by Leif Wright
Who was Heidi? Who was Randy? Why were they famous enough that magazine readers cared about the details of their romp? She shook her head. The world had passed her by, she knew. But in her day, the tabloids had at least used the stars’ full names.
Even The Price is Right, which her VCR had faithfully recorded every day for twenty years, right before Guiding Light, had replaced the adorable Bob Barker with some young guy who smiled too much.
It was hell on earth, she had decided, waiting around to die with no guarantee that she wouldn’t just fade away over two decades of increasing pain, incontinence, and maybe even dementia. Her friends were all too wrapped up in their grandchildren—even great-grandchildren—which only rubbed salt in the wound that Susan had left when she had screamed “Goodbye, Mother!” and had slammed the phone down, never to call again.
Darren was thirty years in the grave, so she was well and truly alone. Sudoku and the crossword were even moving on past her. She guessed she should take up knitting or something.
Retirement was a terrible sucker punch offered up as a carrot to middle-agers who don’t realize how good they’ve got it, having a destination every morning, a purpose. Now, her life was consumed with finding things to fill the void of her day—and hoping her bowel movements stayed regular and healthy. God, ten years ago, “bowel movements” had been something old people said. Now, they were terrifyingly close to being the center of her world.
“Shit,” she said quietly out loud, smiling at her naughtiness, using that four-letter word. “That’s all it is.”
The smile fought against a lifetime of furrows in her skin, forged by disapproving frowns and stern lectures. Downward wrinkles were forced upward, revealing old-lady teeth, properly yellowed by age—another pet peeve of Pearl’s. People’s teeth weren’t supposed to be blindingly white. They were supposed to age just like everything else. Heidi and Randy, she noticed, had brilliantly white—and impeccably straight—teeth, against both God and nature.
She grunted as she pushed against the table, straining to get her knees to stand up. She would return to the Sudoku later, she knew, unable to leave it unfinished. It wasn’t like she slept much anyway. But for now, there was a bowel movement scheduled—a shit, she smiled again—and it couldn’t be avoided.
Maggie, a white toy poodle with brown streaks around her eyes and mouth, dutifully hopped up, her nails clicking on the linoleum as she wagged her tail, which ended in a cotton-ball-shaped poof of Afro. BM time was one of her favorites; she loved lying on the cool tile of the bathroom as Pearl hummed to herself and read magazines.
A noise outside gave Maggie temporary pause, as she stopped and cocked her head. Her hearing wasn’t what it used to be, however, so she couldn’t be sure a noise had happened at all. Pearl, hearing the clicking stop, turned around, waving her hand in front of Maggie to get her attention. The poor dog would have to be put down soon, but Pearl hadn’t been able to bring herself to have it done. Maggie, seeing Pearl waving, wagged again and followed her to the bathroom.
With Maggie safely in the bathroom, already circling the coolest part of the floor, Pearl closed the door—a vestigial habit from when other people had lived there. She just as easily could have left the door open, but it felt wrong, so she closed it, isolating herself from the rest of the house, now alone with Maggie, the pink, fuzzy cover on the stool seat, and a small stack of unread magazines beside it.
Indoor plumbing was a disgusting idea, she had decided long ago. Number Two (“shit”—she giggled) was intended to be done outside, where humans didn’t also eat and sleep. Still, it was pretty convenient when your bones got too old to bother with the weather for the morning—and evening—constitutional. She didn’t know when it happened, but at some point, the smell of her bowels had changed, and she had acquired Old Lady Shit, the stale smell somehow informing her of her old age more than any other of the myriad indignities that accompanied the passage of time.
She supposed diapers would become her future at some point, simultaneously dreading and resigning herself to the eventuality. She couldn’t remember ever actually being young; even when her years could have justified such a classification. Young people were annoyances, always had been, always would be. It was the cruelty of a male God that foisted youth on the world. Young people had all the vitality—and most of the stupidity—that marked the human race. It was how she was sure God was a man. A woman would have found a more elegant way.
Instead, a male God dumped menstruation on women, the pain of childbirth, the ravages of age that seemed to claw at women more severely than men, making women physically weaker, socially repressed, and yet smarter than the men who otherwise dominated them—the final cruelty being women’s ability to recognize the fundamental unfairness of their situation without the power to change it. And age—another helplessness that attacked the humanity God so claimed to love.
Still, she went to church to please Him, sang the hymns to please Him, read the Bible to please Him, because she would meet Him sooner rather than later, and she somewhat doubted he would feel very sympathetic to the complaints of an old woman who pooped every day with her dog watching.
She laughed a little at the thought.
She eased her underpants down and sat on the seat with one motion, flipping through her stack to see what she’d read today. Reader’s Digest looked the most appealing today. She opened it to an article about near-death experiences—“What I saw while I was DEAD”—and settled in.
Maggie was already fast asleep by the time Pearl finished the first paragraph, and she didn’t wake up until the door was kicked open—on the third kick.
3
THE BATHROOM WAS A MESS. THE OLD LADY, PANTIES AROUND HER ankles, dirty business smeared everywhere, had been a bleeder.
Sheriff John Humphrey generally didn’t go out on calls in city limits, but this was a violent and savage homicide, so he had made an exception. Now he was kind of wishing he hadn’t. The smell was nauseating. And the dog was just unnecessary.
The old lady had been doing her business when someone had burst through the door, leaving splinters of wood all over the bathroom, one implanted in one of the woman’s shins. And then the assailant had beaten her viciously. He had saved the fatal blows on her head for last, it appeared.
The old lady had endured quite a beating before that.
Humphrey leaned over her body. Her open eyes had been closed by a deputy, thankfully, but her face was still frozen in a mask of sheer terror and pain, teeth bared.
In her left hand, she still gripped the corner of a photo that had been torn from her hand. Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be anything identifiable on the paper or in the portion of the photo that remained. Maybe. As he peered closer, he could see just the tiniest tip of a copyright imprint. Donning a latex glove, he pried the woman’s fingers open—no easy task, even though rigor hadn’t set in yet. The blows that ended her life had locked her muscles in place, including her final grimace.
He carefully picked up the corner of photo paper and placed it inside a baggie, marking it with a piece of evidence tape.
“Franks,” he barked, holding the baggie out. The deputy dutifully danced around puddles of blood and excrement, and collected the bag.
Looking at the wounds on the woman’s head, Humphrey thought he saw something in one of them.
“Hey, Franks, you got a flashlight?”
Franks grunted and handed the sheriff a light. Humphrey put his reading glasses on, leaned in, and clicked the light on. Sure enough, next to the hole in her temple, the old lady’s skin bore four small indentations that looked like backward letters.
“Get a look at this,” he said.
“You know I hate corpses, man,” Franks protested.
“Stop being a pussy and look,” Humphrey demanded.
Franks, choking down a lump in his throat, grabbed the light and Humphrey’s reading glasses, tiptoeing over the woman’s leg to get close enough.
“Those l
ook like letters to you?” Humphrey asked, index finger almost touching the raised areas around the indentation.
Franks squinted. “Looks like M, P, and E,” he said. He squinted again. “Might be a four above the M, but I can’t tell.”
“Davis!” Humphrey shouted. “We need a camera and a light over here!”
“I already did the body,” Davis replied from the kitchen.
“Did you get the letters on her head?”
“What?”
“That’s what I thought,” Humphrey said. “Bring the fucking camera and a light.”
Davis muttered something, but Humphrey could hear him gathering gear, so he let it slide. You picked your battles, and calling someone out over grumbling was a stupid battle to fight.
“Use the macro lens,” Franks advised as Davis started setting up the light. He pointed to the letters. “Right there.”
Davis fitted the camera with the close-up lens and started snapping pictures, each of which brightened the light momentarily.
“Clumsy criminal,” he muttered before the final shot. Humphrey grunted agreement. “Have you seen this? She bit whoever it was.”
Humphrey leaned in closer to the old woman’s crooked, yellow teeth. Sure enough, there was a hunk of red skin between two of them. “Lookit that,” Humphrey mused, peering closer. “The old broad put up a pretty good fight. Let’s tag and bag that, Franks.”
The rest of the house was fairly well untouched, except the guy had forced the back door open with what looked to be a pry bar applied to the lock’s hasp.
All in all, Humphrey thought, skin in the victim’s teeth, a possibly identifiable piece of photo paper, and letter marks from whatever had bashed her face in aren’t a bad group of clues.
The brutality of the beating meant it probably was someone she knew. But from all appearances, she was an old loner who didn’t really get a lot of visitors.
News crews were already swarming around outside, he could see through the windows. Police tape was keeping them at bay, but the TV and Internet outfits were wise to that trick and these days they brought tripods and telephoto lenses to see anything they could see inside. It was ghoulish, but he supposed people wanted to know what was going on around them. Burglar alarm sales would go up in the neighborhood, the residents might even form a neighborhood watch, but in six months, everyone would relax again and become easy prey for this kind of thing.
Safety, Humphrey knew, was an illusion. People assumed that, since America had sent troops over and conquered Iraq and Afghanistan, they were safe from terrorism. They assumed that wiretaps, water boarding, and Guantanamo Bay kept the big terrorist attacks at bay, and they were probably right about that. But nothing at all was preventing some psycho from assembling a homemade explosive, taping broken glass and nails all around it, walking into the local mall, and taking out forty or fifty people. Nothing was keeping people like whoever did this from buying a crowbar and a bludgeon of some kind, breaking into an old lady’s house, and beating her to death. Even a burglar alarm wouldn’t have protected her from that.
Hell, he thought, even if she had a gun somewhere in the house, the guy caught her on the toilet. Who carried a gun to the toilet? Certainly not this old broad. He sighed. He hated walking around shit, and dead people almost always were covered in the stuff. It was hard to tell if hers had come out before or after the beating, but one thing was sure: either way, death is a great laxative. He’d figured after this many years in police work he’d be used to the smell of shit, but it never happened. Shit was still gross, no matter how clinically he tried to look at it.
Days like this, he hated his job.
4
ROBBY GOT SO UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN HE WAS WORKING WITH therapists of any kind, particularly those who were trying to get him to do physical things.
Today, it was more work with his finger, but it was worse; they had attached some kind of camera to his eye—the good eye, the left one, which he could control a little if he really concentrated. The camera, they told him and Amie, would watch his eye, analyze what it was focusing on, however briefly, and inform the computer, which would translate that information into pointer and clicking information. Combining that information with his finger, he would be able to actually select whole words with which to communicate. When the therapist described it, the whole thing had sounded like a lot of nothing, but as he used the system, Robby could see how it would speed up his communication and make it a lot easier for him to operate a computer.
Inside, he was jumping for glee, hoping the system really did work right “out of the box” as the therapist had said it would. He could already think of numerous uses for the technology, which would significantly improve his life. He didn’t know if Amie had caught all the implications of what could be happening now, but she was smart; he thought she could look into the future and see how much easier this apparatus would make her job. Eventually, he hoped, he might even be able to control his wheelchair, moving it wherever he wanted to go.
But, God, did it make his eyes tired.
He closed his eye. The other eye closed a second later. Having them closed felt so good. He knew he needed to open them, but it felt so good to have them closed.
“Television,” the therapist said gently. Robby felt like he had probably rehearsed that tone of voice for years, just for situations like this one. “Please look at the word ‘television’ on the screen and then focus on it.”
Reluctantly, Robby opened his eye. The other opened a second later. The unfamiliar view of the camera taped to the corner of his eye briefly startled him. The screen, a foot and a half away from his face, stood out in white against the incandescent yellow of the rest of the room. Robby saw the word “television” on the screen, among a couple of dozen other words that had appeared on the screen with the context of a question that had been asked to Robby, which had been translated onto the iPad in real time by voice-recognition software. Along the bottom of the screen were words less related to the context, and at the very bottom right was the icon for a keyboard, which allegedly would pop up if Robby concentrated on it. Instead, he focused on the word “television”.
“Television,” the iPad said audibly, eliciting a cheer from Amie.
“Yes!” the therapist said, clapping his hands together.
“No” appeared on the screen where “television” had been. Other, less related, words appeared after it. Robby would have smiled if he had been capable. The system was far from ready for use, but watching it come together, however slowly, was balm for his aching eyes. Forty years of being completely unable to communicate seemed to be starting their fade into his rearview mirror, but with that fading came fear and a bit of melancholy. For forty years, he had been in a solitary prison that had been both cell and shield. Sure, it had kept him imprisoned, but it also kept him from having to deal with the vagaries of life and with people’s expectations and interactions.
With every baby step toward independence, the bars on the cell bent and cracked, the shield lost its effectiveness. Soon, when people asked him questions, he would be expected to respond. He would be expected to have opinions. People would know he was listening, paying attention. No longer was he protected by the idea that no one was home, that people could do or say anything around him, because he was mentally incapable of understanding what was being said around him.
He remembered a conversation that had happened near him during one of the rare times when his father had taken him along to a fast-food restaurant. Behind him, a man he couldn’t see had been talking to another man about the fact that the first man had been born without a sense of smell. The second man had been asking questions based on the fact that the first man had somehow been able to detect the presence of marijuana during a concert they had just left.
“I didn’t smell it,” the first man said. “But I can tell what it feels like in my lungs, and someone a couple of rows back was definitely burning one.”
The second man laughed, and then the
first man continued.
“I don’t think I’m missing anything,” the first man said. “From what I gather, most smells are bad anyway. I don’t mind that I can’t smell them.”
Robby understood what he meant, and the prospect of regaining some of what he had lost made him wonder if he wasn’t better off without it all. Most smells were, after all, bad. Most conversations sounded a lot less fun than they were worth, in his estimation. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to ask for something when he wanted it, or to mention when he was uncomfortable. Or to write something. Or actually earn a degree. But being expected to answer, to respond, to engage in conversations … he wasn’t sure he wanted the responsibility.
“Please look at the word ‘fireplace’ on the screen,” the therapist interrupted Robby’s thoughts, in his much-practiced therapist voice.
Drool found its way to Robby’s arm as he looked at the word “fireplace” and focused on it.
“Fireplace,” the iPad said.
Amie cheered again.
The therapist guy smiled. “We’re getting it locked in.”
“Key” appeared in the top position on Robby’s screen.
“Key,” the iPad said.
The room erupted in laughter.
“Excellent,” the therapist said. “Now we’re going to start working on phrases.”
God, Robby’s eye hurt.
Amie had her hands folded up under her chin, grin plastered across her face. Robby could feel an emotion for her he hadn’t felt in decades. He loved her. Not a romantic love—he was too pragmatic to think that she for a second would be interested or available for a romantic relationship. No, his love for her was the unfettered latching on of a son who knows his mother will never turn her back on him. Amie was at least fifteen years younger than Robby, but he viewed her as a much older woman. Maybe that helped him to ignore the fact that she was what the detectives on TV called “a stunner”. Or maybe forty years of imprisonment in a wheelchair had finally drummed the juvenile out of him and allowed him to view women as people, not just objects of puerile desire.