Baby, It's Dead Outside

by E M Kaplan

  “No worries,” she muttered at Bert as they stumbled down the sidewalk for his morning constitutional. “I can take a nap later if I have to. I’m not on a schedule, right?” She could be more like him. He was her life coach after all, and the king of naps.

  Other than heading over to Pleasant Valley to meet Lynetta for the first time, she didn’t have anything else planned. She figured today’s forecast was so mild, she might even take Bert to the town square and window shop later. She mentally thumbed her nose at all the naysayers who’d warned her about the cold.

  This climate was totally doable. People were friendly and didn’t drive like the maniacs in Boston. The town was cute—she wouldn’t even mind living in a place like this. Other than a couple of gently curved roads, the street layout made sense—not like the loopy donkey cart paths that made up New England. Lake Park Villa had grown up between corn and soy fields and was laid out like the neat agricultural rectangles around it. Squares, parallelograms, rhombuses. Josie could understand this logical kind of world.

  She did an internet search about the town while she made herself a cup of tea in the tiny dark-paneled kitchen of her house, feeling very much like she was in a Father Dowling story, except Bert wasn't much of a conversationalist so she had no one to chit-chat with—no sidekick to tell her she was barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. He’d already claimed a spot on the rug by the fireplace, near an old red sofa with a handmade quilt draped over the back. The room just needed a cozy fire. “And a cat,” she added as a jibe at him, even though he didn’t crack an eyelid at her.

  Thus fortified by tea and some toast with jam—not the heartiest of breakfasts but certainly one that matched her surroundings—she went out to her car and plugged the address of the nursing home into the navigation system. She eyed the narrow driveway with wariness, calculating how accurate she’d have to be backing down it toward the street, but when she put the car in reverse, the backup camera came on the screen.

  “Wow, practically drives itself,” she said and eased the car backward toward the road. The Caddy was a far cry from her ’75 Lincoln Continental or “The Green Giant,” as her friends at home called it, but her old ride was currently receiving an eco-friendly makeover and she hadn’t seen it in months.

  Truth be told, she thought as she ran a hand over the leather-covered steering wheel, she could get used to luxury like this. She felt like she was enveloped in a cocoon, floating along on probably the best shock absorbers money could buy. She pressed a button on the steering wheel and Micheal Bublé came on the satellite radio singing an old Sinatra standard. This was the life—

  Beep, beep, beep.

  An alarm went off inside the car and she braked, scanning the dashboard for a clue. On the screen, the video feed from the back bumper showed another car across the way, backing into the street. Sandra’s noisy nephew tore out of his driveway, did the same three-point turn as before, and glared at her once again as she craned her neck to look at him in real life and not in the pixels on her car’s dashboard screen.

  Maybe he wasn’t actually snarling at her with that stupid checkered knit cap pulled down over his ears, making his head look too small for his body and a bit pointy. Maybe he had the male equivalent of Resting Bitch Face, a permanent scowl caused by gravity and not by actual ill will. She mulled it over before she resumed backing out.

  Nope.

  She was pretty sure he was just a grouch.

  

  For all of Josie’s worry about getting lost in Lake Park Villa thanks to Sandra’s ominous warnings, the nursing home was less than fifteen minutes away from the house. The main building was an imposing red-bricked, blocky structure with eight windows on either side of the front door. The architecture pretty much announced the building as a schoolhouse, and Josie could almost hear the echoes of rulers slapping wrists as she passed under the weathered off-white keystone above the arch of the front door.

  The woman at the front desk barely glanced at Josie, taking in her jeans and casual shirt in a single flick of her gaze. “Deliveries out back,” she said, not pausing in her typing. She was a heavy-set woman, probably in her early thirties, with a soft jawline and an extra chin supported by a plump, slightly splotchy neck that seemed to change colors like a pissed-off octopus trying to camouflage itself. Her eyes were downcast, glued on the paperwork in front of her, and her yellow-brown hair stuck out in a shower of crazy, silky corkscrews around her face and head.

  Josie looked around and then down at herself and her empty hands, which were clearly not delivering anything. “I’m here to see my aunt.”

  This time, the woman actually looked at her with greenish-gray eyes shooting her a look that was both assessing and doubtful. “Sorry. My mistake,” she said in a tone that was the least sorry sounding one Josie had ever heard. “Sign here.” She shoved a clipboard toward Josie across the scuffed laminate surface of the counter.

  While she filled in her name and the time, she said, “I was told to pick up a visitor’s badge before I went in.”

  “Then that’s the wrong sign-in sheet for you,” the woman said and yanked the clipboard away while Josie was still filling it out. The pen drew a line off the side of the paper before she could lift her hand. The woman slapped another board on the counter and said accusingly, “You should have told me that.”

  Hello? Rude.

  Josie was too taken aback to say anything. Maybe working in a place like this made a person irritable. She signed the new form and looked around. Instead of smelling like a typical nursing home—at least here in the lobby—the place had a crusty old building smell, which made her wonder for the second time this trip about asbestos and lead paint. At least it had a lot of windows and didn’t feel old like an asylum. Not that she’d spend a lot of time in asylums, but she’d seen a lot in horror movies and TV shows on Netflix, so she was kind of an expert, right?

  “This building was a boarding school, wasn’t it?” she asked the woman, who rifled through a drawer. She pulled out a box of visitor badges with metal clips on them and slammed it on the counter, banging her drawer shut.

  Maybe she’s hard of hearing and can’t hear how aggressive she makes everything sound.

  “Bingo. There’s a plaque over there if you want to learn more.” She made the word “learn” sound slightly disparaging, and she gestured to the far wall without looking up as she flipped through the remaining badges in her box as if taking inventory.

  Ignoring Ms. Panties-In-A-Twist, Josie turned around and, spotting a sign screwed to the wall, made her way over to it. She slid out of her jacket as the heavy and damp indoor heat started to become somewhat oppressive.

  The Wells Preparatory School for Boys was founded in 1848 by steel magnate, William Morrison Wells whose youngest son, Robert, although considered a literary genius from a very young age, suffered from numerous birth defects, including a club foot and cleft palate.

  Nevertheless, Robert flourished under the tutelage of headmaster Henry Howard Falls and went on not to a career in literature, but to found the original Lake Park Villa film maker’s guild, that specialized in early horror, suspense, and noir films.

  Robert married the daughter of his former headmaster, Ellen Louise, with whom he had nine children, none of whom inherited his genetic defects. His youngest son, William Falls Wells, became the world-famous filmmaker in the noir genre.

  Josie appreciated the blunt tone of the historical plaque, mentioning the birth defects and that the offspring had not inherited them. “Relaying the important information and all,” she muttered to herself with sarcasm—but still, she was impressed by the long history of the place.

  “I had no idea William Falls Wells was from here,” she told the woman at the desk, who slapped Josie’s badge on the counter.

  “Yep,” she said. “Film festival every summer. I’ve never seen any of his movies. We have a good microbrewery, too,” she added, apropos of nothing.

  Josie clipped the badge to the neck
line of her long-sleeved t-shirt since it didn’t have a collar. “You haven’t seen a single one of his movies?” How was that even possible? A person could hardly even have a conversation in this country without making a reference to one of them. Terms like “gaslighting” and “femme fatale” had come from movies like his.

  She’d enjoyed every single one of them herself—they were moody, black-and-white films with crazy camera angles and highly dramatic women with razor-sharp, painted-on eyebrows. Revolutionary cinema for their time and beloved by millions of people, his films had pretty much turned the film industry on its ear. Nobody had seen anything like them at the time, but their style had been copied—and parodied—a bazillion times since then.

  “No aliens. No explosions. Count me out. I don’t need any of that crap where you have to think or feel things. And no tear-jerkers either. Not for me.”

  Okay. Josie could respect that. There was a time and place for everything. Sometimes a burger was much more appropriate than a filet mignon. If daily life was a bit of a drag, escapism at the movies and in books was just what the doctor ordered.

  “Your aunt’s room is down the hall to the left. Room 39.”

  “Thanks,” Josie said, putting a hand on the wooden double door. She gave it a shove, but it didn’t budge.

  “Hang on. I gotta buzz you in,” the woman said after the fact. Passive-aggressively.

  I thought we were pals now. We just chit-chatted. Josie narrowed her eyes at the woman, who had her head back down, looking at her computer screen. The telltale blue and white reflection in her glasses made Josie suspect she was browsing her Facebook page.

  “If Lynetta’s not in her room, check the dining hall. A bunch of them hang out there almost all day. It takes them forever to eat breakfast. By the time they’re done, it’s almost time for lunch. Gotta kick ’em out so they can get ready for the next meal. All they do is eat. They act like it’s their main entertainment for the day.”

  Josie paused in the doorway. An entire life of adventures and thrills, reduced to just waiting for the next meal? She had a sudden and clear vision of what her own old age was going to be like.

  Dang. That’s pretty much what my life is now.

  Chapter 7

  Which was how Josie came to feel like she herself was in a black-and-white noir movie as she tripped down a dimly lit hallway with a water-stained tile floor.

  Can’t they get better lighting in this place?

  She passed through a couple of what looked like additions to the original building until she reached room 39. The door stood open, but she knocked before she looked in.

  “Hello?” she said, not seeing any occupants.

  A toilet flushed and a door on the other side of the room opened.

  “Who are you?” the woman who emerged asked. “Are you the hitman I hired to take out my roommate?”

  Josie was stunned by the confession, but the woman rolled her rheumy blue eyes. “Or so she would have you believe. I’m not trying to kill her. I’m a pacifist. Otherwise, I would have done her in my first week here,” the woman said. “I’m Betty, Lynetta’s long-suffering roommate.”

  Still hovering in the doorway, Josie introduced herself as Lynetta’s niece. Not surprisingly, the older woman sat down in a chair on the conservative and tidy side of the room with the handmade afghan on the bed. All the same, Josie grimaced—a clear picture of Lynetta was forming, and she mentally rolled her eyes that Greta Williams had not given her fair warning as to her sister’s state of mind.

  “You’re her niece? I’m sorry. She didn’t mention you to me, but that’s not surprising. She probably forgot. She’s a batty dingbat sometimes. A big, dotty ding-dong.”

  Josie wasn’t sure if Betty was apologizing for Josie being related to Lynetta or for Lynetta not having mentioned her. Either way, it wasn’t making her terribly optimistic about meeting her fake aunt.

  If I had known she was like this, would it have stopped me from coming here? No, probably not. After all, this favor is about Greta, not about Lynetta alone.

  “How long have you been her roommate?”

  “Half a year so far. Also known as a small eternity. I think it was Dorothy Parker who said, ‘Eternity is a ham and two people.’ Or maybe it was Julia Child. I can’t remember—that’s not because I’m losing my mind. I just can’t remember that one—but whoever said it, they didn’t live with Lynetta. That makes the time positively crawl.” Betty picked up her e-reader in a gnarled, arthritic hand and looked ready to escape back into her book.

  “What are you reading?” Josie asked just to be polite. She couldn't decide if Betty was more James Herriot or Sydney Sheldon. All Creatures Great and Small or Rage of Angels.

  “None of your beeswax,” Betty said. “If I’d wanted people to know what I was reading, I wouldn’t have gotten an e-reader, would I have?”

  Josie almost burst out laughing, but Betty was being perfectly serious. Not a smile in sight in the papery skin of her face. In fact, she was outright glaring at Josie, who conceded, “Fair enough. I heard Lynetta might still be in the dining hall. Do you think that’s where she is?”

  “Probably. That’s where she holds court. She and her groupies.” When Josie frowned at that, Betty mistook her confusion. She waved a wrinkled hand as if she were batting away a fly. “Follow the green stripe on the wall. Down the opposite hall and to the right.”

  

  “Sorry, the dining room is closed. You can’t come in here. Move along to the Activities Room,” a man wiping down a table told Josie in a terse tone without looking up. Incongruously, he was wearing navy blue business slacks and a button-down Oxford shirt more suited to an office than a janitorial role. An employee badge on a lanyard around his neck swung rhythmically as he scrubbed at a spot on the round 10-seater.

  He turned his head and yelled in rapid-fire Spanish to another man with a cart across the room. Something about a tablecloth, which she understood thanks to eighth-grade Spanish. Manteles. She was also skilled enough to ask for a pencil sharpener, if tasked to do so. Sacapuntas. And in a pinch, she could tell if someone was cursing at her, but she hadn’t learned that in a classroom—more like the indoor malls of Tucson, Arizona at least a decade ago.

  “I’m looking for my Aunt Lynetta,” Josie told him.

  The man’s head snapped up in surprise as he finally looked at her and his demeanor did a one-eighty. “Oh my lord, I am so sorry. I thought you were one of the residents.” Although his words were contrite, he continued his cleaning hustle, which Josie totally understood. She’d worked in her mother’s restaurant from a young age, bussing and eventually waiting tables and taking phone orders.

  The saying went “time is money,” but sometimes time seems way more valuable. Especially when you’re running short of it.

  “We’re short-staffed in the dining hall today. Some of our servers called in with the flu that’s going around.” He straightened up suddenly. “As you can imagine, we have strict rules about keeping the flu out of this place with the advanced ages of some of our residents. As soon as our workers have the earliest symptoms, we ask them to stay home and take care of themselves, far away from here. But that means this time of the year we sometimes have to scramble to get it all done.”

  He put on a cheery smile that Josie found more corporate than sincere, but she had to admire his enthusiasm in doing his job. She hadn’t realized there were people out in the workforce who weren’t jaded. Most of her friends had ended up in unconventional jobs, including hers. Blogging always seemed like one of those made up things that had suddenly become legitimate to the surprise of many. How did a person like her get a paycheck just from making a list of her top ten types of noodles or how your favorite cookie revealed your personality type? Or even, what food should you eat to ward off getting sick?

  Josie cringed thinking about the flu. She took a minute to mentally backtrack through her entire visit so far, cataloging every germ-covered surface she might have touched.
“I didn’t know I needed to get my shots up to date before coming here.”

  She was being snarky, but he took her seriously. “Flu shots are a definite requirement in this industry.” He checked his watch and turned around to shout in Spanish again, his need for a tablecloth becoming more urgent, apparently. He paused, his blue eyes shifting toward her, taking in her brown skin, and his tone in the other language abruptly became more modulated. He peppered his sentences with a liberal sprinkle of por favores and he added an obsequious smile.

  “Activity Room?” she asked, feeling a little bit as if she’d touched something slightly slimier than simple virus germs.

  His face bore a wide, white-toothed smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Keep following the hall toward your left. You were on the correct path when you got here. The wall has a blue stripe. If you walk along it, it’ll lead you straight to the Activity Room.”

  She thanked him and backed out of the dining hall. He wore the same frozen smile, watching her until she stepped out of sight and broke their line of vision.

  Weird dude. Definitely put him in the suspicious column. At least if it came down to running a business over human warmth.

  Her impression of him was a snap judgment, she knew, but the list of people who deserved her untrusting side eye was growing by the minute.

  Chapter 8

  Although Josie had never met Lynetta before, she knew which woman was her fake aunt right away. Dressed in a rainbow tie-dyed kaftan smock over a white long-sleeved turtleneck—in deference to the frigid weather, maybe—Lynetta held court like a queen amidst a quartet of lesser colorful senior citizen handmaidens.

  As Josie had rounded the doorway and caught her first glimpse of the woman, Lynetta had been saying “—of course, that was right after I saw Hendrix at Woodstock.”

  “Oh my,” another woman said. “The Summer of Love. I remember hearing about that. All those greasy, unbathed free-love people.”