by Cameron Lowe
Eventually, Alicia needed to go, and they all decided to call it a night. Malcolm caught a ride back to Gwen and Calvin’s with them while Alicia took off for her place, and in the car, their easy conversation continued. They exchanged phone numbers, and Malcolm took off to cruise the city a bit before going back to Nic’s.
That was, Malcolm thought later, a good night. A great night. He’d made two new friends, and… well, a something in Alicia. Plus, he’d discovered a cool bar, and in Gwen, someone to occupy his mind at night when he started to drift off to sleep. He expected her to be a fantasy, a passing interest until he found someone else in his life. He wasn’t wrong, at least in the short term. But a foundation was laid that night, a rock solid one, one that wouldn’t be deeply threatened until one night a decade and a half later when he stormed through the doors of the ICU and demanded to know just where the hell his wife was.
Chapter 6
Now
“Malcolm, please-” Nina begged him.
“I swear to God, you tell me to calm down, I’ll start breaking all the machinery I can in here, and nobody in this godforsaken city knows more than us how expensive all this shit really is.”
Two CNAs approached him from either side down the hallway. Nina held up her hands to them, palms out. “It’s okay. He’s the husband.” Quieter, to Malcolm, she said, “Don’t make threats like that. Those machines are helping people stay alive.”
“And you fucking off to the break room while my sick wife walks out of here practically naked doesn’t,” Malcolm growled. “You got any idea where she went?”
“Ike’s still reviewing the tapes, but we’ve got the word out. It’s a big hospital. Someone will have seen her.”
“What happened before she left?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not, I swear-”
The plastic vase full of flowers didn’t make the satisfying crash of glass he’d hoped for, but the water splashing across the dull, glossy floors helped a little. One of the CNAs, a guy maybe a foot shorter than he was and built like an enormous Twinkie, tried to lay a hand on his arm. Malcolm shrugged him off and stormed towards his wife’s former room.
Despite his anger, Nina trailed him, and as he jerked open the closet that had held Gwen’s belongings – those they could trust the staff not to steal while she slept, that was – she said from the door, “Nothing was left here.”
“Did she take it with her or did one of your housekeepers?” he snarled.
“There’s no cause for that. For any of this. She walked out of here. It was her choice, not ours.”
He turned, his fists clenched. “A note. Did she leave a note? Anything like that?”
“No, nothing. Is there someone she’d contact?”
“Maybe… maybe her mom and dad,” Malcolm said. He pulled out his cell phone.
“I’ll go check with Ike and see if he’s got something yet.”
“Do that.” He paced the room as he dialed Daphne and Elliot. They’re going to flip, he thought. That had to be okay. He needed to talk to them anyways.
Daphne picked up on the third ring, laughing as she sputtered, “H-hello? Stop, Rozzie, stop. I’m talking to your daddy.”
“Daddy!” Roslyn shouted gleefully in the background.
The happiness of his middle child compounded his despair. The children had seen Gwen go into the hospital – and come back – so often that they thought this was just another day. His chest hitched, and the emotions he’d been trying to hold back hammered down his defenses. “Daphne. Mom…” He couldn’t speak.
“What is it?” Daphne asked.
Heat stinging his eyes, Malcolm asked, “Gwen, she… didn’t call you, did she?”
Silence, and the sound of Roslyn in the background faded. There was a thump – a door closing – and Daphne murmured, “Malcolm, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. She left the hospital. Walked right out the door when no one was looking.”
“Where were you?”
Of course that would be the question Daphne or Elliot would ask first, but that night, he didn’t care. It was a good question. He should have been there. The problems he’d been trying to fix should have never existed in the first place. Malcolm knew on some level he couldn’t blame himself for much besides the stupid bikes and the fight, but the weight of feeling like he should have been a better earner, a better husband and father fell hard on his shoulders. “Gone. I’ll explain everything if… when we find her. I need you to call around, see if she’s gotten ahold of any of the cousins, that sort of thing.”
“We can do that. But we’re coming there.”
“No,” Malcolm said. “Please. I need you to watch the kids a while longer. Until I find her and figure this out. I can’t… I can’t focus on her and be worried about them at the same time.”
“I can watch the kids. Elliot will come.”
“That works. Will you call?”
“Yes, of course. Let me know the minute you know something.”
“I will.” He paused, and his voice wavered. “I love you. I… don’t say that enough. And… thank you. When this is over, we need to talk. But… I wanted you to know that.”
A sniff, then a sobbed, “We love you too. Find her.”
He jammed the cell phone back in his pocket, rubbed his eyelids with his fingers, and stormed back out. A wiry man with a long goatee was talking to Nina animatedly at the nexus of three hallways. His blue shirt, black slacks, and the radio on his belt gave him away as security and Malcolm jogged to join them.
Nina gestured at the guy. “Malcolm, Ike.”
Ike turned to him and without preamble said, “We’ve had complaints about you. I tell you what I know, then I want you to either take five in one of the empty patient rooms or get out of here and quit harassing the nurses and staff.”
“Just get to the point,” Malcolm snapped. “Where’d she go? Was she with anyone?”
“She went out the side entrance by the gastroenterologist’s office. That’s just down that way.” He pointed down one of the hallways. “Longer walk than the front entrance, but the offices are all closed for the holidays. Someone headed that way wouldn’t get noticed, and that’s what happened here.”
“I don’t care what happened. I care about where she went.”
Ike nodded. “There’s a feed outside for the parking lots to help with vandalism.” When Malcolm twirled a finger in a “get on with it” gesture, the man glared and said, “She took a winding path through the cars out there. I think she was using them for balance. We could only track her so far, but she was headed towards the apartment buildings on the other side of the street. Snow’s deep enough now, you might be able to follow her that way.”
Malcolm shot a hand up and the man flinched away instinctively, but he only wanted to clasp Ike’s shoulder. “Thank you. If anyone shows up here looking for her, have them call me.”
He faced a moment of indecision. If Gwen hadn’t been picked up by anyone, she was on foot. Following her in the same manner would be easier, especially if she’d… no. He wasn’t going to think that. But if he did find her out there in the cold, he’d need the van to get her warm and back to the hospital.
Split the difference. He could grab the van, hit the hospital-owned apartments, and see if he couldn’t find a trail of her. But he had to go, and now. The snow was falling again, and if she was out there, it wouldn’t be long before her tracks were gone.
He ran.
* * *
Winnie twirled around, her hands meeting high above her head in a ballerina’s pose. If there was a name for it, Gwen didn’t know it. Her daughter’s dancing was entirely self-taught. There was no money for ballet lessons, or soccer, or any of the activities the kids wanted to do.
“Mommy, look,” Winnie said, but this wasn’t preteen Winnie’s husky voice. This was six-year-old Winnie, needy Wi
nnie, the Winnie she missed sometimes so much it hurt. Not that she didn’t love her oldest child to pieces, but back then, her daughter hadn’t borne so much responsibility. Now she was, along with Gwen’s mother, their other children’s babysitter. Winnie had become at just eleven hers and Malcolm’s helper, their most reliable aide. No child should have to bear that, but she did it stoically with rarely a complaint. Gwen missed Winnie’s childishness. She missed her daughter’s lost youth.
“Doing great, baby,” Gwen croaked. Why was her voice so wet and muffled? She could barely speak.
She had no idea if the child was actually doing great or not. She rarely did when it came to Winnie’s passions. The child loved theater, dancing, music, and the arts, all things neither of her parents could really help her with. When it came to their oldest, both Gwen and Malcolm were lost, but that was okay. Winnie was her own little comet, tugging them all in the tail of her nucleus.
The show ended, and Gwen smiled distractedly, trying to clap, but her hands were heavy and numb in spots. “Good job, sweetheart,” she tried to say, and instead coughed so hard she pitched forward, banging her head against something wooden and extremely hard. There was nothing there but the stage a moment ago and now…
Now she was back in the church.
“Ow,” she muttered, and coughed again. She stared up blearily at the cross. “That was nice. Couldn’t have let me go in the middle of it?”
The cross was silent. At some point her leg had gone numb, and she feared the frostbite maybe had killed the nerve endings. She stood up, leaning on the pew in front of her carefully, and grimaced as the pins and needles started affixing themselves to all the tender parts of her butt and hip. Much like when she’d soaked the carpet near the entrance, she really had left a mess of the pew, and now that she had a little more energy back, she could do something about it.
Slowly, Gwen limped towards the foyer again, aiming for the office there. Not a chance it would be unlocked too, but she remembered a trick, if they hadn’t updated the doorknobs in a decade and change. The feeling returned to her body slowly, but bits and bobs of her flesh weren’t responding, and those she knew really had been hurt by frostbite. Probably lose some toes out of this, if she decided to go back to the hospital. If she didn’t, she supposed the rest didn’t matter.
The office was locked, but as if he was right there, she heard Dewey, the pastor from her time in the church. “Don’t be telling the other parishioners this door’s got a secret.” His phantom hand – and her very real one – fell on the doorknob, and she pulled straight up, grunting with the effort even something so simple as that took. She put her shoulder into the door, and surprisingly, the lock gave, just as it had then. Dewey had done it because he’d forgot his keys and they needed to grab flyers for a potluck, but now she did it in the hopes that whoever was preaching here these days had some paper towels or something to help sop up the water on the pew.
And she was in luck. On a squat, scarred desk in front her, devoid of much except a dusty computer and a calendar featuring the wrong month, was a box of tissues. She took the whole thing, and stumbled out of there as Dewey began to speak again.
“You know how I know you’ll be great parents?”
“How’s that?” she whispered, echoing her younger self.
“When you first started coming here, one of you always told the other to scoot down when someone older came down the aisle for church.”
“It’s just manners,” both Gwens said.
“Yes,” Dewey said, smiling. “It’s just manners.”
It took a stupid amount of time to remember which pew she’d been sitting in. Gwen dropped to her knees, sweating hard, her breath coming in little wheezes, and she rubbed at the seat vigorously. When it was finally dry again, Gwen rose up shakily to her feet, staring at the pew. Oh no. When she sat back down, it would just get soaked all over again. A sob breached her lips, a desperate one. Why this made her cry, why this hurt so damn much when she was already flayed and frayed, she had no idea, but it did.
There had been a coat in the office on the back of the chair. With another monumental effort, she made her way back to it, her body groaning in protest with every step. She coughed steadily the whole way there and back again, phlegm hitting the crook of her arm as she fought to regain control of her emotions. Her thoughts drifted again to her children.
Little Roslyn and Marley were bundles of raw feelings. Where Winnie had her head a bit in the sky, Roslyn was a creature of the world around her and felt so much. It could be beautiful, like when she cried petting a llama because its fur was so neat and course and thick, and because she thought it was the most wonderful animal in the world. But she was still young yet, and had no gauge by which to measure sadness, so she had a tendency to be upset about the oddest things. That could be exhausting. One time she’d cried for minutes because the man on the news said stocks were falling. Rozzie had no idea what stocks even were, but she felt for them like a lost toy.
And Marley… Marley scared her. In him, Gwen saw a lot of Hugh, of the cloud at the edge of his mind, at the fuzzy anger he couldn’t contain. Marley was a furious child, a rebellious one, even as young as he was. Tell him to come to dinner, and he’d throw one of his books at a wall. Tell him dinner wasn’t ready yet, and he’d kick a cupboard. Once, a friend tried to share his toys, and Marley tackled and flailed at him with his tiny fists because the boy had given him the yellow Transformer rather than the blue one. But get him around his sisters, and Marley was… okay. Maybe he’d never be calm unless he got help they couldn’t afford, but Winnifred and Roslyn soothed the anger in him, drew it out and disbursed it into the ether, much like with Gwen and Hugh.
Were they okay with her mom and dad? Were they happy, and safe, and warm? Had her mother fed them a nice dinner, and not spaghetti like they had far too often or the dollar menu stuff Gwen sometimes had to buy because they just didn’t have enough in the house to put together a real meal for the kids? She knew the answer to that.
It was why she’d walked into the cold, intending never to come back. Because without Gwen, without her mountain of debt, without the cost of Malcolm taking time off to run her to the countless appointments, without the little rattle of pill bottles and the injections and the pharmacist’s tight smile when they said they needed to apply for more aid to help cover the seventeen dollars and sixteen cents of the antibiotics, the Irving family would eat. The Irving children would go to soccer. Or ballet classes. Without Gwen, Marley could go to a child therapist.
Without Gwen, her family could live a life they deserved.
This was not about what she wanted. What she wanted was to see her children graduate, go to college, get married, have little bundles who would then have little bundles of their own. She wanted to grow old and cantankerous with Malcolm. She wanted to watch Jeopardy together in their nursing home room, both of them too damn deaf to hear the questions. She wanted to slip away peacefully surrounded by the people she loved with all her heart.
But the rational, clinical part of Gwen’s mind knew her existence, the air she fought to breathe, hurt her family. If their collective life was a pie, Gwen would leave them nothing but the crust, not because she intended to, but because that was simply what she had become. And she could help fix that. That very night, she could stop taking.
Chapter 7
Then
Slowly, Malcolm came to realize why Nic loved the Flats.
Sure, it was a violent city, and grungy, but it had heart too. The people were a hugely varied bunch. The Crow, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet reservations were all within a short proximity to the city. Latinos immigrated to the area a century ago to work the ranches and farms surrounding the then-fledgling city, and had settled into an area in the southeastern part of the Flats known as Cowboy Mexico. Chinese miners from Butte, Deadwood, and the Crazy Mountains came to the city after the mines started to go bust, and their descendants stuck around. In the late nineties, the Flats saw a huge jump
in its Vietnamese and Indian populations and lately in the early aughts, eastern Europeans were coming to the city in droves. It gave the whole city an unexpected cultural flair, one he liked immensely. Though racism and xenophobia were still depressingly present, the city had a wonderful melting pot atmosphere rivaling New York and Los Angeles.
What really changed Malcolm’s mind was that Sunday’s excursion with Gwen and Calvin. After he got off work, he met up with them at a public indoor basketball court not too far from their new house. Along with some of their friends and fellow church-goers, they had enough for two four-man teams. Malcolm wound up opposite Calvin, something he was primally happy about especially when he learned he was much better at the game than the other man. Let Gwen see that, Malcolm thought, amused at his own need to show off like he was a peacock.
Gwen was a great shot and twice slapped the ball away from Malcolm, grinning at him slyly as she thumped her chest and darted away. An aggressive type. He liked that. Liked it quite a bit.
His team barely eked out the agreed-on thirty points. Some of the others were going to stick around and play something a little less formal, but Gwen, Calvin, and a long-haired hippie friend of theirs, Tristan, invited Malcolm on a drive through the city to see the sights. They stopped first for post-game smoothies, the losers buying for the winners. Then came a long, easy cruise through the heart of the Flats, down by Scraper Row past all the massive financial buildings and the trendiest shopping districts.
“You can get anything you want in this city,” Gwen said from the front passenger seat. She roped an arm behind Calvin’s headrest and turned sideways so she was facing Malcolm in the opposite seat in the back. “We’ve had curry at three in the morning. No joke.”
“That was a fun night,” Calvin said.
Continuing on, Gwen gestured out at the masses walking down the sidewalk and the stores beyond. “For every business that closes down here, you’ve got two that pop up overnight. Sure, they might be gone again by next week, but that’s kind of exciting, you know? You don’t get bored.”