft mud. She could feel the car pulling roughly free of the clinging muck, then shifting to a smooth whir as it went from the soft gravel of the trailer part to the hard asphalt of the pavement. There were no other cars on the road. She brushed the rain from her eyes and blinked out at the twisting black-gloss asphalt ahead of her.
She'd done it wrong, she knew. Isabelle was in no shape to call 911.
She could see it already, the scenario sprung full-formed into her mind. She would get there and the house would be dark. She would go in the front door, and she would find the woman laying on the kitchen floor, telephone in hand, her face a pale white and the tile floor below her washed in blood. It would be Adelaide's fault, because Isabelle had called her, had trusted her and no one else.
But why?
She'd known the other woman for only a year or two, only through the book club. Could Isabelle's life really be so empty that she had no one else to call but Adelaide Anderson? The thought then passed through Adelaide's mind that, were she in Isabelle's position, she didn't know who she would call. Who was there? Who was really there for her?
And then it hit her. The man in the black rain slicker, he'd sounded like Joe, just like her husband. It had been so long since he died. She'd gone to the hospital, driving there as his life slipped fractionally away, driving just as she was now, under-dressed and unprepared and fighting a knot that twisted so fiercely in her belly that she was sure she would have to pull over and be sick on the side of the road, down on all fours in the wet grass while Joe's cancer ate him away in a stark white hospital bed.
She remembered standing over his body, wondering what he was thinking about as he died. What did a person think about when you know you aren't going to wake up again? Could you think? What about? People? People you loved maybe? People you wish you'd been closer to? Did you think about your regrets when you died, or do you think about the things you got right? Had he regretted marrying her? Was there somebody else that he'd secretly been wishing for when he was looking up at her from that hospital bed?
Adelaide could feel tears sliding down her face. She sniffed hard, furious at herself for crying. She gripped the wheel until her pale hands turned bone white and the knuckles seemed near to tearing through her thin vein-webbed skin.
She was seventy-two years old.
What did that even mean, really? Just a number, when it was all said and done. She wasn't so old, was she? Still, every year that went by changed the world a little more, and she stayed the same, drifting further and further out into a future which had no use for her, no place set aside for Adelaide Anderson. Every year she forgot a little more of the life she'd once had, forgot more of that bright shining person she'd once been, and every year that bit of lost memory was replaced by a catalog of disappointments and failures, reminders that she could no longer do everything which she had once been able to do. And every year there were more tragedies piling up in the world. Last year the towers burning, this year Michael Conner carried past her trailer in a body-bag. She was not who she had been, and the world which she had loved no longer existed. No one grain of sand felt especially heavy on its own.
The houses on Isabelle's street were all dark, empty faces with windows like black-glass eyes staring sightlessly across the street, doors like yawning mouths.
But which house was Isabelle's? Everything looked different now, in the predawn gloom. She drove slowly down the street, squinting down driveways for a glimpse of her friend's gray-blue station wagon. She only spotted it after she'd already gone by the driveway, and she put one tire over the curb when she jerked the wheel to the side. She hobbled to the door and pushed her way inside. Her hair was damp from the rain, her clothes wet through. She shivered, but scarcely felt the cold. She peered into the darkness of the house. There was a light on at the end of the front hall.
“Isabelle?” she called out.
There was something frightening about being alone inside another person's house. Even knowing she had been invited, Adelaide couldn't shake the feeling that someone was going to step out of the darkness and demand to know why she was there. Or that she would stumble upon some hideous secret, something she'd never been meant to see.
She found Isabelle in the kitchen, propped up with her back against the cupboard. The cupboard door behind her was shiny wet, and on the floor a trail of smeared blood. Moonlight spilled in the window, and the streaks of water running down the glass threw refractive shadows on the kitchen tile.
Adelaide fumbled for the light switch, hands brushing blindly against the smooth walls. The light came on and spilled garishly through the kitchen, and she saw it all: Isabelle's leg twisted under her nightgown, the harsh red color smeared all over the mauve tile, the off-white telephone slack in Isabelle's hand. And Isabelle's face, frighteningly peaceful, eyes closed, lips slightly open.
Adelaide bent down and took the phone from Isabelle's trembling fingers. She pressed the three buttons, her hands shaking so much that it took her four attempts to input the emergency number correctly. She held the receiver to her ear, her breath shuddering in her chest.
“Hello? What is the nature of your emergency?” The voice on the line sounded robotic, practiced and inhuman. Adelaide sat carefully down beside the unconscious woman and spoke, hardly aware of the words coming from her mouth.
The rest of the night slipped away, the way a dream faded when you woke up from it. The colored flash of the red and blue lights on the rain-slick driveway, the white uniforms of the EMTs, the weight of the man's fingers closed around her arm as he helped her to her feet, the rocking of the ambulance, the man taking her blood pressure while she watched Isabelle breathe into a mask. Finally, the hospital, where they gave her a bed and left her.
She fell asleep in the hospital.
* * *
The steam rose in pale waves of heat. She swirled her coffee so it lapped tentatively at the lip of the white Styrofoam cup, always shying back from spilling out on her hand.
There was an eerie murmur in the hospital cafeteria. People came and went, some in rumpled overnight clothes, clothes that, like hers, were never meant to leave the house. They all shuffled together through their new routine, lifeless, all dead-eyed. Parents with bags under their eyes, spouses with puffy red faces, children staring silently at the faceless tile floor, their collective gaze locked on their collapsing futures.
She took a sip of her coffee. The bitter liquid was course and grainy on her tongue. She swallowed reluctantly and set the cup back down.
“Not good?” Edward took it from her, breathing in a deep sniff of the tepid beverage.
“Terrible.”
He shrugged. “Oh well.”
“And they charge me three dollars for that.” She sighed.
“Can you believe it?” He shook his head.
“Unfortunately.”
Edward pushed his fingers through his thinning hair. The thick spider-web veins on his hands showed dark. “Are you feeling alright, Addie?”
She traced the crisscross table-top pattern with her fingertips. The wire mesh of the chair and table seemed to have been dipped in a soft sort of green rubber. Like flesh over thin steel bones.
“Addie?”
“I want to leave here.”
“Can I drive you back to the park?”
“No. I don't want go home. Not yet.”
“Okay.”
“Let's just go somewhere.”
“There used to be a coffee shop a ways down the road from here.”
&n
bsp; “Is it still there.”
“I don't know.”
“Let's find out. You remember how to get there?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
She dropped the half-full coffee cup through the swinging mouth of the garbage can lid.
The hallways of the hospital were all white and glass, covered in braille-augmented signs pointing this way and that. Recovery, and an arrow pointed at it.
Edward pushed the button for the elevator. They stood there together, watching the downward arrow glow.
“Have you heard anything about your friend Isabelle yet?”
“Broke her hip.”
Edward winced.
“She got a concussion when she fell. Hit her head on the kitchen counter.”
“Is she going to be alright?”
“They think so. Given time.” Given time. Time healed all wounds, she thought, until it didn't. Given free reign, time would tear apart everything.
“Well,” Edward tapped his foot anxiously on the tile floor, “that's good.”
The elevator door opened. She got up off the bench.
They stood together in the subtle vertigo of the slow falling elevator, each gripping with one hand the greasy metal handle that ran along the back and sides of the surprisingly spacious hospital lift. They've got to be big enough for a body, Adelaide realized, her grip tightening. She looked across the close space at Edward. He was watching the number above the door.
“Eddie?”
“Hm?”
“I just wanted to thank you. For coming here. I... really appreciate it. Knowing that I can count on you, I mean.”
He smiled. “No thanks necessary.”
She smiled back. “Still.”
The elevator door opened with a soft chime.
They went out by the lobby, then though the swinging glass doors and into the crisp summer morning. The streets of Ithaca were coming to life, a rare sort of organic life: more bicycles than cars in the road, thin green saplings along the sidewalk clinging to life in the gray expanse. Thick green ivy clung to the brick walls about them.
“Which way is it?” she asked.
“Over there.” He nodded along the road, to the sidewalk twisting slowly upward into the guts of the city. “It's not far.”